Wicked Me (Wicked in the Stacks Book 1)

by Lindsey R. Loucks

  The whole package was devastatingly familiar, likely because he’d had his body pressed against mine less than a half hour ago.

  So, that was Sam? As in Riley’s little brother Sam? The last time I’d seen him, he was maybe ten or eleven and he’d been a little sweetie. He would offer to bring me lemonade by the pool and he would tell me the best hiding places during a round of flashlight tag. He even volunteered to teach me badminton so I wouldn’t suck so bad.

  So, yes, I remembered him. And I doubted I would ever forget.

  “Sam,” I said, lowering my greeting into an accusation.

  He had known who I was because we’d grown up together and he’d changed too much for me to realize it. He’d taken advantage of the situation, and of me, too, though I sure had flirted right back. Riley’s little brother. How embarrassing.

  “Paige,” he rumbled, and I felt the timbre of his voice deep inside me.

  I tried to ignore it, tried to ignore him, but the bloody dishtowel was like a matador’s red flag.

  “What did you do?” I asked since he definitely hadn’t been bleeding half an hour ago.

  “What? This?” He shrugged down at the dishtowel then pinned his gaze to mine once again. A small smile tilted his lips. “My hands get carried away sometimes.”

  Heat ignited over my skin. Was that some kind of a promise or was he just stating a fact? Did he have his hands all over someone else and been attacked by a frothing-mad boyfriend? Disgusting, which pretty much summed up my feelings about myself for almost letting a public library display of affection happen between us. I had been so close to kissing him.

  I quickly shifted my gaze away. “So, Riley,” I said, then cleared my throat. “Tell me everything that’s happened to you over the last seven years.”

  Riley chuckled. “First things first. Do you need anything? Beer? Water?”

  “No, I’m good,” I said. “But I’m in desperate need of a shower.”

  “Right this way, my dear.”

  I gave Sam my back as I followed Riley out of the kitchen, but the force of his gaze behind me felt like a sensual touch. I almost glanced over my shoulder, almost, just to see what he might be thinking. But I refused to give someone like him any more of my attention. He’d had plenty, and if I was going to be living with him for six weeks, then I needed to learn how to control my molecules.

  “You’ll be in my parents’ old room so you can have your own bathroom,” Riley said, breathing hard as he climbed the stairs with my bulky luggage. “What do you have in these anyway? Bricks?”

  “Books. In one of them anyway. I plan to do some reading this summer.” A lot, actually. Graduate school had been killer on my to-be-read list.

  “Good to see nothing has changed,” he said, his voice teasing.

  In a lot of ways, he was right. He still had the same cute butt that all the girls at school had talked about in barely contained whispers when he passed them. For me, he was always the brother I never had, though, not some pretty boy to drool over. Which was why I averted my gaze from his butt.

  “But you know, I hear they make these things called,” he started, then groaned and heaved up the last step, “e-books now. You should really look into it.”

  “Oh, I have an e-reader. It’s in there, too,” I said.

  “Of course it is,” he muttered.

  At the top of the stairs, Riley pushed into a large bedroom on the left and set my luggage down. Inside, three tall windows lit the cream-colored carpet with bright square patterns. A queen-sized bed covered in red pillows of all shapes and sizes took up half of the floor space. On the opposite wall stood a large dark oak dresser, and next to it, another door opened into a massive bathroom with both a whirlpool tub and a shower. Holy hell. This was not how I remembered this room.

  I whistled. “You better be careful, Cleary, or you’ll have a hard time getting rid of me.”

  He laughed, and though it was deeper than seven years ago, the rhythm of it still sounded the same. “Mom and Dad remodeled before they moved to Alexandria into something more ‘presidential hopeful,’ as Mom calls it. They said to tell you hi.”

  Sergeant Maxwell Cleary was expected to announce his bid for presidency any day now, according to Riley, since he’d been turning heads across the political spectrum with his stunning military career and his effectiveness as a senator. To me, he’d always just been Max with his quiet, calm demeanor and a barbecue spatula permanently glued to his hand. Maybe it was because he always made me the juiciest hotdogs I had ever eaten, but I thought he made a great senator and would probably make a great president.

