Her face brightens at the prospect, but before she can answer, I shake my head quickly. “No, I’m good. I’m tired. But thanks anyway.”

Before I walk away, I see Sin’s index finger, the one with the thick silver ring on it, the one with the horns, disappear into the depths of the brunette’s pussy. She throws her head back and moans and I can see that she has already forgotten about the idea of being with me.

Good. I turn my back on the whole thing without a backward glance. Normally, I enjoy watching. But not while my fucking brother is involved.

Jesus.

I seriously might have to get my place. I don’t know if I can take ninety days here.

I pad upstairs and down the hall, where I collapse onto my bed and stare at the ceiling. Try as I might to clear my mind, all I can do is think about one thing.

Jacey.

I’m not sure what it is about her that fascinates me so much, whether it’s the fact that she doesn’t give a shit who I am or whether it’s the fact that she doesn’t try to hide who she is. She’s an open book.

You ask, I’ll answer, she’d said. Yet I know that there’s a lot to her that I don’t even know to ask about. Plus, she’s not so self-involved that she demands that you listen to her talk about herself. And she doesn’t care if you take her or leave her.

I flip on the stereo and turn it up to drown out my thoughts. Hard rock screams at me, thumping and loud. But it doesn’t really help.

Instead, I just picture Jacey’s tight ass wrapping itself around a stripper’s pole to the music. No, she would probably never do such a thing in real life. But this is why a man’s fantasies are so good. In my head, she’ll do whatever I want her to do. And my imagination is vivid.

After a minute, there’s loud banging on my door. “Turn that fucking shit off! You know I hate Jagged Edge. You know they fucked with me last year at Lollapalooza.”

I roll my eyes. “Go fuck something, Sin,” I call back.

He bangs one more time on my door, then he’s gone, and all there is the bass thumping the walls, leaving me free to think about Jacey again.

I slip my hand into my pants as I think about the way her pussy smelled, the way she folded around me, warm and soft, as I fingered her through her clothes. I picture the astonished and embarrassed look on her face when Joe barged in and I can’t help but laugh.

Maybe one of the things I like about her is that she seems innocent at the same time as she seems wild and unrestrained. She has an almost childlike gullibility that seems so different from the people I’m used to.

But one thing is for sure. If she is distracting me this much, I’ve got to stop thinking about her, because I’m never going to get close to anyone again. Fuck that. I’ll never give anyone that kind of power over me.

Never.

Again.

I pull my hand out of my pants and roll over, closing my eyes, letting the music surround me as I get lost in the raging beat.

I think one last conscious thought before I slip away into the oblivion of sleep.

Fuck you, Emma.

Days pass at the gym and I slip into a routine, one day running into the next as I try to serve out my fucking sentence and get the hell out of this place.

Each day, I stay a respectable distance from Jacey. I’m civil, but not friendly. I’m detached, but I still watch her from a distance. I never acknowledge what happened in the cooler… our conversation or the intimate way I’d touched her… and the way she’d let me.

She fascinates the hell out of me because I can’t help but want to figure her out. She’s contradictory, and something about that pulls me to her. But I can’t let her know that.

She seems hurt at first when I ignore her, but then she cools toward me. She makes a point of not looking at me, and whenever she can help it she avoids being in the same room with me. That’s the way it ought to be.

Today, I head toward Joe’s office and stop outside the door when I hear him on the phone.

“Yeah, I know what I owe. It’s my accountant’s fault. He told me what to pay and I paid it. I don’t do my own taxes. What kind of fool does that?” There’s a pause and a sigh. “Yeah, I understand. One way or the other, you’ll have it by the first.”

The phone slams onto his desk and I’m still for a moment.

No wonder Joe has been crabby lately. He’s having tax trouble. I file that away in my head and round the corner, entering his office like I didn’t just hear his conversation.

“What?” he demands, swirling in his chair to stare at me.

“I just needed to get the clipboard for the weights,” I tell him, grabbing it from its hook and heading toward the door.

“Kinkaide!” he barks and I pause. “You going back to California over the weekend?” he demands.

I nod. “Just for the weekend. My lawyers finally got it arranged. I’ve got to get some filming in so the studio doesn’t fire me.”

“Not my problem,” Joe answers. “Just make sure you’re not late to work on Monday.”

So much for being nice. I nod wordlessly and head back toward the locker-room scales.

Jacey looks up from where she’s talking to a couple of the boys, Jake and Tig. It’s the first time she’s made eye contact with me in a couple of days, and even though at first her expression is cool, her brow furrows at she stares at me.

“You okay?” she asks. “You look pissed.”

I nod.

“I’m fine,” I answer, just as cool.

Jacey stares at me for a minute longer before she returns her attention to the boys, turning her body away from me.

As she moves, I can’t help but notice her slender shoulders and her tight-ass top, stretched tautly across her tits. It’s impossible not to notice, and Tig can’t restrain himself. I notice him continually glancing down before he yanks his gaze back up to her face. His cheeks flush red, even though no one but me notices.

When Jacey walks away a few minutes later, I follow her.

“You might not want to wear that shit here,” I mention to her. I know my tone isn’t friendly, but I can’t help it. She’s being ridiculous dressing like that in a gym for troubled teen boys.

She raises an eyebrow. “What shit?”

I motion toward her with my hand. “Tight tops, short shorts. Look around you and remember where you’re at. You’re surrounded by teenage boys who get a hard-on in a stiff breeze. Surely you don’t need attention so badly that you need to use these kids to get it.”

Heat flares into her cheeks and they turn bright red as she glares at me.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” she demands. “You’re so hot and cold. You haven’t bothered to talk to me for days, and now, even though I haven’t done shit to you, you don’t hesitate to snap my head off for no reason. Why the hell do you care what I wear?”

I feel a small twinge of guilt. She’s right. It’s not my business. But somewhere, in a deep down place that I don’t want to acknowledge, I hate the fact that these kids are ogling her. I know what they’re doing in their beds at night while they’re thinking about her.

I hate that thought. I hate that in my head, she’s mine to play with, mine to discard, mine to balance in the palm of my hand… just like I did in the cooler last week. In my head, she’s an option… an option I can choose at any moment, but an option I’d be smart to ignore.

“Well?” Jacey stares at me. “Why do you care?”

“I don’t,” I shrug. “I just don’t want any of them to say something inappropriate to you and then get into trouble. You’re inviting the wrong kind of attention, Jacey. It’s not fair to them.”

She narrows her eyes. “Oh, it’s all about them for you now, right? I can tell that by the way you never talk to any of them. You think they’re beneath you—just like your view on the rest of the world. You need to get over yourself.”

She stomps off and I stare at her tight ass as she does.