She Likes It Irish (18 page)

“Yeah, sure. Whatever.” Zoe pushed her books and homework and notebooks and pens off her bed onto the floor, lay down, and pulled the covers over her head.

“Don’t be like that.” Kristin rubbed her hand across her friend’s back. These childish tantrums were wearing on her.

Silence from the lump on the bed.

“I’ll make it up to you.”

“How?” came the muffled response.

“Next Friday, we’ll find a party, or go to a club and get totally shwasted.”

“You hate parties and clubs, and you don’t drink.”

“Yeah, but I want to do something you like to show you how much you mean to me as a friend. C’mon. Say yes.”

Zoe rolled over, lowered the covers from her head. “What if there’s something I’d like us to do instead of parties. Something we can do right now.”

“Name it,” Kristin said.

She took Kristin’s hand and pressed it against her breast. “I want to have sex with you.”

Kristin jerked her hand away and stepped away from the bed. “I’m with Sean. I don’t have sex with anyone but him.” She climbed into her own bed and grabbed her laptop.

“It’s been so long since I’ve tasted your pussy. I’m dying for it. I need it, Kristin. I need you.”

“I won’t cheat on Sean.” Sean would never forgive her for cheating; he had said as much last night. Lindsey’s betrayal had really done a number on him.

Zoe left her bed and climbed onto Kristin’s.

“It’s only cheating if you have sex with another guy.” Her hand slid up Kristin’s leg. “This is just you and me—doing what we’ve always done for each other.” Her fingers had reached her knee and circled the sensitive flesh on the back that she knew drove Kristin crazy. “Helping each other out. There’s no cheating involved.”

Kristin caught Zoe’s wrist as her hand slid up her thigh and moved inward.

“It is cheating.” She moved Zoe’s hand aside. “I know how it feels to be cheated on and I won’t do that to the man I love.” Setting her laptop aside, she stood. “I’m going to take a shower and get ready for class. When I get back, we can talk about which day we can get together to do something other than sex.”

****

She came back from the shower and Zoe was still sitting on her bed.

“You going to class today?” Kristin asked as she put on her makeup.

Zoe didn’t respond. Didn’t look at her. She sat curled up in her bed, her head down, staring at her fingernails, picking off the chipped polish.

Kristin turned to her. “Zoe?”

Zoe burst into tears, covering her face with her hands.

“What’s wrong?” Kristin asked.

“I have something to tell you. And you’re going to hate me.”

Cold enveloped Kristin’s body. “What did you do?”

“You know how someone stole my laptop?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I, uh…”

“Just say it.”

“I…recorded us—you and me—having sex. The video was on the laptop.”

Kristin’s heart spiraled into her stomach and she tasted bile in her mouth. “Are you kidding me? You recorded us? Why?”

“Just for me. So I could watch and remember.” Tears rolled down her cheeks.

“And now it’s in the hands of some stranger, who could put it on the internet? Dammit! How could you?”

“I’m sorry. I never thought—”

“You never think things through before you do them, that’s the problem.”

Chapter Thirteen

His heart a cold, clay lump at the bottom of his stomach, Sean hit replay for the third time. The shock wasn’t as great this time as when the image of Kristin—his sweet Kristin—first appeared on the video having sex with Zoe.

Her long, sexy legs were splayed wide, knees bent up by her ears, opening herself to Zoe’s mouth and tongue and fingers. Her voice moaning out instructions that would bring her to pleasure faster. Her face in full-blown rapture when satisfaction gripped her. Her calling out his name in joy.

It was a scenario he had witnessed a dozen times but with one exception: it had been his face in her pussy, his mouth drinking her sweet honey. It had been his tender loving that put the look of perfect bliss on her face and made her call out his name.

His stomach turned as he watched the woman he thought was his pleasure her lover. She rolled over and dove into her roommate’s cunt like she was a woman starved for the taste, her hand reaching for her own insatiable clit. Her ass rose up in the air and she rocked forward and back, the way she did when riding his cock. Zoe screamed out her pleasure, followed by Kristin’s low moans.

There the video stopped. He started to watch it again, but knew there was no need. The images were burned into his retinas, his brain, his heart, like a hot brand that had labeled him a fool.