  “Tell them hi back for me. When is your dad going to throw his hat in the ring, so to speak?”

  The same crinkle I’d seen downstairs hardened the corners of Riley’s eyes. He scrubbed it away with a hand over his face and a sharp nod. “Soon. I can tell you all about the statistics I have on proper presidential bid timing, but you’ll probably be begging me to stop in five minutes. Remember those days I bored you into a coma by telling you all about baseball camp? You pretended you were listening when really you were reading underneath the table.”

  I gasped, faking innocence. “I was listening.”

  A smile curved his mouth. “Mm-hm.”

  “Well, if I remember correctly, you whipped out your book, too, and caught up with me so we could dissect Voldemort’s childhood with charts and maps.”

  “Good old Voldy. Those were the days, huh?”

  I laughed at our shared pet name for the Harry Potter villain. “Do you still read a lot?”

  “Sadly, no. I work too much, which means you’re going to be bored stiff here all alone for the next six weeks.”

  My ears perked up at the sound of running water downstairs. What had made Sam bleed so much in the few disorienting moments since the library?

  “Should we be worried about Sam and all that blood?” I asked.

  “He’s not a kid anymore. He can take care of himself.”

  “Of course he can.” And why wouldn’t he be able to? “So...” I didn’t need to know this, shouldn’t want to know. “He lives here? You didn’t say so on the phone.”

  “He lives here in theory, but he’s never here. He’s...” Riley shook his head and sighed. “He’s a mess, is what he is.”

  “Yeah, he’s not like the Sam I remember.” Now he had long fingers that had stoked a fire in my lower belly hot enough to melt steel just by handing me a paperback. I flushed at the memory. The man, once a sweet, innocent boy, had some serious know-how in the turning-women-on department that had little to do with actual touches and a lot to do with...experience? Yet another reason I should feel disgusted by him and the series of women he must have practiced on.

  He was a mistake waiting to happen, and I’d already had my share of mistakes, which was part of why I dropped out of existence after moving to Kansas and needed therapy with Dr. Morrison. Besides, Sam couldn’t do anything for me I couldn’t do for myself. I hadn’t come here for some random hook-up. I was here to better my library career, continue with my carefully crafted life. Nothing else.

  Riley glanced behind him to the hallway and ran a hand through his short, blond hair. “He always has work and parties, so he shouldn’t be much bother to you.”

  Good. Outstanding.

  “Was it a party that gave him the black eye?” I asked.

  “Who knows?” he said, rolling his eyes at the ceiling. “Mom and Dad are too busy to do much about him, and they don’t know half the things he does, anyway. He’s a walking time bomb, and I don’t have time to babysit him, even though it could cost Dad the presidency.”

  “Can’t Rose talk some sense into him?”

  At the mention of the youngest Cleary, all the irritation on Riley’s face washed away into a blank stare. I knew Riley’s expressions too well, but this was not one of them. It was too practiced, too rehearsed.

  “She’s at a private school in Virginia,” he said in a monotone that matched the
emptiness on his face.

  That didn’t answer my question at all. Rose had been a dreamer, perfectly content watching the clouds drift by, while her lopsided pigtails that looked like warmed honey streamed out on the grass above her head. She was adorable and just as innocent as Sam had been. So why the robotic evasiveness?

  Riley cleared his throat and hefted one of my suitcases onto the bed. “Is it still Christopher Pike and R.L. Stine?”

  “Uh, no. My reading tastes have matured some.” I smiled down at the suitcase, my fingers itching to tear—I mean gently open—the books and give them a good long sniff. “I’ve moved on to books with half-naked men on the covers who carry a loaded weapon. Sometimes wearing a kilt. Sometimes...not.”

  He slid me a playful grin. “So, book porn?”

  I smacked him lightly in the ribs, laughing, and it didn’t go unnoticed that my hand had just bounced back from a solid wall of muscle. Between his busy schedule, he must work out. A lot.

  “No,” I said. “Romantic suspense, and yes, there is a difference. And don’t judge because I know all about disposing bodies so they’ll never be found.”

