Breathless 4 (Breathless #4)

BREATHLESS
#4

The
Breathless Series Book #4

BAD
BOY FRAT

By
Claire Adams

This
book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are
products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not
to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual
events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

Copyright
© 2015 Claire Adams

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Chapter
One

After a few moments, the sheer shock of my mom’s
message on my phone began to abate; I decided that I had to get back to my dorm
room — that was not the kind of call that I could make in the middle of campus
where anyone could hear. I hurried across campus, my heart pounding in my
chest.
They hired a private investigator?
I shook my head as I remembered that detail. I wasn’t sure whether to be angry
with them for taking that precaution when they had no real reason to suspect
that Johnny had ever done anything wrong or upset and panicked about whatever
the investigator had uncovered about him.
You
never confronted him about that comment. You never talked to him. You never
even asked him about it.
In spite of the fact that I’d given up talking to
him about what I had read, I had never quite fully lost the back-of-my-mind
feeling of fear and suspicion about Johnny.

I didn’t even wait for the elevator. I half-ran
through the hall of the first floor of dorm rooms and punched at the safety bar
of the door to the stairwell. My heart was pounding so fast I barely noticed
the stairs themselves as I went up flight after flight, heading up to my room —
the one place I could safely call my mom and talk about whatever she had found
out through her private investigator.

I should have known my parents would hire someone; I
should have known that they wouldn’t have taken the cue that I’d chosen my own
college, that I was an adult. I should have guessed that they were going to be
just as paranoid as ever about any guy I chose for myself. It wasn’t fair, but
I should have expected it. I paused as I came to one of the landings between
floors, almost out of breath from how quickly I had been taking the stairs. It
couldn’t be anything, could it? I thought about it. Johnny had only ever had
the one situation in his life, hadn’t he? Or maybe — the thought chilled me — there
was something that the girl in the dining hall didn’t know about. Maybe there
was a history there.

I couldn’t believe it. There was no way Johnny could
possibly be some hardened criminal or some abusive, cruel person. He was sweet
and kind and thoughtful constantly when it came to me. I hadn’t known him very
long, but if someone had the kind of past that a private investigator could
uncover, they wouldn’t be able to hide their true colors, would they?

I made my way up the last couple of flights of stairs
more slowly; I couldn’t reconcile the Johnny I had met, the Johnny I had made
love with and who had taken me into the woods on the sweetest, nicest date I
had ever been on, with someone who could be the kind of man who would alarm my
mother.
Of course
, I thought
bitterly,
it could just be that she
thought he was dangerous because one of his uncles once shoplifted from a
store. In my mom’s eyes, a poor background would be dangerous.
But
nonetheless, I had to lend her a certain amount of attention. I knew that in
spite of how little I respected her views on wealth and things like that — her
pretentiousness — she loved me and cared about me and wanted me to be happy.
She wouldn’t have called so many times if it was something like Johnny being
poor.

That opened up the question once more in my mind of
just what it was that Johnny had done. If he had done something other than be
involved with a girl who committed suicide, I should know about it, shouldn’t
I? I came to my floor and pushed the heavy stairwell door open with difficulty.
My heart was pounding inside my chest as if it wanted to explode, and I had to
walk slowly, already exhausted, towards my dorm room. I had to hope that
Georgia wasn’t around; I needed the most privacy humanly possible for the
conversation that I was about to have with my mom. What had her stupid private
investigator discovered? I couldn’t imagine. It had to be more than what had
happened with Claire, didn’t it? I had taken Johnny at face value when he had told
me about his involvement with the girl who had committed suicide. But there had
been that comment. On the one hand, I had Johnny’s assertion that he had only
been her boyfriend and that people were still bitter at him, still blamed him,
for not being able to save a troubled girl from killing herself. On the other
hand, there were the spiteful words of the girl who obviously wanted Johnny for
herself and the comment from Claire White’s memorial page where someone had
said that Johnny should be in prison, too, and that what he had done to Claire
was not love.

And I had Johnny’s behavior. He had always been sweet
and kind with me, funny and confident. I had seen him be aggressive on the ice,
but that was how hockey players were, wasn’t it? I had never seen him treat a
single woman with anything more than slight disgust and that was when the
jealous girl from the dining hall had flashed him and pressed her boobs against
the Plexiglas at a game. My mind was spinning as I closed the door to my bedroom
in the dorm and caught my breath. I looked at my phone. Mom obviously urgently
wanted to tell me something — I couldn’t just let it wait. I would have to call
her and find out what she knew or thought she knew about the situation.

