Текст книги "ARROGANT PLAYBOY"
Автор книги: Winter Renshaw
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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 43 страниц)
The racing thoughts are gone.
The hemming and hawing is over.
My fingers work between my folds, pressing along the most sensitive part of me because that’s what feels best. I’m growing wetter with each massage. I press harder, rubbing until my face is twisted and all I feel is a buildup of pressure inside. My middle finger finds my entrance as my palm continues rubbing the rest of me with each stroke.
I rake my teeth over my bottom lip as I picture Jensen, imagining his body is weighing me down and we’re both tangled in a mess of white sheets and covered by the veil of night. I want to make a noise, but I have to be quiet. If Jensen were here, I imagine he’d cover my mouth with his strong hand.
One finger is suddenly not enough. I try two.
Much better.
My hips buck as the pressure mounts, but I’m not ready for it to end. It’s the greatest physical feeling I’ve ever felt in my entire life. My fingers press deeper inside me. Faster. Harder. The ache is painful almost, building and building until there’s nowhere else for it to go.
I think of Jensen again.
I think about his big, hard—
And then my body tingles, tightens, and quivers. My mind blanks. I’m pulsing below, hard and quick. My body contorts, and a wave of euphoria rushes over me from head to toe.
When the possessive exultation subsides, I’m as limp as a noodle, all my energy drained clean. My fingers still rest inside me, soaked and pruned from my aroused state.
I couldn’t move even if I wanted to.
My lips twist into a pleasured grin.
I did that. I chose to do that.
Me.
Who knew my body could do something so amazing?
Choice is a beautiful thing.
CHAPTER 9
JENSEN
“Missed you last night, Waverly.” Mark unfolds his newspaper at breakfast the next morning. His face is scrunched, scrutinizing his second oldest daughter as she eats her scrambled eggs in silence.
She’s been awfully quiet this morning, and I’ve opted to leave her alone. I think I pushed her too hard the night before, and I’ve still got five months left of living here. My end goal—graduating high school and moving to California—is way more important than convincing some prudish virgin to finger herself.
I stifle a laugh, my gaze snapping to Waverly. Her cheeks flush and she reaches for her juice. She won’t make eye contact with anyone.
Oh, my God. She totally did it.
I kick her leg under the table.
“Hey.” Bellamy shoots me a dirty look.
Oops.
“Sorry,” I mutter, lowering my head so she can’t see the shit-eating grin on my face.
“I was just tired last night,” Waverly says to her father. “Went up to my room and did some homework, and then I went to bed early.”
Fuck. She’s a terrible liar. Must be hard being habitually honest. She couldn’t tell a lie to save her life.
“Hm.” Mark is studying her like a book. Wonder what he’d think if he knew his precious, virginal daughter, the apple of his eye, his pride and joy, fingered herself last night while she thought of her new stepbrother? “Went looking for you. You weren’t in your room after dinner last night.”
“I did some laundry,” she says, shrugging a shoulder.
“Oh, Mark, did I tell you? The HVAC technician is coming today around ten to tune up my furnace,” Summer interrupts.
Mark mumbles something to her, but his gaze is still transfixed on his red-faced, fidgeting daughter.
The man is not stupid. He’s not naïve or blind to a damn thing that goes on under his three roofs. I know this because any man who uses religion as a weapon or a manipulative tool is a freaking mastermind. What man could convince three women to marry him, have his babies, grow their hair long so they can wash his feet with it in Heaven, serve and satisfy him, and make them feel like they’re the ones benefitting from this arrangement?
Waverly pushes her chair out from the table and takes her dish to the sink. She grabs her backpack and slinks it over her shoulder.
“Leaving early?” Bellamy asks.
Their mom, Jane, surveys in silence. She has “opinionated” written all over her face, but she seems to keep them all to herself—at least whenever I’m around.
Waverly glances at the clock on the wall. Her face reads like she’s trying to come up with an excuse, but she’s so flustered nothing’s coming together in time. “Yep. Leaving early.”
She’s gone.
Just like that.
I shovel the rest of my breakfast in my mouth and stand to leave, keeping my dirty dishes on the table because I don’t feel like being yelled at for not letting the women clean up after me.
House rules are house rules.
I grab my jacket and keys and run outside. Waverly’s sitting in her car, letting it warm up, and messing with her radio. I rap on her window, grinning as she jumps up in her seat.
She rolls her window down. “What?”
“So…” I’ve got a smile a mile wide. “You did it.”
