Dorien sat up, his feet slamming on the floor. When his eyes met mine, the storms threatened to blow me over. “She kissed me back in the library. Fuck, she made this delicious moaning sound… you should have heard it, it’d turn your dick stone hard.”
“Don’t be abou, Dorien,” Ivan warned.
My fingers tightened, nails digging into my skin.
Dorien spread his arms wide. “Go on, Titus. Lay me out. You know you want to.”
“Fuck off.” I turned to his bureau and tipped a stack of music books to the floor.Thump, thump, thump.They bounced on the rug. That didn’t make me feel better, but it did break the hypnotic hold he had over me.
Dorien laughed again, and the sound was hysterical and a little bit terrifying. “You’re right, bro. Faye can’t stand me. She thinks I hired some bum to break into her mother’s hospital room and write on her face. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t something there. Trust me, one thing I knowfor a factis that I don’t own Faye de Winter. But you know I will tame her. So why are we fighting over this? It’s not like the two of us haven’t been into the same girl before. Remember Cherie in Paris? We found a way to—”
“Three,” Ivan said from the door.
I whirled around. “Excuse me?”
Ivan swallowed. “I said, the three of us had the same girl before. And we want the same girl now.”
I lifted an eyebrow. “You too?”
Interesting. I wasn’t sure if Ivan had ever liked a girl. I was the one who fell hard for every chick who batted her eyes at me or complimented my playing. Dorien was a force of nature, and he sucked everything and everyone in his path. But Ivan… he had only one love, and that was Elena.
Until now, apparently.
Ivan nodded as he stepped forward. “I don’t want us to fight over her.”
Dorien flopped back on the bed, sending up a flurry of feathers. “Who’s fighting? Here’s the thing – as far as us three and our cocks are concerned, it’s Faye’s choice. One of us, two of us, all three of us, we can give her the option, but it’s her call, right?”
“Right…” I said slowly, not sure where he was going with this.
“So there’s nothing to argue about. We simply present Faye with a buffet of options – the best Broken Muse has to offer. No sabotage, no playing each other off to win, no jealousy. Faye chooses, and we accept her choice. Fair?”
Ivan and I glanced at each other. On the surface, everything Dorien said was perfectly reasonable. And it wasn’t unusual for us. We’d shared girls before. Things got pretty wild on tour, especially when we hit Amsterdam. Or Berlin.Oh, Berlin… how could I forget the jelly, and the things Fraulein Ana did with giant pickles…
But this wasn’t just some Broken Muse groupie. This wasFaye. Dorien’s Faye. And just because he agreed to this didn’t mean he intended to fight fair.
But fair or not fair, I wasn’t going to miss my chance.
“Deal.” I stepped forward, offering my fist.
“I agree.” Ivan placed his fist on mine.
Dorien thrust his fist on top, the treble clef tattoos dancing over his knuckles. “Good. Because we have something bigger to deal with then your overeager cocks. Someone who isn’t us is after Faye. Someone is trying to get to her through her mother. And we need to focus all our resources on bringing that person down, even if it means Manderley falls with it.”
Chapter Forty-Four
Faye
The three boys disappeared into the city for a recital, and Madame Usher ordered me to clean the rooms while they were away. As soon as I opened Dorien’s door, I was greeted with a fluffy, downy mess.
Feathers.What?
I assumed this was some new way to torture me until I found the source of the down – a pillow torn through the middle. My shoe crunched on something – a broken photo frame lying amongst scattered books and other things. The room looked like a war zone, with duck casualties and Dorien’s intoxicating scent laid out like barbed wire ready to trip me up.
As I carefully packed the glass into a trash bag, I slid out the photograph to place it on Dorien’s bureau. It was a picture of Dorien – his slate-grey eyes glaring defiantly at the camera, accentuated with dark, smudged eyeliner, arresting any viewer who dared gaze upon him. He wore a black shirt with a ruffled collar and stage makeup that gave him the appearance of a mesmerizing vampire – timeless and breathtakingly beautiful. He had his arm around a smiling girl, pulling her against his chest, his body language possessive.
Beside the photograph, someone had used lace and diamantes to create a collage, with a handwritten note in the center. “Dorien. Thank you for the greatest night of my life. Love, Clare.”
Clare.
