Page 49 of Let the Game Begin

“You scare me sometimes,” I grumbled with feeling, and he smiled thinly. He was particularly attractive when he smiled.

“Your eyes can’t keep any secrets from me,” he answered with an intense stare.

It was in moments like these that his effect was especially potent. I couldn’t resist him when he looked at me like that, and he, the giant bastard, knew it. And that was why he felt comfortable getting closer to me and putting his hands on my thighs. I stared down at his long fingers, sinking into my flesh and saw that my legs had started to fall open at his silent command. It was like my body wasn’t even my own anymore.

Neil situated himself between my thighs until my sex was pressed against his fly. I didn’t say anything, but only because that firm, insistent contact stole my breath.

“So, you wanna tell me why you’ve been avoiding me these past fewdays?” he whispered, rubbing my hips with his fingers. My mind was distracted, overloaded with too many uncontrollable sensations. I stared at his full lips and then into his golden eyes, which were waiting on my response. It was difficult to explain my perspective in words.

“Because I know that you’re screwing with me,” I admitted and his face grew dark. He didn’t appreciate the certainty in my voice, but that was what I believed.

“And what else do you know?” He didn’t deny my assertion, though. He leaned in until his nose was closer to my neck and seductively breathed in my scent. I didn’t fight him off, but I kept my hands tight on the counter’s edge. I didn’t have the nerve to touch him or be uninhibited like him, despite the fact that I was sitting there in just my shirt and underwear, practically draped all over his body.

“I know that the night we spent together meant nothing to you, that you actively resist love and that—” I said and he put his index finger to my lips and silenced me. I looked into his strange eyes and felt an unfamiliar warmth spread throughout the middle of my chest. It was the kind of warmth that would have been a lot more intense if I could have shared it with him.

“You’re a smart girl, Selene, but don’t dig too deep into this mystery.” He smiled confusingly at me.

“It’s a bottomless hole, and your hunger for the truth is only going to hurt you. Each one of us is an enigma. An unanswered question. And that’s how it should stay.” He moved his thumb over my bottom lip and examined it like he’d never seen one before.

“That’s just an oblique way of telling me I’m right, isn’t it? I’m not stupid, Neil.”

I was, though, because for some strange reason I felt like crying. I had been accumulating all these emotions and states of mind that I’d never experienced before in my life, and it was all because of the fucked-up boy in front of me. I didn’t know how to deal with or even understand what I was feeling.

“You can do whatever you want with me: You can talk to me. You can listen to me. You can use me…” He grabbed my hand and pressed it against his crotch. I sucked in a breath when I felt that thick and powerful hardnesshidden under the fabric. That had been inside me, moving and bringing me indescribable pleasure. I looked into his eyes, unsettled, as he continued, “But what you can’t do is understand me. Or associate me with anything like love.” The coldness of his words was even more painful than the resignation in his eyes.

I wondered how a young man could already have so much darkness inside him.

“I don’t use people.” I pulled my hand back as though I’d been burned, and he tilted his head to one side, frowning. It was second time he’d told me something like that, seeming to take it for granted that it was normal.

“People are not to be used,” I reiterated with more conviction, and it was then that he took a step back from me.

He looked bewildered, lost. He glanced around before bringing his gaze back to me and staring like I wasn’t even human.

Alarmed, I slipped off the counter, nearly falling, and limped a few steps forward. My knee hurt too badly to put weight on it.

“That’s why you can’t know me.” He gave me a disappointed look and then inexplicably walked away from me. What had I done to make him put that distance between us? A distance that was, more than anything else, psychological?

“Because?”

“Because you can’t accept what you can’t understand.”

I couldn’t tell if I was too fuzzy-headed to get what he was saying or if Neil really was just too twisted to be easily comprehended. I stared thoughtfully at him, and just then, the front door opened. A moment later, Anna appeared with a few envelopes in her hands. She dropped them on the floor and observed me, frowning.

She was definitely wondering what I doing in the kitchen wearing just my panties. Then she looked down at my red and slightly flexed knee and figured it out.

“Selene, honey, what happened?” She rushed to me with maternal worry, like I was her actual daughter, while my eyes remained locked on the somber boy just a short distance away from me.

“Take care of her, Anna,” he ordered the housekeeper before turning hisback on us and going upstairs.

The vibration of a cell phone shook me out of the confusion I was drowning in. I glanced around before realizing that it was my phone. Slowly, I bent down and retrieved it from my jeans, still tangled on the floor.

I swiped my thumb across the screen to unlock it and read the text that had just arrived:I’ll be there this weekend.

It was from Jared.

13

Selene