Page 24 of Watch Your Back (Devil’s Backbone #2)

Carter thinks he’s the only one who can woo Ashley with pretty dresses and shoes?

Wrong. I’ve had her in my bed all week, no way am I gritting my teeth while he dresses her in red for another society event.

It’s required a hell of a trade with Royce to get his help, but I’m confident she’ll be in blue tonight.

It’s a dick move, undercutting Bass like this, but a guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do when love is on the line. Ash is my end game. I feel it in my bones. I just need her to see it too.

I t took the rest of the bottle of rum—shared between all of us, in fairness—and several repeated conversations before we finally cleared the air on what’d happened with Carter and me in the restroom.

I stuck firm in my belief that he was one hundred and fifty percent not under his own willpower, which directly contradicted what Nate’s mom had told them about hypnosis.

Unless, of course, her idea of drug influence played a part.

Then we needed to circle back around to how Carter had been triggered. I remembered the phone call he’d taken right before it all went down, and a check of his phone records revealed it was a private number call.

“I don’t think you’ll be shocked to hear who that call came from,” Nate said with a groan, looking up from his laptop.

He’d grabbed it the moment I mentioned Carter getting a phone call and had spent the last twenty minutes sitting on the floor with his laptop on the coffee table, tracing who’d made the call.

Dread rolled through me, and I rubbed the bridge of my nose. “Dr. Fox?”

Nate shook his head. “Nope.” He spun his laptop around to show us the result he’d zoomed in on. “Abigail Monstera.”

“Great, so our strongest lead is now a ghost,” Heath muttered, shaking his head. “We really should have seen that one coming.”

I rolled my eyes, frustrated. “Obviously it’s not actually her.

It’s someone who knows I had her diary. Right?

It has to be whoever stole the diary from my room, messing with our heads.

Nate already traced her number back when I got those texts about Paris, and it’s disconnected.

So clearly this is just someone with better hacker powers being a smartass. ”

Nate’s lips quirked up in a smile. Admittedly, we were all a bit tipsy at this stage. “Hacker powers?” he teased. “Is that like…invisibility or shapeshifting?”

I narrowed my eyes and extended my middle finger.

“Why Abigail, though?” Heath mused aloud. “I don’t remember anything particularly different about her, do you guys?”

Royce yawned, ruffling Lady’s fur as she rolled on her back to expose her belly. “I remember she was hazed pretty harshly by the inner circle at the time. Remember Dirk had a real vendetta against scholarship students?”

The other guys all nodded and murmured their agreement, but I was out of the loop. “Who’s Dirk and why does he hate poor people?”

“Dirk Fitzpatrick,” Nate said, answering my question.

“Used to be the DB leader when we were freshmen. He was a real elitist snob who perpetuated the idea that Nevaeh students should never be associating with lower-class citizens. Thinking back, there’s every chance some of the initiations and hazing were taken too far with a few students. ”

I frowned, thinking it over. “But…you never saw it happen yourselves? You’d have stopped it if you did…right?” I really fucking hoped so. For all Nate’s faults, I really didn’t believe he’d stand by while anyone was truly bullied simply based on their bank account.

His brows shot up and he met my eyes with a hard stare. “What do you think, Layne?”

“After the stunt you pulled tonight,” Carter said quietly, speaking up for the first time in almost an hour, “I doubt you want to hear what Ashley thinks of you.”

Royce let out a low whistle, glancing between Nate and me with a lopsided grin. “Was this to do with how I saw you two all cozy while talking to Jocelyn?”

“You didn’t hear?” Carter shook his head slowly, clicking his tongue. “Nate and Ashley got engaged tonight.”

Heath’s jaw almost hit the floor and I threw my hands up in the air.

“We did nothing of the sort. Nate was just bullshitting to get his mom to back off. Irrelevant. Can we circle back to Abigail please? Can you guys remember anything useful as to why she’s so involved in this hypnosis shit now? She is dead, right?”

“Uh, yeah?” Royce replied, scratching the back of his neck and looking confused as hell. “They found her body in Lake Placid, didn’t they?”

I shrugged. “From what I researched, they had to ID based on dental records. Seems suspicious, doesn’t it?”

