“She can’t stay at school,” Cassidy rants to the boys as if she’s scolding them.
“She’ll sue Briggs,” Owen barks.
God, I’m not going to sue the school, am I? For what?
My mind spins at a million miles an hour as manic conversations rattle all around me. I can’t focus. The words swim by like slippery fish that my mind can’t quite catch the meaning of. I’m not entirely sure what’s happened, but I’m getting the feeling my life will never be the same.
“Scarlett can’t be photographed with her,” Piper insists, and I agree without fully understanding the true meaning behind this. “Sorry”—she makes a face—“but the Digital Age can be a real bitch. Crap like this can come back to haunt her in ten years. You’ll have to lay low.”
“Lay low,” I repeat stupidly. In fact, I have nothing but my own stupidity to blame for this one. God, why am I such an idiot?
“What if she stays with Cade?” Cassidy offers up her boyfriend on a silver platter, and for a fleeting moment, I’m thankful and yet still unsure why.
Piper shakes her head. “Buddy will bark up a storm every time a photographer comes sniffing around.” She leans in forlorn at the mention of Cade’s big furry beast. “I’d offer you Owen’s place, but there are way too many places for those pap vermin to hide.”
“Pap?” I nod into the lunacy happening around me. “Do I need to get a pap smear?” Anything seems possible and quasi-logical when your life is spinning out of control. God knows I’d skip all the way to the gynecologist’s office to right the situation.
“No, silly.” Piper gives my hand a tug, and I blink because I wasn’t even aware of the fact she was holding it. “The choice is clear. You’ll have to stay with Jet.”
Cassidy nods frantically into this. “You’ll have to stay with Jet.”
Scarlett lets out a heavy sigh of relief. “You’ll stay with Jet.”
I glance down at the other end of the table at the hulkish, tatted manwhore of a beast.
“I’ll stay with Jet?”
Bodies burst into the room just as my friends escort me out and into Jet Madden’s souped-up monster truck. Before I can blink, we’re off to the other side of Hollow Brook.
What the hell just happened?
Jet
What the hell just happened?
I pull into the back of the tiny house I’m usually proud to call my own, but at the moment I’d trade in my pride of ownership for a cloak of invisibility. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t shake the fuckers who followed us here.
“Don’t worry,” I say, killing the engine. Daisy Pembrooke sits by my side, staring straight ahead, shaking as if she’s just seen her life flash before her eyes, and in a lot of ways she has. “They can’t come back here. It’s private property.” I help Daisy out, grab her bag, and usher her in through the side door just as an infantry of men erupt over the lawn, clutching on to their cameras as if it were their dicks. “Dude,” I bark at the first one who gets in my face. “Get the hell out of here! I’m calling the cops.”
No sooner do I get us inside and lock the door than an angry fist slams over it as someone shouts, “I’d like to ask a few questions!”
“Not today, buddy.”
I help Daisy into the living room and glance around helpless at the pigsty the place is. Soda cans, fast food wrappers, shoes in a pile at the foot of the door, and a pair of baby pink panties I manage to flick under the couch with my shoe. “Let’s take a seat. You want something to drink? I can make coffee.”I can make coffee?Hell, I don’t think I can boil water for this girl. God knows that ancient coffeemaker I have collecting dust hasn’t worked since day one.
“No.” It’s all she can manage. Her fingers tremble as she plays with her necklace a moment. Daisy is sweet—not usually, but for the sake of pity, I’ll defer to kindness. But she is undeniably beautiful with those pouty pink lips and tits the size of melons. I never understood why the hell she flaunted the goods down at that meat market to begin with. Caila reigns in that place. But Daisy? Miss Whitney Briggs University? Now that’s just a case of wrong time, wrong place written all over it. I thought she might live to regret that stripper hovel one day, and now I’m convinced she’ll live to regret something far worse.
“Start from the beginning.”
“I—” a few gagging noises emit from her throat. “Then he—” she twirls her finger through the air. “Caila—” she gets a far away look in her eye, a little demonic if you ask me, just before she starts nodding her head nonstop.
The back door rattles, and I hear my name shouted and cursed. I let Daisy’s buddies in while Rex shakes his head at me.
“You okay with this circus?” He nods back at the screaming crowd as I bolt us inside.
“Yeah, sure.” Something in me is very much not okay with any impending circus taking up residence on my front lawn. If the McCarthy’s next door thought they had an issue with my truck making the neighborhood look like trash, I’m sure they’re loving this. The McCarthy’s can suck my big, fat dick as far as I’m concerned. That girl is hurting, and if this is the only place she has, then so be it.
We head back into the living room where the girls huddle in a frantic circle, crying, screaming—and from this vantage point, it looks as if a struggle is taking place.
