by Becker Gray
“Look, we’re keeping the touching to a minimum.”
He shook his head. “No, no. You wanted to sell this, remember? So your friends can vouch for you, and also so Sera and Lennox don’t make things worse with your family by trying to fix this mess. And let’s face it, Sera isn’t going to believe it unless she sees it with her own two eyes. So buckle up, buttercup. You and I are a thing now.” He gave me a small, tight smile.
“Have I mentioned that I loathe you?”
Dark amusement curved his lips even more. “More than once. Several occasions, actually. But it’s okay. It gets you hot.”
“It most certainly does not!”
“Oh, I think it does,” he said, his voice going into a low purr.
Okay, maybe I had thought about some hate-kissing with him. But he didn’t need to know that.
Still wearing that dirty, flirty smirk as if he could read my thoughts, he said, “It’s okay. It can be our little secret.”
“We’ve got too many of those already,” I grumbled.
Smiling, he leaned in and kissed my cheek. It was soft. A whisper of a kiss really. And there was a part of me that wanted to lean in too. That part of me that, in fact, didn’t hate him. That part of me that had once dreamed that maybe, just maybe, Phineas Yates could be someone I cared about.
That part of me had died two years ago, obviously—but then I would see glimpses of him that reminded me of how he used to make me feel. It was very confusing.
“Don’t overdo it, Yates.”
His hand reached up and his fingers brushed my hair off my cheek, tucking a strand behind my ear. “You know, your eyes and the dark hair, they’re a terrific contrast. Eerie almost. But it suits you. And just so you know, it doesn’t matter what version of you I see, I’m obsessed with it all.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “You know we’re not around anyone else right now, right? You don’t have to pretend.”
He gave me an unreadable smile and his fingers squeezed oh so gently at my waist. “Let’s go inside, shall we?”
Keaton was extra. And when it came to Iris, he was extra extra. He’d rented an entire restaurant in the nearby town of Hope, just a couple of miles from the school, so we could celebrate her being back with us.
Keaton and Iris had fallen in love in this whole whirlwind romance at the beginning of the year. She’d only been here a semester, hell, just a couple of months really, before she’d gotten some prestigious internship in Paris. She’d graduated early and packed up her bags. Now she either came back to visit or Keaton was gone to see her once a month. It was very sweet. And the two of them were completely besotted with each other, which gave every inner happily-ever-after-wanting princess an awww moment.
Keaton had the restaurant decorated in soft tea lights, bringing a hint of Paris inside this Vermont eatery. La Chaumiere had accommodated him because he was a Constantine, and that’s how being a Constantine works.
Phin opened the door for me and then stepped aside to let me pass. I gave him a brief nod. “Thanks.”
“Try and smile. You’re not off to the guillotine.”
“Right.” I forced a smile on my face.
He grimaced. “Jesus. Actually, the scowl is better.”
I pursed my lips.
“Nope. Not that face,” he said. I threw up my hands exasperated, and he shook his head. “Not that one either.”
I gave him the plastic smile I used at state events, and he grinned back. “Ah, that’s the one I’m looking for. Try that one. I mean Sera is going to see right through it, but the others won’t.”
My stomach flipped at the thought of Sera. He was right. She was my best friend, and she would absolutely see through this. So would Sloane for that matter. Sloane could spot a liar a mile away. Though she had a particular area of weakness when it came to people she loved. So maybe I had a little hope.
As the hostess directed us toward where our friends were, Phin took my hand and wrapped his larger one around it. “It’s going to be fine.”
When we walked in, everyone was laughing. Tanith had pulled Owen to the dance floor and was trying to make him dance with her. Which he sort of did but in this kind of stiff way as if he were looking for a rapid exit. But she hopped around him dancing, and he gave her this indulgent smile like she was his whole world. Which, God, I suppose she was.
I always thought him cold, unyielding, but he would give Tanith anything. She could ask for his trousers and boxers right now he would walk around swinging in the wind. It was quite impressive.
