Just Like Animals: A Werelock Evolution Series Standalone Novel Read online

  Jesus. She was the same Bethany I remembered. Adorably quirky. Strong-willed. Unconventional. Sexy as hell.

  And I was fucking her tonight. Off-limits be damned.

  3

  Bethany

  “It’s not okay to shag your best friend’s brother.”

  “What?” Jessie’s petite, freckle-dusted nose wrinkled up in the bathroom mirror to my right. “You don’t have a brother.”

  Ugh, she was too blitzed to be helpful. “No, Jessie, that’s what you’re supposed to say to me right now.” I snatched the lip balm out of her hand. Lip balm was always helpful.

  “You mean that big hot guy?” Kylie squawked in the mirror to my left. “Raul? Mr. orgasm on the dance floor? Of course you’re going to fuck him. Who gives a shit who his sister is?”

  The three of us were holed up inside the one large handicap-accessible stall within the women’s bathroom that contained its own sink and mirror, steadfastly ignoring the irritated remarks about us hogging the “good stall” that were coming from ladies who were waiting in line for an open one.

  “You both suck. How about you remind me that I’m engaged, huh?”

  Kylie snorted. “Bitch, remind yourself. You just ate an entire PocketPak of Listerine strips. If that’s not a commitment to fuck someone who isn’t your fiancé tonight, then I don’t know what is.”

  “If I had a brother that sexy, I’d totally let him fuck you,” Jessie interjected.

  “Okay, not helpful. That just came out creepy, Jess. You got any cheek stain or cream blush in your bag?”

  “You’re as pink as a vagina already.” Kylie shook her head, studying my face in the mirror. “You don’t need cheek stain. You need to get revenge-laid tonight by a sex god and then call off your engagement tomorrow morning.”

  “I am not calling off the wedding.”

  “Then I’m wearing a slutty red dress, raising my hand, and objecting.”

  “You will not. Marchesa doesn’t make a slutty red bridesmaid dress.”

  “I can’t wear red,” Jessie spoke up. “It clashes with my skin tone.”

  “No one in the bridal party is wearing red.”

  “I will,” Kylie insisted, reapplying her eyeliner in the mirror. “And the minister will agree with me when I show him photos of the groom’s dick on my cell phone.”

  Jessie gasped, and the mass of red hair she’d been working into a French knot fell to her shoulders. “Gregg sent you photos of his dick, too?”

  Kylie groaned.

  It took effort not to roll my eyes. “Jess, I sent the photos of his dick this afternoon to you both from the texts I found on his phone that he’d sent to another woman.” She still looked confused. Jessie was a genius medical researcher when sober and a complete moron after a few cocktails. “Never mind. I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

  “It won’t sound any better then,” Kylie told her.

  “Gregg and I will work through this.”

  “Mm, I dunno …” Jessie gave me an uncertain look in the mirror. “There’s really no good medical fix yet for a small penis.”

  Kylie narrowly avoided stabbing herself in the eye with pencil liner when she burst out laughing.

  “His penis isn’t small,” I said in defense of my cheating fiancé. “That was a bad photo. It wasn’t quite … to scale.”

  “No? I thought his hand provided just the right scale, actually,” Kylie snarked.

  “Couples get cold feet and have flings before they tie the knot. It happens all the time,” I argued.

  “Keep telling yourself that.” Kylie swept her shoulder-length dark hair back into an oversized clip and zipped up her wristlet. “Come on, Jess, let’s dance.” To me, she said, “I better receive a high-res photo text from you of the best friend’s brother’s dick by zero eight hundred hours.”

  “Ha! Right. Because that’s happening. There an ‘or else’ you were going to tack onto that ultimatum?”

  “Yeah.” Her sly smile spread into a wicked grin. “Or else maybe I’ll be the one taking photos of his penis.” She wagged her brows at me in the mirror and ushered a confused Jessie out of the stall.

  “Oh, come on,” a female voice complained with a noisy rap on the stall door when I remained inside, closing and locking the stall after Jessie and Kylie had departed. “I’m supposed to piss myself out here while you’re busy makeup-ing and debating whether to cheat on your cheating, small-penis-having fiancé?”

