Chad's Chase (Loving All Wrong Book 2) (19 page)

Still reading from his phone screen, he mumbled, “There’s a library, there’s cable, there’s Internet. Do whatever.”

“Can I order a call-girl?”

A pause, then, “Do whatever you want, Blood. Just don’t attempt to leave the building.”

“Oh, right, because you’re ‘protecting’ me,” I said, keeping on his heels. “Um, from who again?”

“Later,” he replied when he got up to the elevator and poked the call button. He pocketed his cellphone. “We’ll talk on that matter later.”

“You’re
lying
.”

That got him to look at me. “Excuse me?”

Folding my arms protectively across my chest, I repeated, “You’re lying. There’s no one after me. You just want to scare me from leaving so you can keep me here as prisoner.”

He said nothing, his cheeks sucking in.

“Just kill me, Chad,” I pushed. “I don’t want to be your prisoner. I don’t want to be your do-as-I-say slave. I don’t want—”

My words got knocked back down my throat when he turned on me and grabbed my face painfully hard with one hand, glaring down at me. “Use the word prisoner or slave again, and I’ll show you exactly what it’s like to be imprisoned and enslaved. Don’t. Fucking. Push me.”

Holding my ground, I spoke as clearly as I could through my squished lips. “I’m not afraid of you.”

“That’s because so far, I’ve been playing nice. Maybe
too
nice.” Squeezing my face harder, he stepped closer so our bodies were touching, and brought his face lower, boring his malignant, pitch-black eyes into mine. “Do I need to give you something to fear, Blood?”

“You said you wouldn’t hurt me,” I reminded him.

“Then stop fucking pushing me!”

My eyes squinted at his burst of anger, and the only reason I didn’t recoil was because he was keeping me in place. I could exercise my skills and fight him. But maybe I really needed to stop pushing him and believe him.

I didn’t know why I was even acting like this. Like I was suddenly dependent on him. Like I needed him to
be
there. To talk to me.

Him leaving to go wherever to do whatever was bothering me. I wanted him to take me with him or not leave at all. Because maybe…maybe he wouldn’t come back.

I sighed.

Silly. That’s what I was being. Silly. The man lived here. Of course, he’d be coming back. And I would get to see him then. We could talk then, and eat, and maybe kiss, and fuck.

Who the hell was this person inside me? It was as if my body had been hijacked my some wanty, needy bimbo.

As the elevator pinged open, Chad released me and stalked inside, making a furious rake of his hand through his hair.

When he turned to face my direction, I opened my big mouth and lied, “I hate you.”

Apparently I had no control over my mouth either. Why was I tormenting him? The words were right, because I
should
hate him, but they weren’t congruent with my actual feelings. I felt anything but hate for this man.

Rejecting the bait, Chad sucked in his cheeks and stared back at me, his gaze doing a sweep down my body and back up. “I really,
really
wish the feeling was mutual, Blood. It would make it so much easier to bury a bullet in your head and get it over with.”

A strange feeling crept from my toes upward, and I scraped my fingernails at my thighs to keep myself restrained as I watched Chad watch me, the elevator doors closing in.

The feeling won out, restraint broken, and I bolted forward, pushing my hands between the doors to stop them from closing, then launched myself at Chad.

He caught me, our bodies crashing violently into contact, our lips attacking each other’s, our tongues embroiling in a deadly war.

Chad’s hand reached out and flipped the switch to stop the elevator in the same time he shifted and slammed me up against the wall, hiking up one of my legs around his hip.

Body on fire, I grabbed at his too-lengthy hair and forced his head down lower so I could kiss him deeper. His tongue was so hard and probing. So commanding, bossing my tongue around. But my tongue was stubborn, defiant, fighting him at every swirl.

He rocked forward, his hard-on shouting ‘
Here I am
’, telling me he wanted me.

Moving one hand down between us, Chad dipped down into my leggings and panties, where he found me slick and hot and aching for him. He drove his fingers through and through the valleys of my folds before taking hold of my clit between his fingers and began massaging. The sensation felt so fucking amazing, I bit on his lip and rocked into his hand, again and again, until he massaged an orgasm right out of me.

I came with a shattering jolt, and cooled down in placating ripples, hips still rocking at his fingers until I went lax.

Removing his hand, Chad brought his wet fingers up to my mouth and I greedily sucked them in, loving the taste of myself and the masculinity of him.

Brooding gaze on my mouth as it sucked his fingers clean of my cum, he said in an easy, but threatening voice, “Better let this hold you until later. ‘Cause if you dare order a call-girl, I’ll fucking kill you.”

Staring at the unsolvable math problems on the pages of her homework notebook, the girl bit her lip, and bumped her forehead down on her study desk in her room.

She was no good at mathematics. Blood usually helped her with her homework, but she hadn’t seen him in over two weeks, and her father and brother thought she needed to learn to solve the problems on her own.

That’s why she loved Blood more than them, because he always, always helped her and made things easier.

The girl hated math. She hated homework. She hated school as a whole. It all made her head hurt—

The air suddenly felt different.

Without even having to look up, she felt him appear at her bedroom doorway.

Her headache transformed into relief as she set down her pencil and swiveled her chair away from her study desk to greet him.

But her smile morphed into a gasp when she saw his face. His right eye was swollen shut, nothing but blackened, bruised skin clotted with blood. He looked as if he’d been tied to a wheel of a trailer truck and then dragged through the streets. A gash on the cheek, a busted lip.

