Page 56 of Let the Game Begin (Kiss Me Like You Love Me #1)

The next day, I decided to relegate Selene to a corner of my mind and deal with the much more serious issue.

My sister didn’t want to go to school and was locked in her room, drowning in the pain that piece of shit Carter Nelson had inflicted upon her.

I knew I should regret leaving him comatose in a hospital bed, but all I could feel was frustration that I hadn’t killed him outright.

On top of everything else, I now knew that the Nelson family intended to press charges against the attacker when Carter woke up. There was no way the kid wouldn’t mention my name if I didn’t find some way to stop him.

“What are you thinking about?” Jennifer kissed my neck, nuzzling the tip of her nose against me to breathe in my smell.

We were in my car, but I had no intention of fucking her there, despite her continual advances.

She’d asked me for a ride home, and I’d agreed to take her, not thinking about the possibility that she might try to get in my pants the way she usually did.

I didn’t mind her forwardness. I was used to it, in fact.

Jennifer and I had known each other for four years at that point, and we had established a type of relationship based purely on sex without any sort of commitment.

We got along well, especially when we weren’t talking.

She had an incredible body: huge tits and a tight ass well worth slapping.

And she was a real firecracker in bed, which was why I generally preferred to fool around with her in my free time.

“You know I don’t like it when you stick your nose into my business.”

She was very familiar with who I was and how I thought about things.

Jennifer sat back comfortably in the passenger seat and adjusted the plaid skirt that barely covered her thighs.

Today, they were wrapped in a pair of dark tights.

Despite the falling temperatures, she never gave up her uniform of knee-high boots and miniskirts, which I used to instantaneously access the only part of her that really interested me.

“Do you know any friends of Nelson’s?” I asked as we arrived at the front gate of her house.

Jennifer was part of a wealthy family, originally from Ireland.

Her father had died in a car accident, and her mother wasted no time at all starting a new life with an entrepreneur out of New York whom she met by chance on a business trip.

“Friends of Bryan, you mean?” she asked, doing up the buttons of the coat that she’d just opened in a desperate attempt to lure me.

“No, the younger brother. Carter,” I specified, starting to develop a plan that I could put into action soon to make sure the little bastard didn’t press charges.

“Mmm…you should ask Xavier. He always knows everyone.” She shrugged and tugged on a black hat, covering the top of her blond head.

“Okay. You can go.” With one hand resting on the steering wheel and the other on the gear shift, I glanced out the window again. I kept the engine running, waiting for her to get her ass out of my Maserati. Jennifer, however, just sat there, staring thoughtfully at me.

“You’re sleeping with her, aren’t you?” she asked suddenly, out of nowhere.

“With who?” I scowled, almost annoyed with her. I hated it when she brought up personal questions, trying to ferret out some kind of secrets about my love life. A love life that I didn’t have and, more importantly, would never want to have.

“With the little Virgin Mary who lives with you.” She gave me a look of such disturbing rage that it would have sent shivers down anyone else’s spine.

“No,” I lied. “And even if I were, it shouldn’t matter to you.” Her bright eyes lingered on my hand gripping the steering wheel, then moved down to take in my entire body and the tension there that I had gotten all too good at hiding.

Apparently satisfied, she brought her eyes back up slowly to mine. Then she leaned into me and put a hand on my knee, stroking up toward my thigh.

“Then why not let Xavier and Luke share her? They’d both like to have her,” she whispered, just a short distance from my lips.

Her words fluttered slowly around in my brain, conjuring up images of the two of them in bed with Selene while Babygirl shouted and writhed to escape their unwanted touches.

A searing heat spread from the pit of my stomach up to my chest. I grabbed Jennifer by the throat and tightened my grip until her nose was touching mine.

She held her breath and stared at me, terrified.

“You try to get them to do something like that and you’ll regret ever meeting me,” I threatened her sharply. Carter’s treatment was just a sampling of the many insane things I was capable of doing.

She smiled. Fuck, she smiled! And I knew exactly why: She had won. She’d gotten the reaction she wanted from me.

“You are sleeping with her. And I’ll tell you what’s more: you like the little brat, too.” She murmured the last part in a broken whisper that made me abruptly release her. Jennifer rubbed her throat and coughed, staring at me with glistening red eyes.