She had fooled him good and made him think she loved him. That he was the only one for her.

“Oh, fuck me.” He cursed aloud, then louder, then roared it at the top of his lungs, a long, drawn-out moan that bounced off the walls of his room and down the hall.

****

Kristin read Sean’s text again, looking for clues between the letters as to what happened to make him end their relationship.

“Kristin, we’re over” didn’t give her much to go on, not the first time she’d read it and not now. If she could just talk to him, hear his voice, get him to open up, she could clear up whatever misunderstanding must be playing out.

She dialed his number again. Her call went to voice mail after a couple of rings. He was refusing her calls.

“Sean, I don’t know what’s wrong, why you’re mad at me…if you’re mad. Oh, God, I don’t know what you’re feeling, but I—” Her voice broke; she swallowed back tears and tried speaking again. “Please, call me.”

The words of Sean’s jilted lover, the one Randy sent to her, flooded her mind. “He’ll fuck you then dump you…End it now before he breaks your heart.” Never in a million years had she believed he’d do the same to her. But he had. He had fooled her good, made her think he loved her. She never saw it coming. She dropped her phone in her jacket pocket, covered her face with her hands, and cried.

“Kris?”

Kristin felt a hand on her shoulder and looked up into Mason’s worried face.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” she said, and quickly wiped the tears from her face with her fingers. But there were too many, and they kept coming. “No.”

“Aw, babe. C’mere.” He hugged her to his chest and let her cry.

After a moment, she pulled back. “I’m sorry. I can’t seem to stop crying.”

He pulled a couple of paper napkins from the fast food bag in his hand. “Here, take these.”

She took them and dabbed her eyes, but the flimsy paper couldn’t tackle that much moisture.

“I’ve never seen you cry, except when your grandpa died—Oh, man, did somebody die?”

She shook her head, but her mind was screaming
Me! The second I read Sean’s message.
“Sean and I, uh, we broke up. Actually, he broke up with me. I’m not taking it well, obviously.”

He squeezed her arm. “I’m sorry. What happened?”

“I don’t know.” She gave a hopeless little shrug. “He didn’t tell me why he broke it off. If I understood why, I think I could deal with it better, you know?”

“Yeah, no one knows that better than me.”

“What do you mean? Who dumped you?”

“Well, Zoe.”

“What?”

An awkward little laugh gurgled in his throat. “You knew we broke up, right?”

“Yeah, but she said you broke up with her.”

He shook his head.

“I’m confused.”

It was his turn to shrug. “We went to my room after the movies that night, started, you know, making out like we always did. Afterward, she told me we were through and left. No explanation. Won’t return my calls. Won’t talk to me. She looks right through me now, like I’m not there.”

Kristin put her hand on his arm. “I’m sorry. I had no idea.”

“That girl is trouble with a capital T—wild, rude, and impossible to control—and that’s exactly what I loved about her. I miss her. But I’m moving on. And you will, too.”

She sighed, her breath shaky. “I don’t think I can.”

“I know it feels that way.” He hugged her then eased back. “Hey, I hate to desert you, but I gotta get to class. Call me later and we’ll grab some food, talk, get drunk, whatever.”

She nodded. “Thanks.”

He was a couple of steps away when she called out his name. “Would you take her back, even after what she did?”

He nodded. “In a heartbeat.” He waved to her with his bag of food and headed across campus.

On her way back to her room, she thought about what Mason had told her. Zoe always had a motive for her actions. The question was, why break up with Mason and then lie about it that night? What was she up to? Kristin wondered whether she had succeeded in getting what she wanted from the action. Knowing Zoe, she had…and left behind a trail of dead or wounded souls.

Mason’s comments also made her wonder whether there was a connection between Sean breaking up with her and Zoe’s admission that she had recorded the two of them having sex and that the laptop with the videos was now in the hands of a stranger. Had Sean seen the video? Was that why he wasn’t talking to her?

If he broke up with her simply because she’d been with a woman, then maybe he wasn’t the right man for her after all. No, he’d just come out and ask her about it. She was sure of it. He said he loved her, and when you love someone, you don’t just toss them away.