And then of course my brother kept trying to pull Sloane off to the side. I knew what that meant. He wanted to give her a poke.
Shudder.
They were sweetly in love. Although Sloane was terrifying, and I wondered what would happen if Lennox fucked up at some point. I mean I would kill him. And then Sloane would dig up the remains and kill him again. Except she would take her time, which was scary. As for Keaton and Iris, they were so wrapped around each other and in love it made me want to gag a little.
At least I thought that was what the burning in my throat was. It definitely wasn’t jealousy. I definitely wasn’t jealous that they had the real thing, and all Phin and I had was an elaborate act.
The last and most evil Hellfire member, Rhys, was in the corner drinking something amber-colored and lounging about, looking bored with the entire affair. But as ever, his gaze was fixed on Sera, who was chatting to one of the other guests. Laughing in that way she had, where it took up her whole face.
He looked at her like he was a werewolf and she was the full moon.
Of my brother’s friends, he was the most terrifying. I didn’t know him well. But despite the rumors of him destroying hearts, lives, and reputations, there had been a moment this winter when he’d been exactly what I needed. When he’d helped me.
My nose started to sting, and I quickly blinked away the tears that threatened to well, shoving the sudden swell of emotion back down where it belonged into the darkness. Tucked away, where no one could see it.
Rhys caught my gaze then and gave me a nod. Which I’d learned was his way of acknowledging he saw me. But his scowl returned back to Sera and then quickly snapped back to me and Phineas, down to our hands together, and back up to my face. Then one dark, straight brow cocked into a perfect arch.
A silent what the fuck?
And here we went. I forced the smile a little harder and marched in with a wave. “Hey, guys.”
All conversation ceased. Every single one of our friends turned to stare at us. It was Iris who gave a nervous laugh. “Oh, come on.”
My brother scowled at Phineas. “My fucking sister, mate?”
I rolled my eyes. Because that was such a Lennox thing to say.
Owen merely blinked. Slowly. I could see it, his mind working and worrying, trying to ascertain how the fuck this had happened. Because everybody knew I had always vowed to kill Phin. And now here I was holding his hand.
Hell, even I wondered what the fuck I was doing.
Phineas released my hand and slung an arm over my shoulder. And then he leaned in and nuzzled my neck. “I know. You guys think this is bananas, but Aurora and I are giving this a shot.”
More blinking. More stares.
Sera walked over. “I just want to make sure that I’m not delusional. Aurora, you’re okay?” Her eyes were too wide and her eyebrows were raised, communicating her unmistakable meaning. Are you really okay? Has he drugged you?
I smiled brightly. Because what could I say? ‘I have to do this, or my mother will make me marry a royal-fucker?’
“Everything’s fine Sera.” I knew what I was going to have to do to sell this, to make it look real. I steeled myself and then glanced up at Phin with an adoring look on my face. Hopefully not one that said I would like to boil your nut sack and force feed it to you. “Yes, there were a lot of misunderstandings before. But this makes me happy.”
Phin glanced down at me. And wow, he was really good at this. Because he
was giving me a look that said he absolutely adored me. And I knew they would believe it. They were going to buy this all on the power of his sell alone.
I just had to ignore the way that look made me feel, the way it sped my pulse.
“Yeah. I’ll be holding on to her this time around.”
Sera kept blinking like she couldn’t believe it. But then she gave me a warm squeeze, wrapping her arms around me tight and stepping back. She looked Phin up and down. “You fuck up again, and I will be the one you need to be terrified of.” She pointed at Sloane. “Not her. I will plot and plan all the ways to kill you so slowly and painfully that you’ll end up begging for the sweet release of death.”
He nodded, his brow furrowed and his gaze serious, like he really, truly cared about having my best friend’s approval. God, he was a good actor. “Understood.”
And then everyone was hugging us like we were in some kind of club or something.
