Star-Crossed by Kele Moon

recovering. He shouldn’t even be out of the hospital. Getting him all worked up and aggravated is the last thing he needs.”
    “Someone’s touchy,” Wyatt observed and then leaned over to stare at Jules’s phone, obviously deciding to turn his nervous energy loose on her instead. “Who ya texting?”
    Jules swatted wildly at his chest with one hand and clipped him behind the ear with her phone in the other. “Leave me alone. You’re in my personal space.” She dropped her phone and pushed at Wyatt’s massive bicep with both hands, trying to shove the mountain of a man God had cursed her with as a twin. “Move, ya overgrown oaf.”
    “It’s a car,” Wyatt said incredulously. “What the hell do you want me to do ’bout it?”
    “I should’ve rented a bigger limo.”
    Jules huffed and picked up her phone once more. Wyatt could scoot over and give her breathing room, but he was still trying to see what she was doing. The lack of sleep 76
     
    was getting to her, and it’d been a stressful morning trying to get everyone’s luggage packed and loaded. To say nothing of the nightmare it was to get Clay discharged.
    Hospitals didn’t let gunshot victims walk out the door that easily, even if they had a plane to catch. In the end they had to cancel their earlier flight and book one later in the day to give the doctors time.
    “Are you okay, Jules?” Melody considered her from across the limousine. The pretty waitress had a sling that matched Clay’s, and both hands were wrapped and bandaged from the incident the day before that had left her in need of several sets of stitches. Her sandy-blonde hair was in a ponytail, showing the exhaustion of the past twenty-four hours on her face, but still she was worried about Jules. “You look tired. I know you’ve been doing a lot since everything happened, and we sure do appreciate it.”
    Jules gave Melody a smile. “I’m fine, darlin’. Keeping busy is what I do best.”
    “You do got circles under your eyes.” Wyatt reached over, trying to touch Jules’s face in that annoying brotherly way he’d never grown out of. “Long night?” Jules swatted at him again. When that didn’t deter him, she clasped her smartphone tightly and smacked the screen of it against his forehead hard enough to make a loud thump that had both Melody and Clay wincing in sympathy.
    Wyatt rubbed at his forehead. “Damn it, Jules!”
    “Touch me again and lose a hand.”
    Jules sat back, feeling very self-satisfied as she checked her phone to make sure she hadn’t cracked the screen on Wyatt’s thick skull. Seeing that her phone was still intact, she leaned against the door away from Wyatt and deleted her original text, replacing it with:
    Brothers are a pain in my ass.
    “I guess the business meeting didn’t work off all that womanly aggression you got most of the month.”
     
     
    77
    Jules kicked Wyatt’s leg. “Shut up ’bout my business meeting.”
    “Didn’t go well?”
    “It went fine.”
    “And business meeting’s code for?” Clay asked.
    Jules felt her cheeks heat and lifted her head to glare at Wyatt before she turned and gave Clay an apologetic look. “It’s nothing. I had a date. It was fun. Now it’s over.”
    “It ain’t that over,” Wyatt observed when Jules’s phone vibrated in her lap. “Is that him you been texting all day?”
    Jules ignored Wyatt and picked up her phone to read Romeo’s text.
    No shit! I bet my brothers are a bigger pain in the ass than yours is.
    Jules smiled and reminded him.
    My brother is Wyatt “The Deputy” Conner.
    It took less than a minute for Romeo to text her back, and Jules laughed out loud when she looked at the screen of her phone.
    You win.
    “Why dontcha share with the whole car what’s so funny?” Jules looked up from her phone, seeing that everyone was looking at her. She felt her cheeks heat once more and grabbed her purse on the floor to hide her phone in it.
    Then she looked out the window as a