Page 55 of Wicked Angel
Instead, I found myself thinking about kissing Angeline, three years ago.
That memory was clear now.
I knew the exact night it happened, because it was the night I found out about my mom.
I was a total mess that night. My dad had called to give me the news. But I didn’t even remember that call. Or kissing Angeline… until I saw her again at a party and it started to come back to me. I didn’t remember a whole chunk of that night. At the time, I attributed that to alcohol, but I’d eventually remembered much of what I’d lost, in therapy.
Localized dissociative amnesia. I’d experienced it exactly two times in my life. And it had nothing to do with drinking.
I’d never told my friends, much less my sister, about what happened that night. About how hard I took the news about my mom. About the memory loss. Or about the kiss. As far as I knew, no one knew about that kiss except Angeline and me.
Maybe I felt guilty about that. That she had to harbor that secret, because of me. I wasn’t sure. I felt shitty right now, yes. Generally fucking shitty.
Because I knew what it was like to harbor secrets.
I drank some more, because thinking about those secrets was not something I did. Not if I could help it. And the booze was supposed to help with that. Eventually, it would, as long as I drank enough.
As I drank, I tried not to stare at Angeline. But my eyes kept wandering that way while my buddies joked around, ribbing me whether or not I was listening. She’d seemed so damn pathetic and desperate when she begged me to let her stay at Shayla’s and clean my house. And she wasn’t looking much better right now. She was wearing my T-shirt again, which looked dirty from cleaning my house yesterday. Her hair looked like it hadn’t seen a brush in days, in a blob on top of her head.
I’d never seen her at a bar looking like that. I was surprised Shayla let her out of the house like that, but maybe Shayla didn’t get a say in it.
Weird thing was, Angeline Delacroix didn’t need makeup or sexy clothes to be attractive. In an oversized, dirty T-shirt and yoga pants with no makeup, zero effort made, she was still beautiful. Soft brown hair. Sweet face. And so much feeling in her eyes…
Maybe it was her eyes that fucked with me so much.
I’d never been good at reading feelings; my own or anyone else’s. But Angeline Delacroix’s eyes overflowed with emotion whenever she looked at me.
Hatred. That was what I saw.
But also… a lot of other things. If only I could figure out what the fuck they were.
Maybe my friends had a point. Maybe my colleagues were right to think I couldn’t be trusted around an attractive woman, much less one I’d already kissed,tasted, and couldn’t have. A woman I’d been left wanting.
I didn’t want Cary Clarke’s wife.
I didn’t want JC’s girlfriend or ex-girlfriend or whatever she was. Not anymore.
But I’d never been left wanting anyone like I wanted Angeline Delacroix.
The match was struck the night I first kissed her… and when I put her to bed the other night and she kissed me, she poured gasoline on that fire.
The temptation of having her in my face, living right next door, wandering around my property? This was the kind of shit that was guaranteed to get me in trouble.
I’d tried to tell her no, though. That she couldn’t clean my house. But shebegged, for fuck’s sake.
And then she walked in on me while I was naked.
Because I let her.
I knew she was in the house, coming up the stairs. I didn’t exactly lock the door and stop her.
Her eyes met mine through the crowd. She looked away, took a sip of her drink, then glanced my way again. When she found me watching, she turned away and leaned in to talk to Larissa Jones.
Good. She needed to keep away from me. If she wasn’t careful, if she gave me the slightest encouragement—when she wasn’t wasted—I’d dive right in and glut myself on the juicy distraction from all this band shit that she offered, no matter how off limits to me she was supposed to be.
Fuck limits. I had none. Not when it came to something I’d decided I wanted.
But seeing Trey sitting right over there… I tamped down the urge to find out if I could get Angeline underneath me tonight. His smiling face was a cold reminder that I had a serious problem to deal with, and it wasn’t magically going away—no matter how much I drank tonight or who I fucked.