She shifts her car into drive, and it lurches until she puts her foot on the break. She’s staring ahead now, opting not to make eye contact with me a second longer than she has to.
“You’re glowing.” I rest an elbow on the inside of her window.
“Stop.” She rolls her eyes.
“Stop what?”
“Gloating. You’re acting like you… like you made me… like you gave me the…” She can’t say it.
It’s probably not a word in her vocabulary, so I’ll say it for her. “Orgasm.”
Her face whips toward mine, freshly-washed, sandy hair spilling down her shoulders.
“You can say it, Waverly. Or-gas-m.” I smirk. “And I kind of did give it to you. I mean, not literally. You did all the work. I can’t take any credit for that.”
I glance up toward the main house to find Mark standing in the living room window, casting a hard stare our way. His mouth forms a hard line. I smack the top of Waverly’s car and tell her to get going, giving Mark a friendly wave and a thumb’s up. He doesn’t return anything other than a stone cold stare. If he asks later, and I’m sure he will, I was just checking on her. Making sure she was okay. Just being a good stepbrother.
It’s not a lie.
I do care about her, in my own little way. I think beneath her stuffy exterior and Miss Priss attitude, she’s a good person. I think we’d be friends if the conditions were favorable.
“See you in Chem,” I say as she pulls away.
***
I’m stopped outside my classroom by Claire Fahnlander.
“Jensen, hey.” She twirls her hair around her finger and leans against a red locker. “I know you’re new in town. I’m having some people over this weekend, like, for a senior party. My parents are going to be out of town, so I’ll have the whole place to myself. You should stop by. You know, if you’re bored or whatever.”
She bats her lashes. She’s the kind of girl who knows she’s pretty—the kind who skirts through life on her good looks and manipulative charm. She’s the type you could spend a drunk and rebellious teenage weekend with and not think twice about her again because underneath her fuck-me façade, there’s nothing at all.
I glance into the classroom to find Waverly watching. Her eyes veer away the second she’s caught.
Claire turns to see what I’m looking at and then rolls her eyes. “Ugh, Waverly Miller. Total wannabe.”
“Really?” I scratch the space above my brow. “She doesn’t seem like that to me. A little uptight, maybe. A little tightly wound.”
I can’t imagine Waverly wanting to have anything to do with Claire or her posse of mean girls. There’s a group of bitches like that in every school across North America.
“Trust me. She’s annoying.” Claire folds her arms. Her mouth twists into a devious grin. “Anyway, about this weekend, you should come by around—”
I don’t say another word. I simply walk away.
“Hey.” I pull out the chair next to Waverly, leaning in and nudging her arm. “What’s up?”
“I didn’t know we were friends now.” She flips her notebook open and clicks her pen, staring straight ahead at the dry erase board in the front of the class where Mrs. Davenport is writing and erasing something.
“Are you cool with what happened last night?” I whisper. I hold my breath, anticipating her answer. She’s clearly bent on making me wait.
Is she punishing me? If so, I did nothing wrong. I planted a seed. She chose to water it.
I snicker as she scribbles today’s date on the corner of her paper and throws her pen down. “Yes, Jensen. I’m fine.”
I don’t believe her.
The eight a.m. bell rings and Mrs. Davenport takes attendance. Claire Fahnlander watches us from the corner of her eye. I swear she’s plotting all the ways she thinks she’s going to make me hers.
She’s in for a world of disappointment if she thinks I view her as anything other than a piece of ass, and even then, I have no intention of fucking around with that. She’s probably been with half the school, or at least anyone with a football jersey and a half-smile.
“You’re different now,” I whisper to Waverly. She stares straight ahead at the white board.
“Can’t get anything past you, huh.” Her voice is hardly audible.
“So you did it. I know that much,” I cross my arms and sit back in the chair, not even attempting to fight the grin consuming my lips. I lean over to her, whispering into her ear, “But the biggest question is, were you thinking of me when you came?”
Waverly jolts and pushes her chair back, causing a metallic grinding noise to beckon all eyes our way. Mrs. Davenport stops yammering about reactants and holds her marker in the air. She scans the classroom and spins around, resuming her lecture with an air of annoyance in her tone.
There’s nothing I enjoy more than watching a girl squirm from the heat of my stare. She was a delicate flower when I met her a few days ago. Now she’s blossoming right before my eyes.
Quiz sheets are passed to us and the teacher rains silence upon the classroom and mutters something about an hour.
An hour to take a quiz? I flip the sheet over. It’s thirty questions. I hate when teachers give way too much time for these. She probably wants some quiet time so she can do a little online shopping or Facebook browsing during work time. No one needs a whole fucking hour to take a thirty-question quiz.
