Dare Me
Page 3
She disappeared back into the greenhouse. I crossed my arms when he slowed to a stop a good two yards from me. “Really, Callum.”
“What.”
“You’re acting like I’m the walking plague.” I bristled when he didn’t reply. “Why did you even come here tonight if you didn’t want to see me?”
Callum’s blue eyes hardened like a layer of ice. He took his time to reply, as if I weren’t worth the effort of his words. A least that was how it felt. “What do you think?” Another long pause. “I came here for her.”
Caroline. I’d always loved the respect he had for his mother’s wishes. Of course tonight, it stung like hell to know that he wouldn’t have even come to say hi if it weren’t for her insistence. “So, what, we’re just never going to talk? We’re going to just ignore each other like we never knew each other?”
“What’s the point in talking?” Callum asked, his tone cold. “I don’t know you. Not anymore. And I don’t care to know who you’ve become since you left.” His words carried an easy confidence that dug deep into my heart. My lip trembled and I could’ve broken down right then and there – Callum could never take it when I cried – but I fought the emotions wringing inside me because I didn’t want my first time back with him to be like this. I didn’t want to force his affection by bursting into tears. I wanted to earn it back. I wanted Callum to touch me because he missed me, because he remembered that he once loved me. Not because he couldn’t stand to hear me cry.
“So you don’t care to speak to me at all.”
“No. I haven’t thought of you in six years. I don’t intend on starting again now.”
I swallowed the knot in my throat. I hated that he had to look so grown up, so handsome and sure of himself as we had this conversation. I tried to give the night a last shot. “I came back to see you,” I murmured. “You don’t know how much I missed you, Callum. I don’t think I went a day since I left without thinking about you. I still dream about you. Always.” I cupped my elbows. The words felt pathetic leaving my lips, but I needed to get them off my chest and I could see them shaking him. Nothing in his expression showed it but there was the briefest waver in his frosty glare and I knew Callum well enough to know that it meant something. “You had to have known that I didn’t want to leave. I loved my life with you. Every day, I felt like the luckiest girl. I woke up and you were always the first thing I thought of. You were my world, Callum.”
“You were mine.”
His low mutter shocked me. I looked up to see him standing closer. I had to stop myself from reaching out to touch him. My hands were trembling. They ached to calm themselves by pressing against his chest, brushing down every section of his abs and tracing the deep lines the way they used to. But I stopped myself. I wanted him to touch me first and I felt like he actually might. I could finally see some sort of life in his expression. He was wearing the faintest, most handsome frown between his eyebrows and it made me wish he’d just go ahead and let it all out – unload six years of anger and fury on me so I could at least know that he still felt something and we could finally start cleaning up the mess.
But he threw me a curveball.
“Tell me right now where you went,” Callum challenged me. “What you did, why you left. Why you came back now. Every detail. I know exactly what you look like when you lie so don’t try it. Tell me everything right here, Lake. Right now.”
I tried. My lips stumbled over themselves. I tried to think of a version of the story that I could tell. I tried to make up a new one. But I knew that lying would get me into deeper trouble than I was already in so I breathed out nervously and shook my head. “Callum, I can’t tell you but it’s purely out of – ”
“Bullshit.” Enraged, he stormed two steps forward but stopped himself short. The breath he sucked in was short and sharp and it cut like a knife through the thick air between us. “If you’re not going to tell me now then I’m done with your bullshit, Lake. I am. I was productive without you, I did good shit without you, so why don’t you take a page from my book and just forget me now? Erase me. Pretend I never existed and none of the shit between us ever happened.” I trembled from the heat of his body so close to mine. I finally got a smile out of him but it was cruel. “It’s hard at first but I can’t even tell you how damned good it feels when you finally get rid of the poison in your life.”
Chapter Three
Lake
“Another round?”
Nick Spencer didn’t wait for my reply before rapping his knuckles on the bar and signaling for another round. He tossed his black card onto the counter, letting it skid across the marble surface and onto the floor for the bartender to pick up. God, I hated him. Everything about him, from his cheesy smile with neon-white veneers to the way he treated the waitstaff. I had bartended for a little after running from Sunstone – right before getting caught and dragged back – but even if I hadn’t, I’d know not to treat another human being the way Nick Spencer felt entitled to. But I wasn’t too surprised, considering who his brother was and what those two had done to me and Callum in high school. There was never proof, but I didn’t need that to know it was them.
“Theo still thinks about you, you know,” Nick said of his brother, handing me a shot of something amber-colored. I wasn’t sure what it was but I downed it. Isabel narrowed her eyes at me from afar but she let me be, giving Nick the time for a “private apology,” as he’d requested. Several of us had gone straight from dinner in the greenhouse to drinks at the bar and to my chagrin, someone had taken it upon him or herself to invite more of my former classmates. It was becoming the high school reunion I’d never asked for. But I sat there and drank because what else did I have to do? For once, I had nothing but time and I had to find ways to kill it.
