Irresistible Attraction (Merciless World Book 2)

by W Winters

  But Seth’s already texted me.

  And I sit there motionless in my seat, reading what he wrote as Carter bites out my name, demanding an answer I don’t have to give.

  We found the sister.

  She’s alive.

  Marcus has her.

  Bethany

  I can’t stop reading. When I do, I have to face reality and I’m not ready to face the consequences of my decisions yet. I’d rather get lost in the pages.

  Every time they kiss, I think of Jase Cross.

  I think I love him.

  I love my enemy.

  Why couldn’t I be like the characters in this book? Why couldn’t I be like Emmy and fall for the boy who loves her just as much and the only thing they have keeping them apart, is whether or not they’re both still breathing?

  Why did I have to fall for a villain? Maybe that’s what I deserve. Deep down inside though, I don’t think I even deserve him.

  Books are a portal to another world, but they lead to other places too. To places deep inside you still filled with hope and a desperate need for love. Places where your loneliness doesn’t exist, because you know how it can be filled.

  Jase isn’t a good man, but he’s not a bad one either. I refuse to believe it. He’s a damaged man with secrets I know are lurking beneath his charming facade, a man with a dark past that threatens to dictate who he will become.

  And I think I love him.

  I can’t bring myself to tell him that. I just had the chance a moment ago when he told me he wasn’t able to come tonight because he was with his brother and Carter needed him.

  But he still asked if I needed anything. I could have told him I miss him. I could have messaged him more. Instead, I simply told him I would be ready for him when he wanted me.

  The constant thumping in my chest gets harder and rises higher. I have to swallow it down just so I can breathe. This was never supposed to happen. How could I have fallen for a man like him?

  I’m drowning in the abyss, and he’s the only one there to hold me. That’s how. I need to remember that.

  He made it that way, didn’t he?

  The sound of the radiator kicking on disrupts the quiet living room. I take the moment to have a sip of tea, careful not to disturb the open book in my lap. The warmth of the mug against my lips is nothing compared to Jase’s kiss.

  With my eyes closed, I vow to think clearly, to step back and be smart about all of this. Even though deep inside, I know there is no way that means I could ever stay with Jase Cross, and the very thought destroys something deep inside of me. Splintering it and causing a pain that forces me to put the cup down and sink back into the sofa, covering myself with the blanket and staring at the black and white words on the page.

  It all hurts when I think about leaving him.

  That’s how I know I’ve fallen.

  The Coverless Book

  Eighth Chapter

  Jake’s perspective

  “Kiss me again?” Emmy’s voice is soft and delicate. It fits her, but she’s so much more.

  “You like it when I kiss you?” I tease her and that bright pink blush rises up her cheeks.

  “Shhh, she’ll hear us,” she says as her small hands press against my chest, pushing me to the side so she can glance past me and toward the hallway to the kitchen.

  “Miss Caroline knows I kiss you.” I smile as I push some strands of hair behind her ear, but it falls slowly. It should be her mother who Emmy’s afraid will catch us. But her mother is never here.

  “Maybe go check on her?” Emmy asks, scooting me off the chair. “See what she’s doing and if we have a little more time?”

  It’s her elation that draws me to her. There are some people in this world who you love to see smile. It makes you warm inside and it feels like everything will be all right, if only they smile.

  That’s all I can think as I round the corner to the kitchen. I’ve only been here to Emmy’s house twice, but I know the help’s kitchen is through one of these two doors. I’m right on the first guess and there’s Caroline, hovering over the large pot with a skinny bottle above it. Clear liquid is being poured into the steaming pot of soup.

  Although I’d planned to offer to help, just so I can gauge how much time we have, my words are stolen.

  The glass bottle she’s holding doesn’t look like it belongs in a kitchen. I feel a deep crease form between my furrowed brows and I stare for far too long as she pours more and more into the pot. She’s humming as she does. A sweet tune I’m sure would lull babies to their dreams.

  Emmy has soup every night. Every night the caretaker makes her soup. And Emmy stays sick, every day.

  “What did you put in there?” My question comes out hard and when Miss Caroline jumps, the liquid spills over the oven and the bottle crashes onto the floor with her startled cry.

  I debate on grabbing the notebook from the kitchen counter where I left it. Just so I can add to the collection of underlined sentences. I’m reading without really paying attention, just letting the time go by.

  My gaze skims the page, finding four sentences underlined this time and none of the four hold any new meaning. One is the same as it’s been for a while now. I’m invincible.

  If it weren’t for the distraction of this story, the suspense and the emotion, I’d feel hopeless. I’m hopeless when it comes to Jase.

  If hope is a long way of saying goodbye, hopeless can only mean one of two things. As the thought plays in my mind, my thumb brushes along my bottom lip and I stare at the page.

  And that’s when I see it. What I’ve been waiting for. What I was so sure was here.

  A chill spreads across my skin as the mug slips from my hand, dropping to the floor, crashing into pieces. If the letters weren’t staring right at me, I never would have seen them.

  It’s not the underlined sentences. It’s the lines below them. The first letters of the sentences beneath the pen marks. C. R. O. S. S. She buried the message so deep, I didn’t see it before.

