Page 80 of A Lethal Game of Trust

She sat up, anger blazing in her eyes. “Bored?” she blurtedand scoffed. “Fucking hell, Dom.”

“You want me to lie to you?” I asked.

I was already lying. Already lying.

And I knew I was hurting her like I had before. But hurting her like this was better than destroying her.

“It might be a touch too romantic for post-sex cuddles,” she snapped. “I don’t know if you could handle it.”

And she left.

I was losing her again.

29

Someone I Can Trust

Leonie

Issy left early to ‘go to the bakery.’

When I’d sneaked back into her room in the early hours of the morning, I’d seen her phone lit up with texts from ‘DINGUS’. The name Rocco was saved under.

I wasn’t about to ask. In case she asked me the same question.

Like I had started to sneak about, she’d been doing so on and off for years to go and see him.

When there were a few raps at her bedroom door, I knew it was Dom.

I pulled myself up and opened the door an inch. “Yes?”

He was looking sheepish, lips pursed and staring at the floor, rocking on his heels. Like he did as a kid.

“I like us being friends,” he said, avoiding eye contact. “And… I don’t want to lose that.”

My silence made him look up at me through his lashes. “Want to bake Issy’s birthday cake with me? Like we usedto?”

Every year, the Belov siblings had a competition. They made each other a birthday cake and tried to cover it with the most horrific, child-like decorations they could manage.

Since the tradition began back when Issy and I were eleven and he was thirteen, Issy had won every year but one. The last year that we had baked together was for Issy’s fifteenth birthday. We had made a Yoda cake, where his ears were drooping so badly that before we had got it to her, one of them had fallen so it looked more like it was coming out of his crotch than his head.

“You want us to bake?”

That might have been the Dom from years ago, but the Dominic Belov before me now had other things on his mind. Like sex.

Yet he wanted to bake with me?

Maybe we were actually friends.

With a few benefits.

“I want us to bake,” he confirmed.

In our kitchen, I pulled out all the ingredients we would need and he tied one of the aprons around my back.

We made the cake, getting half-covered in flour. Dom was always the messiest chef but clearly had an ulterior motive by getting two handprints on the apron across my tits.

Watching him stir the mixture in the bowl, I suddenly felt an overwhelming wave of sadness. Dom would have baked this cake alone if I wasn’t here.