Beautiful Sinner

by Sophie Jordan

  He groaned softly. “Don’t remind me.”

  That stung. Something told her he’d rather be locked up alone than with her.

  She stretched her legs out in front of her and leaned back against the wall, trying to act like she didn’t care. She stared at the dark shape of him. “Conversation will help pass the time.”

  He sighed, but offered no comment. Okay then. So he was going to ignore her.

  “Fine.” He surprised her by agreeing. “We can talk. Yes. I’m enjoying my newfound freedom. A lot. Your turn. Who were you avoiding in this closet?”

  She released a puff of indignant breath. “You call that an answer? Hardly satisfying.”

  “If you want more than that you’re going to have to tell me who you’re hiding from in this closet.”

  Sigh. “Natalie Markson.”

  He was quiet for a moment. “Short cheerleader?”

  Of course, he remembered her—and her cheerleader status.

  “That’s her.” The girl he had thought he was kissing in the boathouse.

  “Yeah . . . she was—”

  “A bitch?” she supplied. She couldn’t help it. The girl had just called her overweight—to her face.

  He laughed softly and she realized it was the first time she had ever heard the sound of laughter come out of him. “Yeah, something like that.”

  “What about you? Why were you walking the halls? Running from someone, too?”

  “I don’t do crowds.” All levity left his voice.

  “Why’d you come then?”

  “For my sister.”

  “Same here. I came with my entire family for Dakota.” She shook her head. “And I didn’t even get to congratulate her.”

  “Your entire family was here? And you don’t think anyone will notice you missing?”

  “I drove with my sister. And there were so many of us here, all in multiple cars. Tess probably thought I went with someone else.”

  “Or they’ll have the police out looking for you.”

  “Doubtful. But what about you? No one wondering at your whereabouts?”

  “No. My sister knows I’m not a fan of crowds. I saw Malia get her award. She probably assumed I slipped out.”

  He fell quiet then. It was fully dark now. There was just the general outline of him. She couldn’t hear him rustling around within the closet anymore. It should have made her feel better. She didn’t have to stare at his face or body any longer. Except now she had that deep, disembodied voice that traveled over her skin like a velvet hand.

  She moistened her lips. “Are you going to stand all night?” She patted the drop cloth. “You can sit.”

  Was she actually coaxing Cruz Walsh to sit down beside her? It was like something out of one of her dorm room fantasies.

  His shoes scraped over the floor as he approached and lowered down beside her. Not that close, really. No part of his body touched hers.

  She folded her hands in her lap and stared straight ahead into the opaque air. The building was quiet. Empty. Just the hum of the air-conditioning and the two of them. Not another soul in the school. “You think we’ll be okay?”

  “Yeah. It won’t be that comfortable . . . or fun. We’ll have to figure out bathroom arrangements in the morning . . . or sooner.”

  “Oh.” That was going to suck. She hadn’t even thought about that.

  “I noticed a bucket earlier.”

  A bucket! God. Peeing in a bucket in front of Cruz Walsh definitely wasn’t part of any previous fantasy. Maybe that’s what she needed. A dose of reality with this guy. He wasn’t into her. He was the opposite of into her. He barely remembered her and she annoyed him. Why not top it off by doing her business in a bucket five feet from him and making sure she killed any chance of him seeing her as a woman?

  “There are worse things,” he said.

  Worse things than being locked up for a weekend with her? Or worse things than peeing in a bucket? “I’m not sure about that.”

  “I’m sure,” he said dryly, and she suddenly felt foolish. Of course he would think that and now he thought she was a naïve, over-privileged diva.

  He’d been in prison. Prison was worse. He was saying that being stuck with her was better than prison.

  She winced. Well. That was heartening.

  She let her head fall back on the wall and closed her eyes again. She doubted she would fall asleep, but it would be nice. Nice to close her eyes and wake up Monday morning free of this nightmare.

