Page 14 of Deep (Chicago Underground 8)
My offer. Sex. That was what he meant. Suddenly my mouth went dry. His posture, blocking my exit, felt more sinister than before. He had refused me flatly, cru
elly. And I’d been both hurt and relieved at the time, but I’d thought it was over. “You said you weren’t interested.”
“I thought about what you said. It’s only fair you pay your own debt. And I…” A hand cupped my waist and then slid down to my hip, burning a path—branding me. “I can’t deny I would enjoy it.”
My pulse raced, blood hot. “I doubt that. I don’t know anything.”
“I could teach you what you need to know.” A taut pause and then his voice was rougher. “I would love to teach you.”
Arousal bloomed between my legs, and I shuddered. “What about Shelly?” I whispered.
I felt his displeasure shimmer in the air around us. “She won’t like it.”
“Do you care?” I didn’t think he cared what anyone thought about him, didn’t think he would let anyone stop him.
“You’re too young,” he said instead of answering. Or maybe that was his answer. Shelly was protecting me because I was young—and somehow that had made me off limits even to a man like him.
Too young. I lifted my chin, defiant. “The men at the hotel didn’t think so.”
“And I’m just like them,” he said, half question.
He was nothing like them. They were small and mindless, rocks falling from a mountainside. Philip was his own freaking mountain. “You are,” I whispered because I wanted to hurt him, the same way he had hurt me when he rejected my naked, battered body.
It shouldn’t have bothered me when he did that. I should have only been glad.
And I shouldn’t have been able to move him at all, a small dandelion in his large shadow.
But he went stock-still, and somehow I knew I had gotten to him. A direct hit. He peeled his hands off the railing and walked away without another word. And I knew in that moment that I did have claws—I was glad of it. I needed some kind of defense against this dark world.
I had made him bleed. I’d won something tonight.
And lost something. I felt that too, just as sure.
Chapter Eight
I LAY IN my bed, the same bed where I had dreamed about cute boys at school and first learned to touch myself. I had been innocent then, but I felt different now. Changed in some fundamental way I couldn’t yet define. It wasn’t only about sex, knowing the mechanics of it. It wasn’t even about cruelty, the marks of which still lingered on my skin. Those things mattered, and I still woke up with nightmares, even now, having been back home for six months.
But there was something else, something elusive and strangely tantalizing. A secret beyond my reach. Something about Philip and the way he had looked at me, dismissed me, hurt me—but saved me too. I would always remember that, even though he was the one part of this experience I wanted to forget the most.
He had protected me, after all. And he hadn’t touched me again.
Some small, dark part of me wished that he had.
I stood up unsteadily and walked to the bathroom, looking at myself in the mirror. I didn’t recognize the girl staring back at me, the one with shadows under her dark eyes and dull black hair—the one who looked nothing like the people around me.
For weeks, I had lived in a well-guarded house with Philip. And with Shelly.
A strange, protective little family.
The truth was, I missed them.
My adoptive parents had taken me to a counselor who had told them to give me time. Mom and Dad were dubious about that. So was I. I didn’t think time would turn me back into the girl I had been, so desperate to please them first, so desperate to rebel later, the one in glittery tops and short skirts. I was some other creature now. But what?
This is where you come from. This is who you are.
Even the sight of bathroom pipes beneath the sink made me vomit.
I collapsed on the cold tile floor, sobbing so violently that my whole body shook. That was what had changed about me. He had changed me. He’d made me want something I shouldn’t, awoken a slumbering dragon inside me. And now that I had seen Philip, wanted him, there would be no turning back. The sweet family life I had always dreamed of—how would I find it now, with this mirroring darkness inside me? This strange and lonely desire?
