Page 37 of Wicked Little Darling

I hadn’t even heard him come out of the bathroom. He’d been in there for so long that I was starting to get worried and had contemplated knocking. Or breaking the door down.

“Were you crying?” I asked. I didn’t like that. At all. Was it because of me? I really hadn’t meant to make him cry.

I pushed out of the chair and walked over to him.

Reese watched me with a guarded expression, his lips pressed together in a hard line, hazel eyes flinty.

He had two freckles in his left eye. I really liked them. I really liked everything about how he looked. All his features were fascinating, especially his eyes. I’d never seen a prettier combination of colors. Green, brown, and gold swirled together and made me think of a sunlit forest in the summertime.

“No,” he lied. He threw his damp towel on his bed and rubbed the back of his neck. “Dakota, look, I’m really sorry for—for—” His face heated as he gestured at my shirt. “For—coming at you like that. It was really uncalled for. I’ll…” He shifted his gaze to the floor. “I’ll buy you a new shirt.”

“Nah, it’s okay. I’ve got enough shirts.”

“But—”

“I never told you how I got my scar,” I said, cutting him off.

His brows drew together. “What?”

“Wasn’t that the deal?”

His eyes, more greenish-gold than brown right now, slowly drifted across my face, from my temple to my jaw, tracing thescar. When they moved back to mine, I could see the curiosity there and knew I had him.

“Okay. Fine. I’ll play,” he said, parroting my earlier words. “How’d you get your scar?” His eyes dropped down to the rip in my shirt again, and the prettiest blush spread across his cheeks. I wanted to touch the heated skin so fucking badly.

I was enjoying the way he responded to me. All his reactions. For someone so cranky, he blushed so damn easily that I wanted to draw it out of him every chance I could.

Was he embarrassed that he’d ripped my shirt? Or was he flustered? I wanted it to be the latter, especially because I didn’t care that he’d torn it open like a mini Hulk. When he’d done that, it had awakened something inside of me. A need to have him ripallmy clothes right off my body.

Bonus points if it was because he was mad with lust and not angry at me for allegedly stealing his violin.

I smiled and stepped closer, forcing him to tilt his head back. Then I slid around him—deliberately brushing my chest against his arm—and sat down on the end of his bed, leaning back on my hands and watching as his expression shifted from curiosity to annoyance. He opened his mouth—probably to yell at me to get off his bed—so before he could, I said, “I did it to myself.”

His brows drew together. “You…did that to yourself?”

I nodded. “Yup.”

I didn’t care about my scar or how it made me look. I’d never told this story to anyone, but I didn’t particularly mind if Reese knew. A deal was a deal, after all.

Well, I didn’t mind if he knew the story that had been passed around for years. He would hear it at some point, if he hadn’t already. I’d learned a long time ago that the truth didn’t matter. Not one bit. People believed what they wanted to, and the confirmation bias was strong when it came to me.

“Why?”

For a moment, all I could do was stare at him. No one had ever asked me why. No one had ever questioned Everett’s narrative, or wondered if maybe it wasn’t true. The immediate condemnation had been swift and sweeping, and thewhyof it all didn’t matter.

“Why?” I repeated, still shocked he’d asked.

“Um, yeah. Why would you do that to yourself?” He looked skeptical, like he didn’t believe me at all, and for some reason that made me unbelievably happy. My mouth stretched into a wide smile, and Reese’s lips parted as he stared at me in confusion.

“You know, I feel like I should thank Albert for putting you in here.”

“Albert?”

I flicked my hand in a careless gesture. “Dean Voss. Whatever you want to call him.”

The dent between Reese’s eyebrows deepened. “You call your dad by his first name?”

“When he’s never acted like a dad before, yeah.”