Besides, I was kind of amazed that Nick Spencer even had the nerve to speak to me after everything he and his brother did to humiliate me, posting every last one of those horrible pictures that I had never wanted to take for him anyway. I wished I could just look at it as high school drama but I couldn’t because the whole thing wound up changing the course of Callum’s life forever. He was on a good path. He’d won two Junior Olympic medals by senior year and he was beyond set to follow his father’s Team USA footsteps. But I set him on a different one. My chest still got tight when I thought about it and I’d fantasized so many times about punching Nick or Theo in the face if I ever got the chance again. But now that I had it, I forced myself to hold it together because I was kind of curious as to what Nick had to say, and of course, Isabel had gone and married the oldest Spencer, Alec, so I had to show at least an ounce of respect, if only for the fact that this insane jerk was now my best friend’s brother-in-law.
I managed to give him a look of amusement. “Theo still thinks about me?”
“Yeah. I mean everyone thinks about their high school sweetheart but with the way you guys ended… you know. He’s grown up. He feels bad about it. He always wanted to reach out and apologize to you but you went and disappeared on all of us,” Nick laughed. “Which sucked ‘cause, you know… we always kind of wondered what you’d look like when you got older.”
Oh, I remember. The boys used to bet during lunch on whether or not Isabel and my boobs would get any bigger as we got older. Advantage Isabel on that one. Mine had stayed the same but on the bright side, they still sat about as high on my chest as they did when I was eighteen. I caught Nick observing that.
“Sorry,” he grinned. “Couldn’t help it. Never could. But you remember.”
I smiled though he was bordering quickly on creepy. As usual.
Nick had been a senior when I first entered Mercer School as a junior. I remembered the way he looked at me on my first day, wandering through the dining hall and doing my best to find a table to eat at since Callum, the night before, had banned me from sitting with him and his friends. I had spent five minutes floating around and being stared at until Nick’s hand shot out and grabbed my thigh for my attention. I spun around to
“Hope you don’t mind the giant sausagefest,” Nick said when he had me sit between him and his friend, neither of them giving me much space on the bench. “And when I say giant, I’m talking about myself. Can’t speak for these guys.”
Nick Spencer had a talent for turning everything into a dick-swinging contest. All the Spencer boys did. I’d find that out later, though. Nick was asking which school I’d transferred from when Callum finally came, looking thoroughly annoyed. He muttered something to them and then dragged me off to his table at the other end of the room.
“Good thing Cal changed his mind. I was about to beat his ass if you wound up sitting with my brother’s friends.” Theo and his twinkling brown eyes smiled at me the second I took the seat across from him at Callum’s table. “You don’t want to sit with those guys. They’re all a bunch of pervert assholes.”
“Isn’t that all guys?”
“No. We’re all perverts but we’re not all assholes.”
Callum had clarified that statement for me that night at home. “Yeah, Theo’s an asshole too,” he warned me, since I’d spent our entire lunch period talking to him. “He’s been the horniest bastard since we were like, ten, and he’s… demanding with girls. But if you’re going to date someone, you might as well keep it in the circle.”
“Why? So you can keep an eye on me?” I had been so smug because it was obvious that Callum was fiercely protective of me. He just never acknowledged it.
“I’m telling you, your proud Christian virgin thing isn’t going to fly with Theo if you end up with him. He’s a good guy but he’s also… a guy. Period. If you think I need sex all the time, just wait till you get to know him.”
He had warned me, I had to give him that. And I knew I should have known the lack of sex would be a problem but Theo was so cute and I liked him enough. I liked Callum more but back in high school, everyone considered him my brother, so I couldn’t have him like that. Not that I didn’t have him anyway. We were in a relationship of our own and we’d always been – it just wasn’t the kind that was normal enough to have a name, or be something that you could tell other people about. I tried explaining it once to my roommate in college but came up empty. She sniffed and said that if Callum and I were anything real, we would know what to call each other. How to categorize each other. Boyfriend, girlfriend, friends with benefits. I disagreed but I didn’t argue. There was no point. I never thought to put Callum in words because he was just so natural to me. Like air. There was no need to describe it, it just was and we just were.
“You know Theo’s turning twenty-eight this Saturday. I’m throwing him a surprise party at XIII in Chelsea,” Nick murmured, his gaze drawing a straight line up my thighs. “You should come. You’d be the biggest surprise of all.”
“Thank you… but I shouldn’t.”
“Why not?” Nick frowned. “We’re all grown up and you’re both single. It’s time to bury the hatchet.”
“Nick, I know we’re adults now but some things that happened in the past are still hard pills to swallow.”
“Well you can’t just leave it in your throat, right? This is our chance to put all the bad shit behind us. Life’s too short to hold onto grudges. Everyone deserves a second chance, am I wrong?”
My gaze fell as I considered his words. After leaving New York, I’d spent so many sleepless nights telling myself that I didn’t deserve a second chance with Callum. But that was mostly thanks to the hate and vitriol spewed at me on a daily basis. “Trash. That’s what you are,” that awful woman loved to tell me. But as much as my surroundings confirmed it, I refused to let the idea sink into me. I told myself I was worthy. It was a mental battle I mustered the strength to fight every day because while I lived waist-deep in misery, I refused to sink all the way in. I had a life I loved at some point and I was determined to find it again someday.
