Page 11 of Let the Game Begin (Kiss Me Like You Love Me #1)

Neil

I had no idea what time it was.

I sat on the edge of the bed staring into space, thinking about how life had drained all the essential energy from me. I was trying to survive, to hold on to this world, but I would have to give up soon.

I blinked repeatedly as the sun’s rays filtered through the window, lighting up the dark interior of my room. My desire to rise and face another day was nil. It was happening to me more and more often in recent days.

Why me?

It was the same question I asked myself every morning.

I rubbed my temples, throbbing because I’d had too much to drink the previous evening. Then, I glanced down at the bed, where the crumpled blankets beside me still held the imprint of the girl I’d spent the night with. I didn’t even remember her name. Luckily for me, she was already gone.

Lots of guys bragged about racking up women like they were collectible figurines, but I felt nothing but disgust toward myself. I just couldn’t find any other way to release the frustration inside me. That wasn’t an excuse, I knew, but it was what my life had taught me to do.

I got out of bed and grabbed the condom wrapper off the floor and threw it away.

I walked into the bathroom, still nude, and halted at my reflection in the mirror.

The memories rose up again and lit the fuse of my rage, which I knew would blaze inside of me until nothing was left but a pile of ashes and pain.

Why me?

I touched my lip with my index finger and licked the bitter taste from it. Then, I stared at my neck, wearing evidence of greedy kisses; my chest, crisscrossed with scratches. It wasn’t hard to guess how I’d gotten them.

Sex was essential for me. I didn’t just derive pleasure from it; I had an extreme, even sick need for it.

Yet I still hated the filthy feeling I got afterward.

I hated feeling the residual traces of strange hands or lips on me.

Most of all, I hated my body and my face that made me so desirable in the eyes of women.

Was it because of the way I looked? Was that why I had been picked?

I didn’t know, but I was determined to exploit those characteristics to the fullest. I would use them like a weapon against anyone who ever tried to hurt me. Never again would someone be allowed to destroy me.

I brushed my teeth, scrubbing them so hard that my gums bled. Then I got immediately into the shower and used an entire bottle of body wash to scour the memories from my skin. The boiling hot water alternately burned and the soothed the pain. The pain reminded me that I was alive.

I got out of the shower and wrapped a towel around my waist. Then, unexpectedly, a new and different train of thought interrupted my usual internal torments.

I thought about her.

About Selene.

I remembered the good smell given off by her silken hair. It smelled like purity—the scent of a woman and a girl at the same time. Maybe it was just a figment of my imagination, but I couldn’t remember ever having smelled anything like it before.

No woman had ever drawn me in like her. I wanted to unearth her, provoke her, talk with her…

and take her to bed. Selene had become another trophy for me to covet, but oddly, I didn’t just want to fuck her.

I wanted to kiss her and lick slowly all over that slender, delicate body.

I wanted to touch her hair and suckle her breasts, push her thighs open…

I wanted to give her pleasure instead of just receiving it.

Instead of just demanding it.

These ridiculous thoughts made me smile.

I quickly got myself together, and decided I would confine myself to just toying with her.

She would be just one of many for me, even if she was Matt’s daughter.

I could just have some fun without worrying about feelings I didn’t believe in. Feelings I couldn’t believe.

I had known a different kind of love, one that I would never want to push onto another human being. Still, I never knew how to control the impulses, and I felt the lure of the forbidden like a moth feels the flame.

I shut down all that rumination and went back into my room. Voices from outside in the garden caught my attention. Chloe and Logan were down there talking and joking with each other. I watched them from my balcony and felt a warming sensation in my chest.

My siblings were my reason for living.

I decided I would join them, so I put on a clean pair of boxers and some dark pants.

On my way to the garden, I passed the kitchen and spotted my mother reading a fashion magazine.

I hesitated for a few moments in the doorway.

I didn’t want to talk to her, but I knew I couldn’t avoid it forever.

I sighed as I walked into the kitchen, praying to whoever might be up there that she wouldn’t immediately start busting my balls with the usual questions.

“Good morning, darling.” She smiled at me, and I smiled in return, noting her severe pale pink suit and the way her blond hair was scraped back in an elegant hairstyle.