Cold chills wound through the girl. Seeing him like that pained her heart to the very core.

As he entered the room, she started to ask, “What happe—” but he cut off her question with, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“But—”

“Please.”

With a weak movement, he waved the J. R. R Tolkien book in his hand. “Can we read?”

The girl walked up to him and tipped up her chin to accommodate his great height. He was a well-grown teenager, she wasn’t even close. They were a wide eight years apart. “Only if you let me put something on your eye. I still have a half-tube of that smelly antibiotic ointment the doctors gave me when I broke my pinky finger.”

The girl would not let up if he denied her that much. He was used to getting whatever he wanted, but not this time; not unless he agreed to her terms. In any way she could, she needed to help ease his pain. Of course, she was no doctor, but maybe her ointment would help. It had helped with her broken finger a few months ago.

When he started to object, the girl fixed her hands on her hips. “If you say yes, we can read. If you say no, you can leave.”

The corners of his lips twitched, and she bet it was her mother hen pose that amused him. “Okay, Tweety Byrd, you win.”

As he went to sit on her bed, the girl ran into her bathroom, climbed up on the vanity sink and knocked around in her cabinet until she found the ointment. Hurrying back into her room while twisting off the cap from the tube, she shimmied herself between his legs, squeezed some of the gooey stuff on her fingertip, and then gently applied it on his swollen skin.

“Can you see out of it?” she asked him, because she couldn’t see his eyeball at all. Only swelling, black, and bluish purple.

“A little bit.”

“Does it hurt?”

He made to answer, but then the girl’s father’s voice broke into the room with a booming, “What the hell is going on in he—” but his words tumbled down a slippery set of stairs as a horrified expression took over his features when the girl spun around and her dad saw Blood’s eye.

“Jesus Christ, son!” he exclaimed, rushing into the room. “What—who did this to you?”

The girl tossed the tube of ointment and ran to meet her father halfway, pushing at his protruding beer gut with her small hands, stopping him. “He doesn’t want to talk about it, Dad. Leave him alone.”

But her dad wouldn’t budge, a worried, wide-eyed look on his face. “Son, tell me what happened so I can—”

The girl pushed harder at her father’s stiff stomach. “Dad! He doesn’t want to talk about it. Go!”

Still, he just stood and stared over her head like she wasn’t even there, until the girl had to resort to pounding his stomach with her fists. “Get out of my room, Dad! Getoutgetoutgetout!!”

With a scowl, the girl’s dad glanced down at her, then his face softened, as though finally understanding. Nodding, he walked back out the door, where he turned at the threshold and said, “Know that I love you, son. Know that I’ll always be here for you. You can talk to me at an—”

The girl slammed her bedroom door and clicked the lock. When she turned around, Blood’s head was hung low, staring at the book in his hands.

So angry, her little hands curled into fists at her side. She didn’t like this. She didn’t like that he was hurt. She didn’t like that his smile was gone.

“You need to tell me who did this to you so that, when I grow up, I can hunt them down and kill them for you,” the girl said, jabbing a finger at him.

Raising his head, he gave her a small smile. There it was. The smile she loved so much.

Waving the book at her again, he said, “You promised you would read if I let you put that shit on my face.” Easing down from the edge of the bed and onto the floor, he leaned back, stretched out his legs and crossed them at the ankles, then patted the space next to him. “Come, Tweety Byrd. Now.”

Biting down on her lip, the girl counted to ten to cool down. If he didn’t want to talk about something, she knew well enough there was nothing she could do to get him to talk about it. So she let it go and went to sit beside him.

He set the book in her lap, then pointed at his eye, still smiling. The smile was for her. She knew his smiles that were just smiles, and his smiles that were specifically for her. “One eye. So you have to read to me tonight.”

The girl rolled hers, opened to the bookmarked page, and picked up where they’d left off two weeks ago.

After an hour of reading out loud, her eyes began to droop, her reading frequently interrupted with yawns.

When she could go no further, she transferred the bookmark from its previous location to a new one, and closed the book as she said, “That’s it. My eyes are tired—”

The girl’s words stopped short when she looked to Blood and saw how intensely he was watching her, which made her wonder if he’d been listening to anything at all as she read.

“Are you okay?” she asked him, reaching a hand up to touch his face.

From his swollen eye, a tear found its way through the closed lids.

Heart twisting in her chest, the girl tried to console him with, “You taught me not to cry, Blood. You say they win when I do. So you shouldn’t either. Don’t give them your tears.”

Bringing his hand to cover over hers on his face, he whispered, “I love you, Tweety Byrd. Always remember that, okay?”

“I know you do. I love you, too. We all love you, Blood.”

He shook his head, furiously. “I want…I want you to never forget that I love you. No matter what happens. When our fantasy is ripped away from us and we’re thrown into the ugliness of the real world, I want
you
, Tweety Byrd, to never, ever forget that I love
you
.” His good eye closed. “Promise me that.”

The girl could only watch him. She didn’t know what was going on with him, but the pain on his face was more than she could take, forcing tears to her own eyes.

As if she were taking too long to give him her promise, his good eye flew open and he gripped her slender shoulders and shook her hard. “Promise me.”

The girl wasn’t afraid of him, though. He would never hurt her. People who loved each other didn’t hurt one another.

Leaning forward, the girl wrapped her arms around his middle and hugged him tight as she cried into his shirt. “I promise.”

That was the last bit of emotion Blood had ever shown to her, or anyone else. That sad, painful moment in time, the girl had later grown to understand, had been a goodbye.