Page 9 of Phobia
Nothing but the best for the wealthy.
Insert eye roll here.
I examined the wooden buttress suspended over the foot of the stairs; it supported the overhead balcony. Elaborate newel posts bled into smooth handrails, and the balusters featured ornamental cast-iron round posts gleaming under the chandelier.The glow of carved pumpkins cast haunting shadows along the wooden risers, their radiance flickering along people who passed.
The coffered ceilings were at least twenty feet high and painted a deep brown color, the same shade as the walls that somehow didn’t shrink the room.
Katrina was in her glory but seemed less impressed with the whole point of the building. I’d nearly barreled into her when I’d led her through a narrow, borderline claustrophobic moulage hallway by the waist and she realized the impressions had belonged to real dead people. The epiphany caused her to come to an abrupt dead stop. Her full lips stretched into a grimace, and her eyes rounding to the size of dinner plates.
I wasn’t sure how she was going to fare when we got upstairs, but we’d see.
This had been her idea, not mine.
“Do I know who?” I asked, studying the curve of her profile. Her pert nose wrinkled at the rows of diaphonized animal skeletons in glass jars.
I was confident the animal remains reminded her of a moment in our lives she didn’t want to revisit, and I didn’t blame her.
I’d give anything to undo all of that for her.
She twisted around to face me, the hem of her dress catching air, picking up over her thighs. “The girl in the box office and Wagner.”
I knew who Rhys Wagner was. Regretfully. I rocked my jaw, considering how much to divulge to her. “It’s a small town, baby. Everyone knows everyone.”
Especially Josephine. The girl had tried her damnedest to remain invisible since the day she had the misfortune of leaving her mother’s womb, but it was no use.
Not with Briar as her older sister. She made Vince almost seem perfectly sound of mind because he had a method to his madness and maintained a fucked-up construct of rules he abided by.
Briar had no such limits. She didn’t give a shit that Josephine was her kid sister.
All the more reason to torture her and make her pay a penance for something she could have never prevented. Something that wasn’t her fault.
“Idon’t know everyone,” Katrina reminded, a tiny smile blooming on her pretty lips. I shifted in place. Those lips would look better stretched around my cock and I flicked my eyes around the main floor, searching for an alcove to drag her into. “Give me the tea.”
Especiallyto get her the fuck off this topic.
I scratched the back of my neck. “The prick with the chip on his shoulder is Rhys Wagner. He owns the museum.”
Katrina snorted, her lips rolling together like she was fighting the urge to remind me I wasn’t exactly the epitome of approachability myself.
Vince, Gabe, and I had gone to high school with Rhys, and he was our age. He barely uttered two words to anyone, communicating only with glares and head nods. Back then, his head remained buried in one of his weird anatomy textbooks while he huddled over a sketchbook, replicating what he was looking at, graphite discoloring his hands while he worked the pencil back and forth, dumping whatever was in his head onto paper.
Pretentious fuck.
Despite that, he had that whole moody-artist vibe going for him that somehow got him as much pussy as it did us. It didn’t seem to matter he rarely opened his mouth. He was unwittingly popular, well-liked, and ended up at the same house parties we’d attended. Tall, dark, and broody mysterious bullshit lingering in a corner, waiting for his next meal to come to him. I would have hated him if I hadn’t been impressed.
Vince was less amused, making a point of intercepting Rhys’s would-be conquests before they could get to him.A wolf outfoxing the hawk.
Gabe took up drawing for two weeks before he decided he didn’t need a skill set to pull girls. Which really meant he couldn’t even draw stick people straight. His lines were all slanted.
“And the girl?” Katrina prompted.
I hesitated, begging her with my eyes to move on. Shit, I’d listen to her go on another tangent about how she wanted to install an oriel window on our house over having this conversation.
“Adam.” She was losing her patience, and this would have been easier if we were at home and I coulda dragged her under me already to distract her, but no.
We had to go outside and do stuff and be active members of society. Her words, not mine.
Ugh.
