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Текст книги "The Billionaire Takes a Bride"
Автор книги: Jessica Clare
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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 16 страниц)
So she crawled out of her unfamiliar bed and put on a pair of flannel pajama pants. Normally she slept in a tank top and panties, but she suspected Sebastian wouldn’t be a fan of that if she trotted into his room half-naked and wanting to share the blankets.
That was the good thing about Sebastian. He didn’t think with his dick, which made him safe.
Chelsea padded out of her room and down the brightly lit hallway, heading for Sebastian’s room. Not the locked “mystery” room but his bedroom. The door was shut and she knocked gently.
He opened it a moment later, dressed in an undershirt and boxers. A notepad was tucked in his hand, along with a pencil, and his dark hair looked tousled, as if he were getting ready for bed. “You okay?”
She wiggled her feet on the hardwood floors and clasped her hands in front of her breasts. “Can I sleep with you tonight?” At his surprised look, she added, “I’m a little freaked out about the new room and I know you’re safe.”
Sebastian studied her face, then nodded, opening the door a bit wider.
She crawled into his enormous bed, noting the decor here was just as sterile and gray as the rest of the house. Here, though, there were a dozen fluffy pillows to get lost in, and only one corner of the bed had been disturbed by Sebastian. She bounded onto the other side, feeling a bit like a kid with a sleepover, and grabbed a pillow. “I appreciate it, Basty.”
“Basty?” He snorted. “That’s worse than Nugget.”
She yawned and shrugged as he got back into bed, then snuggled down next to him. Sebastian was warm and safe, and she immediately relaxed. “You work on your similes, I’ll work on my nicknames.”
Chelsea was asleep before he even responded.
Chapter Twelve
Being married to Chelsea was messing with his head.
It had been a week since their impromptu wedding and so far it was a week of secrets, sneaking around, and blue balls.
Oh, and his house smelled like flowers.
Secrets, because Chelsea continually left the house without telling him where she was going, a big bag hung over one shoulder. She’d disappear during the daytime for about an hour, return, and then head straight to her soap making, where she’d put on a pair of headphones and rock out to music for hours while mixing soap recipes and then cutting bars. This week, she told him, was lilac week, and the house smelled like flowers. Tons of flowers. It permeated his clothing, to the point that guys were giving him weird looks at the gym.
Sneaking around, because when Chelsea wasn’t disappearing in the daytime, she was disappearing several nights out of the week, again with her bag. She didn’t volunteer where she was going, and every time he asked, she ignored him. Not rudely. She’d just wink and give a cheery laugh and say that it was part of their agreement, and if he wasn’t going to open his locked room, she sure wasn’t going to tell him where she was going.
Except his locked room was just full of drawings. Not particularly good drawings, either. And when she came home? Half the time she came home with bruises.
So to say he was concerned was an understatement.
The sleeping arrangements were a torture he hadn’t foreseen. Every night, she showed up at his door to the point that he’d come to expect her in bed with him. And after a few nights? She’d stopped “dressing up.” Since he was going to be in his boxers, she had now started going to bed in a tiny tank top that outlined her perky breasts and pert nipples and a pair of tiny underwear. And he told himself it was fine.
He didn’t mind Chelsea crawling into bed with him. He didn’t mind the teeny tiny underwear. He didn’t mind that she was a clingy sort of sleeper, too, and that he’d wake up with her arms wrapped around one of his, her breasts pressed on either side of his bicep, or that her leg would be kicked over his.
She was gorgeous and half dressed. He’d be crazy to mind it. But that was part of the problem. They were supposed to be just friends, and he was feeling decidedly un-platonic. Every morning, he woke up with a hard-on that he had to conceal. Every evening, he had arousing, incredible dreams about her. She was in his head constantly, the subject of his furtive sketches, and the reason he took many a cold shower that week.
And they were supposed to be platonic for two years.
He was going to die. Blue balls were going to kill him.