That’s an hour of sitting here with my quiz finished and being unable to breathe a single word to Waverly. As pleased as I am that she touched herself last night, I want to make sure she’s okay. I’m not a complete asshole.
She finishes her test after fifteen silent minutes and turns it in before coming back to her spot and pulling a book out from her bag. I squint to see what she’s reading. Jane Austen. How classy. Of course she wouldn’t read anything modern. I doubt Mark Miller allows his precious daughter to be exposed to modern-day romance and all its oversexed dialogue.
I turn my quiz in and take my sketchpad from my bag along with a carbon pencil. Observing my surroundings, I’m left with minimal options. I can either draw a picture of the radiator to my left, the back of Claire Fahnlander’s narrow head, or Waverly reading. I opt for the latter.
Leaning back in my seat, I rest my pad across my lap, making broad strokes and creating the outline of her book’s profile. Her hair spills down the side of her face, covering all but the silhouette of her pointy nose and her dark lashes that curl up at the ends. There isn’t a speck of makeup on her face, but she doesn’t need it. The fluorescent light isn’t ideal, and the shadows it casts on her aren’t the most flattering, but none of it matters. She’s still fucking stunning.
Ten minutes pass and I’m almost done with the outline. I begin shading, finding myself in the early stages of getting lost and forgetting where I am. I don’t feel like I’m sitting in Chem class drawing my tragically pure stepsister. My mind is blank as I grip the pencil. I use my fingertips to smudge certain areas just a little. My hands will be gray by the time I’m done, but I don’t care.
That’s the beauty of art—it transports me. It makes me forget. There aren’t a lot of things I can lose myself in, but this is one of them. When I draw, I’m not an arrogant bastard. I’m not Jensen Mackey, son of Josiah. I’m not a hundred shades of fucked up in the head.
I’m just me.
Waverly shuts her book and pulls in a deep sigh as if she’s just read a beautiful passage and needs to let it marinate for a bit before she can move on. I know that feeling. I get that way after I draw something I never knew I was capable of drawing.
She turns to me demurely, her eyes falling on my paper and then narrowing as she realizes the girl on the paper is her. “You drew me?”
I shrug. “You were convenient.”
She pulls the sketchpad from my lap and inspects the grayscale drawing. Her eyes soften a bit and she fights a smile, not unlike the first time Juliette found my drawings for the first time.
“You do these?” Juliette asked, flipping through the pages of my sketchpad. Women. Nothing but beautiful women.
I was sixteen.
Playboys were contraband in my house and the vast majority of websites were adult-filtered on our family computer—I had to use my imagination. I held my breath until she came to the drawing I’d done of her from memory: a sketch of her seated at the family breakfast table when her peach satin robe had come untied, gaping open in the front to reveal her ample cleavage as it peeked out from the top of her matching teddy.
That was the first time I got hard for my father’s girlfriend.
Only I never saw her as a mother. She was always just… Juliette. And truth be told, Josiah treated her like his daughter most of the time, too. He controlled her. Told her what to wear and how to act. He treated her as if he were raising her, as if she were a teenager and not a thirty-something woman.
My only conclusion was that she enjoyed it—that and she had daddy issues up her tight, stripper ass.
When Juliette found the picture I’d drawn of her she stopped. I expected her to yell at me, to take it to my father, to scold me and tell me how dirty and fucked up I was. Instead she set the pad down gently on my nightstand and shut my bedroom door.
“Are you curious about me, Jensen?” she purred. Her overfilled lips curled into a smile. “It’s okay if you are. I won’t tell anyone.”
“I wouldn’t say I’m curious,” I said, sitting frozen on the edge of my bed. Juliette had never come onto me like this before. “Juliette, have you been drinking?”
Her fingers traced down the front of her white silk blouse until they found the top button. One by one, her blouse came undone. She stepped toward me, reaching down for my hand and placing it over the outside of her bra. The warmth of her body radiated through my palms and her breast overflowed in my hand.
“You’re not a virgin, are you?” she asked with a wicked glint in her eyes.
“You’re not going to tell my dad, are you?” Not that I cared what he thought, but I wasn’t in the mood for another one of his lecture-and-beatings.
“We’re on the same team, you and me,” she whispered, pretending like my hand on her breast was the most natural thing in the world. My eyes trailed up to her pretty face. Her hollow cheeks and hollow eyes were shadowed, covered up by layers of makeup. For the longest time, I wondered why she wore so much of it, and then I saw the bruises. “We’re stuck here. We’re bound to him. What if I told you there was something we could do to make ourselves feel better about our… situation? Don’t you want to feel vindicated, Jensen? Satisfied?”