“What, am I wrong?” Nick read the change of heart drifting onto my face.
“You’re not wrong but – ”
“Then pay it forward, Lake. You left two days before your best friend’s twenty-first birthday – before you guys were gonna go on this big trip together. And she forgave you because you were basically sisters since you were sixteen years old and the fact that you disappeared didn’t erase that. It’s not like you never had any good memories with Theo. It’s not like Theo didn’t spend a decade having Callum’s back and bailing him out of trouble before all that shit went down. There’s good and bad to every relationship. And the ones that have a lot more of the bad to get past only end up being more rewarding. Tell me I’m not right about that.”
He was. Shockingly so. I thrust my hand through my hair, Nick Spencer somehow saying all the right words to rip my heart right open. Of course, Theo wasn’t the one it was bleeding for.
“Okay, I’ll go to the party,” I finally blurted.
“Shit – yeah?” Nick pumped two fists in the air. “Yeah!”
I stared into space as he burst out of his chair and celebrated by gathering everyone and ordering a giant round of shots. I went with the toast and knocked it all back but underneath my smile, I entertained a bad thought. A slightly evil thought. I had agreed to go in earnest because I believed in second chances. I lived on the idea of them. But even if I didn’t, seeing Theo Spencer still might not be the worst idea.
Because all those years ago in the dining hall, Callum hadn’t brought me to his table till I’d lit a fire under his ass by sitting with Nick. A decade later, I wondered if Theo’s party might have him feeling the heat once again. It was a call to his bluff. I needed to know if I was fighting for anything – if second chances did exist. So I clinked my glass to Nick’s.
“Cheers to a new beginning, Lake DePalma,” he grinned.
I did like the sound of that.
Chapter Four
Callum
I knew something was wrong based entirely on the fact that Oz was being quiet for once and there was rarely anything quiet about Osborne Tate. He was a lumbering, six-foot-five giant of a man who shook the floor when he walked. The sound of his footsteps and the boom of his voice announced his arrival before he ever stepped into a room.
I had met him five years ago at a bar in Scotland and with similar interests but opposite demeanors, we got along quickly. Shortly after, we’d renovated the Pike Distillery. A few years later, we’d made the Pike name something every whisky drinker would recognize at a bar. But I still had a constant hard-on for branding, which was why I opened The Pike last year. It was my eighty-seat cigar lounge on Fifty-First and Park, serving only my whisky and a handful of other spirits owned by the conglomerate that acquired our company. The club was members only but we offered Scotch tastings every other month, open to the public by reservation and the purchase of a ticket priced just under three hundred dollars a pop. Oz and I made sure to be present at every one because they used to be full of fat cats in thousand dollar suits, all of them waiting to approach us at the end with some sort of business pitch.
But as we got popular, the trend of our audience changed. We didn’t complain. Now the tastings were half-filled with gorgeous women in short skirts, who crossed and un-crossed their legs while eyeing me and coating their lips with my Scotch. They were perfect – generally coming straight from the office, too busy with their careers to think about anything beyond a quick fuck and a good orgasm. Which I was good for. Oz eventually started calling tasting nights “The Reaping.” They were guaranteed sex. Even our waitresses started taking notice.
“They call him the Viking and you the Greek God. Which I think is fitting,” one of them murmured as she dropped off my third round. I always sat with Oz at the far leather booth while the tastings went on. It wasn’t till the end that we had to speak. Of course, Oz usually shouted across the room to pitch in with random facts and corrections, none of which were true because he’d just made them up. I was fine with it because everyone laughed and hardly understood what he was saying anyway. After five drinks, his accent surfaced and he started rolling his Scottish ‘R’s like twelve pound bowling balls.
But tonight, he wasn’t drinking or speaking. He was preoccupied with his phone and occasionally glancing at me but not saying shit, which definitely meant no good. I tried to ignore it and focus my attention on the new girl, who kept “accidentally” brushing her chest against me while dropping off our drinks. “See one you like?” She peered over her shoulder at the women in attendance.
“A few,” I lied. My eyes were naturally drawn to a certain type and I didn’t realize till tonight that that type was any pretty girl who resembled Lake. Average height, glowing skin and thick, wavy hair – light brown and darker would do the trick. I spotted three of those tonight and they all had their eyes glued to me but my mind wasn’t reacting the way it usually did. At this point, I usually had my choices narrowed down and started picturing the one I wanted in my bed with her hands bound by her panties. But I had none of that in mind tonight because despite having her coloring down, none of these girls were Lake. And I had seen Lake again. Recently. Witnessed her beauty up close in person, so now my own type was ruined. They looked good but they weren’t Lake and I was apparently fucked, cursed to spend my life holding every woman I looked at to her standard of beauty.
It wasn’t happy about it.
“Well, let me know if none of them make the cut. I’m not doing anything after work and I’m too nice a girl to let you go home alone.”
I blinked over at the new girl, wishing I remembered her name. “Is that right?”
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