The most annoying thing? She constantly referred to him as “safe.” As if he were some sort of nutless teddy bear she could cuddle on and not think twice about. Like he wasn’t a red-blooded male who needed sex.
It was getting harder and harder to keep things platonic, because the more he saw her? The more he wanted to roll her over in the bed and start kissing her. Press his mouth to those full, gorgeous lips, her breasts, her juicy nipples, her bouncy, tight ass that flexed in those tiny panties, everywhere. Everything she was—her personality, her body, her laugh—she totally did it for him on every level.
But he couldn’t—wouldn’t—because he remembered how stricken with terror she’d been at the hotel. He needed to figure her out before they could move things forward.
Which was why he was following the bodyguard he’d hired to protect her.
Which was another thing going terribly wrong this week.
He’d gotten a recommendation for a security company from Hunter, who had his own personal security guard who attended him when he went out in public. He’d called and explained his needs and they’d sent over a man named Rufus.
Rufus was enormous. Six foot tall and easily four hundred pounds, he had a mean scowl that would make anyone step back, and his arms, neck, and ears were covered in tattoos. He was perfect for the job, and Chelsea seemed to like him. Now she took him along when she left, and as part of his tasks, Rufus was supposed to report back to Sebastian.
Except, Chelsea had asked Rufus not to.
So now when he went to Rufus to ask how things were, he got a blank stare. It didn’t matter that Sebastian was the one cutting the check—Rufus’s loyalty was to Chelsea. And really, he was fine with that, too.
But now his curiosity was getting the better of him. Which was why he’d tailed them when they took the subway and headed across town toward a local college, Chelsea’s ever-present enormous bag on her shoulder. She was chatting Rufus’s ear off, which was how they’d managed to not notice him.
The college part baffled him. Was she taking classes? It was Saturday night—who had classes on a Saturday night? In addition, that didn’t explain the bruises.
He grew more baffled as they headed into an arena. Chelsea entered through a back door, nodding at a guard posted there. Instead of following them, Sebastian headed around to the front of the building, following the crowd that was slowly moving inside.
There were flyers and T-shirt stands and he stopped to browse through the contents, not entirely sure what he was looking at. A lot of it was tough-looking girls on roller skates. He picked up a flyer, curious.
“You got a ticket for tonight’s bout?”
Sebastian looked up. The woman in the booth was covered in tattoos and piercings, but her smile was friendly.
“I’m looking for a friend, actually.”
“She play?” The woman gestured at a table full of oversized trading cards.
“No, I don’t think she does,” he said, eying the pictures of the women. Some of them were larger, heavyset, and muscular. Some were dainty, posing flexing their arms. Some had a star on their helmet and some were covered in tattoos. A few looked all business while there were a couple in heavy makeup, their track uniforms altered to be sexier and more provocative. He scanned the faces on the cards, gravitating towards the purple– and pink-bordered cards. Chelsea’s bag was purple and pink.
Sure enough, posing with a vicious looking snarl, was his new wife, her hair in pigtails. She was one of the ones in a more provocative costume, the neckline gathered at the breasts, her skirt a lot shorter and pleated. She wore stripy knee-high socks and held up a fist as if she’d like to smash it into someone’s face.
She looked incredibly fucking sexy.
Chesty LaRude, number 34DD. Broadway Rag Queens.
“I want this card, please,” he said, and pulled out some cash.
Ten minutes later, he was inside the small stadium with a beer in hand and a lot of damn questions. He sat down in the bleachers near the top, glancing around. The floor was overlaid with some sort of strange blue flooring, the lines of the flat track marked in pink. Chairs were set up in the center of the room, and girls skated around, warming up. He didn’t see Chelsea, but the uniforms were the wrong color. So he kept watching and waiting, sipping his beer.
Roller derby. It didn’t make sense, and yet it did. His cheery, happy Chelsea who had a smile for everyone, got along with him like peas and onions (he really had to work on his similes), who sold fruity soaps . . . she played with these rough and tumble women? She didn’t seem the type. As a bruiser of a girl with a Mohawk and huge biceps rolled past, he wondered at the constant sets of bruises Chelsea had on her body.