It was as easy as that. As the party went on, Phineas was always there, with a drink or a snack. Wrapping his arm around me, kissing my neck, and every time I felt a brush of his lips, I nearly jumped a mile out of my skin. He was never very far from me. Touching me all the time. There was something sweet about that.
Don’t be a dummy. This is just for show, he is not into you.
It wasn’t until the boys went outside to talk about Hellfire club business—new recruits I think—that Sera, Iris, Tanith, and Sloane descended on me.
They seemed like they were smiling. Truly, they did. But then I saw the calculating look on Sera’s face, and I asked innocently, “What’s up, you guys?”
She shook her head. “I’m not buying it. Convince me.”
I laughed to cover my nervousness. “Maybe there comes a point for everyone when they just get tired of fighting, you know?”
Interestingly enough, that response seemed to satisfy Tanith, Iris, and Sloane. Although Sloane did narrow her gaze at me as if she could tell I was lying. But then she let it go. Because after all, she and Lennox had hated each other for years. I mean honestly, there was a point when she almost did kill him. Ah, young love.
But Sera—Sera couldn’t fathom ending a fight. “Aurora. This is you we’re talking about. There’s no way you’re giving up the fight. You hate him.”
“I do. I did. But we talked, and you know, I can choose to be angry with him or forgive him, and I’m choosing to forgive him. Because I can’t seem to escape him anyway. And when I’m with him, I like how I feel. That’s the best way I can describe it. It’s like my skin is humming. And I feel like I’m the only person in the room. I don’t want it to end.”
Sera studied me. “So this is really for real then?”
I nodded slowly, knowing that she was going to be hurt when she found out the truth…the lie. That was if she found out.
“Are you sure about this?” she asked.
I nodded again. “I’m sure.”
She sighed. “Well then, I guess congratulations are in order. Just so you know, though, if you do decide to kill him, Sloane and I will help you with the body.”
I laughed. “Thanks, guys.”
And just like that, everyone believed us. And I wasn’t sure if I was happy or extremely disappointed.
Either way, this was real now. And sooner or later, I was going to have to live up to my end of the bargain.
Chapter Seven
Aurora
Once dinner ended, we began to drift outside to our cars. I followed behind slowly, hoping to put some distance between myself and the prying eyes. Well, the prying eyes that weren’t part of my security team.
During school hours, the detail simply hovered on the periphery of the classroom buildings, but in the evenings they liked to know exactly where I was. I was used to skirting their watchful eyes and flouncing off whenever I felt like it, but I’d stopped most of that after New Year’s Day.
After New Year’s, I’d learned my lesson.
As we reached the door, my detail at a discreet distance behind me, Phin took my hand.
Heat flushed my skin, my mouth was full of sawdust, and my belly was full of butterflies threatening to take over. Why was I so nervous? This was just Phin. And I could own him.
“No one is around to see this. You can stop pretending.”
He wasn’t buying my brush off though. He leaned in and his lips tickled my ear as he murmured, “It’s time to settle up, princess.”
I hated the jolt of heat that arrowed straight to my core at that idea, and I blamed him for it. It wasn’t enough that he looked unfairly good tonight, with his uniform shirt rolled up to expose his lean, muscled forearms, and his tie all loose and his top button unbuttoned so I could see the base of his strong throat. No, he’d had to play the part of obsessed boyfriend perfectly. Dragging me into his lap, stroking fingers up and down my arms.
Ghosting his lips over the nape of my neck.
And now I was all wound up, my cheeks flushed, my pulse running fast, my knickers already damp. I hated that he still had this power over me, even after two years of him being an unmitigated knobhead.
I took a deep breath, trying to do whatever it was boys said they did to get control of their boners. Think of sports? Silently recite the names of American presidents in order? Think of their grandmothers?
Aha. Grandmothers. Which made me think of mine, and then my mother, and then Brantley Nichols.
Shudder.
Okay, so I just had to remember that this was a transaction, and that was all it was. A transaction to keep me away from Brantley Nichols, and it didn’t matter if my clit pinged an SOS every time Phin so much as looked at me. It also didn’t matter that the thought of settling up, as he put it, made me want to tear off his clothes and mount him right there in a restaurant parking lot.
