Honeytrap
Page 1
Titles by Crystal Green
Aidan Falls Series
Whisper
Honeytrap
Rough and Tumble
Down and Dirty
Honeytrap
Crystal Green
InterMix Books, New York
INTERMIX BOOKS
PUBLISHED BY THE PENGUIN GROUP
PENGUIN GROUP (USA) LLC
375 HUDSON STREET, NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10014, USA
USA • Canada • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China
penguin.com
A Penguin Random House Company
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
HONEYTRAP
An InterMix Book / published by arrangement with the author
PUBLISHING HISTORY
InterMix eBook edition / February 2015
Copyright © 2015 by Chris Marie Green.
Excerpt from Sugarbaby copyright © 2015 by Chris Marie Green.
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
Cover design by Lesley Worrell.
Cover image © Stanislav Solntsev/Imagebrief.com
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-18425-1
INTERMIX
InterMix Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group
and New American Library, divisions of Penguin Group (USA) LLC,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
INTERMIX® and the “IM” design are registered trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) LLC
Version_1
Contents
Titles by Crystal Green
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Special Preview of Sugarbaby
About the Author
Back in Late February on the ParlorFly Site, Public Chat Boards
T-Rex Alvarez: Quiet nite after a blazing workout. Call of Duty time. Anyone else feel like shooting up some video shit online with me?
7:50pm
Dante Rhodes: You will be doomed when I show up to play, superstar.
7:52pm
T-Rex Alvarez: Fightin words.
7:53pm
Doug Scott Markowski: Coach would approve.
7:53pm
Lana Peyton: Is it boys only? ; )
7:54pm
Doug Scott Markowski: I believe we have been challenged.
7:54pm
T-Rex Alvarez: U play Lana Peyton?
7:54pm
Lana Peyton: Like a pro.
7:54pm
Chance Gutherie: Um . . . *I’ll* play.
7:55pm
Doug Scott Markowski: Me too.
7:55pm
T-Rex Alvarez: Lana . . . U in a class with me or . . . ?
7:55pm
Lana Peyton: You followed me on this site, so don’t you know?
7:55pm
Chance Gutherie: This could be way more entertaining than shooting shit up.
7:55pm
T-Rex Alvarez: Got lots of online friends, but Im curious now.
7:55pm
Dante Rhodes: HELLO? GAME? WHEN?
7:57pm
Chance Gutherie: We’ll get around to it, Dante. Quiet in the cheap seats.
7:57pm
T-Rex Alvarez: Lana? U still there?
7:58pm
Chance Gutherie: . . . ?
7:58pm
T-Rex Alvarez: ???
7:59pm
Doug Scott Markowski: Looks like she’s gone, dude. Just a flyby.
8:00pm
Dante Rhodes: Good. Mind on the game, Alvarez. Your destruction is imminent.
8:00pm
T-Rex Alvarez: K. Lets get it started.
8:01pm
Chance Gutherie: Heh. Too bad she barely escaped you, Rex.
8:01pm
T-Rex Alvarez: Hey you know Ima taken man. Its cool.
8:01pm
Chance Gutherie: Yeah. I’ll be sure to let Shelby know re: your sacrifice . . .
8:01pm
T-Rex Alvarez: Bro she knows shes my only girl.
8:02pm
Chance Gutherie: Yeah but do you?
8:02pm
1
When the group on the dock finally saw us lying out on the lake’s shore, the attacks began, just like I told Evie they would.
“She came back to town? Unbelievable!” one of them yelled.
“Small town, small world! Too bad it isn’t big enough to make that bitch disappear!”
From the towel next to me, Evie put her hand on my arm. In her unflappable voice she said, “Ignore them, Shelby. They’re just being dicks.”
It didn’t really matter that the loud comments were coming from two girls I’d gone to high school with more than a year ago. In Evie’s world, being a dick was equal opportunity.
I didn’t have to remind her that I’d gotten used to being raked over the coals like this the past couple of months, so I didn’t respond except to pat Evie’s hand in thanks. Then I tried to relax while I reclined on my back, dressed in my bikini, letting all the shouted comments evaporate like the May humidity.
But my fan club wasn’t done.
“Let’s see how fast she hightails it outta here when Rex comes!” This time, it was a guy’s voice.
I bit my lip at the sound of Rex’s name, hurt tightening my throat. Rex, my first love . . . my first in a lot of things. The anguish trickled downward, into my chest, strangling my heart.
Evie slowly sat up and, with smooth deliberation, flew the double bird to the small pack on the dock about a hundred feet away. They laughed and flipped her off right back.