But as I pulled up her contact information and started
to hit the button to dial out, it occurred to me that once more I wasn’t giving
Johnny the benefit of trust. Anything that Mom had to say to me was something I
wouldn’t be hearing about from the man it concerned himself. I was once more
going to listen to what amounted to rumor instead of confronting the man who
had told me he loved me.

I had been with him so many times; I had had so many
opportunities to ask him more. Even when we had been alone in the woods and I
had asked him about Claire White, I had just let it go when he asked me to. At
the time, it had seemed like the best idea. It had seemed cruel to try and drag
it out of him when he was clearly upset about having to talk about the
girlfriend he had lost his virginity to. But had it just been stupid of me to
let him distract me from asking about it again? Every time I had been on the
edge of confronting him, asking him to his face if there was more to the
situation than what he had told me before, I had stopped short. It would be
better just to face whatever Mom had heard from her ridiculous private
investigator and figure out how to deal with it. Figure out how to confront
Johnny and what this meant for me.

I pressed the call icon on my screen and took a deep
breath. Mom would probably still be freaking out; one of us had to remain calm.
I closed my eyes as the phone rang.
Damnit
, Mom
, I
thought as it rang once and then twice.
You
wanted me to call back. Answer the damn phone already.

“Sweetie! Oh thank God,” Mom said the moment the call
connected. “I’ve been so worried all this time.”

“Mom,” I said, as she started to rattle on, sounding
panicked. “Mom. What’s going on? You hired a private investigator? Isn’t that a
little over the top?”

“Sweetie, if you knew what I know about that boy
you’re dating you’d thank me for it.” I rolled my eyes.

“Okay, so tell me what you know about Johnny.” Mom
took a deep breath, and I knew she had been expecting me to argue harder
against what she and Dad had done. I just wanted it over with; I wanted to know
if there was something else for me to worry about with Johnny or if there was
just the same old scandal.

“One of his girlfriends, a girl called Claire White,
killed herself a few years ago,” Mom said. I sighed with relief. It was just
the same scandal that had come up before.

“Mom,” I interrupted. “I know about Claire White. She
was Johnny’s girlfriend, they were together in high school, and yeah it’s very
sad that she killed herself, but it’s not like someone can blame Johnny for that.”

“Becky, sweetie — if he could do what he did to her,
what’s to say he won’t turn around and do it to you, too?” I rolled my eyes
again.

“Claire killed herself, Mom. What are you talking
about? What exactly do you think he did?” Mom gasped.

“You don’t know? Oh, baby girl.” Mom’s voice dropped
and I heard a mixture of fear and sadness in her tone. “It wasn’t just some
troubled girl who killed herself. Claire White…a group of boys from that school
drugged her and raped her, Becky. They took pictures of her while they were
doing it and spread them all around the school.” I felt my blood starting to
run cold; I remembered what I had seen on Claire White’s memorial page, what
the people had said about the different boys who had been involved all going to
jail. And then the comment that Johnny should be with them.
Oh God.

“They raped her? And took pictures?” I heard my voice
as if it was far away, I was in so much shock at what Mom was telling me.

“Yes, Becky. That Claire White girl was so ashamed of herself
— she was bullied and made fun of and it was so awful that she killed herself.
She couldn’t deal with it. If…if Johnny could to that to one girl, he could do
it to you, too.” I shook my head. For a moment, I couldn’t believe it, not any
of it.

“What happened to the boys?” I wanted to hear it. I
wanted to hear her say it.

“The boys are all in prison; all of them except
Johnny.” The words made my stomach sink to my knees.

“Well if Johnny’s not in prison, he must not have been
involved,” I ventured to argue. I could imagine my mom shaking her head.

“The world doesn’t work like that all the time, Becky,
and you know it. He’s a big hockey player — he probably got off scot-free just
because of that. Nobody wanted him to be carted off to jail when he could be
playing.” My throat felt tight, my mouth was dry. “He was a really big deal in
that town; a home hero on the ice.”

“I…I mean, come on, they have to uphold the law. I’m
sure there’s just something…” I couldn’t think of anything, though.

“Our investigator was only able to discover that there
was a sealed file on Johnny about the investigation. Nobody knows what’s in it —
except for law enforcement. And Johnny, of course. But nobody really knows what
his involvement was. Becky…if he wasn’t involved at all, then why would he have
a police file?” I didn’t have any answers for her. I had no idea what to say to
that. I took a deep breath. There had to be something that I could find out
from Johnny himself, something to make this right. I had been wrong to call my
mom before talking to the man I loved himself.

“I’m going to get to the bottom of this,” I told my
mom.