“You’ve been warned. Now get out!” I ordered, interrupting our stare-down.

Jennifer had never been jealous of Alexia because she knew that, of the two of them, I preferred her, but she had always been extremely threatened by other women.

So much so that she occasionally went to extreme lengths, like beating up girls I had been with.

The two of us weren’t in a relationship; we weren’t together in any real sense, but something had changed between us in the last year.

“She likes you; I like you. Everyone likes you because you’re impossible to ignore,” she said. I had quit looking at her by then, but I could sense her irritating scent creeping into my space as she leaned close to my ear. I could even feel her warm breath touching my skin.

“Everyone likes you because you are filthy in exactly the way women want.”

Women liked me because I was filthy, but none of them knew just how filthy I really was.

I tried not to give her any additional attention, because our conversation was already over, but Jennifer stopped getting out of the car when she saw a man lurching around right in front of the gate.

I bent down to see him better. He was wearing a nice suit, but the shirt was buttoned incorrectly and he looked confused. He looked drunk, actually.

“Billy,” she murmured, looking alarmed. It was strange to see Jennifer scared of anything, yet in less than a minute, that man had completely changed her demeanor.

“Your stepfather?” I guessed, and she nodded. “Is your mom home?” I had long suspected that Jennifer’s home life wasn’t the best. Her stepfather was an alcoholic prick, and her mother only got with him for his money and to ensure her life of luxurious excess.

“I doubt it,” she said as she continued to stare through the windshield at Billy. He could barely stand upright.

I could have just told her to leave and gotten the fuck out of there, but even though I’d always been callous, I wasn’t quite that callous.

“I’ll go with you,” I suggested, getting the pack of Winstons out of my jeans so I could light up.

“No, you don’t need to. Billy’s a solid dude; he’s just been going a little overboard with the alcohol lately. But it’s fine. Go back to your brat,” she sneered at me.

She was pissed at me, and she was going to continue being that way until I went back to giving her the kind of attention I did before Selene came here.

“He hits you, doesn’t he?” I asked her abruptly, taking my first drag. I’d never cared much about my friends’ personal lives, and it wasn’t like me to ask that kind of question. But I felt compelled in that moment to learn more about her. I knew what it felt like to be under someone else’s thumb.

“I’ve seen the bruises; you can’t lie to me,” I added quickly.

I knew every curve of her body since I saw her naked on a near daily basis, and I had spotted some suspicious marks on her pale skin.

I’d never been overly curious about them before, but now this confirmed my theory.

Jennifer shook her head and gave me a sly smile.

“Those are evidence of your passion. When you’re fucking me hard, you—”

“Cut the shit! Don’t joke about that kind of thing!” I scolded her shortly, and she flinched, dipping her chin in discomfort. I had never seen her yield so quickly. I continued to smoke and sighed. I hated being so aggressive, but it was a part of my nature that I’d been living with my whole life.

“Why do you care what Billy does to me?” she said softly, and for the first time, I saw her suffering.

There were tears, clinging to her eyelashes and filling her blue eyes.

Blue, but a different shade from Chloe’s or Babygirl’s.

Jennifer’s eyes were like two pieces of sky, semi-obscured by smoke.

They could be sweet sometimes, like Babygirl’s, while other times they radiated all the energy of a furious storm.

“The whole time we’ve known each other, you’ve never talked to me about anything personal,” she answered shortly. She looked back out the windshield and sank down in her seat.

I mulled over her words, sucking on my Winston again.

It was true: Jennifer and I had known each other for years, but I’d never been capable of just having a conversation with her or really getting to know her.

I’d often wondered how she felt about being treated that way by me, so coldly detached, indifferent, and insensitive.

Why couldn’t I stop myself from taking out what had been done to me on the women around me?

“I know what your skin smells like, how your body feels, and all the things you like in bed, but sometimes I just look at you and wonder if I’ll ever really know you at all.

” Jennifer spoke again, but I just kept smoking and avoiding her gaze.

I raked through my hair with one hand while I clamped on to my cigarette with the other.

A desperate attempt not to lose control.