Page 82 of Let the Game Begin (Kiss Me Like You Love Me #1)

“Don’t joke about that kind of thing, Selene.

Jealously has nothing to do with it! You and I are not together, and I would never try to forbid you from fucking whoever else you like, but if someone tried to assault you…

Well, I wouldn’t be responsible for my actions,” I confessed, willing her to understand that it was the sexual-abuse element that had the alarms going off in my brain and all of my instincts leaping to action.

It was true, after all, that I would never have kept her from sleeping with someone else. I had no right to do that, even if…

“Really? So, if I got down with Xavier or Luke or someone else from the university, you’d be just fine with that?” she teased me, the smirk on her face so impertinent that I could have bitten it off.

No! Of course I wouldn’t allow Xavier or Luke to touch her, because they were twisted perverts like me.

They were worse, even—they were genuine sleaze bags.

Plus, I was very familiar with their sexual fantasies—I’d even participated in a few of them—and none of it was right for an innocent woman like her.

I would never have done anything like that with her.

“Some other guy at school, sure.” I pasted on a cocky grin, because I could accept that, but only once I’d gotten tired of her.

She could have other men but only after me.

“But for the moment, Tinkerbell…” I leaned into her and breathed in her coconut smell. She smelled freshly scrubbed, something that drove me crazy in a woman. “You’ll just have to settle for my cock,” I whispered, making her jolt.

Oh, yes.… She rubbed it and stimulated it at length the previous night. She had examined its length and diameter, and I was confident she wouldn’t easily forget it.

“What the hell was going through your head!”

My lustful reminiscences were interrupted by a furious Logan, who burst into the room without even bothering to knock. I turned away from Selene and braced myself for another tedious lecture from my brother.

“It was an accident,” I said mockingly, and Selene turned red, sitting back down on the bed. Logan was so enraged that he had thus far ignored her presence.

“An accident?” he repeated, looking first at me and then, finally, at Selene.

“Neil! Losing your phone is an accident; a fender bender is an accident; knocking over a vase is an accident. Sleeping with Matt’s daughter is not an accident, for God’s sake!

What were you thinking?” he snapped, and I glanced at Selene, who was looking extremely troubled.

Logan followed my eyes and allowed his shoulders to slump, scrubbing a hand over his face. “Selene, I know you’ve have a rough day, but I really need to talk to this dickhead.” He gestured at me, and I looked back at him, threateningly this time.

“Be careful,” I warned him, because he was approaching a line.

“Do you have any idea what is going to happen when Matt finds out about this?”

“Keep your voice down,” I hissed through gritted teeth. I hated verbal aggression; I hated it when people raised their voices at me. I knew that I’d fucked up and that sleeping with Babygirl was a huge mistake, but Logan knew how I was.

“How long has this been going on?” My brother looked exclusively at me, possibly because he blamed all this shit on me or possibly to avoid embarrassing Selene. If that was his goal, though, he was failing miserably at it.

“Since two weeks after she got here,” I admitted evenly. After all, it wasn’t like I killed someone. I had sex with a girl I liked. What was so wrong about that?

“So, for nearly a month, you mean?” he exploded, running both hands through his hair.

What a drama queen.

“I told you to lower your voice,” I repeated sternly, moving closer to him with my usual despotic authority.

“You didn’t even give her time to unpack,” he commented. “I’m used to your bullshit, but even I didn’t think you’d do something like this,” he continued, sounding anxious.

“I already told you; it was an accident.” I answered him with a false air of calm that I hoped wouldn’t completely evaporate.

“Yeah, tell it to someone else,” he snapped back.

“Neil’s telling the truth. We were both drunk.” After a prolonged silence, Selene’s delicate voice pushed in between us, drawing both of our attentions to her pallid face. She was visibly exhausted by her nightmare day. “It happened the night I got drunk, and…”

“And I took you back to your room,” Logan guessed with a heavy sigh before giving me a speculative look. “And you were drunk, too? Why?”

I didn’t know if that was a serious question, but I gave a nonchalant shrug either way.

“That’s none of your business,” I answered bluntly, mincing no words. I couldn’t tell him the real reason I was getting trashed with Selene right there. I would have, if we were alone and I hoped he could see that.

