Boys And Their Toys: A Dark High School Bully Romance (Troubled Playthings Book 1)

by Tiffany Sala

  I could barely stop myself from rolling my eyes at him. “Seriously? I think we’ve actually been letting women out of the basement even for as long as you’ve been alive, Lucas…”

  “I didn’t mean I fucking think you should be some Stepford bitch,” Lucas retorted. There was something dangerous in the way he was looking at me, a spark that seemed to be passing between our gazes, but I was getting pretty used to that feeling of danger where Lucas was concerned. I stood my ground. What more was he going to do to me? “If I thought you really wanted a fucking backhoe, I’d go slap one on hire purchase this fucking instant. Be the first investor in your goddamn business.”

  That completely threw me off. “Really?”

  “Well, I’d have to break into an account I’m not supposed to touch to do it,” he said, “and there’d be hell to pay with the parents, but sometimes it’s just worth it, you know?” I would never have wanted to admit it to him, or to anyone really, but his smile as he talked about doing bad things really did things to me.

  “Anyway,” Lucas said. “I know that’s not what you really want to do. You’re just trying to make a point, a stupid fucking point. And I say stupid, because you’re not ever going to be allowed to make it. You’ll just waste your time. Those fuckers will let you waste your time until the last minute because they enjoy their little show. And I’m not so sure I think they deserve that show.”

  “I provide more value to Stacks Brothers than just visual appeal, Lucas.”

  Getting riled up in this freshly-painted, unventilated room was starting to mess with me. I put a hand against the nearest wall to prop myself up. There was another angle to this I didn’t really want to think about: how close Lucas was hitting my own secret dreads about this job, about my future in it. He couldn’t be right about it.

  “You’re right, baby,” Lucas said, “but you know they don’t see that.” He planted a big hand in the middle of my chest and pinned my back to the wall behind me with a gentle pressure. “You know what they really see when they look at you.”

  He leaned in and took hard possession of my mouth with the kind of kiss I’d wished all my teenage years could be real. My knees buckled, and he was there again, keeping me held up with the pressure of his body. A firm shape nudged between my legs, and I felt a readiness I didn’t want swelling up in me.

  This was about the last place we should be doing anything like this. So, of course, I should have known better than to ever let Lucas get me into this situation.

  But I could barely think about the issues with the location while Lucas was kissing me like that.

  I shivered when his mouth moved to my neck. I was struggling to focus on what his hands were doing, fidgeting at my hips.

  “This is what they’d use you for, if they could,” he whispered, “and you know it, don’t you?”

  I stiffened as his hands found their way under the waistband of my pants and then into my underwear, and started pulling. “Lucas—”

  “Quiet, Callie,” he ordered, “or they’ll hear us. And that definitely wouldn’t fit into your career plans, would it?”

  He yanked my clothes down to my ankles in one movement and was upright again to spread a hand over my mouth as I got my thoughts together enough to protest. He gathered up my wrists in his other hand and held them in front of me as I struggled to push him off, to get myself covered again. Anyone who happened to walk in at that moment would be able to see more than I could ever recover from.

  “You see, Callie,” said Lucas, stepping back enough that he could take a peek downwards himself, “you should just stick to those skirts. I’m not a dinosaur like some of these creeps you work with, but it’s that much harder to get where I want to without pulling it all out. And you know it won’t stop me… but it’s going to make it rather awkward for you if anyone does come in.”

  “Lucas, don’t—”

  “I’ll be good,” he said. “I tell you what though, I might not have been otherwise. I’d love to fuck you in a house this nice; I can tell it gets you off just being here. Much nicer than your own place, right?”

  I was so stunned by that I didn’t put up any resistance when he let go of my hands and slipped his between my legs, pressing a finger up against my clitoris and beginning to rub in slow circles. How had he been so easily able to guess what was inside my head?

  “You know that’s how it’s going to go from here,” he told me, leaning close to my face while he stroked me. My eyes kept flicking around the room behind him and just skirting around his eyes; it was too much to look straight at him right now. “If you don’t want to give that to me, Callie, then you’d better make sure I leave you alone right now, because I’ve just about got it all worked out in my head. Not going to be some half-assed shit in someone else’s bedroom, either. Going to make sure we have all the time we need. Now, you’d better try to keep quiet and relax, or this is going to take so long your boss will come looking and see a lot more than either of us want him to.”

  He twiddled his finger between my legs so I writhed like a fish on a hook, and then took his hand off my mouth. I took in a big gulp of air, then clutched at his shoulders, trying to stop him as he crouched in front of me… or maybe just trying to brace myself, I wasn’t sure. I felt like I might explode with embarrassment at the thought of everything he would be able to see. He’d had his hands just about everywhere now, of course, but it was definitely different when there was a visual element. I’d skipped the skirt that day because I knew I was going to the building site, plus I’d probably thought it would offer some protection against Lucas, but that had been a big mistake after all.

  I thought he was going to just look, so when he pressed his face to the apex of my inner thighs and inhaled, I groaned a little. His finger withdrew, and was quickly replaced by something softer, warm and wet—his tongue.

