“Jesus,” Jay said. “Don’t do that while you’re driving!”
“Well, I’m not really sure what you want from me Jay. I had it all under control.”
“Not beating Michael up would have been a start.”
“He made you cry.” A few drivers gave him second glances as they passed in their vehicles. People in Hollybrook weren’t generally in the habit of driving around half-dressed, busted up like they’d been bare-knuckle boxing in some underground bar. “On the street. In front of everyone.”
He gripped the wheel harder, wishing he’d broken Valdez’s nose.
“And he had a baby in the home. God, Nick, I never would have told you if I’d known that this is what you were going to do. You’re lucky Angie didn’t call the police. You could have killed him, hitting him like that.”
“Probably because she’s planning on killing him herself,” he said darkly.
Jay pressed her lips together and he felt an unwilling flicker of fear. The last time she’d looked at him like that, she had left him for nine years.
“It was because of the paper,” he said, and he saw her head turn back towards him. “That’s why I did it. When Meghana showed you that newspaper, you were looking at her the same way you looked at me.”
When I forced you.
Her mouth trembled before she bit her lip and turned away like she’d heard the unspoken words.
When they arrived at the house, she slipped past him as soon as he’d gotten the door unlocked. Nicholas had to resist the urge to follow, to forbid her from leaving him again. He made the turn into the master bedroom instead, gripping the marble sink of his bathroom and leaning in to study the damage that Michael had done to his face in the big, full-wall mirror.
Touching his nose tentatively, he hissed through his teeth. Blood trickled out of one nostril accompanied by a hot flash of pain. It didn’t feel broken but he looked like a fucking mess.
At least Valdez looks worse.
“Did he break your nose?” Jay appeared in the mirror behind him, framed by the gilt edges his father had chosen. She had changed out of her work clothes and was now wearing sleep shorts and a faded tank top that left very little to his suddenly very overactive imagination.
“No.” He lowered his hand to the sink. “Just busted it pretty badly. I’ll be fine.”
“Sit down,” she said, pointing to the bench outside of the shower.
He moved to obey, glancing up at her beneath his dark brows. “I thought you’d left.”
“Why would I leave?” she asked crossly. “We’re kind of stuck with each other at this point, aren’t we?”
Nicholas did not care for that phrasing at all, but when he opened his mouth to say as much a snarl of pain escaped his lips instead as she dabbed at one of his cuts with a Q-tip that felt like it had been doused in battery acid.
“Fuck, that hurts.”
“It’s your own fault if it does.” She picked up his hand in her cool one, studying his split and oozing knuckles, and he had a vision of himself coming to her for some bleeding scrape at ten, when her hands were still bigger than his and her gentleness was all he’d craved. Nicholas inhaled and—god, he could smell her fucking hair. “You’re lucky this isn’t deep. When human bites get infected, you can get sepsis all the way down to the bone.”
“You’re such a little nerd,” he breathed, shifting uncomfortably as she got a new Q-tip and began dabbing more of that liquid fire torture all over the back of his hand.
“As opposed to, what, a fratty jock with anger issues?” Her golden eyes narrowed beneath their heavy fringe of lashes. “I know what you thought you were trying to do, but beating up my ex-boyfriend isn’t going to un-print what that stupid newspaper said about us.”
“Are you sure it didn’t turn your crank at least a little, seeing me mop the floor with that waste?” Another harsh breath escaped him as she wound the bandage around his hand. He flexed his knuckles. “I thought you liked it when Daddy got mean.”
“Cut it out,” she said, in a missish voice that had him stirring. “You could have gone to jail. Orworse. Don’t shake your head at me,” she snapped, furious again, seeing the smirk tugging at his lips. “Even you’re not above the law, despite what you seem to think. Did you really think he took those pictures? Hand to heart.”
No,” he admitted. “But whoever did it knew their way around our house so it could have been him, and to be honest, after you told me what he said to you, I wanted to put a little fear of god into him, anyway.” He let his hands fall to his sides, tilting his head obediently when she leaned in to study the scratches from Angie’s nails. “He’s still in love with you. I can tell. Thinking about you with me doesn’t fit with his image of Jay the Angel. Seeing photographic confirmation would make his head explode.”
“Was I part of your bargain, too?” Her fingers gripped his chin a little too forcefully. “The one that you cancelled in the car? Did you really pay him off to stay him away from me?”
“I told you what I was willing to do to make you mine.”
Jay applied the Q-tip from hell to his face far more viciously than he felt the situation required. “Have you ever readFaust, Nicholas?”
