RIOT HOUSE (Crooked Sinners #1) - Callie Hart Page 0,86

suspicion: that he truly is a motherfucking asshole.

“Is this the part where you judge me again and make assumptions about what I’m gonna do?” he fires back.

God, I’m too tired for these kinds of games. I barely slept last night, and after jogging so far this morning, grinding myself into the ground before dawn even broke properly, I’m running on fumes. Rolling my eyes heavenward, I sag back into my hardbacked chair. “Is there something I can help you with, Wren?”

My disloyal, double-crossing heart jackhammers away beneath my ribs as he stops smiling, pinning me with that rude green gaze. Normal people don’t look at others the way Wren looks at me. It’s as though he’s searching for something in my face and he won’t blink or turn away until he’s found it. It’s extremely uncomfortable to be studied this way. “You can start by telling me what you meant by, ‘whatever this is.’”

“Fuck. I don’t know! I didn’t mean anything by it. It was an off-the-cuff comment, okay? Don’t worry, I’m not expecting you to declare me your girlfriend now.”

He tips his head back and laughs. In the library, where silence is golden, he tips his beautiful fucking head back and he laughs. A stern sshhhhhh! echoes across the room, and a horrible heat creeps up my neck. It was bad enough before, when only a few of the other students working at the desks had noticed Wren’s arrival. Now everyone in the place knows that he’s here, and that I just said something that he found patently ridiculous.

“You might not have figured it out, but I know exactly what this is, Elodie,” Wren says, his laughter dying on his lips. “If you ever scrape up the courage and want to find out, all you need to do is ask. You know I’ll be unfalteringly honest.”

“Oh yeah. I can always rely on your unfaltering honesty.” I wonder what the punishment would be for slapping another student. If we were in the art rooms, or Fitz’s den, or the food hall, I might do it and find out, but not here. I wouldn’t dare risk my library card.

A ruinous smirk tugs at Wren’s mouth. That wicked curve to his lips is absolutely torturous. When I see it, all I can think of is the heat of his mouth as he kissed me on that blanket. The smell of fresh pine and salt air and half-forgotten beaches in his hair as he dipped down to press that cruel mouth to my neck…

“Is this the part where you tell me how excited you are to meet up tonight?” he asks.

I ignore the question. “Are you seriously going to risk Carina coming back here and seeing us together?”

He looks at me like I’m speaking in tongues and nothing I’m jabbering about makes any sense. “I’m sorry, Little E. I don’t know what I did to encourage this belief that I give a flying fuck what Carina Mendoza thinks about anything but let me clear this up. I don’t care if Carina comes back and finds me sitting in this chair. I don’t care if she knows that I want you. I don’t care if she knows that I had my tongue down your throat last night and you made my dick harder than it’s been in two fucking years.”

Wow.

I look down at my hands, my cheeks burning like crazy.

“Oh, Elodie,” Wren whispers breathlessly. “You don’t like hearing that? That you made my dick hard? Or…do you like hearing it too much?”

“For god’s sake, can you not say stuff like that in public, please?” I despise myself for blushing. From the way he’s staring at me, his lips parted, eyes wide, he’s fascinated by my reaction to his outrageous statement. It would have been so much better for me if I’d kept my cool and not reacted at all. For some reason, it matters to me that he doesn’t think I’m some stuttering, stupid, inexperienced schoolgirl. It shouldn’t, but fuck, it really does.

Wren slides his hand across the table, palm facing upwards, his fingers curled up toward the ceiling, his eyes fierce and intense. “You do know how crazy you drive me, don’t you, Little E? You know that my body isn’t my own anymore. I fucking crave you. And I really don’t give a fuck who knows it.”

He looks down at his hand, resting between us on top of the lacquered table’s surface. Clearly, this is some sort of test. He’s waiting for