day
getting my ass kicked. What could be better?”
I flipped the light switch up as my
gaze fell to the cut on his lip. Instinctively, I reached out. “Let me get you
something for that…”
Slade brushed my hand away. “Relax.
I’m a doctor. Jesus.” He glared at one of the end tables, now askew, that he’d
bumped into on his way through the living room. “The hell you got all this
furniture for? Your apartment doesn’t even look like it belongs to a
twenty-five-year-old. It looks…” Slade wrinkled his nose. “Nice.”
I snorted. “It ought to. I’m an
interior designer. Having a shitty apartment would be a waste of my degree.”
“You are?” He blinked at me, eyes
thinning.
I nodded. “Run my own business and
everything.”
“You never told me that,” Slade
murmured.
I shrugged. “You never asked.”
For a second, Slade looked like he
was going to argue with me. He parted his lips, brow creased, and let out a
strangled noise that almost, but not quite, sounded like a word. Then he looked
at me, hard, with a kind of stoniness in his eyes. I almost could have mistaken
him for completely sober.
“Kellan doesn’t just know about us,
Iris,” he said, jarring me from any pretext of a pleasant conversation. “He
thinks I raped you.” He wet his lips, the corners of his eyes creasing. “Is
that what you think happened between us?”
My stomach turned. “No!” I said,
shaking my head vehemently. “No, Slade. That’s not what I think at all. Jesus,
why the hell would I say something like that, make up a lie about what happened
between us?”
“Revenge,” he suggested with a shrug.
“Payback for me leaving. For what I did to you.” He reached down and started
taking off his shoes. “Make me get on a plane, make me go to the worst part of
town to talk to a kid I haven’t seen in years, make me feel all responsible for
his downward spiral—and then let him punch me in the face.” Slade’s eyes met
mine again as he peeled his socks off. “Iris, if you’d ever wanted to stop…”
“I didn’t,” I said, maybe for the
first time out loud. My heart was racing. I’d never meant to bring all this
down on Slade’s head. All I’d wanted was my little brother back. The way
Slade’s pulse throbbed in his neck, the way his eyes shone—I could tell he was
upset. And not just in an “I’m angry and drunk and a dickhead” way. What Kellan
had accused him of—what his own father thought of him—had hit him like a ton of
bricks.
I thought back to our tryst. From the
very first moment to the very last, I’d wanted Slade Jarvis more than anything
in the world. He was a sweet, sexy, smart as hell twenty-one-year-old, and I
was the eighteen-year-old virgin who fell in love with him. For years, I’d told
myself it was all an act, that Slade never felt anything for me, that I’d been
a pawn, a tool to get back at his father for whatever sin Slade thought he’d
committed.
Looking into his eyes now, I realized
I was wrong. Slade did care. He cared a whole hell of a lot.
“I didn’t want you to stop,” I said
softly, afraid of those words and what they meant. “I never wanted you to stop,
Slade. Because I trusted you. I…” My throat was suddenly hoarse. I swallowed,
hard. “I loved you. And I thought you loved me, too. You betrayed that, and
yeah, I’ve thought once or twice about revenge…” More than that, but that was
beside the point. “…but not like this. I never wanted to—”
“Iris,” Slade said much more gently
than I’d imagined he could. He stood up off the couch, beginning to undo the
buttons on his shirt. “I believe you.”
I blinked. Tonight, Slade was just
full of surprises. My gaze fell to his fingers working at his shirt. “Wait,
what are you doing?”
“Getting comfortable,” Slade said,
shrugging out of his shirt. He had a little trouble with the sleeves, but once
he’d
Ann M. Martin
Josephine Law
The Betches
M.P. Hingos
Katharine Ashe
Tymber Dalton
Mary Burchell
Captain Frederick Marryat
Martin Amis
Katherine Neville