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Brooks is not the boy I knew when I was a child.
He’s the man who held my heart in his fist and carved it up like a damn butcher.
The air between the two of us seems to sizzle like the seconds before an electrical storm. I feel charged and high-strung, and there’s a sudden ache between my thighs that’s impossible to deny.
Brooks stares at me as if…as if he plans to eat me for dinner. It’s a heady, intoxicating sensation, one that has every hair on my arms standing at attention.
And then he says, in a voice like thunder, “There’s a lot you don’t know about me, Lily Dean.”
His words are a bucket of ice water being dumped over my head.
It’s the truth, though. Thereisa lot I don’t know about this man standing before me—just as there’s a ton he doesn’t yet know about me. Our history is shrouded in pain, tainted in secrets, and obscured in mystery. We’ll never be the Lily Dean and Brooks Bellua who kissed in the alley outside the dress store a few days before prom.
Our future will always be polluted by the memory of him saying goodbye to me mere minutes after I found my parents murdered.
That reminder exacerbates my previous anger.
“Come on,husband.” I sneer at him. “How about we catch this ghosty and get out of each other’s lives as soon as possible, okay?”
Something flickers in his eyes, there and gone too quickly for me to comprehend it.
“Yes, please.” Abruptly, he jumps to his feet and storms towards the bathroom. Just before he slams the door shut, he calls out, “Try not to get murdered in the meantime, okay?”
“Ye who have little faith.”
“That’s not how the saying goes!” His voice is muffled through the wood of the door.
Muttering under my breath, I move to pull back the covers on the bed. “Stupid, idiotic, irritatingly handsome, and possessive, panty-stealing, ass licker.”
I throw myself onto the surprisingly comfy mattress with a huff.
And then I freeze as something occurs to me—a startling revelation that locks my joints together and freezes my muscles.
One bed.
Two of us.
I gulp.
I’m going to have to share a bed with none other than Brooks Bellua.
The first man I ever loved…and also the first one to break my heart.
9
NINE: LILY
My stomach ties itself into a dozen intricate knots when the door to the bathroom opens, and Brooks steps back into the room after his shower.
Shirtless.
Soaking wet.
I swallow.
Water drips down his defined planes, stopping at the waistband of his basketball shorts. They’re so low I can see his Adonis belt and that damn V that drives most girls insane.
Is he purposely trying to torture me?
