Page 28 of Wild (Chicago Underground 4)
“I don’t know what he wanted with me. I didn’t do anything to him. I don’t know. I don’t know.”
She was bowed down to me, her words like a prayer. I felt uncomfortable in my own skin, a fake object of worship, a fraud. My skin itched, too tight, all wrong. She probably needed comfort, but I couldn’t give her that. I’d known all along I wasn’t cut out for this. I’d said all along that this wasn’t my thing. I would protect her, not baby her.
I slipped out from her grasp and out of the room, leaving her arms outstretched to nothing, ignoring the darkened stains of her tears on the bed. I really didn’t care at all.
Chapter Fourteen
I found a workaround to the phone situation in the form of Adrian’s cell phone and a well-placed Chanel catalog for distraction. Locking myself in my room, I dialed Luke’s number. I wasn’t ready to deal with his desperate search for some other girl, but this situation needed him. Ella needed him.
“He is only one cares enough,” Jade had said.
I called his apartment first, disconnected. Then his cell phone; it rang and rang. If he cared so much, then where was he? Not just now, but every time I had ever been hurt, ever been humiliated, why hadn’t he been there to protect me? It was irrational to think he could have saved me before we’d even met, but my love for him was irrational. It was obsession and affection, all blackened with the taint of resentment that I wasn’t pure enough. It was lust and it was familial, but then those two things had always been twist-dyed for me.
I kept thinking if I only had a name for what I felt for him, the solution would reveal itself to me. But there were no words for it, only sensations. Only the hollow sound of my voice calling out in a well where no one could hear me. There was only this churning, choking feeling in my gut¸ the remembered bite of a whip I had sworn never to feel again. Now I felt it always—phantom pain.
How much would I pay to keep my friends safe? It began as a mantra, a way to help someone who needed it at the time, a way to prove I wasn’t the shallow rich girl everyone thought I was. How much of myself could I give away and still be me? I feared we had already passed the mark, the sacrifice like a cancer that ate away at me inside, always hungry, never full.
A knock at the door startled me. I flung it open, expecting to see Ella: penitent, indignant, forgiving. Instead Philip glowered there.
“Where the fuck did you go?”
“Don’t start with me.” The look I gave him was pure venom, my whole body a poison. “I’m not in the mood.”
He brushed past me. “You and your moods. Everyone living at your whim. You’re like the goddamned queen sometimes, Shelly.”
“I’m a queen?” It was so ludicrous, a laugh puffed out of me. Resigned, I locked us inside, lest Ella get the idea to check on me after all. Can’t let the kids see Mommy and Daddy fighting. Or fucking, if that was what we were going to do here. I recognized the gleam in Philip’s eyes along with the bulge in his trousers. So he’d finally decided to collect, which felt like a relief. Why shouldn’t we fuck? No reason. Let it wash over me.
“I work my ass off to keep you safe here,” he was saying, “and come to find out, you run off at the first opportunity. No one knows where you are, except Allie.”
“Your sister-in-law,” I said, just to annoy him.
“My soon-to-be sister-in-law, who apparently doesn’t give a damn about your safety either, because she helped you. I mean, fucking hell. I told Colin—”
“Ooh, you told Colin how to handle Allie, didn’t you? I would have loved see his face when you did that.” I grinned, though it felt more feral than amused. I wasn’t sure why I was needling him this way, except that the only thing that sounded more appealing than sex right now was angry sex.
“Why are you taking this so lightly?”
I stepped close to him, bathed myself in his heat. “Because it doesn’t really matter what happens to me. It’s sweet that you worry, baby.”
He pushed back, uncharacteristically hesitant. “Jesus Christ, Shelly. What’s gotten into you?”
The glitter of silver in his onyx eyes gave lie to his refusal; he pulsed with lust, he breathed it out, filling the air between us with heat and spice. His desire might not have been for me, but caring had never been a requisite, so I purred anyway, rubbed my body against his in response, because ohh, he felt so very solid and aroused…so present. Yes, this was a little bit of payback to a man who’d used me and then turned me loose. And so what? That man didn’t want me anyway. Another girl.
“I’m trying to make it up to you,” I told him.
“And then worst of all,” he continued as if I hadn’t spoken, as if his erection weren’t pressing into my belly now, “you leave that girl here. She’s got claws, that one, and here you’re a cat in heat.”
“So kick us out.” I stepped back, waving my hand as if I didn’t care—and I didn’t. I was halfway to suicidal on a good day, and this wasn’t one.
He smiled, and I shivered. “I came up here to make a deal with you, Shelly. You know how this works.”
“I said I’d give you what you wanted.”
“You don’t have that anymore, sweet girl.”
I stiffened, not aroused nor pliant any longer. He wanted Ella. He wanted her fight, her youth. Or maybe, as I had learned, there was no rhyme or reason to who we wanted. “You can’t have her.”
“Why not? She’s old enough.”
