“First,” Stone says, interrupting. He glowers at me. “I thought I made it quite clear that you weren’t to have anyone else touch you but us.”
My mouth drops, hanging open like I want to catch some flies. I snap it shut. “I thought we were going to talk about the state Lucas and I found my dorm room in. The whole reason why I’m here.”
“The reason why you’re here is because you didn’t listen to simple instruction,” Stone explains. His voice is so haughty and proper. There’s no twang or velvety tenor like Lucas’s. He’s city all the way, and yet, he’s not at the same time. He knows what he’s doing up in the mountains even though the attitude he puts off would say otherwise. “Todd is a grunt, nothing more.” Anger lances Stone’s face, and he bares his teeth. “That he even thought he could touch you.”
His words hang in the air. I keep waiting for someone to explain the big deal to me, but no one does. “Oh, okay,” I say, letting how puzzled I am about all this seep through. “You’re serious about this. So, for starters, fuck you. I’ll touch who I want.”
Lucas chuckles in the corner, but it’s drowned out by Wyatt’s laugh and splashing in the pool as he kicks away from the opposite side to glide across the water and heave himself out of it. “Ah, look. Stone looks confused.”
“Fuck off, Longhorn.”
Wyatt doesn’t heed his warning. He goes to the side of the patio, rummages in a cement shelf and pulls out a towel. He rubs it over his face and then through his hair. It’s the first time I’ve seen him without his hat or without the hat hair he’s usually sporting. It’s— Who am I kidding? It doesn’t matter what Wyatt wears—or doesn’t wear—my body instinctively wants to climb him like a tree.
I catch something Stone says as I tear my gaze away from Wyatt’s abs. His voice is filled with disdain. “...you don’t need to stoop to their level.”
“Wait. Whose level?”
“Fuck boy Todd,” Lucas helpfully supplies.
“Todd isn’t—” But then I shake my head. Why does everything they say make me want to argue against it? “Yes, he’s a fuck boy, but I wasn’t going to sleep with him. Not that anyone I sleep with is any of your business.” Jesus. Just because he’s some sort of local celebrity doesn’t mean he gets to tell me what to do.
Stone’s gray-blue eyes capture mine. He’s always intense, no matter what he’s doing. I wonder how the cogs in his brain do so much overtime. It must be exhausting to be him. To want things just the way he likes but thwarted at every turn because there are mere mortals in the world who can’t easily oblige him. “It is, actually, my business,” Stone says. He puts up a hand when I start to argue with him. “Because we have a real problem on our hands, Dakota. We don’t actually know exactly where it’s coming from, so we have to be careful about who we talk to.”
“You mean you guys have a problem,” I say. “Not me.”
“The condition you found your room in would say otherwise.”
I groan. “Then you brought the heat on me.”
Wyatt chuckles as he moves to one of the chairs beside Stone, drying off his chiseled chest in the process. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen it glistening with water, and it’s really nice. Both times. “The heat?” he questions with amusement.
“Shut up,” I say for lack of a better comeback.
“It was only a matter of time before they came to you,” Stone says.
“Who?”
“I told you. We don’t know.” He runs his fingers through his hair, pulling the ends for a moment before he maneuvers it back into place. It falls perfectly, and I suddenly hate him even more. He has no idea how I’ve struggled with my hair for ages. Ages, I tell you. I tug my hair out of its elastic because the weight of it on my head is adding to the headache the guys are giving me. I tame it down my shoulders as best I can and then blink when I realize I have the attention of all three of the guys. They’re staring at me intently as if I’m an animal in a zoo exhibit.
I calm my beating heart for a moment, schooling it back to beat out an even rhythm with a deep breath. “But Todd? I’ve gone to school with Todd since middle school. He’s harmless.”
“It only takes a wise man to arm someone.”
I narrow my gaze at Stone, but he stares back with the same even stare that looks like it belongs in boardrooms and not the untamed nature around us. Despite the fact that his statement sounded more like it came from a fortune cookie than a twenty-something year old, I suppose he’s not wrong.
At that thought, the wind picks up, tossing my hair around my face. I quickly tuck it behind my ear.
“You’re lucky we got to you in time,” Stone says.
I laugh at that. “Are you kidding? Quit acting like I’m some sort of naïve little princess who lives in a castle at the top of a hill surrounded by an alligator-ridden moat.”
“That was oddly specific,” Lucas says.
Okay. I’ve had like years of daydreaming and book reading to come up with lots of shit, but they don’t need to know that. “I don’t need your help, Stone Jacobs. I don’t need any of you.”
To prove my point, I stand from my chair and stride through the house. If there’s one thing I can’t fucking stand it’s superiority complexes. Stone and his friends have one a mile wide. They sit in their fucking castle