I wasn’t sure what she was getting at. Scratch that—I knew damn well what she was getting at. I just couldn’t believe it was really happening.
“You’re testing me.” I retract my hand from her bra cup.
“Oh, but I’m not.” Her face fell, morphing into something I could only describe as the greediest lust I’d ever seen in my entire life. “He punishes us all the time. Let’s give him something to punish us for.”
“Why don’t you just leave him?”
I was sixteen. I had nowhere to go. I couldn’t leave unless I wanted to dive headfirst into foster care, but Juliette? She could walk out the door at any time and never look back.
“It’s complicated,” she cooed, raking her pink fingernails through my hair and pouting. She reached back and unhooked her bra, her double-D tits bouncing into a perky position. Her nipples hardened. “Adult stuff. Someday, you’ll understand.”
She climbed onto my lap, sending my cock throbbing. Grabbing fistfuls of my shirt, she tugged it over my head before pressing me back onto my mattress. “God, Josiah would be so pissed if he knew…”
Every beating. Every harsh word. Every hypocrisy. They all rushed through my mind at the same time, painting a picture of the monster that lived and breathed and abused us both for no other reason than to build himself up, make himself stronger.
We could fight back, her and me, in small, stolen moments and behind locked doors.
I stared into her despondent gray eyes, and I decided then and there that we could help each other. We could fuck the shit out of each other and not feel a damn thing except revenge toward my father.
“I never knew you liked to draw,” Waverly says, snapping me into the present moment. I can’t help but feel dirty against her pure-white presence.
I pull the sketchpad out of her grasp and shut the cover, shoving everything back into my bag. Mrs. Davenport is talking at the front of the classroom. The hour is over. Waverly’s stare is invading, intrusive. She can have me at face value. I’ll give her that. But my past? That’s something she’ll never touch. I won’t allow it. She wouldn’t understand.
“Do you have more of those?” she asks. She won’t fucking drop it. I’m not sure why she cares.
“Of you? No.”
“No, any more drawings.”
“In my art class, sure.”
“At home.”
I shake my head. “Left everything at the old house.”
It was true. I left that place with a few clothes shoved into a duffel bag. Juliette cried as my dad assured her since I was eighteen that it wasn’t statutory rape. I’ll never forget my father standing there, knuckles bruised and bloody, and he’s calm as a fucking yoga instructor as he shoots the shit with the cops our neighbors called when they heard Juliette’s guttural shrieks. I left with a bag of clothes and the social worker. As for Juliette’s fate, I’m sure my father roughed her up pretty good, and for the first time, I wasn’t there to protect her.
“You’re incredibly talented,” Waverly says.
“You seem surprised.”
“It’s not a bad thing. I’m impressed, is all.”
Claire Fahlander spins around and shoots Waverly a dirty look before shushing us both. I have half a mind to break her heart just for the sport of it. I bet she’s one of those girls who ugly cries.
“That’s what happens when you judge a book by its cover.” I smirk.
She leans close, her steady breaths tickling my ear. “Likewise.”
I knew it.
I fucking knew it.
Underneath her prim and proper façade is a girl dying to break free from the confines of her ass-backward religious restraints. She’s straddling the line. I can see it. It’s written all over in the way she looks at me, like I make her feel things that terrify and excite her all at the same time.
Any guilt I might have felt by pushing her buttons last night evaporates. I have my work cut out for me, that’s for sure, but I’m so not done with her yet…
CHAPTER 10
WAVERLY
I forced myself to talk at dinner tonight. I couldn’t take another family meal smothered by the weight of Jensen’s stare. I’m a big girl. I made a decision. I touched myself last night, and I enjoyed it.
End of story.
Bellamy always says everyone has secrets; some are just better at hiding them than others.
So now I have a secret. It burns hot inside me, fresh as the instant it was placed there by the most earth-shattering orgasm I could’ve ever dreamed up. But it’s there now, and there’s no getting around it.
I finish dish duty and glance out the sliding door toward the backyard, where Jensen is outside playing with Gretchen and Gideon after the light drizzle we got that evening. They’re half-siblings, but they look nothing alike. They have soft features like Kath does, but their hair is almost colorless. Dad said his hair was that pale when he was a kid. The twins are like two effervescent angels. Jensen is dark and hardened. The three of them all laughing and playing together is a sight to see.
