Vicious. Kevin O'Brien
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doing his best to keep them safe—against all the odds.
CHAPTER FOUR
“You guys just want to see me naked,” Moira Dancey said.
Jordan Prewitt and Leo Forester stood by the kitchen door, each with a rolled-up bath towel under his arm. Jordan had a flashlight. It was already dark outside, starting to get chilly; they both wore fall jackets over their street clothes. Yet they were ready to hike through the woods so they could sit naked in some secluded hot spring.
Leo rolled his eyes at her and shook his head. “Jeez, full of yourself much?” he said. “I don’t want to see you naked. I want to see Jordan naked. We just need you for a chaperone—so things don’t get too Brokeback Mountain.”
“You wish,” Jordan said, bumping his shoulder against Leo’s.
The buffed, handsome lacrosse player and his lean, gangly best buddy made an odd-looking duo. But they’d been best friends for six years. “It’s weird to think,” Leo had mentioned in the car on the way up from Seattle. “Jordan and I have known each other B.P.H. That’s before pubic hair.”
“And we’re all still waiting for Leo to grow some,” Jordan had chimed in from the driver’s seat, never taking his eyes off the road.
“Stop, stop, please,” Leo had rejoined in a deadpan tone. “My sides are aching. You’re so hysterical. I think I just ruptured my spleen from laughing.”
Riding alone in the backseat of the Honda Civic, Moira had felt a bit like an outsider with the two of them. She was Leo’s friend. He and Jordan went to Garfield High School, and she attended Holy Names Academy, an all-girls Catholic school. A year ago, her mother and Leo’s mother had fixed them up at a Sadie Hawkins dance—or the Sadie Hawkins Disaster, as they now referred to it. Mrs. Dancey had been really pushing for the date, because most of the guys Moira hung out with were a bit dangerous. Mrs. Dancey described them as “hoody.” Her mother needn’t have worried too much. Moira was still a virgin—technically. She never let it get too far with any of those guys, but sometimes, she felt like she was pushing the envelope—and her luck. One of her friends said she was a “virgin on the verge.” Moira wasn’t exactly sure how she felt about that label, but it didn’t make her happy.
Unlike the guys who usually turned her head, Leo was safe—and nice. His dad had been killed in Iraq, and Leo worked nights, busing tables at Broadmoor Estates Country Club to help his mom with the finances. He also had a kid sister he helped care for. How much nicer could a guy get?
Moira and Leo had a horrible time at the dance, probably because she was—admittedly—a jerk to him for the first two hours. She’d made up her mind not to like this guy her mother was forcing her to go out with. But afterward he’d taken her to the Deluxe Restaurant, and during their one-on-one time together over burgers, she realized he was funny and sweet and genuine. He even had an offbeat kind of cuteness. But she just wasn’t that attracted to him.
Leo later said he’d caught on to her lack of passion when he’d tried to kiss her good night on that first date. Moira had let him kiss her on the lips, but she’d kept her mouth closed and punctuated the kiss with a mwah afterward. “You gave me the mwah. That’s the way my aunt Sonja kisses,” Leo had later told her.
Moira liked him—just not that way. So they were good friends—with a little something extra, that something extra being his slight crush on her. He was always there for her. As long as Leo was around, Moira had a date for every dance or social occasion that came up. She still had an occasional date with some other guy, but never anything serious.
She’d met Jordan four times—always with Leo, of course. She thought he was very handsome and sexy, but the less Leo knew about that, the better. So she did her damnedest to conceal her attraction to this brooding, sensitive jock.
She wasn’t sure how Jordan felt about her. Earlier, when they’d stopped at that ma-and-pa grocery store down the road, he’d shown a lot more interest in that pretty brunette woman with the little boy than he had in her throughout the entire drive up from Seattle.
The Prewitts’ Cullen retreat was a brown-shingle, two-story cabin—quaint and rustic looking on the outside. But inside she found a gracious living room with a big stone fireplace. The kitchen was wallpapered with a tacky design that must have been called Spice Rack, because it had olive and brown-tone renderings of spices and jars—sage, oregano, rosemary, pepper, and thyme. The matching avocado oven and refrigerator were kind of ugly, but she liked the lime-colored dinette set from the fifties.
There was a basement. Moira had peeked at it from the top of the cellar steps of the kitchen when Jordan had given her a tour. It was cluttered with junk—and creepy. Throughout the tour, Jordan had occasionally touched her arm, and Moira had liked that.
Right now he was standing by the back door, giving her a guileless smile. “If you want, while you get undressed, we’ll close our eyes until you’re in the hot spring. Plus—it’s pretty dark out there anyway, Moira. You shouldn’t miss this experience. Some people drive half a day to get to a hot springs, and this is a ten-minute walk for us.”
“C’mon, where’s your sense of adventure?” Leo asked.
One hand on the kitchen counter, the other on her hip, Moira frowned at her friend. “I’m sorry, but this reminds me too much of that Friday night last month when we were alone and you kept challenging me to a game of strip poker.” She turned to Jordan. “Did he tell you about that?”
Nodding, Jordan laughed. “You can’t blame the guy for trying.”
“Hey, I just wanted to hone my card-playing skills for a possible appearance on Celebrity Poker,” Leo said. “Don’t flatter yourself.”
Moira sighed. “Yeah, well, you guys go have fun. I can’t get too excited over the prospect of traipsing through those creepy woods so I can sit bare-assed in some muddy water. I don’t care how warm the water is.”
“Okay,” Jordan said. “Make yourself at home. We should be back in about an hour, and then I’ll fire up the barbecue.”
“Yeah, let’s get traipsing,” Leo said, opening the screen door. “I didn’t want to see her naked anyway. Did you want to see her naked?”
“Hmmm, maybe,” Jordan allowed, and then he winked at her.
Moira felt herself blushing. “Oh, I know who you wouldn’t mind taking to the hot spring and seeing naked, Jordan,” she said, teasingly. “That pretty lady at the grocery store you were talking to earlier. I think you were flirting with her. You must have a thing for older women. Maybe it’s some kind of mother complex or some—” Moira stopped herself when she realized what she’d just said.
The smile seemed to freeze on Jordan’s face. He let out an uncomfortable chuckle.
“C’mon, let’s get cracking,” Leo announced, pushing his friend out the door. “You can analyze Jordan later, Moira.”
“See ya!” Moira called. “Have fun!” She jumped a bit when Leo let the screen door slam shut behind them. She felt like an utter moron, bringing up the subject of mothers to Jordan—and in such an idiotic way, too. Leo had told her ages ago that Jordan’s mother died in a car accident when he was eight.
“Nice going, Moira,” she muttered to herself. “That was real charming.” Rubbing her forehead, she turned toward the refrigerator.
She heard the screen door yawn open behind her, and she turned around.
Leo stepped into the kitchen. “Why did you bring up his mother?” he whispered. “Jordan’s crying. You made him cry.”
“Oh, no,” Moira murmured, a hand on her heart. “I’m so sorry—”
Leo broke into a grin. “Relax, I’m screwing around with you. He’s fine.”
She slapped him on the shoulder. “You shit.”
“I