If Only You (Bergman Brothers, #6)(11)

I gesture around my patio, exhaling. “To what do I owe the pleasure of having my privacy invaded?”

Her blush deepens.

The sight reminds me of the moment she hiked up that dress on the terrace, dragged off her underwear, and glanced over her shoulder— A memory which has a very inconvenient effect on my body. Thank God for the blanket, which I tug tighter over my lap. I draw up my uninjured leg to obscure what’s started happening.

This is what I’m reduced to when I have to swear off “carousing.” I’m so keyed up, I’m half-hard from the sight of a blush.

Shutting my eyes, I revisit the last time I saw my mother and stepfather. That very quickly puts an end to the trouble that just started in my briefs.

“I’m here…” Ziggy continues, then pauses.

Dammit, somehow it’s even more arousing when my eyes are shut, hearing the rasp at the edge of her voice, the upswing in her pitch at the end of each phrase.

I crack open an eye and glare at her, thoroughly annoyed by this. “You’re here? Spit it out already.”

Her jaw clenches. She sits up, arms tight across her chest. “I’m here because…” She takes a deep breath, and now I feel like an utter ass. Her mouth works, but words don’t come out, as if they’re caught somewhere between her brain and her tongue. She scrunches her eyes shut and turns away, until she’s sideways on the chair, the sea breeze unfurling more hair from her braid. I watch those strands jump and dance on the wind like flames, before they wrap around her head, hiding her face.

Her shoulders lift, then fall. A deep breath, as if shoring herself up.

“I have an…idea. A plan, I mean. That will help us both get out of our current…situations.”

My eyebrows lift in surprise. Of all the people to have a plan for helping me out of the mess I got myself into, Ren’s little sister was the last person I’d have ever considered. “Why would you want to help me? Last time I saw you, I harassed you, insulted you, and made you cry.”

And I hated myself for it.

“You didn’t make me cry,” she says evenly. “I mean, you kind of did. They were angry tears, though. You ticked me off. But…” Silence stretches between us, before she says, “Just because you were a jerk about it, doesn’t mean you were wrong. If I want to be seen, I need to take ownership of that. Which is where you come in.”

I stare at her, curious. “Go on.”

She bends her head as the wind pins her hair against her face, hiding her from me. Her fingers knot in her lap. “You need to repair your public image.”

“‘Resurrect’ is the term I believe Frankie used.”

A soft, huffed laugh leaves her. Involuntarily I smile at that sound.

She shrugs. “Same thing.”

“It’s really not, but I’ll hear you out.”

Another silence stretches between us as she smooths her hands down her thighs and sits straighter. “I want my image…smudged up a little. Matured, if you will.”

A frown tugs at my mouth. “I don’t understand.”

“We each have what the other wants. I have a good-girl reputation. You have bad-boy notoriety. If we were seen together, those public images could rub off on each other. I’d be taken more seriously. You’d look like you cleaned up your act.”

I blink at her, stunned by the implication of what she’s saying. “Are you suggesting we pretend to date, because there’s not a chance in hell that I’d—”

“No!” She shakes her head. The wind shifts, tugging her hair back in slim, copper strands. “Not pretend to date. Just pretend to be…friends.”

The word drops like a stone in the still, frigid well of what little feelings I have and ripples out, an unwelcome disturbance. I can’t help but fixate on how she said that word, “friends”—like it’s as strange to her as it is to me.

While someone like me doesn’t deserve or desire friendship, why the hell wouldn’t she?

A dull ache echoes through me. That ache is a bridge too far. I drag on the joint and hold in its smoke, calming myself, telling myself that ache’s only there because she’s Ren’s. Because the one good person in my life, who I haven’t managed to scare away, loves her fiercely and protectively.

“Friends,” I repeat on my exhale.

The wind whips back her hair, revealing her profile—that long straight nose, a cascade of cinnamon-spark freckles. She shrugs. “Yes. Friends.”

“What would you tell your brother? He’s not going to be suspicious that suddenly I’m friends with you, too?”

Ziggy bites her lip. “I’ll think of something. It would have been recent, obviously. Maybe it started when you and I talked at the wedding, which isn’t a lie. We did talk.”

I am not thinking about the fact that we talked on that terrace. I’m thinking about watching her lift up her dress like a dream come to life, sinking her hands into the fabric— Don’t think about her taking off her panties. Don’t think about her taking off her panties.

I growl in my throat and massage the bridge of my nose.

“We bonded over…something,” she continues, oblivious to my suffering. A frown wrinkles her nose. “I’ll figure out what to tell him, he’ll believe me because he’s Ren, and that’ll be that. Friends. Totally plausible.”