“I dunno,” he sighed. “That would mean she faked her death, which I don’t think is anywhere near as easy as books and films make it out to be.

I think…it’s more plausible that someone knows you found her diary and is now fucking with your head.

All our heads, to be fair. We need to look into Dr. Fox more. He’s definitely involved.”

Heath nodded. “Agreed.”

Carter huffed a sound of agreement as well, then gathered up the empty glasses to carry them to the kitchen. “I’m going to get some sleep,” he muttered to everyone and no one at the same time, then disappeared down the hallway with his shoulders hunched and his steps dragging.

Everyone remained silent as he left and then exchanged worried glances when his door clicked shut.

“I hate to be the one to say it,” Royce said quietly, breaking the silence.

“But I don’t think he should be alone right now.

” His quick glance at Heath said everything he wasn’t saying out loud.

If guilt and paranoia could drive Heath to suicide based just on fragmented memories of bad deeds, what could Carter be pushed to with firm evidence of what he’d done?

Nate grimaced, swiping a hand over his tired eyes. “Royce’s right.”

He started to get up from his seat on the floor, but I got up faster. “I’ve got it,” I said quickly. “You keep doing the hacker thing. Find us someone to hold responsible, please.”

Nate’s brow dipped in a frown as Heath and Royce both made sounds of protest but I was already halfway out of the room.

Carter had flinched when our hands brushed earlier, and it hadn’t escaped my notice that he wasn’t meeting my eyes at all.

Nothing good could come from letting him beat himself up over hurting me, and no one could absolve him of that guilt better than me.

I tapped lightly on Carter’s door, then let myself in when I got no response. A quick glance around told me he was in the shower, so I closed the door behind myself and made my way over to his bed. For as much time as I’d spent in the guys’ apartment, I’d never actually been in Carter’s room.

It was tempting to snoop around and look at the small collection of framed photographs displayed on his wall, but he hadn’t invited me into his space.

So I sat my butt down on the edge of his bed and tucked my knees up to my chest. I’d stripped out of my gown not long after getting back and was wearing one of Heath’s hoodies and a pair of his boxer shorts with the waistband rolled several times.

I’d grabbed the shorts so I wouldn’t be bare-assing it on the sofa with all the guys while we talked.

Carter took ages in the shower. Ages. Long enough that I got sleepy and laid my head down on his pillow while waiting for him. Then the moment my eyes shut, I was struck by a flash of terror. What if he’d drowned?

Acting on instinct and panic, I clambered over his bed and burst into the attached bathroom, fully ready to administer CPR or mouth-to-mouth or…something.

“Ashley?” Carter exclaimed in confusion, looking up with water streaming down the hair flopped in his face. He was alive. Not drowned. Just sitting on the floor of the shower with the water beating down on his broad back so hot, his skin was red and steaming.

I blinked a couple of times, wondering why I’d been so sure he needed my help. “Um, I was worried. You were taking a really long time…”

He swiped a hand over his face, pushing his soaking, ink-black hair back from his forehead. “I didn’t know you were waiting.”

I bit the edge of my lip, embarrassed. “I was worried,” I said again.

The surprise and confusion melted away from Carter’s face, replaced by darkness and regret. “I’m fine,” he muttered, his head dropping low once more to break our eye contact.

I frowned, because the dismissal was painfully clear. He didn’t want my concern, nor did he want my company. Well, tough shit. No way in hell was I letting him take on the guilt of what’d happened under hypnosis.

Drawing a deep breath, I stepped farther into the bathroom and tugged off the hoodie I was wearing, tossing it on the floor. That motion was enough to jerk Carter’s head back up from the pool of despair he was currently drowning in.

“What are you doing?”

I huffed a frustrated sigh, pushing my borrowed shorts off. “Joining you, obviously. Make some space.”

Stunned, he stood up to allow me access into the cubicle, but his every muscle was tensed up and his jaw clenched as I brushed against him. I took my time, getting my hair fully soaked under the spray before turning to face him.

“Carter,” I said softly, “you keep calling me Ashley and I don’t like it.”

