Tiffany’s wealthy family purchased a great amount of acreage right next to Gram and Adelaide’s estates and they built a huge house and moved in over the summer. Next thing I knew, Tiffany was going to high school with us.
I hated it.
And what was worse, Dante had become friends with her. He said hi to her now when we ran into her, smiled at her, he even chatted and joked with her. When I’d called him out on it, he’d said, “She’s not that bad, tiger. We’ve snubbed her for years for no good reason aside from spiting my mother. Don’t you think it’s time we grew up? She can’t help that my mom’s a psycho any more than I can. Give her a chance. She’s actually pretty cool.”
I didn’t take that well. I gave him the silent treatment for two days, would barely look at him, but then it occurred to me that if I withdrew from him, he might turn to her.
I approached him at his locker. He was surrounded by people, as he always seemed to be lately, but I ignored them all.
Tiffany was lingering near him, talking to some girls. I knew she’d do that. She’d become a part of his circle of friends, I was certain of it.
The thought had been my last straw and why I had decided to approach him right then.
He smiled warmly when he saw me. He thought I was over my snit, and he was happy about it.
I didn’t smile back but moved right into him, smashing my soft chest against his hard one.
He put his arms around me, and I lifted my face up to him. He was not into public displays of affection, but he gave me a brief peck on the mouth.
I wasn’t having it, so I reached up and pulled his head back down to mine. I rubbed my body against his and started kissing him.
With a quiet groan, he started kissing me back, his hands going to my hips.
After a few beats he pulled back with a curse, “Jesus, what’s gotten into you? Not here.”
He wouldn’t let me move my hips, but I was brushing my breasts lightly into his chest, back and forth, over and over.
“Not fucking here,” he gritted out. “Guys!” he barked at the jocks he called his friends these days. “Give us a minute, will you?”
They left and the girls that were with them followed, Tiffany sending one long, steady stare my way before she joined them.
I met the stare, pressing my body harder against Dante. Mine, I told her silently. My man, my territory.
“What was that?” His voice was quiet and incredulous.
I glared up at him. “What? Are you embarrassed of me? I’m pretty sure everyone at this school knows we’re together.”
That pissed him off royally, I could tell. His hands tightened on my hips and his eyes shot daggers at me. “You know better. Don’t say shit like that. And yeah, of course everyone knows we’re together, but look at you right now. The fuck me look on your face, grinding on me in broad daylight in front of a crowd? I don’t want other guys seeing you like this. I don’t want them to have this picture of you in their head when they’re fantasizing about you because I know that every fucking one of them does. The assholes can use their imagination; they don’t need a picture like this.”
I was sure he was right about at least one of them. The way Nate looked at me, even just before the guys had cleared out, the gaze he’d cast my way, one of sheer longing, I was well aware I was the star of his fantasies.
“I think Nate is in love with me.” I had a habit of goading his jealousy, because I couldn’t get enough of it.
“I think so too. Try to go easy on him, will ya?”
“Aren’t you jealous?” I was pouting. That was hardly the reaction I’d been expecting.
“No. I trust you, and I don’t honestly think he can help it. I know I can’t.”
I pulled his head down to me and started kissing him again.
After a few drugging moments, he pulled back again.
“I need you,” I said into his ear.
“Jesus, Scarlett, we have class in like five minutes.”
“You can’t skip one class to give your girlfriend what she needs?” I breathed.
For that, he crowded me into the locker. “Oh, I’ll give my girlfriend what she needs all right, but I highly doubt we’ll only miss one class, and just for the record, I’m a little disappointed in her.”
“Why?”
“She hasn’t spoken to me for two days because she’s jealous when she, of all people, has no right to be jealous.”
I pulled back to look at him. “I don’t?”
“You don’t. No right at all. Other girls, other people, aren’t even on my radar. I don’t notice them. I don’t see them. I don’t care about anybody but you and you know it.”
With a coquettish smile, I took his hand and led him out of the building.
We walked through the parking lot and then into the woods. The elementary, middle school, and high school were all just minutes from each other, and all of them backed against the same large stretch of forest. It was a longer walk through the woods to get home than it used to be when we were younger, but still only about twenty leisurely minutes.
“Where should we go?” he asked me. “Dammit, I should’ve driven today.” His brain had gone into full-on rut mode.
“The forest,” I decided. Usually we went to my grandma’s house. I hated that place, but it was always abandoned until the evening so it was too convenient not to use.
He grunted, not sounding pleased with the idea, but when I started pulling him, he didn’t resist.
We didn’t make it far, maybe five minutes in before we were all over each other.
“We need to walk the rest of the way,” he told me between drugging kisses. “I don’t have any condoms on me.”
“You don’t? Why the hell not?”
“Because normally I don’t need them at school, and I especially didn’t think I’d need them today with the way you’ve been giving me the cold shoulder.”
“Whatever. It’s fine. You can just pull out.”
