He covers my mouth with his large hand. “Fucking stop.” He breathes heavily, a guy that runs marathons, a guy that scales mountains in minutes. “I never slept with her, but I can’t take back what you saw. I wish to God I f**king could.”
He never slept with her. This almost brings tears to my eyes. I see how much this moment is tearing him up, and the torture that I feel reflects equally in his rigid posture and cinched brows.
He keeps his hand over my mouth. “I’ve ignored a lot of bad shit in my life, but I don’t want to ignore this one good thing anymore. It’s too painful.” He stares at me deeply, my chest rising with something pure and warm. “I kissed you tonight because I want your lips to only touch mine. From now until forever. That’s the f**king truth.” He drops his hand.
My heart can’t stop slamming into my chest. From now until forever. I skim my hands down his arms. He doesn’t withdraw. He’s serious. He wants to be together, no more dating other people. “What about your brother?” I ask the million dollar question, the crux. “And my mom…my dad?” They’re the biggest roadblocks.
“It’s up to you,” he says. “We can tell them, or we can do this in private and wait until the age gap isn’t a big deal to them anymore.”
“When will that be?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know. Maybe when you’re twenty.”
A year and a half. I think I can wait that long. If we tell everyone now, I see my mom tearing him away from me. I see too many headaches and more heartbreaks. I just want something good. Something right without anything abysmal attached. So I say, “I don’t want to tell anyone.”
He nods and looks relieved by my answer. I don’t think he was ready to confront his brother. He backs up a little, but as he watches me, he grimaces. It’s the same expression he had when I brought up Ian. “I’m going to spell it out for you,” he says, “because I’m still f**king worried you don’t understand what I want.”
I smile. “Okay.”
“We’re together,” he says pointblank. “I’m not going to be with anyone but you, even if no one else f**king knows that. We don’t date other people for show. They just think we’re single.”
I nod. “I like it.”
I hear his phone buzz. He takes out his cell again, annoyed. He ignores the second call. “We need to go upstairs to your room.”
I tilt my head with a playful smile. “How forward of you.”
“Cute,” he says. “But we’re not f**king. We’re meeting two people there.”
I frown. “What?”
“I didn’t fly alone.”
The bottom of my stomach drops and my eyes grow to saucers.
“You think I could leave Philly to check on you without worrying anyone else? They read the tabloids too.” They learned that I was thrown out of the Havindal collection.
“Who?” I ask. “Who came?”
He touches the small of my back and guides me up the stairs. “Surprise.”
I do like surprises.
But this one will be bad no matter what. Being alone with Ryke sounded like a hot, steamy vacation. Add in one of my sisters or his brother, and it turns awkward and uncomfortable…but definitely more dangerous.
Danger. That is alluring. And it’s what partially drew us together in the first place.
I realize, right now, that this is the beginning of something new.
21
RYKE MEADOWS
Lo raises his arms as we walk down the hallway towards him. “I called you ten times. What the hell were you doing?”
I point to Daisy beside me, a normal amount of distance between us even though I’d rather be back in the stairwell, with her wrapped in my arms. “I was trying to find this one. She wasn’t in her room.”
“I went for a vending machine run,” she says, masking the lie with a bright, overwhelmingly beautiful smile.
Lo relaxes some. He wears a backwards baseball cap, looking like a f**king ‘90s kid. But it’s partly to disguise himself from people, not that it’s doing a good job. He has striking features that bring attention, even among male models.
“So you came to check up on me?” Daisy asks with an even larger smile, bouncing on her feet as we stop by her hotel door. She looks to the other person next to my brother.
Two inches taller stands Connor Cobalt.
We’re the only ones who hopped on Connor’s company jet.
And it’s a new situation that none of us are used to—the three of us alone with Daisy. Usually it’s Lily, not the youngest, wildest Calloway with us.
“Yeah,” Lo says. “How are you doing?”
“Better.” She fits a strand of hair behind her ear.
Daisy looks f**king terrible. And I don’t say anything about it, but I think we all can tell that she hasn’t been sleeping. She’s really f**king pale, her body frailer, and all I want to do is hold her and tuck her into bed. I wear my concern outwardly, and I don’t give a shit if someone hounds me for it. I’m f**king concerned, and I’m going to stay that way.
“Right…” My brother says, not believing her at all as he scrutinizes her features.
I asked Lo to come along. I’ve been so f**king worried about his state of mind that it’d be just as hard leaving him as it was leaving Daisy.
But the tension builds in the room because we all know his feelings about my friendship with her. Now that Daisy and I have moved beyond that title, the lie weighs heavy on my chest.
Lies.
I’m used to being wound tight by them, and the guilt will come later. It always does.
“Bad news,” Lo says, turning to me. “Connor f**ked up.”
I let out a short laugh. “I never thought I’d hear those magic f**king words.”
“So much of what you just said, I hate,” Connor tells me causally, as though he doesn’t really care, but I see that he does when his lips twitch.
Magic—Connor f**king hates magic.
He also hates being wrong. “What’d you do?” I ask.
“Nothing,” Connor says. “Which is why I didn’t f**k up.”
“He forgot to book a hotel room,” Lo explains. “And with the Rugby World Cup happening in Paris this weekend, plus Fashion Week, there’s nothing here or close by available.”
Fuck. “How’d you forget to do something?” I ask Connor, cringing the moment I give him that much credit. But honestly, he has a photographic memory. He has charts and alerts and f**king notes everywhere to remind him of things too.
“Not that it’s any of your business—I’m having a fight with my wife,” he says. “My mind was somewhere else.” He’s still fighting with her?
“Is she okay?” Daisy asks, pulling her phone out of her pocket to text Rose.
“She’s how she normally is,” Connor says vaguely.
“Bitchy,” Lo clarifies. “High-strung, obsessive compulsive.” He smiles. “God, I’m so glad she didn’t come.”
Connor’s eyebrow arches. “I’m starting to be thankful too. Truthfully, I’m not in the mood to handle two five-year-olds.” He pauses. “And in case you didn’t catch that, I was referring to her and you.”
Lo laughs, not taking the insult to heart. See—that shit is f**king annoying. If I said that to Lo, he’d give me the cold shoulder. But for Connor, he can say whatever he wants in this mellow, chill way and get any reprieve from my brother.