Page 17 of A Moth to the Flame (Utopia #1)

“Okay.” He raises my hands in a placating gesture. “I know. I get it. Tell you what, try some different tactics if you don’t want to take care of my business. A cold shower the next time it gets hard can help. Or think about the worst thing that’s ever happened to you. That’ll make it deflate.”

I don’t doubt that he knows his penis better than I do, but that advice is downright laughable. Nothing makes his ravenous dick deflate.

“This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me,” I insist. “I can’t stop thinking about it because I’m actually living it, and your stupid cock doesn’t care about my mental distress.

You never talked to anyone in town. You won’t help me read through a collection of the oldest books in the entire mountains, and you’re probably spending your days lounging around while I’m the only one working to fix this for us! ”

He fists my hands into my eye sockets until they make a disgusting squishing noise.

“Don’t damage my body for revenge,” I shriek.

He drops my hands, pinning me with a soft expression that’s almost the last straw. “Is there something else you want me to do? Want me to pamper your body a bit with a spa day at Savina’s Salon, or—” He swallows thickly. “Roll your marble a bit to keep things even between us?”

I call his bluff. “You’ve already made it clear how disgusting you find me. You have zero desire to roll my marble.”

“If you want me to, I will,” he murmurs.

I snort. “You probably don’t even know how to locate a woman’s…marble.”

“I know this is the last thing you want to hear, but I’ve had plenty of practice.” The self-deprecating smile on my face is nauseating. “I can treat your body right while I’m in it. Just say the word.”

I refuse to enter into a body count competition with Duke Castellaw. Instead, I hold my breath and count to ten in my mind.

“Cordie, I—” He swallows harshly again, squeezing my eyes tightly shut. He inhales a deep breath before whispering, “I could help you. Show you the way a man should treat you right.”

That’s it. I blow.

“You’re the man who’s never treated me right!” I scream. “I was a virgin until my junior year of college! No one in town would touch me! I was so convinced that there was something deeply wrong with me that it took me years to even try to date when I got out of this goddamn town!”

He blinks like he doesn’t believe me.

Fine. He needs proof? I have plenty. Now that I’ve released this pressure that’s been decades in the making, it feels way too good to stop.

I rush out, “In tenth grade, you told everyone I smelled bad, and then you somehow made that happen. I don’t know what you hid in my locker, but it reeked.

The smell got into everything. Junior year, you said you caught me humping a sheep.

Senior year, you convinced pretty much every guy at school that I caught rabies from the animals I regularly fucked. ”

He continues to blink at me, like he can’t comprehend what I’m saying. Like I’m speaking a different language.

“Even when I came home for summers during undergrad, you didn’t let up. Freshman year, I was suddenly a meth addict. Sophomore year, I became a mafia mattress. There’s not a mafia presence that I know of in Huntington, by the way. Junior year…” I pause. I can’t actually remember that one.

“You gushed to anyone you saw about your boyfriend back at Marshall,” he states flatly.

Oh, right. Maybe that’s why I don’t remember that year’s gossip about me. Because I drew first blood for once. That little white lie saved me a lot of trouble. I never had a boyfriend. I had a drunk one-night stand at a frat party because I was just so tired of feeling untouchable all the time.

“And senior year, you quit coming home,” he finishes before I can.

Oh, I didn’t quit. I’d never abandon Granny for the holidays or her birthday.

I just got sneakier about arriving and departing in the dead of night, only staying for two or three days at a time.

That was part of the reason I never wandered out of state.

I couldn’t bear to be too far away if she ever needed me for anything.

“That’s right.” I nod. “Because I’d had enough of your abuse. So stop acting all helpful and caring now. You don’t want to pamper my body. You don’t want to teach me things. You’re just abusing me in different ways.”

I could punch my own face when I spy tears welling in my eyes.

“I never told anyone you had rabies or that you were a mafia mattress. Cordie, I swear, I never stuck anything in your locker.”

Of course, this asshole is going to look me in the eyes and lie to his own face. He’s probably so good at lying to himself that this is a walk in the park for him. Either that, or he’s so used to being treated like a prince around here that he can’t fathom being the villain in someone else’s story.

I blow out a cleansing breath and try to convince myself that it’s enough I got even this much off my chest. It’s not about him, and I’ll never be able to prove to him that he’s living in an alternate reality.

If he wants to go the rest of his life believing that he’s innocent, then that’s on his soul, not mine.

All I can do is focus on being proud of myself for growing and changing and not repeating the mistakes of my past. I’d love to grow out of Duke’s body and move on from Utopia—for good .

“This is getting us nowhere,” I say. “If you don’t want to help me read, then can you at least put your Castellaw prince status to good use?

Since you know everyone in town so much better than I do, make a list of anyone who might have books about the history of the well or any other folklore from the area. ”

He licks my lips, inhaling a shaky breath in a pathetic display of calming down.

Such an actor.

“I can do that. And I wanted to give you a heads up. It’s supposed to storm next week,” he says conversationally, as if the past few minutes of emotional agony never happened. “My right knee will ache something fierce unless you take six Advil and ice it a couple times during the day.”

“Six Advil?” I gulp. Holy hell. That’s a lot. “Is that safe?”

“I weigh over two hundred pounds, Gingersnap,” he points out, still with that same soft voice. “Where two pills might work for you, I need a bit more. That’s how much Finn told me to take before the pain gets too bad.”

The youngest Castellaw brother, Finn, is an EMT for the county. I only know that because apparently the funeral home sent Finn in the ambulance to confirm Granny’s death and retrieve her body. I got all the details secondhand, from paperwork.

Blessedly, I don’t have the time or energy to focus on those crushing memories these days.

“Does the pain get worse depending on how bad it storms?”

“Yeah,” he admits, sucking in a breath as he rises from the couch. “Severe weather will really knock me off my feet.”

I gulp for an entirely different reason.

I hate storms. I’m terrified of them. Every time the wind blew too hard in Huntington, I lost my freaking mind.

I lived on the upper floor of a dorm that didn’t have a basement to take shelter in.

The best I could manage was an interior stairwell on the ground level.

My house in Charleston has a full-sized basement, thankfully.

At least the mountains in West Virginia shield us from the most violent kinds of storms. We get lots of snow here. Not so many tornadoes, which makes my phobia completely irrational .

If I can find something in one of these books to help us, then maybe I’ll only have to suffer through my fear of storms instead of suffering through storms with a nonstop erection and a throbbing knee next week.

“You sure there’s nothing I need to know?” Duke asks as he picks up the bag of clothes that I’ve prepared for him. “About your body? You mentioned something about an allergy. I’ve been trying to eat plainly so I won’t trigger it.”

“Stop pretending to care about me,” I hiss.

The smile on my face is sad. Not sure whether that makes it better or worse. “I can’t, Cordie. God knows I’ve tried.”

Whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean. More of his mind games.

I hold my breath until he leaves with a quiet snick of the door closing instead of the expected slam.

I scream out my frustration, but it sounds like Duke screaming back at me. The sound of his voice rings through my brain and makes his dick hard. I hallucinate glowing witchcraft symbols again.