The Fight In Us: A Brother's Best Friend College Romance (The Four Book 4) by Becca Steele (little readers .txt) 📕

Then I noticed the Romanian plates, and I remembered that you said the latest batch of dogs had been transported from Romania.”

“The lock was laughably easy to open.” Zayde took over, his disdainful look showing just what he thought of the truck’s security. “Inside…”

Caiden held up his phone, turning it so we could all see. “I’ll get these up on the TV screen later, but you can see behind all these boxes are the cages, and those sacks in the corner are dog food. The whole of the inside fucking stank of dogs.” He continued by telling us how he and Zayde had left the truck and circled back around to the waste ground. It had been pure luck that they’d come in at the side we were on. The security guy had spotted us—or so the boys had deduced by the way he’d started in our direction, so they’d incapacitated him, then got us out of there as quickly as they could.

Winter went through our experience, and I forwarded my video footage to West, before uploading it to our secure storage. Then I wiped every trace of it from my phone.

You could never be too careful. Promethium had recently told us the story of one of his agents who had incriminating video evidence on his phone. The agent had been investigating a gang in East London who were rumoured to have been involved in sex trafficking. He hadn’t been caught at the time of obtaining the video footage, but around a week later, one of the gang members caught up with him. They’d had their suspicions about him, and when the gang member had taken his phone, the video footage that was still stored on there was enough to incriminate him.

They’d recovered his body from the river a few days later.

Of course, it could have been a cautionary tale made up by Promethium to make sure that we stayed safe, but either way, it was a risk to keep that kind of stuff on our phones.

Thankfully our Kryptos app was secure enough that it would take an expert hacker to crack. Not only that, it was disguised as an everyday phone app, so it would appear innocent unless you were already aware of it.

“I’m gonna go through all this shit and see what I can come up with,” Weston announced, standing up and stretching. My gaze was drawn to the ridges of his abs as his T-shirt rode up, and heat flashed in his eyes as he looked down to catch me staring at him.

Like I’d told him earlier, we were doomed.

I’d had a taste of him, and I wanted more.

One thing that had been drilled into me by every single one of my various martial arts instructors, though, was discipline.

I had the discipline to resist Weston until we’d had time to process whatever this was between us. Until he was sure of what he wanted.

But when his eyes met mine again, I wasn’t sure I wanted to resist anymore.

THIRTY-FOUR

After a night in the guest room, I was woken by a call from my mum.

“Are we ever going to see you?” were her first words when I answered.

“Sorry, Mum. I’m at Cassius’ place. I did text you to say.”

She hummed noncommittally. “Is Weston there?”

“Um. He’s not in the room with me. He’s somewhere in the house, I guess.”

“I want you to invite him for Sunday lunch.” She adopted a stern tone, making me roll my eyes.

“Why would I invite him? Cassius should do it, he’s his best friend.”

“No. I want you to do it.” Her voice lowered. “It’s for Cassius’ birthday. We know he’ll be busy celebrating with his friends, but your dad and I wanted to do a family thing.”

I sighed. “Fine. Am I inviting anyone else to this thing, or what?”

“Invite whoever you see fit. I want to keep it small, a family feel, so maybe just invite the rest of the group and a few others?”

“Okay.” I already knew that this was going to be the opposite of a “small” thing, but there was no point mentioning that to my mum. She loved to entertain. To be fair, Cass loved a party, even more so if he was the centre of attention, so I knew he’d be happy.

We chatted for a few more minutes before she ended the call, and then I made my way downstairs to see who else was around. Cassius was in the kitchen, setting out breakfast supplies, while Winter was pouring boiling water from the kettle into a series of mugs grouped on the countertop.

“Ugh, Cass. Do you have to parade around in just your boxers?”

Winter turned to face me, kettle in hand. “You know he cooks naked sometimes?”

“Gross. Please put some clothes on.” I grabbed an apron from the hook on the back of the door and threw it at him.

“Ah. My favourite apron. Thanks, sis.” He smirked at me, pulling it over his head and adjusting it so the words “Warning: Concealed Sausage” were in full view.

“I just can’t with you,” I muttered, turning away and crossing over to Winter. With a subtle combination of me typing out a message for her to read and several pointed looks, I’d invited her to the Sunday lunch. She said she’d take care of inviting Caiden and Zayde, so I guessed it was up to me to deal with West.

Not that I minded.

“How long will breakfast be?” I asked my brother.

He replied with his head buried in the fridge, pulling out ingredients. “About twenty minutes. You want your eggs scrambled?”

“Fried, please.” I backed away towards the door.

“It’s scrambled or nothing,” he informed me.

“I guess I’ll have them scrambled, then.” Before I left the kitchen, I added, “Thanks,” because regardless of his egg cooking preferences, it was nice of him to cook for me without me asking.

The doorbell sounded, and since I was in the hallway, I padded over to the front door. Kinslee, Winter’s close friend, stood on the