AllFreeNovel
Share Us
It felt as if I suddenly had Gidget’s dog collar back around my neck, tightening snugly.
Clasping her hands together on the top of her desk in an eerily professional way, Monica sat forward, watching me. “She’s not what I expected. I pictured you going for something more…polished. You know, sophisticated and worldly. Not so immature.”
She was probably trying to describe herself. In which case, that was the very opposite of what I wanted.
I said nothing, refusing to give anything away.
I could tell it bugged her. Her smile faded. “I mean, she’s cute enough, I guess, if you prefer the girl-next-door type. But she’s just so…gauche. I remember her in class. Her laugh is freakishly loud and ostentatious.”
Oh no, she didn’t. She dared to attack the laugh? The very laugh I loved? Those were fighting words right there.
The urge to defend Reese rose, but I managed to remain stonily silent.
“Patricia would chew her up and spit her out without breaking a sweat.”
“Patricia doesn’t need to know anything about it,” I ground out.
Dammit. I broke.
I had given my feelings away. Defeat spiked through me as victory shimmered in Monica’s eyes.
“She’s no one,” I said desperately, forcing out a confused laugh and lifting my hands as if I had no idea why we were even having this conversation. “I don’t know why you think this is newsworthy or something to gossip to your friend about, but it’s not. I barely even know that girl.”
But the woman already had my number. “Then why did you even come here, intent to protect her? Why did you say her name when you were inside me? Why did she have her hand on you like you meant something to her? And why did you just sit there and let her touch you?”
“Are you shitting me?” I blurted out incredulously. “I let a lot of people touch me.” My fingers shook with worry even as I attempted to remain as calm and cool as possible. “She’s just a girl I’ve talked to a few times. She’s no one. I don’t know why I used her last night with you. You told me to picture someone else, and I didn’t have anyone, so hers was the first face to pop into my head because she’d been the last girl I talked to before visiting you. That’s all. She’s not anything to me, she’s a complete innocent, a stranger, and not even worth mentioning to Patricia.”
“My, my.” Monica sat back in her chair and smiled. “I think the boy dost protest too much.”
“Fuck yes,” I told her. “Because I know Patricia. And you obviously do too. She likes to fuck with people just for the fun of it. And I pissed her off, so she’d go after me in a heartbeat if she ever learned of something she thought she could use to actually hurt me. If she believed I liked some girl, it’d be a bloodbath. For the girl. But I don’t. So some completely innocent person getting targeted would be even worse. I don’t want shit like that on my conscience. So why don’t you just keep your mouth shut, and we both forget I ever said one stupid name at the worst moment ever. Okay?”
Monica just watched me. Finally, she tsked and shook her head slowly. “Poor boy,” she murmured. “Don’t you know you’re in the wrong business to have something as useless as a conscience?”
She was telling me.
With a sigh, she sat forward. “I’m not stupid, Mason. You would say exactly what you’re saying now if you did really like this girl.”
I thought it through and shrugged. “Yeah,” I admitted, “I probably would. But I don’t.”
She lifted her hands. “Then you know what you have to do to ensure my silence?”
Fed up with this bullshit, I growled, “You want Thursday? Fine. You can have fucking Thursday.”
But she cringed at that suggestion. “Except, no, I think I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to wait all the way until Thursday anymore.”
Strangling her would be the easiest solution. It’d solve my problem, protect Reese, and I wouldn’t have to play her little blackmail game or fuck her ever again.
It was really too bad I was completely against murder or even violence.
“Then when?” I asked, sighing out my impatience and rubbing at the center of my forehead irritably.
She just smiled at me and glanced around the small, closed-in office.
I lifted my eyebrows, my stomach churning with unease. No, I wanted to deny, even though I knew where this was going. Not here. Not right now.
But I went ahead and guessed, “Right here? Right now?”
The witch didn’t even nod. She just smiled at me with this gloating kind of triumph that made me want to rebel and tell her to fuck off so badly my gut burned with acid.
