Her gaze drops to my lap.
“Anytime you want to take a ride, sweetheart,” I goad.
She narrows her eyes.
“You’ve got an hour.”
That makes pretty Violet pause. “To meet with that publicist?”
I check my watch. “Technically, we meet with her in forty minutes.”
“Why should I go with you?”
Oh, a test? I do love these. I pull my phone from my pocket and open the video of her breaking the NDA. Her anger comes off her in waves on my screen, palpable even from here. I let it play, enjoying the theater of it.
When it ends, I watch her. “If you don’t talk to me, then this goes to my father. Remember?”
“This is blackmail,” she says.
I smile. “Clock’s ticking, Vi.”
“You’re a controlling ass,” she murmurs, already heading back to her apartment.
I don’t bother refuting that. Therapists have told me I have a controlling nature. It has to do with my parents. My father’s blasé child-rearing, my mother’s abandonment. Dad only cared about success, prestige, money. Power. He raised me to care about those things, too, and only those things.
The therapist said I tried to control people through manipulation to regain power over my environment.
Whatever.
Fifteen minutes later, Violet reemerges from her apartment and climbs into my passenger seat. She adjusts the long charcoal-gray skirt and sweater decorated with oversized opal buttons. The color is fitting, even if she doesn’t know it yet.
She gnaws on her lower lip as I take us back to campus. Her fingers dig rhythmically into her left thigh. I keep glancing at her out of the corner of my eye.
She’s in my car.
She smells good.
I shouldn’t fucking like that she smells like flowers, that her blonde hair is brushed straight and lays over her shoulders, that her makeup is flawless.
It makes me want to fuck her mouth till mascara streams down her cheeks.
If only that was an option…
“Take a picture,” she says, not looking at me. “It’ll last longer.”
I smirk. “Why take a picture when I have a video of you? Two, actually…”
“Wow, just when I was thinking you weren’t that terrible.” Her gaze is fastened out of her window, and her fingers keep digging into her leg.
I check the clock—we have time to spare—and pull over swiftly. Annoyance surges through me, and I reach out and grab her chin. I pull her back toward me and wait for her eyes to follow. She gives them to me eventually, as the seconds tick by, and they go from my lips to my eyes. Her tongue pokes out, wetting her lips.
“Let’s get something straight,” I say slowly, my gaze fixed on her lips. It’s a real struggle not to kiss her. “I am that terrible—and worse. Remember that, sweetheart, when you go to sleep and wish for dreams. Because you’ll just get nightmares. And me? I’m the worst fucking nightmare you could imagine.”
Her eyes flash, giving me not fear but hurt. Like she has a better picture of me in her head, but I’m ruining it.
Good. It should be ruined.
I release her and pull back out onto the street.
23
VIOLET
He’s going to kill me.
I didn’t think it before. When we first collided—well, not the first time—I thought I was strong enough to endure him. To outlive his anger and his ego.
Now, I’m not so sure.
It’s funny how things change when hope enters the picture.
I sparred with him because there was a recklessness inside me that didn’t give a shit if I came out unscathed. In fact, I think I expected the barbs to sting, if only to distract from my own pain. The voice in my head that said I’d never dance again. The worry that my mother was done with me. The fear of not knowing what I was going to do after college.
Mia Germain infused hope back into me with one phone call.
I’m less than forty-eight hours away from seeing if my dreams are still possible.
And it. Fucking. Sucks.
I’ve never been more stressed.
We park outside the stadium, in one of the VIP spots—as if Greyson needs more ego—and go inside. It’s cool and dark here, and intensely quiet.
“Do you practice here?”
“Most evenings.” He straightens his shirt and glances at me. “Some girls watch.”
“Why would they do that?” Seems it would get tedious, watching them do drills over and over again. At the very least, mind-dullingly boring.
He lifts a shoulder. When I glance over at him, he’s smirking.
I stop. “They come for you, don’t they?”
Greyson’s smirk widens into a shit-eating grin. “Me, Knox, Steele…”
I narrow my eyes. “Yeah, I know pretty intimately why they’d show up for Steele.”
His gaze turns flinty, the smile sliding right off. He doesn’t respond to that—how could he? He’s the one who forced me to get on my knees.
In the back of my mind, I know I had a choice. I could’ve walked away.
But then I would’ve had to deal with the repercussions—worse ones than these.
He leads me to an elevator and hits the up button. We wait in silence, then step inside. Immediately, it feels like we’re in a vacuum. The silence gets louder.
My skin itches with the need to break it. To say something.
I last two floors before I crack. “What are we telling her?”
His cocky, self-assured smile is back. The same one I’m sure he wore when he strolled out of the police precinct after his father got him out. The same one he probably also wore when he left the scene of the crime. He rolls his shoulders back, then cracks his neck. Everything about him relaxes. Even the little muscles around his eyes that, up until this point, held stress.
I look away. This Greyson has been hiding. Shuffled out of sight, because everyone we interact with already knows and loves him. I’m fascinated by it. By the way he just seems to radiate an easy-going confidence. He’s brought out this persona for the publicist.
She’s going to fall in love with him before our time is up.
Am I going with him to be the scapegoat?
Or his savior?
I eye him again, drawn back to the expression he wears like a mask. Maybe I’ve been getting it wrong. Backwards. The anger, the way he is around me… maybe that’s his true nature, and this is the mask. It’s easier to believe that than to think he wears his anger as a guard.
No. He’s shown me who he really is deep down. Not everyone gets to see that.
My nerves are eating me alive by the time the elevator doors slide open. And he still hasn’t answered me about what we’re telling her—what he expects me to say, if anything. I mean, I’m assuming that I have to say something. Otherwise, it’s pointless that I be here.
We exit into a brightly lit foyer. There are windows to our left, and a set of glass doors to our right. We go through them and stop in front of the wide desk that a receptionist mans.
Greyson smiles and tells her who we’re here to see. His gaze flicks up and down the woman’s body, and he winks at her.
She blushes.
I silence my disbelief.
She rises and gestures for us to follow her, and Greyson winks at me. This is all an elaborate game to him. When we reach a corner office, the receptionist opens the glass door and steps back to let us pass.