  “So what do you do?” The question came abruptly. It was grudgingly asked. She knew he didn’t really want to know what she did for a living. He didn’t care. He didn’t want to talk, but they were here, stuck, no relief in sight. It was as though he surrendered to the inevitability of small talk. She could almost hear his internal fuck it.

  “What do I do?” she repeated . . . more for herself. What was she willing to admit to him?

  “Yeah. Since high school. Obviously you know what I’ve been up to. What about you?”

  She didn’t want to lie. She blew out a breath, aware that the truth probably wouldn’t go down well. Not with him. Not considering that he had ignored all interview requests. He wouldn’t be happy about being trapped with a reporter.

  She knew through Cody that all the major media outlets had offered him a pretty penny. Like more than she could ever earn in a year. More than the Daily Reporter could ever pay him. And he had walked away from the offers. Money wasn’t a temptation for him. It should have surprised her about him, but it didn’t.

  “When I first got out of college I went to work for a paper in Fort Worth. A few years after that, I got a job at a paper in Austin. I’ve been living there ever since. I just came back to Sweet Hill a few weeks ago to help Nana after her knee surgery.”

  He tensed as expected. The air grew thicker. “You’re a reporter?”

  The way he said reporter . . . it was as though she’d just admitted to being a terrorist.

  She nodded. “I’m a journalist, yes.”

  “Fucking vultures,” he ground out.

  She bristled. “Well. That’s nice.” She smoothed her hands down her thighs. She was accustomed to criticism. Years of bullying conditioned her for that, but for the most part her choice of career had been deemed acceptable if not impressive.

  She had been the smart one. Her parents even called her that. At home she was the smart one. At school, Flabby Gabby.

  She knocked it out of the park on her ACTs and SATs and got a full ride to Vanderbilt—and that’s what she had wanted. To go anywhere that wasn’t Sweet Hill. As far as Mom and Dad were concerned, she was robbed and should have been valedictorian. Their other two kids had good looks and charisma going for them. Gabriella had the brains. The expectation was always that she would have a lucrative career, but both her siblings outearned her. Her family expected better from her, but they weren’t too disappointed. Mostly because Mom had been a huge fan of the show Murphy Brown, so there was that.

  Friction crackled in the air between them. “Rather judgmental of you,” she added.

  “You’re calling me judgmental?” He let loose a single bark of laughter. “That’s funny considering all my life I’ve been judged and condemned. And you know who often led the charge?”

  She arched an eyebrow. “Reporters?”

  “You said it, sweetheart.”

  “And why do you feel like you’ve been wrongly judged? When did it start, Cruz?”

  He was silent for a beat before bursting out with: “Are you fucking interviewing me right now?” Rage shook his voice.

  “Um . . .” She winced. “Maybe.” And that’s when she faced the truth. She wanted to interview him. Somehow her opinion had changed since running into him in the hall. She wanted his story. She would tell it the right way. Maybe it was arrogant of her to think so, but who better to write the story of Cruz Walsh than someone who had been close to all the drama? No other journalist could claim that.

  She wouldn’t dick
him over and twist his words or take them out of context, or spin an angle that would leave him blindsided. She’d get it right. She just had to convince him of that.

  His weight rustled. “Incredible. Well. Good to know. In the future, I’ll keep my mouth shut around you.”

  “Oh, come on. Don’t be like that. I promise to be nice. It won’t hurt at all,” she coaxed, reaching out to nudge his arm and her hand landed on his warm chest instead. God. The cotton of his shirt was so soft. She instantly wanted to nuzzle her face there and cuddle up against him. Her mouth dried. Bad Gabriella.

  She started to pull her hand away but he caught it, holding it against him. His grip was strong and firm. No sweating palms on him. She usually ended up with guys with sweating palms.

  The thud of his heartbeat filled her palm. Her heart constricted, the air trapped in her chest. Stuck in here with him and her overactive libido couldn’t be good for her.

  “You look at me and you see a story,” he accused softly.

  If he were only that to her, life would be so much simpler.