  “Holding it in is great exercise for your Kegel muscles,” I responded absently, drawing closer to the sink mirror than I’d had the ability to do before when Jessie and Kylie had been sharing it with me. “Trust me, I’m a gynecologist,” I mumbled as I drew my long blonde hair to the side and inspected the fresh love bite on my neck.

  It didn’t look like more than a really serious hickey, but I could’ve sworn I’d felt a strange throbbing sensation deep beneath the surface of the wounded skin when Kylie had joked about being the one to hook up with Raul. I made a mental note to inject a little antibiotic in a few days if it continued to feel tender.

  “So, what are we going to do about your cheating ex?”

  We? Cute. “I don’t see why my problems need be your problems, Raul. Appreciate the big brotherly concern on my behalf, though.”

  “There’s nothing brotherly about it, I assure you.”

  The way his eyes ran over me made my mouth run dry, even as I swallowed the burning whisky from my glass. He didn’t look like he’d aged a day, and yet he was so much hotter than he’d been the last time I’d seen him. There was a certain calmness and maturity to him now—an air of authority that hadn’t been there before.

  Ten years. It’d been ten years since he had shown up out of nowhere at my parents’ front door in Santa Cruz, flanked by two equally tall, well-built hotties. They had invited me to come with them to Argentina to attend a surprise party they were throwing for my best friend Milena—Raul’s little sister. It seemed like yesterday, and yet so very long ago.

  My memories of that day were still mystifying. And not simply because of how odd and abrupt Raul’s appearance and invitation had been, or even because of the bizarre and shockingly uncharacteristic way that my mother had immediately consented and even encouraged me to go with Raul and his friends to South America, of all insane motherly reactions.

  No, it was the way Raul had first looked at me standing out there on my front porch that day: Like a drowning man looks at a lifeline. Like my aunt looked at limited-edition Louboutins. Like my dad still looked at my mom when she wasn’t paying attention.

  In hindsight, I often wondered if I’d only imagined it.

  Raul had gone on to flirt with me, gifting me with that self-assured, dashing smile that I’d seen cause dignified, married female members of the PTA to blush clear down to their toes back when he was in high school and I was still in elementary school. I knew that smile had melted the panties off of countless girls before me. But even as his mouth had casually flirted, going on about how well I looked all grown up and saying how much fun we would have in Argentina, his eyes had reflected something else. Something dark. Fearful. Some kind of desperate, internal struggle. He’d stood there with his hunky Argentinian friends and said everything he could to entice me to go with them. But his eyes had warned me not to come. Pleaded with me to say no. It hadn’t made sense.

  And of course, it had only made me more determined to go. To show him what a truly great time we’d have together and erase that strange fearfulness lurking behind his imploring brown eyes. To this day, I still couldn’t reconcile how in the world my eighteen-year-old self had ultimately found the strength of will to choose the more mature, sensible course of action and decline his most exciting international party invitation. I’d often wondered (and fantasized) over the years about what might’ve happened between us if I had gone with him that day instead.

  “How’s your mom?” Raul’s deep voice and change of topic pulled me back to the present.

  I�
�d been staring at him. And it would appear that he’d been studying me right back. But while I was certain I’d been gawking at him with an empty, glassy-eyed look—and maybe drooling on myself—Raul’s brow was pinched in concentration. He seemed to be considering me as if I were a brain-bender puzzle that he was working to decipher. A complex combination lock whose code he was determined to crack. Weird.

  “She’s good,” I answered automatically. “Thanks for asking.”

  “Your parents still live in the same house in Santa Cruz?”

  “Yep. Same one.” Oh, God. We’d regressed to polite catch-up conversation already. This was depressing.

  “They’re still together then?”

  “Uh-huh.” Don’t remind me. Why would he even ask that? “They just celebrated their thirty-third wedding anniversary.” I smiled brightly, like it was a wonderful thing.

