He trails off, but he doesn’t need to finish his sentence, I already know how it ends.
“No,” I say, voice low. “She didn’t ask about you.”
A muscle jumps along his tightly clenched jaw. “Right,” he mutters. His fingers drum on the bar top. And I stare at him, body tense. Ready to… what? Grab him if he heads over there toward India? Follow him to protect her from him? Protect him from himself. Dammit. I just don’t fucking know.
Unbidden, my attention shifts from him, and I scan the room, locating India and her group at a middle table. I have a perfect view of her profile—and of the asshole sitting on the other side of her with his arm slung around the back of her chair, his hand resting on her upper arm.
Who is he? How long has she been dating him? And how could she let me fuck her mouth just two days ago when she’s been seeing this guy?
And I have no right to ask these questions. No right to the answers. And that I’m even wondering them with Jessie sitting right beside me drags me down to a whole lower level of bastard.
Disgusted with myself, I start to turn back to my beer, but at that moment, India glances at me. And God help me, but I can’t look away. Not when her mouth firms into a hard line. Not when she pushes back from the table and rises.
Not when she winds her way through tables and customers and approaches us.
And not when she stands beside me, her scent a gentle tease under the smells of yeasty beer, grilling burgers, and fried bar food and fresh oak from the “game” room the twins had constructed a couple of weeks ago. Yeah, how pathetic does it make me that I can still identify her skin-warmed, addictive fragrance?
Pretty fucking pathetic.
“Asa,” she greets me in a tight voice that practically vibrates with tension. At the sound, Jessie’s head jerks up, and he whips around on the stool, facing her. His chest rises and falls on fast, silent breaths as he stares at her. “Jessie,” she says in that same taut tone.
“Hello, India,” he murmurs, and that same visceral reaction that surged within me at the sight of her with another man roars back to life.
She was his.
He knows how it feels to be on the receiving end of her smiles, her laughter, her easy affection—her love. He knows the beauty and security of being enfolded in her arms. He knows the peace of falling asleep, wrapped around her after the pleasure of being buried deep inside her body.
He knows what I never will—what I never can. And yet, I still want to drag her behind me, hiding her so he can’t look at her with that tender warmth and possessiveness gleaming in his eyes.
I can’t do this. I can’t—
“I’ll be back,” I grind out, shooting to my feet. Snatching my beer up, I don’t look back to gauge their reaction to my abrupt departure. I can’t bear the longing and heat in my friend’s gaze.
And I don’t trust what I might do if I spy the same emotion in India’s copper eyes.
* * *