“You’d think,” she said, all collected and cool, sliding onto her stomach, her long red braid smacking her shoulder, “that they’d grow up after some college experience, just like the rest of us.”
I kept
trying to act like what they were saying didn’t bother me. And like my stomach wasn’t tumbling about Rex coming here. The end of our relationship had been ugly—devastatingly ugly. I was the first to admit that I should’ve handled the breakup with Rex in a better way, but the kids here in Aidan Falls, Texas, loved their former star quarterback, and no one humiliated him—especially if that “no one” was a nobody ex who should’ve considered herself lucky to go out with a stud like T-Rex Alvarez in the first place, even if he’d . . .
The memory crushed me. Even if he’d cheated with a girl named Lana Peyton.
As I peered from the corner of my eye, I saw that the dock kids had already gotten bored with hurling insults at me. They were unpacking a cooler, the gleam of beer bottles sparkling in the sun, the splatter of a hip hop song breaking the air as someone turned on a playlist and a couple ex-cheerleaders started dancing around.
“Let’s leave,” I said to Evie.
“Hell no.” She stretched out like a cat in a sleek black bathing suit while the tiny hoop piercing in her lip caught the light. “And don’t you dare start bellyaching about how I forced you to come to the lake. You’ve been back for two days already and you hadn’t stepped foot out of your house.”
“They don’t want me here.”
“Jeez, Shel! You’re allowed to go anywhere you want in this town. Are you going to let them control you all summer? Besides, you’ve always had a way of making the others get bored with teasing you every day, all the way back to grade school, when they’d snark at you for not having a dad around.”
True. Kids did get bored after a while if you didn’t react. But this kind of teasing was different because they were defending their idol, and they were even meaner. Could I go a whole season laying low? And would a season turn into even longer than that, making me an eternal social pariah in the town I’d grown up in?
I settled back into my sun worshipping, even though I was still aware of every move and sound the others made. “I said yes to coming here because I thought the lake would be deserted this time of day. Isn’t it too early to party?”
Just like they’d heard me, their music blasted even louder. They “whoo”ed, and I could’ve sworn it was aimed at me. I even heard one of the ex-cheerdevils from high school—someone an average Josette like me would never hang out with—yell, “Here’s to you, loser!”
“Dicks,” Evie muttered.
A laugh cut out of me, like that would somehow ease the tension. But the thudding beats from the music kept digging into me.
Evie stirred on her towel, and I opened my eyes, squinting against the sun. She’d perched her head in her hand, lying on her side, inspecting me.
“So,” she said. “You ever gonna explain what exactly happened at school to get them so riled up?”
That rock in my throat wouldn’t go away. “I told you on the phone months ago. All the gory details.”
“Right. But you never really went into . . . Well, you know. Why you handled things the way you did with Rex . . .”
Crap. “You mean why I was so insecure that I ended up overreacting with him about Lana Peyton? Why I was such a cruel bitch to him in the end, just like all his friends are calling me?”
“There’s a lot more to talk about than that, Shel, and you know it.”
Yeah, there was more, like why my feelings for a guy who’d disrespected me were still so messed up. Anyone with some dignity wouldn’t have a shred of emotion left for Rex, but here I was, shriveling into an emotional vacuum just because of his name.
Fucked up. Screwed up. I didn’t want to be that way, but I couldn’t stop myself. Love hurt and it hoped and it sucked.
Luckily, Evie seemed like one of the only people in this town who hadn’t judged me for being so hard on Rex—a guy who represented the future most people here would never have. He was a homeboy made good, a rising star at college, and I was the asshole who’d gone over the top during our breakup and publicly humiliated their golden boy. In a place like Aidan Falls, people took their idols seriously, and it didn’t help that half my graduating class had also gone to Texas-U so they’d been around for every painful minute of the breakup. To them, I was the psycho ex-girlfriend, the ingrate weirdo who’d never belonged with him in the first place.
I hadn’t been that way in high school. Evie and I were fringe rebel-nerds—she was artsy, and I liked keeping to myself, organizing plans for future businesses, designing what my office would look like, pretending I had money to invest in stocks and fake playing the market. Yup. N-E-R-D. But then graduation had come and, during last summer, I’d grown into a different, taller, curvier non-nerd body.
Rex had noticed.
But those kids were right about one thing when it came to me. I could’ve—should’ve—done things differently. When I’d believed Rex was cheating, emotion had taken me over, and that had never happened to a so-called nice girl like me before.
