Sinners' Playground (The Harlequin Crew, #1)

by Caroline Peckham

“I’d ruin you, baby. I’d prove there’s no other man on earth who can make you feel the way I do. You deserve to be fucking worshipped. I’d show up at your church every day and get down on my knees for you. Every. Fucking. Day.”

I have a perfectly stable, no-drama relationship going with my vibrator!” “Not anymore you don’t,” I snapped then her footsteps pounded through the trailer. “Argh!” she roared. “You monster. Why would you do this to Vlad?!” RIP Vlad.

“I’d drift right off the edge of the world if that was where you were heading, hummingbird.” I clutched her hand and she wound her fingers between mine. “Is it weird that I don’t care what’s out there beyond the horizon? I just want to stay here in Sunset Cove. With you and the others.”

“Too many people think travelling the world will make them happy, more fulfilled or some shit. But the real stuff happens right here. On the dirt we grew up on. This place will remember us when we’re gone, nowhere else will. So I want to keep making it ours, brand our names in the earth itself. I like belonging here. And I like that you belong here too. Nothing can ever change that.”

I really was a kid again then, standing in front of the girl he’d loved before he’d even known what love was.

“No worries, Ace. I’m a big girl. I gave up on being loved a long time ago and I don’t really care if I’m not liked either.”

I really wanted to use me for nothing in return. She’d owned me a long time ago, my heart bought with her smiles and endless days in the sun at her side. She could use me until I was ruined, because my only wish in my whole life had been that this girl wanted me the way I wanted her. But if I couldn’t have that, then she could have whatever pieces of me she liked and discard the rest. My body might have been leant to others, but my heart had never been touched by anyone but her. And she would always have that claim on me.