Love Triangle Six Books of Torn Desire - Willow Winters Page 0,97

wish thing…”

“Pretty accurate,” I say, wishing he would go belowdecks. And wishing he wouldn’t. There’s something complicated about him, the way he makes me want opposite things at the same time. “I don’t want to die, but I want to live. People call that having a death wish.”

With clear reluctance he pulls his hand back and settles his arms on the railing a few feet away from my ass. His eyes are trained on the dark horizon, but I can tell he’s still watching me. “This is what living means? Falling into the ocean with no one around to rescue you?”

I point at the choppy water. “The captain dropped anchor before dinner. We aren’t even moving. What do you think is going to happen?”

“Head trauma. Hypothermia. Drowning.”

“For your information I’ve been coming up here by myself for a decade. No one ever comes with me. Haven’t fallen overboard once.”

“Then statistically speaking, you’re overdue.”

“Wow, you really are my dad’s heir.” Part of me is glad to have company on one of my nightly reveries. The other part of me feels the distinct intrusion of having a stranger in my space.

“What?”

“Go back down and play with your calculator.”

There’s a pained pause. “I can’t. Not when I know you’re up here, getting high and hanging off a two-hundred-foot yacht. If something happened to you—”

“Nothing’s going to happen to me.” The sea takes that moment to bump bump bump me, my ass a full two inches off the rail with every pull of the yacht. I’m holding on tight so I don’t go flying, not forward or backward, my perch secure.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather paint a mythical creature on the observation deck?”

“I know you’re making fun of me right now, but no. I don’t have enough paint for that.”

“Can you just sit on a deck chair like a normal person?”

“Do I look normal to you? Don’t answer that.”

There’s a flash of white teeth. That’s how I know he’s smiling even though the rest of his face is in shadow. The smile is there one second and gone the next, as temporary as his presence in my life but strangely momentous. “I’m sorry I called you a poor little rich girl.”

“Are you just saying that so I’ll get off the railing?”

“Is it working?”

“No, but I appreciate the effort.”

And strangely that was true. Not many people have ever cared enough to follow me up to the deck at midnight, to make sure I didn’t fall into the ocean. Definitely not one of the stepsiblings, who would probably have given me a little push to get rid of the competition for the inheritance.

It makes me want to prove myself to him, to convince him that I’m worth saving even if he apparently already thinks so. “Medusa wasn’t for attention. I mean, she was, but not because I wanted Daddy to pay for a new science lab.”

“Then why’d you do it?”

“This girl got roofied at a party.”

He sucks in a breath. “Harper.”

“It wasn’t me.” I glance sideways to see his black eyes staring at me, so hard and fierce it almost seems possible that he can go back in time and rip the balls off a frat boy. What would he say if he knew my past? “It wasn’t me, I swear. I wasn’t even friends with her.”

After a searching look, he turns back to the ocean. “A girl got roofied.”

“Everyone knew about it, like the next day. One of the football players slipped it in her drink, and then the football team, I mean the entire football team, took advantage of her.”

“Christ.”

“They suspended the guy who brought the roofie to the party, one of the players, but not the one who gave it to her—the quarterback. And not the rest of the team. A big game was coming up. You can’t play a game without all your players.”

He’s quiet a moment. “I’m sorry.”

For that I pass him the joint and watch while he takes a drag, his lips touching where mine have been. “The honor society set up a protest and everyone who went got suspended. And after all that there wasn’t a single word about the party in the local papers. The morning before the game there was going to be a big pep rally with the cheerleaders and the school’s donors. The press was going to be there. They had the janitors stay late shining the floor. Real press, from a newspaper that wouldn’t take money not to print the story.”

He passes the