A warm hand wraps around my shoulder. “You okay, Waverly?”
It’s my father.
“Of course I’m okay.” I force a smile and pray to God he can’t see right through me.
“Is Jensen bothering you?” His lips go straight and his brows meet in the middle. “You haven’t been yourself since he came around.”
“School stuff,” I say, placing my hand over his. “Getting nervous about getting into college. Still haven’t heard from my number one and graduation’s coming up.”
His face relaxes as he kisses my forehead. “You worry too much about your future. You know I’ll always make sure you’re provided for.”
“I appreciate it, Dad, but this is my dream.”
Dad leans down, kissing my forehead. “You’re a good girl, Waverly. Heavenly Father has big plans for you. I feel it in my soul.”
“After college, Dad.” I smile. “I just want to study literature, make some friends, and then I’ll settle down.”
He doesn’t say much, which concerns me, but I chalk it up to my anxiety about not hearing back yet from the University of Utah.
“I’ve been doing good, though, right, Dad?” I glance up at him, meeting his eyes with as much hope as I can muster. “I’m doing all the right things. Making you proud. Showing you I can handle being on my own for a few years.”
“We need to get through the rest of the summer,” he says, his eyes whipping outside to Jensen. “A lot can happen after high school graduation. People change. Attitudes change.”
“Dad.” I tilt my head. “You know me. I’m not like most young women my age.”
I glance across the room at Bellamy. She’s sitting in Dad’s overstuffed club chair flipping through a Better Homes & Gardens magazine. At almost twenty-two, she’s never moved from home, not even after finishing her associate’s degree last year.
I love my sister more than words, but I have no desire to still be living at home at this age, waiting to be married off—if that’s even what she’s doing. I want to settle down someday, but I want to live a little first.
“You could always go to Whispering Hills Community College.” Dad loosens his grip on my shoulder and pats my back. “Bellamy loved it.”
Bellamy is a closed book. Sometimes I think she talks about everyone else’s secrets just to cover up the fact that she has a few of her own. None of us know what she’s thinking half the time. She could’ve hated college, for all we knew.
“You know where I want to go,” I say to Dad. We’ve had this talk before. I applied to four in-state schools, though my first pick is Utah. As long as I get accepted and get a partial scholarship, I can go. Dad, even on his pharmacist’s salary, can’t afford to send me away. He has way too many mouths to feed here.
He made the requirements crystal clear to me last year. Walk a straight line. Get a scholarship. That’s all I have to do to get out of here.
“Listen, everything will work out just the way Heavenly Father wants it to.” His words, normally a downy soft pillow of comfort on which to land, don’t offer the same effect this time. Dad releases my shoulder from his grip and disappears, retiring to his den for his nightly devotions.
I plop down into a nearby chair, resting my chin into my palm. The solid ground upon which I’d been building my future seems to be shakier than before. The only thing I can pin it on is Jensen. Something about him is making my father doubt my ability to go out into the world on my own.
“I found out what happened to Jensen.” Bellamy’s words hook me hard. “Why he was sent here.”
“Oh, yeah?” I take the chair next to her and do my best to pretend I’m not overly interested. “How?”
“Overheard Mom talking to Kath and Summer.” Bellamy licks her index finger and pages through her magazine. She rests it in her lap for a moment, glancing out the sliding door to where Gideon is stomping into tiny water puddles and splashing Gretchen. Jensen clearly taught him that.
“Okay, so what happened?” I hate that she’s keeping me on edge, but I can’t let on that I care as much as I do.
Bellamy folds her magazine and turns to me, leaning in. I do the same. Her face holds no expression. “He slept with his stepmother.”
I want to throw up.
My stomach sours and I fight the retching that threatens my throat. It’s the most vile, disgusting thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life. How can Bellamy just sit there and pretend like we’re discussing the weather? How is she not equally as disgusted?
I remove my gaze from outside, where Jensen’s still playing. I can’t look at him the same, not anymore. I’m not sure what makes me more nauseous—the fact that he slept with someone who was essentially his stepmother, the fact that he convinced me it was perfectly natural to touch myself while thinking of him, or the fact that I willingly did it.
I was a fool to think he actually gave a shit about me. He’s a manipulative con artist, filled with sin and blackness, and I was nothing but a pawn in his twisted game.
I walked right into his web.
I took the bait.
I fell for his cunning lines. His persuasive insistence. His charm.
Nothing but one giant act to cover up his incestuous cravings.
I’m stunned senseless.
I’ve never hated anyone in my life, but as of right now, I hate Jensen Mackey.
