Page 72 of My Grape Crush
“Oh, babe,” she coos, fiddling with an earring laden with so many diamonds, it probably weighs more than her. “We talked about me visiting.”
She blows a pink bubble until it pops, then sucks the exhausted wad back into her mouthwith asnapand makes a kissy face at him.
My soul turns to ash.
Babe?
“No.” Rhys stretches out the word like he’s speaking to a child who never listens. “I kicked you out of my house, remember?”
“This should be interesting,” Sawyer mutters, rising from the floor and wiping dust from his prep-school attire.
The statuesque plaything shoots Sawyer a flirtatious look. “Hi. I’m Myla.” She eyes me up and down, doing whatever math she’s capable of. “Are you his girlfriend?”
“Dani is with me.” Rhys sidles closer to me but stops in his tracks to meet the challenge in my eyes— the one that silently screams, What is going on?Somewhere, in a hopeful part of my brain, I wanted Myla to be one of the millions who fawns over Rhys from afar. Who could only dream of touching his golden skin, like I had.
But they’ve slept together.
A woman always knows.
I clamp my trembling lips together as Myla’s blinding psycho smile dips into a frown.
“But babe,” she pouts. “I just…”
“Stop calling me that!” Rhys shouts. “You need to leave. Now! This is crazy.Youare crazy. I told you the other day to stop harassing me.”
I feel sickness crawl up my throat. I can see him in my mind’s eye—lost in the moment of last night, heavy-lidded eyes, his strokes deliciously deep.
“I can feel your pearls,” he whispered. “So, so fine.”
And I feel the traces of him everywhere: forgotten muscles tight and screaming, the ache in my core. I trusted Rhys with my body and soul, and now this?
“Why don’t you get dressed, and we’ll go for breakfast?” Sawyer beckons me to join him, not quite reveling in Rhys’s embarrassment, but close. “Let these two love birds sort things out.”
“Fuck off!” Rhys snaps. “We are not together. Not in any way. Take Myla for breakfast. Bond over your shared love of money.”
Myla plants her skinny ass on the sturdy silver suitcase worth a few beans and crosses both arms. Her upturned tiger’s eyes, the prettiest part about her, blaze with defiance. “I’m not leaving.”
I hate her irrationally. Because whatever expensive duty-free perfume she douses herself with makes my eyes water from ten feet away. Because she’s a bone-thin supermodel type and, judging from her accent and Euro-trash outfit, she’s jetted across the Atlantic for this rendezvous. And because she is loaded enough to travel on a whim and track down Rhys, I hate her for that too.
But mostly I hate her because she is exactly who I expected him to like.
Sawyer snatches his sunglasses off the floor and slides them on. “Do you really want to be part of this circus?” he asks me, his tone implying I’d be a fool to say yes. “I’ll wait for you in the car.”
“She doesn’t want to go anywhere with you,” Rhys grumbles.
Sawyer’s icy stare levels on his brother. “You sound pretty sure about that.”
The knots in my stomach have nothing to do with hunger. My mind is blowing up with questions.
So many questions.
And I’m not sure I want the answers.
“Why don’t we talk later?” I ask in an unsteady voice.
Rhys spins around to face me. He wears a haunted expression like he’s fighting a war I cannot understand.“Ten minutes,” he pleads. “Give me ten minutes, okay?”
Perched on her suitcase, Myla investigates her trendy black-and-white-striped manicure. Nails sharp as talons. “We’ll need more than ten minutes, babe.”
