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I just stared for several seconds, trying to work out if there was something in his words I’d missed.
“You can’t just… make someone else spend time with you,” I said, when he didn’t give me anything else.
“Can’t I?” said Lucas, spreading his hands wide.
“What are you going to do,” I said, “put me in hospital every time—”
Lucas’s eyes on me weren’t shifting. Suddenly, all I could think about was his damn car. He’d only got the thing back hours ago and he’d smashed it without a thought.
“You could have killed me,” I said, even though the thought made me start to shake.
“Nah,” said Lucas, “you’re fine.”
I was not going to succeed in convincing him of anything, and I couldn’t let myself get upset. Luca
s was far too smooth for me to have any chance of making them understand he was the problem… and if my parents or the hospital staff came back in, I would have no further opportunity to get to the bottom of what was happening here.
I looked into those unsettlingly attractive eyes, and said, “Why?” Then, a better question: “Why now?”
Lucas didn’t seem to have any particular reaction to the rephrased question. “You’re gorgeous, Callie,” he said. “Noticed right away when I first saw you today. I took one look and said to myself, I want in.”
With the way he was looking at me, there was no doubt exactly what he ‘wanted in’ to. My legs became restless under my thin sheet. Surely my body was not reacting to his words in that way…
Well I might be a virgin, but I had spent plenty of time in the shower or in my bed at night, figuring out what was what. Whether I liked the idea of admitting it or not, I was starting to feel turned on.
It wasn’t just going on between my legs either, where anything that was happening was safely hidden from his eyes. My breasts were starting to feel heavy and sensitive too. I squirmed in the bed, and failed to completely stifle a gasp as the hospital gown scraped over my chest. My nipples were standing up hard under that thin bit of cloth. I could blame it on the air conditioning or weird effects of concussion or whatever I liked, but the fact was they were right there for Lucas to see. And I could tell he hadn’t missed this fact.
His eyes glued to my chest, he ran his tongue over that ridiculously pillowy bottom lip. “They’re going to come back to run some tests on you soon—the fuss you made at the crash site sparked some worries about serious brain injury. We don’t have time to argue and I’m not in the mood for it after the day I’ve had, so here’s how it’s going to work. You don’t have a car any more, so I’ll pick you up for school on Monday, assuming you’re in a condition to go.”
“You don’t have a car any more either,” I pointed out, trying to find a way to move my arm casually to block his view of my chest. The only dignified option I seemed to have here was to pretend I hadn’t even noticed what my body was doing. Even if there was no way he would believe it.
“Don’t be silly, Calista,” said Lucas, “of course I have a car.”
Something about the way he said that made me throb again between my legs. Maybe they were going to find out I’d been seriously injured in the head. How could I be having these feelings after this mad fucker had pulled a stunt that could have killed me?
“I’m not getting in a car with you,” I told him. My head was starting to throb too. Like Lucas, I sensed we didn’t have a lot of time left to sort this out.
“Of course you will,” Lucas said. “I’m going to take you to work as well, if you still insist on going.”
I was expecting him to make some threat about what he would do if I refused to accept his offer, but I realised he didn’t need to say anything. He’d already proven he could cause serious trouble for me if I didn’t agree to do what he wanted.
My mind flashed back to several years ago, to walking out the school gates with Mum wondering if he would be there to meet us somewhere along the road. What he would do that day.
Well, he had definitely escalated his games since those days, but some things were still the same. It was still impossible to predict just how far Lucas Starling would go when he had his eye on you. And it was still just as unsettling not knowing.
“You still haven’t really told me why,” I said. “You could have almost any girl in our class get in your car. You wouldn’t even need to smash it up to make a point.”
That perfect, straight-teeth smile again. It seemed wrong that someone so fucked-up should be able to make such a pretty smile. “Why shouldn’t I have the exact toy I want to play with, Callie?”
“That’s not an answer I like,” I told him. “I’ve seen now how you treat your toys when you don’t get what you want.”
“Well,” Lucas said, “you’d better try hard to keep being a toy I don’t want to break.”
He leaned over my prone form and I pulled my head back, expecting an attempted kiss—but instead his hand slid from my waist up and then brushed the side of my breast as it withdrew, barely grazing my nipple through my almost nonexistent hospital gown. Conceivably just an accident, a slip… but with his eyes on mine so intently as he drew back, I wasn’t going to buy it.
He wrinkled his nose at me in a way that had several parts of my body flip-flopping over, and sauntered out of the room with his hands in his pockets.
My blood was on fire. I wanted to scream, throw something after his head, punch him—and if I did anything I would just make myself look even more nuts.