He groaned and started kissing me again, but quickly pulled away. “We’ve discussed it, and you know that doesn’t work. You need to get on the pill and until then, condoms.”
I started rubbing him with my hand through his jeans. “Just once won’t hurt. I want to feel you bare.”
“Fuck,” he cursed, yanking away from me.
I smiled and turned around, unsnapping my cutoff shorts and pushing them off.
“What are you doing?” he asked me when I went down on hands and knees.
I straightened, shrugged my shirt off, then my bra and lowered again. “I’ll let you guess,” I told him.
He cursed and cursed, but it wasn’t long before I heard him taking off his clothes, and then I felt him behind me, his chest against my back.
He kissed my neck. “I can’t believe I’m doing this. You could talk me into anything.”
“It’ll be fine,” I assured him. “Just pull out, okay?”
“Okay,” he panted and pushed his tip into me.
We both groaned.
He palmed my breasts and moved deeper.
“Oh God,” he breathed and rammed himself home.
He’d been getting better about lasting longer the more we had sex, but this time it was like our first time. He only made it a few rough thrusts before he was pulling out of me, coming in warm spurts against my ass, kissing my back and telling me he loved me.
Well, at least he’d pulled out.
“Sorry. Fuck. Sorry.” His fingers were playing with my clit, his other hand still fondling my breast. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of you.”
I squirmed. My knees were already sore and I knew they’d be marked up from the hard ground, but I didn’t want to move. I just wanted to stay like this until he was ready again.
“More,” I told him thickly, moving my hips.
“So greedy,” his approving voice rumbled onto my skin. He pinched my clit lightly as the fingers of his other hand pushed into me, two fingers thrusting steadily. I tilted my hips u
ntil they were hitting just the right nerve.
“Don’t stop,” I gasped when I was getting close.
He stopped abruptly.
“What did I say?” I snapped at him, unfinished and surly with it.
His answer came in the form of his recovered cock breaching me. He picked up the steady rhythm again, but this time it was so much better with the thickness of him.
I’d just started to come, my sheath clenching around him, when he pulled out again.
I straightened, turned, and pressed myself against him, grabbing his spasming cock and helping him finish with my hand, pulling his blunt tip to smash against my sensitive clit as we both got off, his warm cum coating my tender flesh in continuous pumps.
It was so good that I kept ahold of him, giving him open-mouthed kisses as I squeezed him, not ready for it to end.
He pressed me onto my back, spreading my legs open wide.
He had my breasts in his hands, pushed together while he licked my nipples when he reluctantly pulled back. “We should go somewhere. To your grandma’s probably. She’ll still be at work, so . . .”
I pulled his head back to my breasts, aiming one aching nipple at his mouth. I didn’t want to go anywhere. I was already worked up again, and it was still a solid fifteen-minute walk. I didn’t think I could wait that long and I told him so.
With a loud pop, he let my nipple out of his mouth. “It’ll take me more than fifteen minutes to recover,” he pointed out.
I bit my lip and pushed his head down just enough for him to get the hint.
He smiled and put his mouth on me again.
“God, if the girls at school only knew, mmm, that you could do this to them,” I told the sky as he kissed his way across my body. “They already want you something fierce, and they have no idea, mmm, that you’re like this, mmm.”
He came up for air long enough to say, “For the record, I’m not interested in doing this to anyone but you.”
His head was deep between my legs, and I was just on the edge of release when he pulled away.
“What!” I cried out. It was no time to be stopping.
He moved up my body, and grinning, shoved into me again.
My sated body was still vibrating, his heavy weight on top of me, when I blinked my eyes open and caught a movement at the corner of it.
I froze.
Dante was oblivious at first, still moaning as he finished on my thigh, his mouth busy on my neck.
I tapped his shoulder, then tapped it again.
“Mmm?” He made the noise between kisses.
“Someone saw us,” I told him, shivering.
His head snapped up, his entire body lifting off me. “What?”
“Someone was watching us,” I clarified. I pointed to the spot in the trees. “I don’t know for how long, but I saw somebody when I opened my eyes. They were watching us, but when I spotted them, they disappeared.
“Did you get a look at them?”
“It was a big man. I think it was that homeless guy, the one that’s always sleeping by the river, closer to the middle school. Remember?”
Dante was not happy about that. He cursed fluently as he got dressed, then impatiently stuffed me back into my clothes since I hadn’t been hurrying fast enough to suit him.
He dragged me around as he checked the immediate area, but there was no sign of the guy by then. “I don’t like it. I should find the pervert and put the fear of God into him.”
“I don’t honestly know how long he was watching. He might have just stumbled upon us, and I just happened to catch sight of him before he could leave.”
I moved into him, hand rubbing his chest. “Let’s forget about it. Let’s go to my grandma’s.” I cupped him. “We weren’t done, were we?”
His head fell back. “Jesus, you’re going to kill me.”
