Page 86 of Unwritten Rules

Sender: Mila DeMarco

([email protected])

Recipient: Nathaniel Hawthorne

([email protected])

I lost my phone at the club.

I hitched a ride back to Henry’s. I’m safe. I know you’ll have worried.

We need to talk. Please, if you can, let’s have lunch tomorrow.

I’ll cook. My place at 2 p.m.?

I’ll miss you tonight.

This won’t do at all.

What had happened tonight at Valentine’s wasn’t just blurring the line as I’d claimed in the heat of the moment. Instead, our actions tonight had blown all my restraint to bits.

I need distance. I need time to get myself back under control.

Slipping into my SUV, I sit behind the steering wheel in the darkness, watching the revellers at Valentine’s slip from the doors as the night winds down to a close.

My thoughts are everywhere and nowhere, with one moment playing on repeat inside my mind.

When Mila had come apart under her own fingers, her soft cries of pleasure had turned me on like nothing else in my whole goddamned life.

In the darkened confines of the Roleplay Room, I’d not allowed myself a moment to think, to second guess anything – I’d gone on pure instinct.

Going so far as to come in my fucking underwear like some untried teenager – and I’d not cared one fucking ounce.

Now that I’ve had a taste, I want it all. I want her gorgeous body, her beautiful soul, and her unparalleled mind. I want to claim her heart as my own because mine only beats freely when I’m with her.

I want her to be mine. Forever and for always.

But to have her would mean I’m just like my father. A piece of shit, uncaring of whose lives I ruin to get what I want – because claiming Mila as mine would have far-reaching and long-lasting repercussions.

And so, I floor the accelerator and light out of Valentine’s, heading straight back to Surrey, knowing that even a couple of days away from her before school starts back will be enough to get my act together.

It has to be enough.

The trip back to Hawthorne House is quick and painless, and surprisingly, when I make the familiar trip up the driveway to the House, I feel a sense of peace when previously I felt numb.

Before slipping from the car, I shoot a text of apology to V, but I’m unsurprised when I don’t get a reply.

I really am the worst kind of bollocks.

I amble from the car to the house, realising I’ve not brought anything from London but not able to give a rat’s ass right now. I can send someone tomorrow.

Though one thing is for sure: I won’t be making the journey myself, lest I be too tempted to join that Hellcat for one of those delicious gnocchi lunches that she knows I adore.

The house is thankfully asleep as I make my way to my lonely room. I toss my destroyed jocks and slacks in the hamper and then shower quickly to wash Valentine’s off my body.

Mila’s signature vanilla scent lingers in my nostrils, making my cock hard all over again, but I ignore him too, quickly and roughly – as though in self-flagellation – as I finish my ablutions.

Grabbing a pair of fresh underwear, I faceplant onto the mattress and am out like a light. The events of the last few days have taken more of a toll than I’d previously thought.