Page 126 of Chaos at Prescott High (The Havoc Boys 2)
I flick my eyes up to Hael’s face, realizing that I haven’t heard a single word he’s just said.
“Miss Blackbird,” he murmurs, stepping close and putting his palm on the wall beside my head. “Were you just checking me out?” He’s smiling, but there’s something more to his expression, something darker and far less pleasant.
It’s because of the Brittany thing; of course it is.
Not a soul on this earth could smile knowing what’s at stake, not sincerely.
“I might’ve been,” I say, putting my fingers on his bare lower belly and savoring the hot sweaty slickness of his muscles. “But that’s only because I’m so damn confident that it isn’t going to be your kid.”
Hael shoots me a grin, but the expression doesn’t quite reach his eyes.
“That confident, huh? You want to make another bet? If the baby’s mine, you owe me another blow job at a time and place of my choosing. If it isn’t, I’ll owe you some, uh …” He makes a ‘V’ shape with his fingers and flicks his tongue between them to indicate cunnilingus and then laughs.
“Sounds a bit like a win-win for you,” I quip, even though my stomach hurts, and I’m afraid. I’m so afraid. I don’t want Hael to be connected to Brittany through a child. If he is, then I can never truly just have him to myself. He’ll be a dad; he’ll have responsibilities.
And that’s the allure of Hael Harbin, isn’t it? How free and wild and wicked he is?
“The oral sex part is,” he agrees, but the playfulness is already draining out of him as he checks the time on his phone and sighs. “Not so much the rest of it. Wait here for me?” I nod as Hael slips into the house to change. When he comes back, he’s still wearing the dirty grease-stained jeans, but he’s got on a fresh red tee.
And damn if he doesn’t melt the panties right off me.
“Let’s go, Blackbird,” he says, breezing past and tossing his keys in the air as he walks. “You can ride with me.”
Hael leads our caravan of vehicles to a coffee shop—not the one where we got in a fight with the Fuller football team—and parks crookedly across two spaces. After he turns the engine off, he just sits there with his hands on the wheel, staring down at it like he’s trying to get up the courage to go inside.
Brittany is already in there, waiting at a table near the window. As soon as she turns and sees me in the Camaro with Hael, her face flushes with angry heat and she slams her coffee mug down, splashing liquid everywhere.
“Hey,” I whisper, reaching out to lay my fingers atop Hael’s. He lifts his face finally to look my direction, all of his false bravado and cocky bullshit stripped bare. To be fair, I like all of that cocky bullshit, but this … this is intense. I want to see more of Hael without his mask and his flair and his sex appeal hiding what he’s truly feeling. “We can do this. No matter what happens, we’ll figure it out.”
“Looking at her now, can you tell?” he asks me, and I glance back to find Brittany staring at me like she’s got murder on the mind. “Like, does she look upset or …?”
“She looks furious, to be quite honest,” I reply, and he grins.
“Good.”
Finally, he takes his hands off the wheel and we get out together, meeting the other boys just inside the front doors of the coffee shop.
“Why are they all here?” Brittany demands, looking past Hael to glare at the other boys—but mostly me. “This is a private matter between us, Hael.”
“Eh,” he says, giving a loose shrug of his shoulders. “You sort of called Havoc in order to get me to play along, so it’s really more of an all of us issue.” He pauses for a moment and then cocks his head to one side. “So, you gonna tell me or not? I’m guessing since you haven’t thrown yourself at me with tears of joy running down your face, that it’s not my kid?”
Brittany pauses for a moment, swallowing hard, eyes flicking to Oscar as he fires up his iPad like one might discharge a weapon.
“If you lie to me, I will know,” he says, without even looking up from the screen. I have no doubt that the boys will find a way to verify the results of the test from a means other than Brittany herself.
“Hael, please …” she whines, and his attention snaps over to her in a way I’ve rarely seen before. The predator in him is coming out, and he is pissed.
“You made a deal, Brittany. We’ve done everything you asked on our end. I’ve taken you to the movies, to the mall, out to dinner. Our boys beat Rich up; I got beat up by your shitty dad. Tell me the fucking results now.”