“Neil, don’t push me,” he threatened in a low tone. I grinned because no one could stop a person like me or instill any sort of fear in a soul that had already been through hell.

“Little bro—don’t push me .” He knew perfectly well, after all, what would happen if he did that. And appropriately, my cutting look seemed to be enough to make him step back behind the line. Where he belonged.

“How many times has this happened? I mean, what I’m saying is…

is this thing still going on between the two of you?

” He gestured between us with his index finger, and Selene blushed violently, looking adorable the way she always did when she wore her perpetually prim expression.

Even when she came, even in the midst of her orgasm, she maintained that aura of innocence.

“Yes,” I confirmed, drawing my brother’s hazel eyes back to me. Judging by the look on his face, he was preparing to cut my balls off any second.

“And were you drunk all the other times, too?” he asked mockingly, shaking his head as he resigned himself to the reality of what we had done.

“No. But while we’re here, would you also like to know how long it took me to get hard?” I answered with false gravity, and his head shot up. He looked at me like I was an alien, but if Selene wasn’t used to my vulgarity by now, that was her problem.

“This is going to end badly, and you have to know that. You have never had a stable relationship because you are an unstable person,” he accused me, right there in front of the Tigress. If he’d brought up my mental issues, I would have immediately tossed him out.

“I don’t even have to ask if you have feelings for her or if you’re actually together, because I already know what you’re going to say.

I know you, Neil. I know you better than anyone.

” The fact that he was talking like Selene wasn’t even in the room with us was upsetting me.

I hated how he just said and implied things that I would never have explained to her.

“And don’t give me that look, Neil!” he continued in the face of my forbidding expression.

“It’s only fair that she hears this and understands the kind of trouble she’s gotten herself into.

” He turned to Selene now. She raised up her chin, her hands tightening on her thighs.

Fuck, I didn’t want him to scare her. Couldn’t he see she was already terrified?

“Stop it,” I ordered him, trying to hold on to some fucking self-control, even as I felt it slipping away from me like water.

“He’s going to use you, Selene. He’ll use you until he’s had enough of you, and when that happens, you won’t want to let him go because while he was using you, you will have fallen in love with him the way everyone else does.”

Selene’s mouth fell open, but she seemed unable to respond. I lunged at Logan and gave him a shove.

I loved my siblings. In fact, the feelings I had for them were the only form of love that I actually believed in, but that wouldn’t stop me from tearing a strip off them when they deserved it.

“What the fuck are you saying to her?” I yelled, close to Logan’s face.

He was just as tall as me, but his face, like his frame, was less imposing and slimmer.

He didn’t fear me, though, because he knew that I would never lay a hand on him, that I would never really hurt him.

He knew I would lay down my life for him or Chloe, and it was this knowledge that allowed him to challenge me.

He gave me a disappointed look and shook his head.

“Only the truth. And you should be telling her, too. You could have had any girl you wanted; why pick Selene? She needed to stay out of your collection, because we both know how this is going to end.”

And…how was my twisted fairy tale with Babygirl supposed to end?

Certainly not happily ever after, and Logan could see it already.

Even if I didn’t appreciate him saying all of this in front of Selene, my brother was telling her the truth.

A truth that I had only given her in a partially obscured way, because I was selfish.

Because I knew I needed to warn her, but I didn’t want to destroy any possibility of getting to use her again.

And again and again.

I wanted her because, when I was with her, the memories were less resurgent. Which wasn’t what happened with the blonds.

“Logan,” she said, getting up to approach my brother. “Neil’s told me many times that we aren’t in a relationship and that I shouldn’t project any imaginary delusions on him. Don’t worry about me; he was straightforward.”

Incredible: Babygirl was defending me, but she didn’t realize that I had never been as completely honest as she’d thought.

Yes, I had made it clear that I was fucked up in every way and that my brain worked only intermittently. But I hadn’t been explicit, and that was out of pure self-absorption. I was even happy when she finally ended things with her shithead ex, even if I did hate the way he’d done it.

“And now, if you’ll both excuse me, my head feels like it’s exploding and I need to rest,” Selene murmured. Then she walked, shoulders hunched, to the door.