We didn’t make it back to school that day, and even knowing he’d catch hell from his coach for it, he skipped practice.
The next day we couldn’t even look at each other without the past day’s sensory memories ruling us. I lasted until just after third period.
“I’m so sore,” I breathed into his ear.
His answer was a very satisfying, half-stifled moan.
“I can’t sit down for another class, so I’m skipping,” I continued.
His hands squeezed my hips, and I may as well have been reading his mind.
“You know what’s not sore, though?” I asked him.
His only answer was a few helpless pants into my ear.
“My mouth.”
“At this rate,” he told me later. We were in my bed, his naked form spooning me from behind, “I’m going to get kicked off the team.”
I didn’t tell him that that wouldn’t have made me sad. He knew how I felt about football.
It was just a few weeks later that it happened.
It is so sad and so terrible how the most random and senseless things can set about your destruction.
Walking home alone that day was a complete fluke. Nothing but a temperamental whim on my part. Something so silly, some petty, jealous fit over Dante being too nice to Tiffany, and I’d gone into a rage and decided to go home early, ditching out while Dante was at practice, and sulk by myself.
When I think back on it there’s always some significant echo, some resounding weight to the steps I took alone into the woods that day.
But I couldn’t say if I noticed it then, only that it has attributed itself quite securely to my memories.
It is a powerful echo, one that aches with regret and a million what ifs.
What if I hadn’t gone that way? What if I hadn’t gone alone?
What if I’d waited for Dante to walk with me?
Any of those things could have prevented so much heartache, so much pain, and the domino effect of destruction that followed.
One thing was for certain, whether it was memory or retrospect, those footsteps would reverberate like gunfire through the rest of my life.
*****
BOOKS BY R.K. LILLEY
THE DANTE & SCARLETT SERIES
BREAKING HIM
BREAKING HER - COMING SOON
THE WILD SIDE SERIES
THE WILD SIDE
IRIS
DAIR
THE OTHER MAN
TYRANT - COMING SOON
THE UP IN THE AIR SERIES
IN FLIGHT
MILE HIGH
GROUNDED
MR. BEAUTIFUL
LANA (AN UP IN THE AIR COMPANION NOVELLA)
AUTHORITY - COMING SOON
THE TRISTAN & DANIKA SERIES
BAD THINGS
ROCK BOTTOM
LOVELY TRIGGER
THE HERETIC DAUGHTERS SERIES
BREATHING FIRE
CROSSING FIRE - COMING SOON
THE BISHOP BROTHERS SERIES
BOSS - COMING SOON
HERE’S A TEASER FROM THE FOLLOW UP TO
BREAKING HIM.
BREAKING HER
“If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”
~William Shakespeare
PRESENT
SCARLETT
I was drunk. Good and stinking drunk.
We were at the crew hotel in Seattle (not my favorite town) on a layover, and we were trolling the lobby bar.
Okay, I was trolling the bar. My girls were just there for moral support.
No wait, that wasn’t all. We were supposed to be celebrating. Something great had happened, I had to remind myself.
I’d just landed my first starring role in a feature film.
Yes, that was it. We were celebrating.
Also . . .
I was planning to make up for the fact that I’d just spent way too much time being a pathetic, lovesick fool, moping in my room, hiding in my bed.
Hating myself. Wanting to disappear.
I’d barely scraped myself together
enough to make it to the fateful audition that had landed me the part that might change my life.
Even when I’d gotten the news (that I was finally, at last, going to star in a movie!) I’d barely felt even a stirring of happiness.
The last round with Dante still had its hold on me. I’d let him do his worst and the wounds he’d inflicted were just not healing.
But I’d vowed tonight that I was done with that.
I was on the hunt for a stand-in punching bag. I had decided about three drinks ago that I’d feel much better about myself if I put at least one man between me and my last memory of Dante.
I was looking around, a pout on my face. “No cute boys,” I told the girls.
Demi agreed.
“I’m not sad,” Leona said, studying me. “I don’t think I want you to find a cute boy when you’re in this shape.”
They were sitting in a booth and I was standing next to it. I was not in a sitting mood. I was in a sway to the music and get some male attention mood. I just wished there were some males around worth being noticed by.
I’d already shot down two that just weren’t cute enough. More specifically: Reject Number One wasn’t tall enough and Reject Number Two looked too wholesome.
I didn’t like wholesome, never had. I craved sinister categorically.
“Don’t speak too soon,” Farrah said, eyes aimed at the door. “I’ll let you have him if you want him, but damn, I sure don’t want to.”
I turned to see. And smiled.
It was my lucky day.
Either he was actually looking for me or it was a hell of a coincidence, but Dante’s half-brother, Bastian, had just walked in the door.
He was standing there scanning the room and it didn’t take him long to zero in on me.
He grinned.
I tilted my head and grinned back, then pointed my chin at the bar, heading there with a bouncing little strut.
He beat me to it, and watched me approach, his eyes all over me.