A woman sat next to him, beer in hand, her hair in a blue buzz cut. She nodded at him. “Derby virgin?”
“Huh?”
“Are you a derby virgin?” She grinned at him. “You don’t look the type.”
“Oh. Yeah, it’s my first game.”
“That’s adorable,” she said. “And it’s a bout. Not a game. Like boxing.”
“Boxing with roller skates. Got it.” He held his hand out. “Sebastian.”
“I know,” she said with an evil grin. “I watch your mom on that show. She’s fucking crazy, you know?”
“Yeah, I know.”
“I’m Diane.” She gestured out at the floor. “My wife’s Morning Whorey, number sixty-nine for the Rag Queens.”
“My wife’s this one,” he said, holding up his playing card of Chelsea.
“Oh, shit, did Chesty get married? Fuck, that’s awesome. Congrats!” Diane looked thrilled. “She’s fun to watch on the track. Downright nasty and swears a mean streak. Gets a lot of penalties when she’s in a bad mood.”
That . . . did not sound like the Chelsea he knew. But then again, it sounded like he didn’t know her all that well after all. He nodded at the track. “So how does the game work?”
“Bout, buddy, bout,” she corrected. “Like you’re about to wear my beer if you don’t start calling it a bout.”
He grimaced. “Sorry.”
“S’okay. I’ll remember that you’re a virgin.” She took a sip of her beer and gestured down at the track. “I’ll try and make the rules simple for you. When the whistle goes off, everyone starts skating, okay? There’s four girls in a pack. One of them’s a pivot but I won’t go into that just yet, because it’ll confuse you. See the second line on the track down there? The fifth girl for each team skates from there and they have a star on their helmet. Those are the jammers. If they make it through the pack, they have to skate around the track again and try to pass the pack a second time. If they do, they score a point for each person of the opposite team they pass. Got it?”
“I think so,” he said, glancing down at the card in his hand. “So the jammer has to be the small, fast one, right? Is that what Chelsea plays?”
“Chesty?” Diane grinned. “Oh, hell no. She’s in the pack playing a blocker, and she’s a vicious one. You watch and see.”
A few minutes later, music started and the announcer got on the microphone. “Let’s bring out our first team for tonight’s bout . . . the Broadway Rag Queens!”
Music started, and the thumping beat of Destiny’s Child’s “Bootylicious” filled the stadium. The track was suddenly filled with girls in purple and pink, skating in circles and vamping for the audience. They wore helmets and moved so fast that he craned his neck to see if he could find Chelsea among the team.
The announcer began to call out names.
Good Whip Lollipop.
Morning Whorey.
Drool Whip.
Lady ChaCha.
Kid Vicious.
Sandra Flea.
Tail Her Swift.
Sebastian laughed at the names. They were clever and badass all at once. As each girl’s name was called out, the others pointed at her, and she posed for the crowd.
Chesty LaRude.
Chelsea did a little hop and jiggled her breasts at the crowd, which made them roar. Then she licked her thumb and pressed it on her arm, pretending that she was sizzling.
Damn. He laughed again, clapping a hand against his beer. Why had she kept this from him? He didn’t know anything about the sport, but seeing her vamping it up on the track with the other girls? That was awesome. It was so incredibly not what he expected, but seeing her out there in the derby uniform he’d thought was nothing more than a Halloween costume?
She fit. She totally fit.
The other team was called out, and the skaters were announced one by one as their team’s music played.
“Bout’s gonna start,” Diane said at his side a few minutes later. “Get ready to watch some moves.”
The teams lined up in position, and he saw Chelsea was playing in the first round. Bout. Tussle. Jam. Whatever. The women readied, and Sebastian got on the edge of his seat.
The whistle blew.
The women began to skate forward, and immediately Chelsea snarled, displaying a bright pink mouth guard. She flung herself bodily at the woman next to her, knocking them both down. The girl with the star on her helmet—the jammer—jumped over their fallen bodies and skated ahead.