  She saw more than that. She saw a guy she’d like to devour. She gulped down a breath. Bad, bad Gabriella. Get it together. She needed to quit thinking of him as her old crush . . . as her first kiss.

  She should look at him and see just a story. She should have that focus and professionalism and . . .

  Who was she kidding? With him, she had none of that.

  “I’m not giving you an interview,” he added, his voice hard with finality.

  “Why did you do it?” she whispered. She couldn’t help herself. She’d always wanted to know . . . wanted to understand what was in his head all those years ago. “Why did you confess to a crime you didn’t commit?” That part had never come to light. Oh, she was certain the police knew. It had to be material to his release and to the subsequent arrest of Shelley Rae’s true killer. Whatever the reason, it had been kept under wraps from the public.

  “I’m not going to talk about anything relating to your cousin or my time in prison or my release . . . so you can just put your conniving little mind to rest.”

  “Conniving?”

  “You’re a journalist. Conniving seems about right.”

  They fell into silence for a while. There was only the hum of the AC. At least the air hadn’t been shut off for the weekend. It would get sweltering in this closet.

  “I never thought you did it,” she volunteered.

  “Really?” He sounded skeptical. “Well, you certainly were in the minor—” He stopped abruptly.

  “Is that how you felt? That everyone believed your confession? What about your family? They couldn’t have—”

  “Enough,” he bit out. “If you can’t stop talking about things I don’t want to discuss, then we won’t talk at all.”

  Well, that was that.

  Did she think she possessed some magic touch and that she could get him to open up? She had pushed too hard. He had shut down completely. She was no one to him. A girl he couldn’t even remember from high school. She was no one to him then and no one to him now. That wouldn’t change.

  Six

  He lied.

  He remembered her. Fully. Totally. He’d let her think he had only a dim recollection of her, but Gabriella Rossi had been the star of more than one wet dream in his adolescence. Even after his adolescence. He’d inserted her face into more than one late-night fantasy while he was in prison. The nights had been long and lonely, and she had ended up there, in his head, just as she often had when he was a kid.

  The thing was . . . he’d been achingly aware of her since ninth grade. When freshman year dawned and Gabriella walked into his health class, he’d sat up straighter in his chair, immediately recognizing that she had changed over the summer. All her baby fat had shifted and settled into all the right places as far as he was concerned. Places he wanted to touch and explore.

  From that day on, he’d developed a kind of radar for Gabriella Rossi. The moment she drifted into his sphere, it was as though some kind of pheromone was released into the air and he became instantly hard. It was embarrassing, really. He always had to make sure he got to class before her. Seated at his desk, he could appreciate her arrival without any humiliating incidents. In other words, no one had to know he was sporting wood.

  He had been equal opportunity back then when it came to girls. Meaning he liked all kinds. Short, tall. Blonde, dark. Bad girls. Good girls. Good girls especially. They liked to slum it with him. They’d go behind their parents’ and boyfriends’ backs for a taste of the forbidden. Such fucking clichés, but he was there, ready and willing to play their games.

  Except Gabriella Rossi. She was not his type. She didn’t fit the mold of any girl he fooled around with. No. In fact, she was the kind of girl he deliberately never fucked. She wasn’t just a good girl. She was smart. Too smart for him, and he credited himself with having a fair amount of common sense. Street smarts, his mom insisted. He always managed to stay out of trouble. Well, until he went to prison, of course. But that had been his decision. Strange enough, but true.

  His mom had always called him lucky. He never got busted like the rest of the men in his family—not even like Mom. She couldn’t seem to stay out of trouble. Of course, that had a lot to do with the drugs and alcohol. He never put any of that shit in his body. No drugs and he rarely drank. Not after watching the way it destroyed Mom.

  Still, he didn’t come close to being as smart as Gabriella. She was in a league of her own in that department. She actually cared about what teachers were saying. She’d push her glasses up on her nose and listen with singular focus, asking questions that didn’t occur to anyone else. She cared about the news. The environment. She would never give two shits about him.