But something had happened between their night of passion and this morning. But how could she fix it if she didn’t know what it was? If he wouldn’t even talk to her? If she had to track him down and ambush him to get him to talk, that’s what she’d do. She wasn’t going to let go of the love of her life that easily.

Chapter Fourteen

Sean sat at the bar staring into the tall pint—his fourth—between his hands. It had been sitting long enough for the foamy head to dissolve into the dark amber liquid. Part of him worried that if he started drinking to forget Kristin, he wouldn’t stop, and he didn’t have his mates here to keep him calm and safe like he did back home.

Ah, home.
He missed it. For the first time since arriving in America, he wished he’d never come. He could’ve gotten his heart broken at home and gone to his local pub in Dublin with Ian and Jack and Shane and his other friends who would help him see that he was better without the bitch who wronged him. But no one here had his back. Not the acquaintances he’d made. Certainly not the woman who’d betrayed him.

“Something wrong with the beer?”

He didn’t have to lift his eyes to see who had spoken. He knew the voice belonged to Raena Ortiz, the bartender who had been trying to engage him in a conversation and other things since that first night a week ago when he’d sat at her bar.

He shook his head. “The beer’s fine.”

“Then I’m guessing the problem’s with you.”

This time he did look up. The corners of her berry-hued lips curled into a smile meant to be seductive. And it was. But he wasn’t interested in seduction.

“Good guess.”

“Wanna tell me about it?” The light shining in her coal-black eyes told him she’d be a good…listener.

He dug some bills out of his pocket. “If I bore ya to tears, lass, you’d stop with the pretty smiles. And right now, that’s the best part of my day.”

Forcing a smile he didn’t feel, he dropped the money on the bar, grabbed his drink, and stood. Feeling his world tilt to the left, he grabbed the bar with one hand, steadied himself, then picked his way to the back of the darkened room. He slid into a two-person booth, choosing the seat that put his back to the raucous crowd beginning to form.

Two guys stumbled past him on the way to the jukebox. A quick glance told him it was Mason and Randy. He scowled, wondering whether Randy would move in on Kristin now that he was out of the picture. Just the thought of Randy’s slimy hand touching her made him want to break it in a dozen places.

Anger bubbled up in him as he recalled the day Randy had brought his world crashing down around him. He was still torn between thanking him and pulverizing him for telling him about that video of Kristin. He shifted in his seat and fisted his hands on the table, trying to stem the desire to visit vengeance on the guy’s face.

The two left the jukebox, Mason in the lead. He glanced at Sean then away. Then, as if suddenly recognizing him, he stopped.

“Hey, dude. I didn’t see you.” He slid into the facing seat.

Sean nodded a greeting.

“Hey,” Randy mumbled, his head down, and stood as far away from Sean as possible while still being part of the group.

Sean gritted his name between his teeth.

“Hey, man, sorry things didn’t work out with you and Kristin.” Mason continued. “You guys seemed really solid.”

“Yeah, well, you know how it goes.”

“How did she take it?” Randy asked, a slight quiver to his voice.

Sean shot him a look and was pleased when the little snot looked ready to bolt. “You stay away from her.” He pointed his finger at him.

“Oh, I’m seeing someone,” Randy mumbled, shuffling from foot to foot, like he was nervous at the topic. His gaze cut to Mason. “I’m going to order our drinks.” He rushed off.

Silence enveloped the dark table and shrouded the two sitting there.

“I talked to her the other day,” Mason broke through in a low voice when Randy was far enough away to not overhear. “She’s not taking it well.”

Sean’s head lifted and his eyes bore into Mason’s, as if looking there would allow him to see Kristin as he’d seen her. Disappointed, he dropped his head again. “She’ll get over it.”

“I’ve known Kris since high school and, in all that time, I’ve only seen her cry once—when she lost her grandfather. The other day, man—she cried the whole time I was talking to her. Like she couldn’t stop. She’s hurting, bad.”

The words hacked off another slice of Sean’s heart, and he felt himself bleed out, taking with it his last reserves of strength.

“Well, that fucking makes two of us!” he said and pounded the table, making beer slosh out of the glass and puddle on the table. As if seeing the beer for the first time, he grabbed it and gulped down half of it before taking a break to breathe.