  “Lucas—” But from the first really firm lick, I knew there was no way for me to make him stop. I couldn’t imagine leaving that room and facing my boss and everyone else working on the house until I was able to see these sensations through to their end.

  This turned out to be one more thing Lucas was good at doing with his mouth. I had to bite down on my lip to fight off the sounds I wanted to make, my legs moving in an attempt to open myself further to him though I was semi-consciously horrified at the thought, my pants around my ankles holding my legs together an uneasy reminder of just how shameless I was being.

  Everything about it was so dirty: the sounds of him licking at me, the scent coming from my body. My hand tightened around a fistful of his hair, and then my body was tightening too, clutching at something he hadn’t put in me. His face was suddenly next to mine again, his hand over my mouth and stifling the ridiculous squeaking noises I was making as I rode out my release.

  Lucas pulled my pants back up just before I collapsed to the floor.

  “I’m pretty sure I lasted longer than that,” he said. He knelt to plant a kiss on my lips. I could taste myself on him, and I hated that even that sent another throb through my body. “Well,” Lucas said, “I’ll be seeing you, sweetheart.”

  He opened the door and walked out without another look back. I stifled another groan, and made myself get up before Dane came looking for me.

  Before I left the room, I cracked open the window, hoping nobody would notice the gauzy curtain moving in front of it for a while. Perhaps the paint smell would overpower it quickly, but all I could smell in that room was filthy sex. And if I hadn’t dressed appropriately for work that day, who knew—well, I knew exactly what would have happened, because Lucas had told me.

  And now he’d made it clear what would happen if I kept messing around with him the way I had been.

  As if I had any say in the matter… and I didn’t really mean it in the sense that he was twisting every aspect of my life to manipulate me into it any more.

  Maybe Tamara was right, and I’d been doomed to move back in this direction ever since those days long ago when he’d
made a decision to pay me the sort of attention I would have expected a much more popular girl to receive.

  Maybe, before things went any further, it was time for me to address that whole past situation. At the very least, it might get him thinking about whatever it was that had drawn him to me all those years ago. I didn’t have any other plans for getting him to love me at this stage… and the deeper we went into this, the more I realised I was at risk of losing my own heart without getting anything in return.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I started awake without knowing what had alerted me, but even in a half-asleep state I somehow knew to move over to the window and peek through the curtains. Lucas was grinning up at me, leaning on the outside windowsill. He gestured me towards him.

  I shook my head, mouthed no a whole lot, and started backing away towards the bed… but I didn’t let the curtain fall fast enough to miss him jerking his head in the direction of the front door.

  What was he threatening to do? Break in, cause a scene that would rile my parents up? It didn’t seem to matter when I already had complete confidence in his ability to do something that would end in big trouble for me.

  I’d been wanting to see him, anyway. I hadn’t had more than a distant glimpse over the past few days and I’d completely failed at getting him out of my mind for more than fifteen minutes at a time. I had an important problem to solve revolving around him, I kept telling myself… but the truth was I kept wondering about that event he apparently had planned. I hadn’t had a single encounter with him yet that wasn’t an event, so that little bit of advertising left me short of breath.

  I moved back to the window, put up one finger to ask him to wait, and found a jacket and sweatpants to pull on over my pyjamas. I didn’t like my chances of having time to change properly.

  I hadn’t opened my bedroom window in months and winced at an initial little squeal, but for the most part it slid open easily. I was faced with a little blast of chilly air and Lucas’s face free of glass smudges, which was even more handsome than I remembered. And then when I thought about where that pretty mouth had been the last time we were in the same room, I could barely coordinate myself enough to get one leg after the other out the window.

  Lucas looked me up and down when I dropped to the ground in front of him. “Not following the dress code, I can see.”

  I rolled my eyes and turned back to slide my window shut. “Maybe if you actually got me to come out with you at a regular mealtime, when normal people are likely to be dressed for something other than bed…”

  “Spoken like a woman who might actually be willing to agree to come out with me now,” said Lucas.

  I shrugged. “I guess a lot has changed, right?”

  I was walking after him to his car parked on the street just behind mine when it hit me. “Shit, how am I going to get back into the house later? I forgot to take my keys.”

  Lucas broke into a laugh so loud I winced. I felt like the entire neighbourhood was going to be looking out their windows to see what was going on, but of course in my neighbourhood, people quickly learned it was better to pretend not to notice. “Are you usually this organised or do I have a special effect on you?”

  “You weren’t acting like you intended to give me enough time to get ready properly,” I said. “So I made some mistakes.”

  “It’s okay,” Lucas said. “You can sleep in my car until the morning, and when you need to get in I’ll come explain to your parents it was entirely my fault. I’m actually pretty good at getting people out of trouble.”

  “If you’re at least as good at it as you are at getting them into trouble we’ll do fine.” I tried to keep things a bit sassy so he wouldn’t notice I was actually really touched by the offer. It had to mean something that he was finally willing to take responsibility for the trouble he got me in, and not just because he needed to get himself out of the firing line.

  Surely this was the time to talk about the rest of our history, if ever.