Evie gave up on trying to squeeze any deep talk out of me, and she rested her arms on the blanket, cradling her chin on them. Streaks from the layers of sunscreen I’d rubbed onto her back gave off a clean summer scent.
“Just know I’m on your side,” she said. “No matter what, okay? Even when I go back to school halfway across the country, I’m always there, Shel. I’ll wait the whole summer for you to talk if that’s what it takes.”
“Thanks. I’d rather not talk about it right now, though.” Or maybe not ever, if I could avoid it.
“Got it. But if I have to kick the butt of every single cheerdevil over on that dock to shut them up, I’ll do that, too.”
“Like you need a reason.”
“What can I say? I’ve always wanted to paint their smug faces with the wrong end of one of my brushes.”
Evie and her artsy side. “Thanks for that most of all.”
“It’s only fair that you have a fraction of the support system Rex has. And, damn, does he need it more than ever or what?”
I squinted at her again.
She cocked one perfectly plucked eyebrow at me. “Oh my God. You don’t know the latest, do you?”
That tumbly feeling was going on in my stomach again—half from fear of what Evie was about to tell me and half twirling heat from hearing Rex’s name one more time. Nice.
Evie gave a low whistle. “Wow, you’re totally in the dark. Has your head been stuck in a hole the entire time you’ve been here?”
“Pretty much.” I’d been working in the back of my mom’s restaurant for the past couple days, scrubbing until everything shined, until Evie had pulled me out of there when she’d gotten home from UC San Diego.
“Jadyn Dandritch,” Evie said, like that was all she needed to tell me.
The name knocked at me with bladed force. Jadyn, Rex’s rebound girlfriend? The townie who’d comforted him when he’d returned home for spring break after my relationship with him had imploded? The girl he’d dated from afar for the rest of the school year?
“What about Jadyn?” I asked tightly.
“Let’s say you’re not the only one in the doghouse with Rex’s friends. She and him broke up, too, and it also wasn’t pretty . . .”
As she trailed off, I flushed so hard that I thought my face might stay red forever.
Evie widened her brown eyes, knowing it’d be best to move on. “Anyway, about two weeks ago, Jadyn ‘accidentally’ messed up real bad, and it was with that new guy everyone’s talking about.”
I sat up slowly. “What?”
“She banged him,” Evie said.
“That’s what I thought you meant.” But why had my stomach spiraled again? Was it happy because Rex was available now?
But I hadn’t come back to Aidan Falls this summer so I could see if it was possible to win Rex back or something. I was here because my mom needed more help running the café and she couldn’t accommodate any more staff. I’
d thought that I could work scrub jobs for her while I figured out what to do with the rest of my life. Wherever I was going next, it sure wouldn’t be back to school on the scholarship I’d pretty much blown because I’d fallen down on my studies so hard after the breakup in March.
“Are you sure Jadyn cheated on Rex?” I asked, still unable to grasp the news.
“What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, right? But this new guy she did it with . . . Word is that he comes on strong, and Jadyn had a little too much to drink at a party and gave in to him.” Evie frowned. “But that’s only the start of it.”
Oh, God. I didn’t like how this sounded.
She made a sorry-to-tell-you face. “There’s this crazy rumor. Some jerks are saying that you persuaded this guy to go in and seduce Jadyn so she and Rex would break up.”
I didn’t move a muscle, couldn’t say a word.
Evie held up a hand. “I know—stupid. So stupid.” She paused, looking at me long and hard to see how I was handling the news, and then went on. “But there’s even a second rumor, and it has to do with Rex and his whole paranoia about a girl cheating on him. You know how he acted with you when you started dating? All jealous and checking up on you every night?”
She was talking fast, like she just wanted to get through all this, and the only reason she was putting me through the rumor mill was because I needed to know. And I did. Forewarned is forearmed.
I calmed down my stomping pulse. “I thought his possessiveness meant that he really did love me. I didn’t know any better.” I’d never really dated much before Rex. But now I was wiser.
“Right. So I heard that Rex was still hurting from your breakup, and we know that underneath the jock suit he’s a hypocrite who was always afraid you would leave him. And some people are wondering if, somehow, Rex let Jadyn have an extra-long leash at parties and such, and he was testing her faithfulness that way.”
Was she saying that Rex had asked this new guy to seduce her? Yeah, that really was a weird rumor. Truthfully, it was stranger than the one about me and the new guy.
I turned my face away from Evie. It was just that, every time she said “Rex”—and every time a memory spiked me—I got sicker and sicker.