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My hands tighten on the steering wheel as I fight the urge to glance at her sitting quietly in the passenger seat of my SUV.
Yeah, I’d wanted to punish her. I’d intended for the kiss to be simple, a rough press of my mouth against hers. But then, fuck, I don’t even know what happened.
If I thought she smelled good, she tasted the way I imagined a hit of ecstasy might make a man feel. Suddenly, my punishing kiss turned into something more. A craving I needed to fill. A taste I needed to deepen.
When she gasped, I invaded.
She’d tasted like apples. The forbidden fruit this devil knows damn well better than to devour. Still, if it hadn’t been for the ballroom full of other people, most surely looking our way, I’d have stripped her down and taken her right there on the floor, sullied her the way she’d begged me to only the night before on my porch.
Jeez.
I wipe my hand down my face, forcing my mind away from sweet apples and rain and the temptation to strip her of the innocence she claims to possess.
She’s delusional if she thinks I’m buying that virgin bullshit.
I’d been with her sister when we were just kids. Thinking back on it, I’m not convinced Ophelia had ever been innocent. She’d known right from the start how to drive a man wild. How to spin her words so they’d always fall sexual. How to crook her finger in that way men simply can’t resist.
I’d been fifteen when Ophelia pushed me up against her bedroom door, falling to her knees as she told me she’d suck me off if I bought her a bag she wanted. I’d told her I’d buy it for her anyway, but her hands had unbuckled my belt, and I’d been lost to the pleasure of her hot mouth. It’d only been six months later that I’d been pounding into her from behind as she lay bent over the island countertop while her parents had been off at some function, again. We’d fucked like rabbits anywhere and everywhere, until the last year of our relationship when Mom got sick, and we realized the woman I’d planned to marry was fucking my father just as she fucked me.
The memory brings a wave of acrid sick rising up in my belly, and I forget about the taste of apples as a familiar anger begins to boil in my gut.
Yeah, I need Ian to get his shit together. And while he’s at it, I’ll have him hack into Olympia’s medical files. If Darius hired a doc to check for her purity, it’ll have been recorded. At least I can fact-check something.
With the anger, I no longer have to worry that I might do something stupid. Like reach over and take one of those small hands that sit twisted tightly in her lap on a bed of blue suede, into mine. Glancing away from the dark highway, I steal a peek as my hands stay firmly fixed on the steering wheel.
Her neck is twisted and she’s looking out the window. She hasn’t said a word since she climbed into the SUV, and I slammed the door behind her. It’d been all plastic smiles and pleasantries as she said her goodbyes to my friends. My chosen family. They’d all bid their farewells as though devastated I was cutting them off from her for the night. And when Kane pulled her in for a tight hug and a loud kiss on the top of her head, I’d had to battle back the red.
I know well enough he was trying to push me. But I have no intention of letting him see just how near the edge I really am when it comes to this girl. Especially after that kiss.
Fuck, I really shouldn’t have done that.
Olympia glances from the window, catching me watching her. I don’t look away, and heat climbs into her cheeks. Her breathing quickens, I can tell by the faster rise and fall of her full chest.
Awkwardly, obviously needing to fill the silence, she blurts, “I like your friends.”
Tension tightens my gut. “My friends.”
It’s a bizarre response, I’m well aware. She looks at me bizarrely for it. Then she dips her head to her lap, eyes focused on those twisted hands as my own bounce between the dark road lit by my headlights, and the little distraction in my passenger seat.
What is she thinking?
I don’t like that I want to know.
She finally speaks, “I’m not going to steal them, Tav.”
“That’s right, you’re not.” I force myself not to look at her again as she makes an incredulous sound. We sit in silence for another few minutes. “What about your friends?”
She pauses, but finally says, “I only have one.”
That can’t be. Ophelia had been insanely popular, constantly surrounded by people vying for her attention. Olympia is just as beautiful, if not more so.
“Only one?” She makes an affirmative noise. I respond with a grunt of disbelief.
I can feel her eyes on me when she reminds me, “You don’t know me, Tav. You think you do, but you don’t.”
“Who’s your friend?”
“Charlie.” She smiles when she says the name. I know, because I can’t seem to stop myself from looking at her. “Just Charlie.”