I would make sure that everything between us stayed exactly like it should, a mutually beneficial deal. He would keep me unavailable as a bride for Brantley, and I would get him off. I’d screwed boys before—boys I barely remembered the names of sometimes—and I could do this. It was the exact same thing.
Right?
I turned and gave Phin what I hoped was a very efficient, very businesslike nod. “I’ll meet you in your room in twenty minutes, then.”
I expected a smile from him, maybe even one of those lazy, sensual ones that always curled my toes. But instead I got an intense flash of those caramel-brown eyes as they hooded.
“Twenty minutes after we get back,” he said, and his voice was so much more heated than usual, almost…commanding. A shiver went through me just to hear it, and it wasn’t a shiver of anger or fear, even though it should have been of irritation at least, because no one commanded me, not even the literal monarchs in my life.
But when Phin spoke like that, like he would come find me if I wasn’t where I said I would be…
Ohhh, it felt good. Almost good enough to forget that Phin was the ultimate “any girl will do” kind of playboy.
I gave him another nod, hoping the dark evening hid the worst of my flushing, and then I practically fled to the car that would take me back to Pembroke Prep.
* * *
Time to settle up.
Yep, I was officially a monster girl for being turned on by that. My quick shower did nothing to settle my hormones and neither did the ten minutes I spent washing every speck of makeup off my face and picking out the most boring pajamas I owned. I didn’t want Phin to think that I cared about impressing him. Or that this was in any way a real hookup.
I would march in there, give him a brisk hand job, and march right back out without being affected in the least.
I wouldn’t be turned on, I wouldn’t come, I would simply fulfill the letter of the bargain we’d struck. He could get off, and I could keep the family from strong-arming me into a feudal betrothal or whatever.
Except as I knocked lightly on Phin’s window—thankfully his room was on the ground floor, as evading my security team took a small amount of skullduggery involvin
g avoiding the hallways—I felt frissons of excitement ripple through me. And as he swung the window open with that same commanding expression on his normally easygoing features, lust spiked my blood and sent heat everywhere that mattered, to my breasts and my belly and my lips and my core.
His room was nearly dark except for one small lamp on his desk, and he looked a little forbidding with shadows gathering along his eyelashes and under the curve of his full lower lip. He’d changed into drawstring pants and nothing else, and the shadows did their work there too, showing off his tightly etched abs and the firm muscles of his broad chest. He had the flat navel and cut lines around his hips of a male model, but it was the trail of dark hair leading into his low-slung waistband that had me forgetting how to breathe.
“Hi,” I whispered, but he didn’t say hi back. Instead he scooped me off the inner ledge of his window like I weighed nothing and carried me over to his bed. His biceps were hard against my back, and when my hands instinctively reached up to wrap around his neck, I felt the rounded swell of his shoulders and the subtle shift of his muscles as he set me on my feet next to his bed.
We didn’t speak for a moment, only stared at each other, and I couldn’t help but wonder… What if everything had gone differently that night? If he hadn’t hooked up with Lea at Sera’s party and then proceeded to fuck his way through the eastern seaboard, would I have been here tonight in his room anyway? As his girlfriend for real?
The thought unsettled me—or maybe it was feeling how hard my heart twisted when I thought of an alternate universe where Phin was mine to kiss and touch without a fucked-up bargain between us.
A fucked-up bargain that was somehow extremely hot to me.
I needed more therapy ASAP.
But for the here and now, the safest thing to do would be to get this over with. And I was confident I could indeed get this over with. It was my experience that guys never lasted long once you got your fingers around their meat puppets, and I could be done in a few quick strokes.
But when I reached for the waistband of Phin’s drawstring pants, he caught my wrist. And fuck if there wasn’t something weirdly hot about him holding me like that, looking down with that stern, unsmiling expression, like I was the naughty girl caught reaching into the cookie jar.