Total pages in book: 93
Estimated words: 87068 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 435(@200wpm)___ 348(@250wpm)___ 290(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 87068 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 435(@200wpm)___ 348(@250wpm)___ 290(@300wpm)
The light turns green. I floor it, just to burn off the feeling.
I don’t talk again until we’re in the underground garage, the door closing behind us with a hydraulic whine. I kill the engine and turn to face her.
“You want to tell me the real story?”
She stares down at her knees, hands still bunched.
“Stella dared me. She said I should— She said you’d want—” Kayleigh’s voice breaks, but she rallies, swallowing hard. “I just wanted to get out, I swear. It wasn’t supposed to be like that. I swear—”
She can’t finish. The silence fills in the gaps: not just the stepsister, not just the afterthought, not just the thing you look past to get to something better.
I watch her for a while. I want her to squirm. I want her to own her actions.
Finally I say, “Did you enjoy taking those photos?”
Kayleigh blinks. She looks up, and her eyes are wet and embarrassed and, beneath it all, desperate.
She nods, so tiny I almost miss it.
I nod back, once, like we’re making a deal.
“Good,” I growl.
We take the elevator up, the tension between us a third person in the mirrored box. I can smell the young woman’s sweat, her perfume, and under that, something sweeter, like fragrant nectar. My cock jerks immediately. Fuck, this girl’s going to be the death of me.
At my floor, the doors slide open. I put my hand on the small of her back and guide her to my place.
Inside, she stops just inside the door, heels sinking into the carpet, and looks around like she’s waiting for instructions.
I drop my keys on the counter, take off my coat, and turn to face her.
“You look like shit,” I say, but my voice is softer than I mean it to be.
Kayleigh smiles, a crooked shadow of a smile. “I feel like it, too.”
She stands in the entryway, arms folded over her chest, trembling, needy, and goddamned beautiful.
I step closer, until we’re breathing the same air.
“You sent me those photos,” I say, slow and deliberate, “and now you’re going to stand here and act like you don’t know what I want from you?”
She shakes her head, but it’s a lie.
I lift her chin with two fingers, gentle but insistent.
“What do you think I want?” I ask.
She shudders. “To punish me?”
I smile, slow and predatory.
“No,” I say. “To see if you’re as good in real life as you are in the pictures.”
She’s trembling, but she doesn’t look away.
I let go of her chin and step back, giving her space to decide.
“Go take a shower,” I say. “Get the makeup off. I’ll make coffee.”
Kayleigh nods, grateful for the order. She slips out of her shoes and walks down the hall, bare feet silent on the hardwood.
When I hear the water running, I exhale, slow and deep, and pour myself a scotch.
I sit at the counter, glass in hand, and watch the entry to the hallway.
Part of me wants to go in there, rip the dress off her, and bend her over the sink. But part of me wants to wait, to let her come out clean and exposed and knowing exactly what’s about to happen.
Either way, the game has already started.
And this time, I’m not going to play nice.
10
EXPLAINING THE UNEXPLAINABLE
Kayleigh
It turns out a penthouse can be luxurious but cold at once. Even at sunrise because there are no fresh-baked muffins or cartoon birds chirping on the window ledge—only a flood of directional brightness, as if someone airlifted the top floor off the building and set it in the middle of an operating room. The whole place looks surgically clean, even with a bouquet of yellow peonies on the front table.
Trevor’s place is all rectangles: two gray sofas so deep you could stage-dive into them, black glass tables with edges sharp enough to file your nails, art on the walls that’s just thick white paint smeared in angry horizontal lines. It smells like luxury and money and, faintly, of his cologne, deep and spicy.
I sit exactly where he told me—on the edge of the velvet sofa, wearing a bathrobe so fluffy it could double as insulation, ankles crossed and hands locked in a little knot at my waist. My hair is still wet from the shower, the last drips gathering at my neck. There’s nothing on my face, not even mascara. My skin feels raw, and I feel hopelessly young and naive.
Meanwhile, my stepbrother stands at the bar cart with his back to me, pouring something dark gold into a glass. Is that alcohol? This early in the morning? But the set of his shoulders makes me bite my lip, and I don’t ask. The windows behind him are floor-to-ceiling and show the city spread out below, a river of metal and exhaust and too much sky. Forty stories up, you can see the whole grid of Minneapolis, straight to where it curls around the lake. The clouds are a sheet of flat pearl, and the light bounces off every glass building, turning the city into a million cut mirrors. I wonder how many people are looking up, right now, and if any of them see us.