“Damn,” Diane said at his side. “Chesty’s not wasting any time tonight!”
He watched, mouth dry, as Chelsea pulled herself up off the track and began to skate back after the pack again, then rejoined them. For the rest of the jam, she flung herself into the pack with abandon, body-checking and skating in front of others to block them. She got pushed. She got knocked around. She went down. She caught an elbow to the face and shook it off.
Then the jammer tapped her hands on her hips, and the whistle blew.
“End of the jam,” Diane told him. “They scored four points. Good one.”
For the first half of the “bout,” he watched as Chelsea endured more hits than a football player, more falls than a beginner ice skater, and kept getting back up to throw herself into the game. She was brutal. Utterly brutal. She didn’t use her elbows, but she was downright cruel on the track, getting in other girls’ faces and yelling at them, pushing them aside for her own jammer, and doing whatever she could—at whatever cost—to get her jammer through.
And the audience both hated her and loved her at the same time. They booed her whenever she attacked someone a little too roughly, and it didn’t faze Chelsea at all. She just got right back into things.
As she picked herself up after skidding five feet and out of bounds, he swigged his beer, unable to take his gaze off of her. No wonder she was covered in bruises. Jesus. She also got penalties, too, and had to sit out, which apparently pissed her off even more. He noticed some of her teammates were giving her unhappy looks.
He grew concerned.
No one else was playing as hard as she was. Even Diane commented on how dirty Chelsea was playing tonight. When the second penalty flew and both Chelsea’s teammates and the opposing team gave her unhappy looks, he grew even more worried that she was in a bad frame of mind.
This wasn’t fun. She was making this . . . well, war.
By the time the halftime bell rang, she looked supremely pissed and sweaty. And as the Rag Queens gathered and moved off the track to head to their locker room and cheerleaders took the center of the floor, he got up from the bleachers.
He needed to talk to Chelsea.
This wasn’t just playing the game for the sheer hell of it. This was her taking out some serious rage on the other team. Even her own teammates were a little concerned, shooting her pissy looks.
Something was going on, and he needed to talk to his wife.
“Save my seat,” he told Diane. “I’ll be back.” And he hopped down from the bleachers and sprinted across the floor.
As he headed to the backstage area, he saw Rufus tailing behind the crowd of women on skates. He followed the bodyguard and when the man parked outside of a room, Sebastian waited.
Rufus narrowed his eyes at Sebastian, as if he knew what he was doing there and didn’t like it.
Well, that was too damn bad for him. He was here to get answers. “Is Chelsea in there?” He pointed at the door to the locker room.
Rufus just stared at him.
“Damn it, I know I hired you to be her bodyguard, but . . .” His voice trailed off as the door opened and several women skated out, mopping their brows and chatting. Amongst them was Chelsea, her ponytails damp with sweat. She didn’t see him and skated right past. “Chelsea,” he called.
She stopped and turned, a look of horror on her face. “Sebastian?” She glanced around and then skated toward him. The horror turned to anger. “Are you fucking following me? What the hell?”
“I wanted to know what was going on,” he told her, and found his voice was raising to match her tone. “Why would you keep this a secret?”
“Because I’m not going to quit and you can’t make me quit!”
He shook his head. “Why would I ask you to quit? I think it’s awesome.”
She looked a little dumbfounded at that. “You do?”
“Ooooo.” A girl skated up to them and began to circle them. “You got a hot date, Chelsea?”
“We’re not dating,” she said flatly.
For some reason, that pissed him off. “We’re married.”
The woman’s eyes went wide. “Holy shit.” She looked over at Chelsea, and when Chelsea didn’t deny it, the woman gasped and took a step backward. “I gotta tell the others.”
Chelsea groaned as the woman skated off. She put her hand on Sebastian’s arm and began to steer him away from the main traffic of the crowded hallway, full of skaters, fans, and everyone else. “Did you have to tell Gilmore? She’s such a blabbermouth.”
“Don’t you think you should have told them?” Why did that piss him off so much that she didn’t?