  And she didn’t do guys. He watched for that with dread, figuring someday he’d see her on some prick’s arm. Some loafer-wearing guy who went to the country club with his parents after church every Sunday. Surprisingly, that day never came.

  She never went to parties either, but he always looked for her there anyway.

  No, his study of her was limited to school. He would watch her like a hawk in whatever class they shared or in the halls. He studied all her soft curves like there was going to be a test. She had a nice, round ass. Big tits. And hips that stretched her jeans tight. He remembered thinking how he wanted to sink into all that softness. How she would take him, fit him and cushion him. Her softness to his hardness.

  She chronically wore her baggy T-shirts and sweatshirts like armor, but he saw through that camouflage. When she stood up from her desk, leaning forward to hand in her homework to the kid in the desk in front of her, her shirt would ride up to her waistband and he’d get a view of that ass spread out in front of him like a feast.

  His dick would turn rock hard, blood rushing between his legs. He’d have to adjust himself and lower a notebook down there to cover himself. Even sitting down, it would still be obvious for anyone who looked his way that a boner tented his jeans. Sure. He was a teenager back then. A stiff wind could give him a boner, but it was her. Rossi with her nonstop ass and mouthwatering rack.

  Of course, he never spoke to her. She wasn’t like other girls. She wouldn’t even look him in the eyes. So he kept it to himself. He kept his hard cock and dirty thoughts to himself. To this day, no one knew he’d ever had a crush on the smartest girl at Sweet Hill.

  But here he was. Gabriella Rossi was asleep, draped against him with an ass and tits even sweeter than he remembered. For multiple days. He closed his eyes in misery.

  How was he going to keep his hard cock to himself? And did he even want to? They weren’t kids anymore. He was done pretending. This was who he was.

  He gulped down a breath and tried to hold still. With her so close it was damn near impossible. His nightmares weren’t as bad as this, and that was saying something since most of his nightmares consisted of him back in prison, stuck in his old cell. Or out on the yard, being surrounded by a group of guys who d
ecided they wanted to get a workout by kicking his ass.

  He took careful sips of air, trying not to think about the fact that he was in an enclosed space. Ever since he got out of prison, he avoided tight spaces. For seven years he had lived in a cell. In a box. Sure. He got outside every day . . . exposed to the brutal West Texas heat of the yard. Still, it had felt good to taste the sun on his skin.

  But every night the door clanged shut and he was back in his cage. He could still hear the slam of loud steel reverberating in his head. He only had to close his eyes and he was back in there again.

  He’d lived like that for so long, so this shouldn’t be such a struggle. How could he develop claustrophobia now? All this time later? Now that he was free? It was a weakness and he didn’t do weaknesses. He had never been able to afford vulnerabilities, and yet somehow he had acquired this one.

  The weight of Gabriella Rossi’s head flopped onto his shoulder. She was passed out, dead to the world . . . and apparently she had decided to make a pillow out of him.

  He turned, but couldn’t make out her features in the dark. Of course, he remembered what she looked like. He’d gotten his fill of her face during their encounter in the hall and before it got so dark in this little closet.

  She had a nice mouth. Wide and full. Plump. The kind of mouth that didn’t need lipstick because it was already a dusky pink. Sitting here in the dark, with her body pressed against him, an image flashed through his mind. An image of Gabriella Rossi putting her mouth on him. Her tongue licking his head and—

  Fuck. This wasn’t the place to fantasize about her, but the image intensified until his breathing grew harsh. He envisioned himself doing wicked, dirty things to her. With her.

  Things he would be more than glad to teach her if she didn’t already know.

  Fuck. This wasn’t him. Corrupting nice women wasn’t his game. A fine moral woman like her might not like to do the kinds of things he was envisioning, but that excited him even more. He could teach her to like it. Open her eyes to the delight of dirty sex. Train that mouth in the finer points of proper cock sucking.