“Good morning,” I answered cooly. I poured myself some coffee, hoping both that it would ease my hangover headache and that my mother wouldn’t realize I’d been drunk the night before.

“Sleep well?” she asked, and I immediately noticed a suspicious tone in her voice that put me on alert.

“More or less,” I answered. I sipped my coffee with an indifference that was both affected and calculated. But I knew full well that war was going to break out at any moment.

“So, I saw something strange this morning…”

And here it is, shots fired. This enemy had a machine gun.

“Strange like?” I pretended not to know what she was talking about, but I was only wearing pants so my mother’s sharp eyes had no trouble spotting the incriminating marks on my chest.

“Like a girl coming out of your room, Neil!” she scolded me, and her voice bounced around between my temples until I had to squeeze my eyes shut.

“How many times do I have to tell you…” she went on but was interrupted when Matt appeared in the kitchen, unwittingly coming to my rescue.

“God, my back is killing me, but I have to go to work to today,” he complained, and my mother turned to console him for a few moments.

I took advantage of her distraction to sneak away and avoid what would undoubtedly be a tedious dressing-down.

She had long suspected what I got up to in my room, but I hadn’t given her confirmation before.

Living in a big house like ours gave me some freedom to fully dedicate myself to my sex life but didn’t provide all the privacy I would have liked.

Sure, I could smuggle the girls out through the service stairs or the back gates, but that wasn’t enough to hide the assiduous way I plowed through my quarry.

I was like the worst kind of beast: always starving, always unsatisfied.

It was a psychologically ruinous sort of existence that would eventually lead me to destroy myself as both a person and a man.

Brushing off these grim thoughts, I went out to meet my siblings where they were sitting at a table under our gazebo. The rays of the sun were warm and gentle on my bare shoulders as I walked.

“Oh, to what do we owe this honor?” my sister teased with a smirk.

“Love you, too,” I answered. I gave her a wink and then looked around for Selene. I couldn’t say exactly why, but I’d been hoping to run into her this morning. Or maybe just see her around the house, poured into those jeans of hers and filling up the space with her sass.

“It’s almost lunch time. You were up late, huh?” said Logan, giving me a suggestive look. My brother knew how I lived, and I’d never tried to deny any of it with him.

“Well, you’re the fucking romantic. I make my own fun,” I said shortly, because I was too focused on trying to determine the whereabouts of the lovely tigress who had invaded our house days ago now. I didn’t want to ask Logan about her and make him suspicious, but I couldn’t keep quiet any longer.

“Selene come out?” I scratched one eyebrow with my thumb and feigned a lack of interest, like I was just passingly curious about where she was. But my brother wasn’t stupid.

“No, she’s up on the third floor at the indoor pool,” he answered.

The fact that we had two swimming pools, one outside and one inside, had never seemed so practical as it did to me that day. Was Selene all alone there?

The idea thrilled me and sent a strange rush of adrenaline down my spine. It was completely inappropriate, but my deviant mind wanted to see her. Against all my good sense, I quickly excused myself, pretending that I’d forgotten my pack of Winstons in my room.

I avoided the kitchen and headed straight for the house’s elevator on the first floor, because I was in an atypical hurry to find Selene, even if I didn’t fully understand why.

When the automatic doors opened on the third floor, I crept down the hallway that led to our pool.

I mentally counted down the seconds that divided me from her and then… then I saw her.

I froze, just watching her for what felt like endless minutes.

She was stretched out on a chaise lounge wearing just a black bikini that fit her like a dream.

Her pale skin glowed, and her damp hair looked like polished amber.

Her rounded lips were parted slightly, and occasionally, she would lick them, which generated increasingly indecent thoughts in my twisted mind.

I refused to even blink, perhaps out of fear that she might vanish at any moment like a dream or an illusion.

I approached her like the most lethal sort of predator and threw myself down on the empty chaise next to her.

“Morning, Tinkerbell,” I said politely, nudging her side. Selene jumped and pulled out her earbuds.

“You scared me!” she cried irritably and turned my way. The ocean in her eyes dazzled me, and she seemed somehow even more beautiful than she had been the night before.