  I was yawning as I sank into the front passenger seat of his car, but I tried to keep my head. “I guess my dad might want to have a bit of a go at you, but my mum won’t care, for sure. Honestly I think she’s been hoping something would kick off between us since that time when we were ten.”

  “What?” said Lucas. The car pulled out of my street, and I sagged into my seat with a relief I would never be able to put into words. It was an awful thing to think, but maybe one of the reasons I hadn’t stood up to Lucas and his shenanigans as much as I should have was because I really liked the way it felt to be caught in his orbit, in a world where there was plenty of money for anything that came and nobody needed to worry about a fight kicking off in their street at night or someone trying to smash up the car they were driving just because it was nicer than everyone else’s. Even when he was only interested in me so long as nobody needed to know, it was a taste of a life I’d wanted for so long without even realising what it would be like.

  It made me uncomfortable to think of myself as being that sort of person. Well, it wasn’t like I had some designs on Lucas, like I expected I would be able to lure him into marrying me and ‘saving’ me from my old life that way. I’d been working on my exit plan since long before he shouldered his way back into my life, after all. But I realised now I’d taken a lot for granted about what it would be like to have that life, about what I would have to do to get there. Maybe I did need him around, to show me the way. That wasn’t the same as trying to use him, was it?

  I wished I hadn’t mentioned my mother and her stupid fantasies now, but I was too sleepy to come up with a way out of that now.

  “It’s not like she’s ever said anything, but I’m pretty sure she’s been holding a torch for you since back then. Since you’ve started, um, hanging around a bit, she’s made it clear she still remembers.”

  “Well,” Lucas said, “it’s nice that she remembers me, but perhaps you could remind me exactly what it is she’s supposed to remember from back when we were ten. Because I know we were in the same class some of the time back then, but I don’t remember having much to do with you.”

  If he was joking, he wasn’t playing it in a very funny way. And I knew Lucas was capable of being very sharp when he wanted to be.

  “Uh…” Maybe if I stalled, he would come out with his just kidding or something that would save me from making an even bigger fool of myself than I already had.

  “I’m not screwing with you, Callie,” Lucas said. “I have no idea what the fuck you and your mother think you remember about me, and I’m sick of waiting to find out.”

  “Not long after you first came to Sands Primary,” I said, each word feeling very heavy in my mouth, “you started showing up wherever my mother was waiting to come walk me home. We lived a couple blocks away from the school back then so it was easy to walk…” I shook my head to dispel details he didn’t need. “I… you… At first you’d just walk behind with my mum and talk to her, I can’t remember about what, but it must have been entertaining enough because she didn’t shoo you away, and my mum hates other people’s kids, honestly. She used to resent it when we had Tamara come home with us some afternoons if her mum was busy, she’d just go off into her bedroom and ignore both of us until someone came to pick her up…”

  Lucas turned his attention off the road to scowl at me, and I went on quickly. “Anyway, after a while you started walking with me, and you’d put your arm over my shoulders while we walked even, so I couldn’t get away without making a big thing of it. But you always did that where none of the other kids from school could see, so they’d tease me about how you had a crush on my mum but had no idea about the rest.”

  “You were always late out of class in the afternoon,” Lucas said suddenly. “You’d have some painting you needed to hang up perfectly, or one time you had to put all your pencils back in their case in order.”

  I tipped my face back to the ceiling in relief. “You remember.”

  “I don’t remember any
thing really,” Lucas said. “I mean, if you say this happened, I guess it happened? I just know a few weird things about you from back then.”

  This was my chance to make some joke about how kids were funny and try to steer the conversation away from that whole mess, but his carelessness had provoked me and I wasn’t awake enough to make better choices.

  “Well, surely you remember our fifth grade school dance.”

  “Surely,” Lucas echoed.

  “You asked me to go with you,” I said. “As a date.”

  “What?” said Lucas. “Wouldn’t I have had—”

  He’d stopped too late for me to be able to pretend I didn’t know where he was going with that. Wouldn’t he have had someone better to go with?

  “I can’t explain it to you,” I said. “It’s not like eleven-year-old me ever bothered to ask eleven-year-old you whether there was some deeper meaning behind it all. You just asked me, and I said yes.”

  “Okay,” said Lucas, “so when we went to this exciting party I can’t remember, what did we do? Share some non-alcoholic punch? Dance at a safe distance of about one foot?”

  I winced. He remembered the dumb rule our homeroom teacher had instigated that year to deal with excessive physical contact between boys and girls, but not that party? “We didn’t end up going together. You came up to me a few days before the party, while there were lots of kids around who had already been teasing me about my new boyfriend, and you told me you didn’t actually want to be just going around with someone else at the party. So I said it was fine, and really it was, except I wished you’d never asked in the first place if you were going to be like that, because it just made me look like an absolute idiot. And I still don’t know why you did any of that, not that I know why you’re doing any of what you’re doing now either…”

  “So… is that what’s been going on in your head the whole time we’ve been hanging out?” Lucas asked. Only he could characterise what had been happening between us the past few weeks generally as ‘hanging out’. “You’re there trying to work out if you can finally get the answers to your questions about some stupid thing that happened years ago I can’t even remember?”