  Riley stepped closer into the sunlight and held up his hands in defeat. The rays threw sharper angles onto his face and highlighted the faint whiskers along his jaw. He’d grown up to be handsome, just like his dad, but even when I was surrounded by the gushing girls at school, I always wondered why I wasn’t attracted to him the same way they were. He was a catch, sure, but he didn’t inspire a searing ache like...like no one.

  “No judging, Sullivan,” Riley said, then folded me into another hug.

  He felt good, cool and warm at the same time, and smelled like lemony wood and coffee.

  “It’s too good to see you again to be judgmental,” he said, his breath sliding across my temple.

  “It’s good to see you, too.”

  He squeezed harder, sliding his hands farther down, and pressed a lingering kiss to my hairline. I frowned at the show of affection. Our friendship had never gone past simple elbow jabs and kicking feet underneath the dinner table. This felt peculiar, like we were crossing a straight, orderly line that I was perfectly content to stand behind.

  Someone cleared their throat loudly in the doorway. I tried to pull away from Riley, but he held fast, his eyes narrowed and aimed over my shoulder. The air sizzled with thick silence and a tension that skittered up my back. With my palms against Riley’s chest, I pushed myself away and turned to see Sam, whose bright blue gaze knifed into Riley.

  Sam ticked his eyes at me for a second, a tortured grimace rolling across his bruised face, before returning to Riley again. A deep, ugly cut slashed across the knuckles of his right hand, but he didn’t seem to notice it when he balled his fingers into a fist.

  “I’m leaving,” Sam said, his voice more composed than the rest of him. Then he turned and disappeared down the stairs.

  I blinked after him, my mind roiling with constant replays of his single glance at me. He’d seemed hurt somehow, but not in the physical sense. Surely he wasn’t jealous of Riley and his hand-roaming hug. Was he?

  With my finger pointed at the empty doorway, I turned to Riley. “What was all that about?”

  “No idea,” he said and rubbed his hands together, seeming to dismiss the whole thing. “So, what do you want to do tonight? Go to a club? A movie? We can do anything you want, and we’ve got six weeks to do it all in.”

  I smiled at his enthusiasm. “Food. I’m kind of a fan.”

  “Food first. Works for me.”

  “Shower first because I can’t go anywhere smelling like this. I must smell like sweaty goat.”

  “If I agreed with you, would you dispose of my body somewhere where someone could find it within a few days, at least?”

  I shrugged. “Doubtful.”

  “At least you’re honest,” he said, grinning. “No reading your book porn in the shower, okay?”

  With a loud snort, I shooed him out of his parents’ room. After the best shower of my life and smelling much less goat-like, I padded downstairs in my bare feet, my strappy sandals swinging at my side. I had no idea where we were going to eat, but I’d dressed myself in a casual black dress that skimmed my thighs, and I wore my long hair down so it waved in soft curls around my shoulders. One last glance in the mirror had assured me I looked well-organized, like book spines all lined up in a tidy row. Yes, I might’ve had some obsessive compulsive tendencies.

  Riley stood in the living room with his cell pressed to his ear, his mouth pinched tight. “I left it on my desk. Are you even looking at my desk?”

  Uh-oh. I leaned against the hallway wall to put my sandals on while trying to appear like I wasn’t eavesdropping. The latter was easier than the former.

  “Fine. I’ll be there in ten.” Riley ended the call then held the phone in a tight fist, like he was seriously considering whether to throw it or not.

  “Trouble?” I asked.

  He gave me a slow once-over, and his mouth dropped open as his gaze snagged on all my curves, of which I had more than a few. My Puerto Rican mom passed down a certain plumpness to various parts of my body, parts Riley had never seen before, let alone seen squeezed into a little black dress. Under his heated stare, I suddenly had the urge to cover up, even with the scorching sun outside the window that hadn’t yet ended its plunge into twilight. Why couldn’t it be like we were kids again, so easy and carefree?

  “You look incredible.” He walked toward me and then trailed his fingertips down my bare arms, tracking the movement with his eyes. “But I have to go to my office. My assistant can’t find the report she needs for Dad, and he’s flying out to Dallas first thing tomorrow.”