“Look, it’s nothing personal,” she said defensively. “Relationships and derby don’t mix. It requires a lot of practice hours and commitment, and more than one girl has had to break up with a guy because he wasn’t into her spending so much time on the track.”
“Have I struck you as the crazily possessive or overly clingy type?”
“Well no, but this isn’t a real relationship.”
Again, that kind of irritated him. And again, he dismissed it as irrational of him. Because hell, he was being irrational. But there was something about all of this that wasn’t sitting right, and it was striking a nerve. “No one knows that but you and me, and if you keep secrets, this is never going to work.”
“Oh, really? You’re one to talk, Bluebeard.” She nudged his shoulder with a pointed finger.
“Bluebeard?”
“Yeah, the secret room of creepiness? The one that you swear is nothing at all but you still won’t let me see it?”
“It’s just a study!”
“And Dexter was just a blood spatter analyst!”
“It’s nothing, I swear.” For some reason, the thought of showing her made his skin crawl. He never showed his art to anyone. No one ever understood it. No one ever got his obsessive need to draw and explore through art. No one in his family ever had, and he’d learned to hide it long ago.
“Well with that attitude, I think we’re heading for a divorce,” she said, glaring at him. It was the same glare she used on the track, and it startled him to see it. Game-Chelsea was a whole different woman than the one he knew.
“You want to talk about attitude, then?” he challenged, gesturing back at the auditorium where he could hear music playing as the halftime show continued. “How about the one-woman wrecking ball out there?”
Her hands went to her hips and she scoffed at him. “You don’t know shit about derby. You’re supposed to be aggressive.”
“There’s a difference between being aggressive and frightening your own teammates!”
She licked her lips, seeming uncertain for the first time. “I’m just a little off this week. It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine. You’re going after everyone out there like you have something to settle.”
“He’s right,” someone called out and skated past Chelsea, swatting her ass with a towel.
Chelsea scowled and moved closer to Sebastian. Her voice dropped to a low whisper so no one would hear them. “Look. Derby is my therapy. I get a lot of stuff out of my system on the floor out there.”
“What the hell can you possibly need to get out of your system that requires attacking so many other people?” He crossed his arms over his chest. “You don’t make sense, Chelsea. I know we’re friends and all, but damn if you aren’t confusing the hell out of me. You want to be platonic but crawl into my bed. You leave the lights on like a scared toddler and have a stage name like a stripper. You hide something that’s totally awesome like the derby, but you attack your teammates. I don’t understand what all this is adding up to—”
She leaned in close, her teeth gritted, fists clenched. “I. Was. Raped. Is that what you want to hear?”
It was like a splash of cold water on him. He took a step backward. “You . . . you what?”
Her breasts heaved, her expression emotional. “You want to know what I need to work through? Three years ago, I was roofied at a bar and when I woke up, I was in a Dumpster. Discarded like trash. So if I seem a little too ‘aggressive’ on the track”—she did air quotes around the word—“you don’t know the fucking half of it, all right?”
“Are we going to jaw all night or are we going to fucking talk some strategy?” A man in a purple shirt called from the next room. “Get the fuck over here, Chesty. Potty break’s over! We need to have a team talk.”
“I have to go,” Chelsea said to Sebastian in a flat voice. “Still got half the bout to go through.”
“I’ll see you when you get home,” Sebastian said. “Then we’ll talk.”
She skated away, not answering him.
And that was just fine. Because he couldn’t really put together coherent words at the moment. She’d leveled a grenade at him, an emotional grenade that had torn through his scaffolded hopes for what their relationship might turn into.
The derby he could handle.
The thought of Chelsea being traumatized and roofied? When who knew what happened to her?
It made him feel helpless. Angry. He understood why she skated like she was on a mission now. Why she flung herself at others, heedless of her own safety. Why she body slammed herself through every jam.
He felt like doing the same at the moment.
But he couldn’t, so he turned around and stalked out of the stadium.
He needed to think. To process.
Something.