Broken Empire A Reverse Harem High School Bully Romance - Callie Rose Page 0,28
casual ease, hit me right in the chest.
He was right.
People could change.
But they so very rarely did.
“I know,” I whispered. Then I turned my head and craned my neck to press a kiss to his cheek, stealing a hit of his sunshine scent as I did.
His breath hitched, and his arm tightened around me, and for a second, my heart slammed wildly in my chest. Our faces were so close together—close enough that just the slightest shift of his head would bring our lips into contact.
He hesitated, and I could feel the coiled tension in his body, a mirror to the energy that pulsed through mine. Terror and giddy hope swept through me like a tidal wave as the moment seemed to hang suspended in time.
Then Finn cleared his throat, giving my shoulder one more squeeze before sitting up straight and grabbing his literature textbook off the table.
“Okay. So… what the fuck is this thing about?”
A snort-laugh burst out of me before I could stop it, and I scooted forward on the couch, grabbing my phone instead of my textbook. “Before we do that, I wanted to show you a couple things I found. I don’t know if they’re any good, but there are some tricks people use to…”
I went over what I’d found on the internet, passing the phone over to him a couple times to show him images and graphics that’d popped up. He nodded and occasionally shook his head as I talked, but the things I was saying seemed to make sense to him. I hadn’t been sure they would, since I didn’t know quite what it was like to be inside his head.
We spent several hours studying, working through a few techniques to help him sort the shapes of the letters into recognizable words. The whole time, our bodies stayed close, our sides pressed together as we bent our heads over the phone or the book. My skin felt electric and alive, as if the contact between us was building up a static charge, but maybe the most surprising thing about it was that I felt… comfortable.
I’d become almost used to the intense physical reactions I had around the Princes. My body had been drawn to them even when my mind and heart rebelled against that fact. From almost the first moment I’d met them, that connection had existed between us.
But this was different. The intense attraction was still there, but it was both tempered and inflamed by the fact that something else was there now too.
Something deeper.
A feeling I didn’t dare put words to yet.
Before Finn left, he bent down to where I still sat on the couch and pressed a kiss to my cheek, just like I’d done to him earlier. I watched him leave and stared at the door for a long time after he was gone, fingertips still brushing against my cheek.
He’d almost kissed me on the lips. I was sure of it.
And maybe more terrifying was the realization that I wished he had.
That thought stayed with me through the rest of the weekend and into the beginning of the second week of classes, bouncing around in my brain and colliding with memories of the conversation I’d had with Elijah.
Had I forgiven the Princes?
I wasn’t even sure what that word meant anymore. It felt too small and mundane to encompass my feelings toward the four boys, the things that existed between us. And I wasn’t sure it was the right question to ask either.
Maybe it wasn’t so much about forgiveness as about understanding. And I understood them now, in a way I never had before.
Per Doctor Garrett’s orders, I was still supposed to stay off my feet as much as possible, so gym had basically become a free period. On Wednesday afternoon, I watched the guys play volleyball as I typed absently on my phone.
I’d moved on from combing through articles and forums about dyslexia to digging for dirt on Adena. Her attacks against the Princes had only gotten worse, and I couldn’t stand it. She still came after me too—though not physically, since the boys escorted me pretty much everywhere—but all she had against me were words she’d used a hundred times before.
Bitch. Trash. Whore.
I could ignore those. But I couldn’t ignore her dragging out the Princes’ dirty laundry every other day, making sure no one on campus would ever possibly forget about it.
We needed to stop her. But we still didn’t know how.