His head bowed again, water-drenched hair falling over his forehead. “I don’t deserve to call you anything else. Ashley…” He reached out, his thumb tracing over the dip of my throat where I’d already noticed a bruise darkening.

I swallowed, leaning into his touch. “You didn’t hurt me, Carter,” I told him earnestly.

“One thing I am absolutely certain of when it comes to you? You’d never hurt me like that.

Not physically. My feelings, yeah, sure, you’re pretty brutal there, but this?

It wasn’t you any more than it was Heath or Royce or Nate or fucking me for that matter.

So don’t you dare feel guilty for something you had no control over. ”

He shook his head, rejecting my logic. “I understand what you’re saying…but it doesn’t change facts. I hurt you. Me. These bruises were left by my hands. How can you not be terrified to be alone with me right now, Ashley? I am.”

Tilting my chin up, I cupped his face in my hands to force him to meet my eyes. “I’m not scared of you, Carter, because you stopped. You snapped out of it when you realized you were hurting me. No matter how firmly the hypnosis had its claws into your head, you stopped.”

Self-hatred and guilt radiated through his deep blue gaze, but I wasn’t accepting that. Not now, after all we’d been through. Rising up on my toes, I brushed my lips over his to show him in action what I was trying to get across with words—that I trusted him implicitly.

A pained moan escaped him as he whispered my name, but I didn’t want to hear it. Every Ashley on his lips was cutting me like a knife, and I’d do anything to bring us back to Spark.

“Carter,” I breathed, kissing him again. “You don’t scare me.”

He kissed me back, unable to help himself as his hands found my waist and gripped me tight.

A small moan slipped between us as he pressed me to the shower wall and deepened our kisses until my head swirled with desire.

The hard length of his cock trapped between us said he was equally affected, but he seemed satisfied to simply kiss me.

Tough luck, buddy. I want more.

“I should scare you,” he whispered against my lips as I hitched a leg up around his waist to pull him closer.

“You should simply be with Heath and not give me a second thought.” He meant more than just tonight’s incident, but that wasn’t new information.

His hot-and-cold act of the past weeks was exactly that: an act.

He wanted me just as much as I wanted him.

“That’s the problem,” I confessed as I snaked a hand between us and gripped his erection. “I think about you all the time…even when I’m with Heath.”

His breath hitched, understanding exactly what I was implying. “Fuck,” he whispered in a hoarse voice, his dark lashes fluttering as I stroked his cock. “Fuck…Ashley…”

My grip tightened and he hissed a sharp inhale. Then a little chuckle. Hope surged in my chest, sure that I must be finally getting through to him. “Carter, I’m not tall enough. You’re gonna need to pick me up because if I don’t get this dick inside me within the next three seconds, I’m going to?—”

My sentence cut off with a squeak as Carter hoisted me into the air and slammed the full length of his huge cock into my pussy. It hurt, but in the best way.

“Holy shit,” I gasped, my fingers clawing at the back of his neck for balance as my body spasmed with the sudden intrusion.

His answer was a bruising kiss that stole the very air from my lungs and turned me into a puddle of goo in his arms. My hips rocked, and I moaned into his kisses, begging him to fuck me.

“Is that what you wanted?” he asked in a dark whisper, his lips still against mine as he slowly withdrew just the slightest distance before thrusting back in.

A whimper escaped my throat as I nodded. “Yes,” I hissed, then bit his lower lip. “Fuck me until you remember who the fuck I am.”

His next thrust was hard enough to knock my head against the tile and I laughed, to which he just shook his head with disbelief. Still, the tiniest hint of a smile curled the corner of his mouth, and I’d take that as a win.

“As if I could ever forget,” he growled, pinning my hips to the tile as he increased his pace. His mouth found mine again as he fucked me under the shower spray, doing exactly what I asked for.

Deep in my chest, an acidic puddle of fear and anxiety tried to eat away at me, but the intense waves of arousal and euphoria Carter was shoving into me quickly smothered it.

Regardless of what might have happened, we won. We. Won. And we’d come out stronger for it.

Dr. Fox—or whoever the hell was playing ghost—had no fucking clue who they were messing with, and we sure as shit wouldn’t break so easily.