  At first it hits me she left me a message, and there’s hope. And then I read the word again.

  C. R. O. S. S.

  “No.” The word is whispered from me, but not with conscious consent. My head shakes and my fingers tremble as I stare at the evidence.

  C. R. O. S. S.

  She did leave a note. My blood turns to ice at the thought. Jenny left me a message in this book, and it has to do with the Cross brothers.

  “No.” I repeat the word as I lay the book down, although not gently, but forcefully, as if it will bite me if I hold it any longer. I nearly trip over the throw blanket in my rush to get off the sofa.

  Thump, thump, thump. Ever present and ever painful, my bastard heart races inside of me.

  My limbs are wobbly as I rush to the kitchen, searching for the notebook. I need to write it down. “Write it all down,” I speak in hushed and rushed words as I pull open one drawer in the kitchen, jostling the pens, a pair of scissors, and papers and everything else in the junk drawer. It slams shut as I bring the notebook to my chest, ready to face the book. To face the message Jenny left me.

  Knowing she wrote something about the Cross brothers.

  Knowing Jase Cross lied to me.

  They had something to do with her murder. Maybe even him.

  Tears leak from my eyes as I stumble in the kitchen.

  “No,” I whisper, and force myself to stand. It will say something else. I tell myself it will, and the sinful whisper in my head reminds me, Hope is a long way of saying goodbye.

  Swallowing down my heart and nerves, I push myself to stand, only to hear a creak.

  Thump, goes my heart, and this time the beat comes with fear.

  I couldn’t have heard that right. No one is coming. No one is here, I tell myself, even though my blood still rushes inside of me, begging me to run, warning me that something’s wrong, that someone’s here who isn’t supposed to be.

  I keep silent and hear the sound of my front door.


  Thump. Terror betrays my instincts. Stealing my breath and making me lightheaded.

  The foyer floor creaks again and the front door closes, softly. A gentle push. A quiet one meant not to disturb.

  The creaking moves closer and I listen to it with only the harsh sound of my subdued breath competing with it.

  And I’m too afraid to even whisper, “Who’s there?”

  A Single Kiss

  “Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.”

  ― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

  Book 2 of Irresistible Attraction

  Prologue

  Jase

  It’s odd the things you remember in the midst of fear. Fourteen years later, and I still recall the cracks in the cement; the sidewalks were littered with them. This particular one though… I remember it in vivid detail, probably because of what happened immediately after.

  Against the old brick building of the corner store, a green vine had found its way through the broken cement and climbed up the wall. I remember thinking it had no business being there. The crack belonged, but the new life that had sprouted up and borne what looked like a closed flower wasn’t supposed to be there. Nothing beautiful belonged on that street.

  The dim streetlight revealed how lively it was, even that late at night. With shades of green on the perfect vine and its single leaf with the bud of a flower just waiting to bloom, it made me pause. And in that moment, I hated that it was there.

  I was almost eleven and maybe that childishness is why I scraped my shoe against the leaf and stem, ripping and tearing them until the green seemed to bleed against the rough and faded red bricks. I know I wasn’t quite eleven, because Mama died right before my birthday that year. It was her medicine that almost fell out of the overfilled paper bag I was gripping so tight as I continued to kick at the wall before feeling all the anger and hate well up and form tears in my eyes.

  Life wasn’t fair. Back then I was just learning that truth, or at least I’d felt it somewhere deep in my bones, although I hadn’t yet said it out loud.

  Mama was getting sicker. Dad’s condition was getting worse too, although he couldn’t use cancer as an excuse. Thinking about the two of them, I continued to kick the wall even though my sneakers were too thin and it hurt to do so. The bottles the clerk had given me to give my dad clinked against one another in the bag, egging me on to keep kicking until I felt a pain that I’d given myself. A pain I deserved.

  All the while, the bottles clinked.

  That’s what I had gone out to get, even as my stomach rumbled. I had enough money left over to get something to eat, but Dad always demanded the receipt. If he saw that I spent his change, I knew it’d be bad. I knew better than to take his money. Times were hard and I would eat what I was given to eat and do what I was told to do.

  I picked up the medicine and beer for my folks on the way home from dropping off something at a classmate’s house on the other side of town. Maybe a book I’d borrowed. Those details are fuzzy over a decade later. I didn’t have many friends but a couple of students pitied me. I was the smallest one in the class and we couldn’t buy everything I needed for school. The other kids didn’t mind letting me borrow their things every once in a while. I never asked the same person in the same week and I always gave stuff back promptly. Mama always smiled when I told her I’d just gotten home from giving things back to my friends. I told her they were my friends, but I knew better. She didn’t though.

  I’m not sure what I’d returned that night or to who. Only that I had to go by the corner store on the way home.

  None of that mattered enough to remember, but the damn flower I’d killed, I remember that.

  It was the shame of nearly crying that made me take that detour, right at the damaged sidewalk that was free of what wasn’t supposed to be there anymore. I cried a lot and that’s why everyone looked at me the way they did. The teachers, the other kids, the clerk at the corner store. They always got a certain look on their faces when they saw the dirty, skinny kid whose mother was dying.