  “We’ll just eat after, then,” I said. “No problem.”

  Riley sighed and took his suit jacket from the back of the couch. “I mean we’ll have to stay there and redo the report. My assistant said her computer crashed, so if she can’t find the report, we’ll have to redo the entire thing.”

  “That’s terrible,” I said, and failed to keep the note of disappointment from my voice.

  “We’ll catch up another time, okay?” he said. “There’s plenty of food in the fridge. Help yourself to anything you need. I’ll be back later.” He shrugged into his jacket then dropped a kiss on my head. “I’m really sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It’s your work,” I said.

  “I’m really sorry,” he said again. Frowning, he walked out.

  I sagged against the closed door to fight with the straps on my sandals so I could take them off. All dressed up with no place to go. I allowed myself a full thirty seconds of a pity party complete with anguished violin music screeching through my head before I trudged back upstairs to change.

  Do I know how to empty a house or what?

  3

  Sam

  “I HAD TO FIRE MY COUSIN today because he’s going places,” my friend Tony said, squinting at the road ahead. “Not to college, but other would-you-like-fries-with-that places.”

  “Sucks.” I swallowed my sigh along with a fiery dose of tequila and rolled my gaze out the open passenger window. On any other day, I would be more sympathetic, but today had turned into an avalanche of shit. And I wasn’t even counting Hill and his sudden obsession with my fingers.

  My mind, the prickly bastard that it was, kept flashing to my brother’s hands creeping down Paige’s back to just above her ass when they’d hugged. It probably had felt innocent enough to her, but she hadn’t seen the look in his eyes—a hunger that promised he would use her, then cast her off harshly for therapy bait like the dozens of others.

  But to do that to Paige? I guess I should’ve known Riley could stoop so low. I hoped she was smart enough to see it coming if he tried.

  Still, I couldn’t shake that image of them, what they could be doing right now, if for whatever reason Paige didn’t see that he was looking at her like a sexual object. But Paige was so much more than that. Funny, since I was the guy who had wanted
to strip her naked in a public library when she didn’t even know who I was. This wasn’t a case of like brother, like brother, though.

  Tony narrowed his eyes through an exhale of cigarette smoke. “Dude, relax. Zen it out.”

  Easier said than done. I didn’t have time anyway. We were almost at the house where Hill had so politely requested my presence.

  “Turn right,” I said, pointing. “We’re looking for a yellow house.”

  Tony turned, squinting at the road ahead. Judging from the leap his cigarette made from relaxed to jutting straight out, I could tell he was about as thrilled as I was to be in this neighborhood after dark.

  “You sure about this?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “That makes me feel so much better,” Tony said.

  He would go with me, of course, since he knew all about the debt to Hill that wasn’t mine, my family’s extracurricular activities, why my right hand looked mummified in gauze. That was why I’d asked him because I sure as hell wasn’t going alone. He’d had my back since eighth grade during a particularly risky Dungeons & Dragons mission. Those were the good old days. The good, geeky, I-didn’t-have-a-criminal-record-yet days.

  A loud bass beat drowned out the classic rock station in Tony’s Buick and announced where a party was long before we saw it. Some girl stood in the doorway of a house—not a yellow one—shrieking and giving the full moon her middle finger. A built Asian was shoving a big, black guy between two parked cars, out into the street. Dozens of people stood around on the lawn, cans and bottles in their hands winking in the glow of Tony’s headlights in a sort of strobe-like warning that might as well have read #sorrynotsorry.

  My stomach curled at that particular hashtag, made the backs of my eyes burn, my pulse pound, so I attempted to scorch that memory from my mind with another tilt of the tequila bottle. There. Not gone, but thoroughly melted and dulled into something rubbery I could wedge into place at the back of my mind.

  “Not that house,” I said.

  “Good because it looks like they started without us.”

  I hated parties like those, so out of control and unpredictable, and I was about to contribute to it, to break these people even more than some of them probably already were. Unless they got their drugs from someone other than Slim at the yellow house. Which was two houses down from the party and the shrieking chick.