Breathless In Love

It was a far cry from the boy he’d once been.

Sebastian slapped him on the back as he rose to pour himself a cup of coffee from the pot no one had touched yet. “Something tells me that’s the last we’ll ever hear from Ray. He won’t want to have to slink back around any of us with his tail between his legs. Good job, guys. We were brilliant.”

“Right,” Evan said. “Brilliant like all the crap we used to pull when we were teenagers.”

“Speak for yourself,” Sebastian shot back. But Evan was right; they’d all had their less than stellar moments back then. Though Will’s were worse than the rest.

“And you—” Sebastian nodded at Will. “—didn’t even tear him to pieces with your bare hands.”

It was meant as a joke, but Will felt the truth of it. That was how he used to do things. Talked with his fists. Back when he was a kid, he’d thought that was how he’d always be. But he’d held it together today—kept things above board rather than dragging his ex-employee into the back alley and teaching him a lesson street-style.

“No Road Warrior justice today, I guess.” Even from the video screen, Daniel’s smile was wide, as he put into words what Will had just been thinking.

“Come to think of it,” Matt said, as the one who knew best what Will was capable of, “I can’t actually remember you knocking anyone’s block off in twenty years.”

For all his fears, Will was surprised to realize Matt was right. Even though fighting had once been all Will knew, he hadn’t resorted to violence in two decades. He’d actually kept his cool with Ray today. And while that had felt pretty damn good—if something ever happened to Harper or Jeremy, Will couldn’t imagine how he’d be able to keep from tearing apart the people who had hurt them…

The guys all razzed him about the Road Warriors, but they’d each had their own way of dealing with the old neighborhood. Evan hid out with the library computers, sucked into his circle of numbers and equations. Matt loved his universe of books and gadgets. Sebastian got by on the power of persuasion and charm. And Daniel used his hands, not to fight, but to build things.

Will was the only one who’d chosen a gang. Even after Susan and Bob had taken him in, he had still straddled those two worlds for years. The Mavericks versus the Road Warriors. He’d thought the gang was his family—at least, as long as he stole cars, won drag races, used his fists—and kept his mouth shut when they did stuff he hated. Don’t step into the middle of someone else’s business. He’d understood their rules and he knew where he fit in—the kid with the good eye who wasn’t afraid to go really fast. But with the Spencers and his new non–Road Warrior friends...

He hadn’t been able to believe a good family could actually want him. So he’d kept screwing up, and screwing up, and screwing up. Until one screwup had been bad enough to finally set him straight. Or at least as straight as it could, when fighting his way out of problems was still fundamentally in his bones.

“You were different today.” Evan caught the mug of coffee Sebastian slid across the table to him. “It’s Harper, isn’t it?”

It was the very thought of Harper that had helped him keep himself in check.

“You’ve been holding out on us,” Daniel added from the other side of the country. “Evan tells us there’s a new lady in your life.”

Will had never had a lady in his life. He’d had women he dated, women he slept with. But there’d never been anyone like Harper.

The Mavericks knew everything about him, from the day they’d met when he was in the sixth grade to the time he moved in with Susan and Bob at thirteen, to the night the Road Warriors imploded. They’d been there for everything in between and all the changes that had come in the two years after that. The truth was that they’d become his family in a way the Road Warriors had never been.

Which was why, even though Will hadn’t yet gotten used to the idea of not only wanting Harper, but needing her, too, in a way he’d never needed anyone else, he found himself telling his closest friends the same thing he’d told Susan.

“She’s special.”

So special that even if he didn’t deserve her...he still couldn’t make himself walk away.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Harper’s nerves were at an all-time high the following Saturday as she drove up Will’s driveway with Jeremy grinning like crazy in the passenger seat.

“I’ve been waiting all week to come back here,” he said.

And the problem was, so had she. Because Will had gotten under her skin. Big time.

All week long, Harper had tried to convince herself that she should be glad she hadn’t heard from him since the previous Saturday. He’d talked with Jeremy over Skype about the car, but he hadn’t asked for her. And she hadn’t asked for him, either. Instead, she’d told herself a thousand times that she shouldn’t let Will pull her in, shouldn’t risk giving herself a taste of the pleasure he was promising her.

She knew what he was trying to do with all that talk of his intentions, with the way he’d said Soon we’ll both have want we want right after he made her forget everything but how much she wanted his almost-touches and almost-kisses. He was trying to get her so worked up that she couldn’t think straight, couldn’t remember all her good reasons to steer clear of him.

Knowing precisely what he was trying to do should have made her even more firm in her plan to keep things purely friendly for Jeremy’s sake. She didn’t want to shake up their lives. But even as she tried to convince herself that staying clear of Will was the only reasonable course of action, the truth was that she’d been feeling less and less reasonable as each day of that long week passed.