  They didn’t look at my older brothers that way. They were trouble and I was just… not enough of anything other than a kid to feel sorry for.

  I stalked down the alley to hide my face in the darkness, only to meet a man I thought was a figment of everyone’s imagination.

  He was like the boogeyman or Santa Claus; all myths I didn’t believe in.

  A lot of people called him the Grim Reaper, but I knew his name was Marcus. It’s what my brothers called him. I thought they were messing with me when they’d told me stories about him, right up until I looked into Carter’s eyes and he shook my shoulders because I wouldn’t listen.

  Don’t ask for Marcus, don’t talk about him. If you hear his name, run the other way. Stay the fuck away from Marcus.

  Swallowing thickly, I remember the harsh look of fear that Carter never allowed to cloud his expression and his tone that chilled my spine.

  The second I lifted up my head about halfway down that alley, staring at where I’d heard a soft cough in the darkness, in that moment, I knew it was him.

  I thought I knew fear before that night. But no monster I’d conjured under the bed ever made my body react like it did when I saw his dark eyes focused on me. His breath fogged in front of him and that was all I could see as my grip involuntarily tightened on the paper bag. It was late, dark and cold. From the icy chill on my skin, down to my blood and even deeper to the core of what makes a person who they are, suddenly it was freezing.

  So I stood motionless, paralyzed in place and unable to run even though every instinct inside of me was screaming for me to do so.

  I remember how gracefully he jumped down from his perch atop a stack of crates, still hidden in the darkness. The dull thump of his shoes hitting the asphalt made my heart lurch inside of my chest.

  “What do you want?” I braved the words without conscious consent. As bitterly cold as I’d been seconds ago, sweat began to bead on my skin. Sweat that burned hotter than I’d ever felt, knowing I dared to speak to a man who would surely kill me before answering my question.

  A flash of bright white emerged in the blackness as he bared a sick grin. I could feel my eyes squint as I searched desperately for his face. I wanted to at least see him, see the man who’d kill me. I’d heard the worst thing you could see before you die was the face of the person who ends your life. But growing up here, I knew it wasn’t true. The worst thing you could see were the people all around you who could help, but instead chose to do nothing and continue walking on by.

  The streets were quiet behind me, and somewhere deep inside, I was grateful for that. At least if I begged for help, no one would be there to deny me a chance to be saved. It would end and there would be no hope. Having no hope somehow made it better.

  “Your brother has an interesting choice of friends.”

  Again my heart spasmed, pumping hard and violently.

  My brother.

  I was going to lose my mother; I knew I would soon. She was holding on as hard as she could, but she’d told me to be strong when the time came and that was a damn hard pill to swallow. I’d already lost what semblance of a father I had.

  My brothers…. they were all I had left. I suppose life is meant to be suffered through loss after loss. That would explain why the Grim Reaper showed up, whispering about my brother.

  I don’t know how I managed to answer him, the man who stayed in the shadows, but I questioned, “Which brother?”

  He laughed. It echoed in the narrow alley, a dark and gruff chuckle.

  For years that followed, every time I heard footsteps behind me or thought I saw a figure in the night, I heard that laugh in the depths of my mind. Taunting me.

  I heard it again when my mother died, loud and clear as if he was there in that empty kitchen. It was present at her grave, when I saw my closest brother dead in the street, when my father was murdered and I went to identify his body—even when I first killed a
man out of vengeance when I was nineteen years old.

  That demeaning laugh would haunt me because I knew he was watching. He was watching me die slowly in this wretched world and yet, he did nothing.

  “Carter,” he finally answered me. “He’s making friends he shouldn’t.”

  “How would you know?” I asked without hesitating, even though inside I felt like a twisted rag, devoid of air and feeling.

  “I know everything, Jase Cross,” he told me, moving closer to me even as I stepped back. The step was quick, too quick and the one free hand I had crashed behind me against the rough brick wall from the liquor shop. It left a small and inconsequential gash just below my middle knuckle. Eventually the gash became a scar, forming a physical memory of Marcus’s warning that night. His laugh stayed in my mind after that night, and like my scar, served as a permanent reminder of him over the years.

  He neared the dim strip of light from the full moon overhead, the bit that leaked into the alley, but still he didn’t show himself.

  I nearly dropped the bag in my grasp when he came even closer and I had nowhere to go.

  “I have a message for you to deliver to him,” he told me. “If he ever goes against me, your entire family will suffer the consequences.”

  “Carter?” I breathed his name, shaking my head out of instinct from knowing Carter hadn’t done anything. “He doesn’t know anyone. You have the wrong person.”

  All he did was laugh again, the same sick sound coming up from the pit of his stomach. I repeated in the breath of a whisper, “Carter hasn’t done anything.”

  “Not yet, but he will.” The words were spoken with such confidence from the darkness. “And I’ll be watching.”

  He left me standing there, on the verge of trembling as he walked away. The pounding in my chest was louder than his quiet footsteps although I didn’t dare breathe.