  He gave me a sympathetic smile in return, nodding his head. “I’m sorry. Bearing witness to unrequited love is almost as painful as engaging in it.”

  Fuck. And there went my heart.

  I felt it. As sure as I felt the growing chasm splitting my loyalty.

  How could Milena claim that her brother was perpetually clueless, insensitive, and inherently selfish when Raul was capable of noticing something so personal about my parents’ relationship—her best friend’s parents—that no one else ever picked up on? Not even Milena.

  How had Raul known? He’d never even spent much time with them that I could recall. Or any time with the two of them together, actually, now that I thought about it. Had he picked up on it solely based on my reaction? On something I’d said to him in the past?

  “Shit, I’m sorry, Bethany.” He pressed a hankie into my hand just as I felt a tear escape my right eye.

  What the hell, I was crying now? I quickly dabbed my eyes and pulled it together. Brilliant, Bethany. I’d steered us from boring catch-up sesh into awkward maudlin territory.

  “I shouldn’t have pried. That was wrong. You’re entitled to your privacy. I’ll stop. I won’t try it again.”

  What was he talking about? Why was he so apologetic? “No, no,” I assured him with a laugh, “it’s just the whisky, see? It burns my throat and then my eyes have this reaction.” I took another big gulp to further support my stupid explanation, making a show of squeezing my eyes shut and wincing as I swallowed. Oh, my God, I was acting like an ass.

  I opened my eyes to catch him draining the contents of his own glass.

  “Cheers to fucking emotional shields,” he muttered under his breath as he brought his empty glass down onto the tiny café-style table between us with a clatter.

  Emotional shields? “What’s an emotional shield? That a new psych term?”

  At first he seemed taken aback. Then he answered simply, “Yes.” His expression was hard and impassive, despite the polite smile he forced. “It’s a new theory related to protective instincts where one’s emotions are concerned,” he expounded. “It’s a good thing for a person to have strong emotional shields.”

  He’d totally just made that shit up. I went along with it anyhow. “If it’s such a good thing, then why’d you toast-slash-curse emotional shields just now?”

  His eyes held mine, but he didn’t answer. And behind his shuttered features I sensed that same desperate internal struggle playing out—warning me to run while begging me to come closer.

  “What are we going to do about your cheating ex?” he repeated his earlier question. But this time he spoke the words slowly. Carefully. And their meaning seemed to have changed entirely. Because the question sounded sensual now. Sexual. And I knew that he was really asking what we were going to do about us.

  There could never be an “us.”

  Raul’s sister had been my best friend since kindergarten. Sleeping with her only brother would be in poor taste. Particularly when I knew how strained things had been between them for more than a decade.

  The sad truth was things had been strained between Milena and me for nearly as long. Just not in the same way. Raul and Milena’s kind of strain was the overt, bitter Cold War kind, whereas mine and Milena’s was more the tragic growing apart, slow-death-of-a-childhood-friendship kind.

  The last time I’d seen Milena, her husband Alex had given me a warmer reception than she had. As the years had passed, she and I had spoken on the phone less frequently. Half the time when I called I ended up talking to Alex longer than I did my best friend. I often felt like I was bothering her, or that she didn’t want to hear from me. She never opened up to me anymore, and I couldn’t seem to get straight answers out of her whenever I questioned her about her life.

  Sometimes I got this niggling sense in the pit of my gut that Milena was mad at me for some reason. That she resented me for something that I had done. But for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what it might be. She was the one who had left me. If anything, I should’ve been resentful that she’d gotten engaged at eighteen after a whirlwind romance with an older Brazilian guy—a multi-bajillionaire businessman who had swept her off her feet in record time, prompting her to move to São Paulo and alter all of her plans for college and her future in the blink of an eye.

  But I couldn’t blame her. And I would never resent her. Alex was near perfection in human form. He was everything Milena had ever needed in a partner and male figure in her life. More importantly, he adored her. Worshipped her. Hung on every word that came out of her mouth and fretted over every frown that wrinkled her brow. It would’ve been disgusting were it not so damned cute.

