Page 66 of Break You

“That’s none of your business.” I was struggling to keep in control of myself with him standing so close.

“I’ll take that as a no. Have you even looked at, or thought about another guy since we started hooking up? ‘Cause I can tell you that there’s been nobody even close to capturing my attention since the very first day.”

“What about Cherie?” I hated how much I sounded like I cared.

“What about her? She’s irrelevant in all of this. Always has been. In fact, apart from to warn her off harassing you, I haven’t even thought about her since I came inside her while eye fucking you.”

I was pretty sure my brother dry retched. Men really were fools. He’d happily scatter a person’s brain into the four corners of the room, and not even blink. Yet the mention of his adult sister screwing someone had him almost losing his lunch. If it wasn’t so fucked up, it would be funny.

“Look at me.” Xavier’s voice was gentle and coaxing, but there was no way I was going to carry out his request. “Look. At. Me.” He moved his hand beneath my chin and tilted it backward, forcing me to meet his ardent gaze.

I wanted to run, or hide—anything to get away—but my legs seemed to be made of lead, and rooted to the spot. Instead I let my eyelids drop, trying to block out not only his words, but everything he was silently telling me with his eyes.

“Angry Girl?” Despite every bone in my body telling me not to, I met his gaze again, this time steeling myself against the wave of emotion that flooded my body.

This isn’t real. It’s all a lie. He hurt you. He wants to hurt you again. You’re in shock. What you’re feeling isn’t real.

I silently chanted the words over and over, trying to focus on them, rather than what I was really feeling.

“Tell me you don’t feel it now. Haven’t felt it every time we’ve been together, even when we apparently couldn’t stand the sight of each other.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t lie to me. Your mouth is saying one thing, but your body is saying the opposite, Angry Girl.” To demonstrate his point, he tilted his hips to brush his hard on against me. I tried not to react. I really fucking tried. “And as for your eyes…there’s a reason they say the eyes don’t lie.”

“You’re confusing lust with something else, Loaded Boy. Just because you make me come so hard I black out, doesn’t mean I want to be with you any other way but horizontally.”

There was shuffling behind me and I wouldn’t have been surprised if Pete put a bullet in the back of my head, just to end the torture. I’d meant what I said to Xavier, but I was overdoing the detail, simply because I knew my brother hated it. It was going to be a long time before I forgave him for his part in the charade unfolding before me, but in the meantime, I was going to make him suffer in every way I possibly could.

Xavier smirked and licked his lips. I’d never wanted to simultaneously kiss and throat punch someone as much. “Horizontally, in the car, on the table, against the wall, backward over my weights…” Obviously noting Pixie’s discomfort, he’d decided to up the ante, as well.

“But that’s not all it is, and you know it. That’s why you pushed so hard to keep it superficial—no eye contact, no small talk, no pillow talk, no bed or bedroom, even—because you knew that every time we exchanged an intimacy like that, we were taking one more step down a road we couldn’t turn back from.” He trailed his thumb down from behind my ear to press down on the center of my bottom lip. As my body shuddered at his touch, I resisted the urge to suck it into my mouth, though I badly wanted to.

“I call bullshit. All of this is an unnecessary distraction from the fact that you terrorized me, even let me think my brother could be dead, for Christ’s sake. And, P... you knew he was fucking me, and fucking with me, and you let it all slide. Either you’re going soft in your old age, or there’s something you’re not telling me. I just can’t seem to figure out for the life of me what it is. I said I wanted answers, and so far I’ve had the tip of the iceberg. I’m not going to sweep that under the carpet to talk about who I’m fucking. Or in this case, was fucking.”

Xavier’s body stiffened, and his eyes hardened—glassy and ice-blue. I counted backward from ten silently, waiting for his next move.

I got to seven, and was taken by surprise when he quickly moved his hand from my lips to the back of my neck, squeezing hard, and slamming his mouth to mine. Part of me desperately wanted to push him away, or worse, to punch him in the dick and tell him never to touch me again, but another part—clearly the dominant and altogether more stupid part—couldn’t think past the overwhelming feelings I got lost in every time he touched, or even looked at me.

The kiss was more brutal than any we’d ever shared. There was so much hurt, anger, and confusion, flowing between us and we didn’t hold back. Xavier moved his other hand to the small of my back, pressing my body hard into his, imprinting me with his erection. As our bodies dueled—biting, sucking, scratching, pinching, and tearing at each other, the raw emotion threatened to be the thing to finally break me. I was wounded and on the edge.

If the not-so-subtle movement in the room was anything to go by, this time it wasn’t just my brother who was made uncomfortable by our PDA—Xavier’s friend Drew and Pete’s bodyguards shifted around restlessly.

Finally, Xavier was the one to apply the brakes, wrenching his mouth from mine, but at the same time, moving his hand from the back of my neck to grip my jaw, the tips of his fingers pressing firmly into my cheeks—he really appeared not to give the slightest fuck whether my brother wasted him where he stood. I still had my nails dug into his biceps, which would probably leave a mark. Not that I cared. My scratches would be nothing compared to the emotional scars he’d left on me.

“You’re not completely blameless when it comes to lying, are you, Angry Girl? I mean, I asked you about the scholarship so many times, and you never once told me the truth, did you?”

What the fuck does the scholarship have to do with anything, and why is he so obsessively focused on it?

“I didn’t lie to you either. You’d made a whole bunch of assumptions, and I didn’t correct them. I’m not to blame for your bias. Besides, we’ve been over this already. There is no scholarship. At least, not for me, anyway. My fees are paid by an anonymous donor. Why won’t you let it go?”

“Why won’t I let it go? The better question is why aren’t you curious? Doesn’t it intrigue you even a little who would be prepared to put up that much cash, just so that you can go to college?”

“Of course, it intrigues me, I’m not brain-dead, but the records are sealed. It’s a condition of the donation that it remains forever anonymous. I’d like to know, of course I would, but I’d like to graduate more, so it is what it is.” I shrugged. “Anyway, why do you even care?”

“I don’t know. I mean, why should I be the slightest bit bothered by the fact that the person I hate most in the world is paying the college fees of the girl I love?”

Xavier

---