  I was happy for her. For both of them. And because of that, I overlooked the fact that Milena’s husband Alex was probably most definitely for sure a Brazilian mob boss. Who had once been Raul’s boss, I reminded myself. Which meant that Raul might also be mixed up in the Brazilian mafia. And everyone knew it was bad form to sleep with a Brazilian mobster who was also your best friend’s brother.

  I cleared my throat. “I never said Gregg was my ex.”

  “Excuse me?” Raul’s eyes narrowed. His voice had dropped an octave.

  Whoa. Hot when angry.

  “Look, Raul, I haven’t even given Gregg a chance to explain himself yet.”

  “Explain himself?” Raul’s nostrils flared, and I could’ve sworn that his irises lightened for a split second. Then a phone went off. “What’s there to explain?” He retrieved a phone from his pocket. Without so much as checking to see who was calling, he pressed a button to silence it and set the phone on the table. “He cheated. He’s fucking history.”

  Protective much? God, he was getting me wet all over again. He was only Milena’s half-brother. Did sleeping with half-sibs really count?

  “It’s more complicated than that,” I said, squeezing my thighs together to tamp down the pulsing in my sex.

  “No, it’s not, Bethy.”

  I got distracted staring at the angry line of his luscious mouth and momentarily forgot what we were talking about, because I blurted, “I like it when you call me Bethy.”

  I liked it when he got all angry and protective, too.

  His phone vibrated against the table. I glanced down to see a FaceTime request from “Princess Elsa” flash across the screen. He quickly declined it and flipped the phone over, screen side down to the table. He ran a hand through his hair. “Bethy, I—”

  It buzzed again.

  “Did you want to get that?”

  He sighed and shook his head, looking annoyed. “It’s just work. It can wait.”

  He had programmed his work in as Princess Elsa? “That was work? At this hour?”

  “How long has he been cheating on you?”

  Five months at least. “I’m not sure.”

  “How many?”

  “Times?”

  “No. Women.”

  Ouch. “Can we talk about something else?”

  “Fine. Let’s start with his address.”

  I groaned and downed the remains of my Johnnie Walker. “How about we start with another drin
k?”

  “Deal,” he agreed as a man in a suit was approaching our table. “Stephen, I’m busy,” Raul said, not bothering to turn and look at him. “Go order us another round, and then go back and wait with the car.”

  The man stepped forward nonetheless, extending a phone.

  Raul’s jaw tightened. Slowly, he turned and leveled the man he’d addressed as Stephen with a look so cold it made me want to recoil.

  “Sir, I apologize for the interruption.”

  Sir?

  “But she’s threatening to blow cities up unless you sing the Frozen song with her. Chaos wants to talk to you about it.”

  Huh?

  With an infuriated eye-roll, Raul stood and yanked the phone from Stephen’s hand. To me, he said, “Please don’t go anywhere. I’ll only be a minute.” I got the impression, based on the weighted glance he threw at Stephen, that it was now also this man’s job to make certain I didn’t go anywhere.

  Which might’ve explained the weird manner in which Stephen just stood there watching over me after Raul was gone, like he was guarding my person.

  “Hi, Stephen. I’m Bethany.” I extended my hand to him in greeting. He nodded once in acknowledgement but didn’t take my hand. “Please, have a seat,” I offered, gesturing to Raul’s vacated chair with my awkwardly outstretched hand. He kept standing. O-kay then. I gave him my biggest, brightest I-can-win-you-over smile. “How do you and Raul know each other?”

  It was clear the man worked for Raul in some capacity, but I wanted him to confirm it. He didn’t. Fine then. New tactic.

  “So what’s with the ‘Sir’ business?” I asked, raising my volume to a level that ensured I would be heard by as many people as possible around us. “Are you Raul’s sub? It’s all good with me if you are,” I told him when he looked momentarily stricken by my public outing. That’s right, buddy, this girl is not so easily deterred. And never ignored. “You can be his full-time bitch. I’m only planning to use him for revenge sex tonight. Possibly tomorrow morning, too, if he’s as good with his cock in reality as he is in my imagination.”