Page 18 of Unlawful Lies

My heart constricts at the way he looks at me.

Edward leans forward slightly forward. The top few buttons of his shirt are undone, giving a brief glimpse of dark chest hair and perky muscle. My mouth goes dry, and I lick my lips to prove to myself, and to him, I’m not impacted by the sight at all.

Except I am, and he notes the gesture if his smirk tells me anything.

“Try to keep your nose clean, Nicola,” he purrs. “I’d hate to have to come back and bail you out of trouble.”

“You are trouble.”

“I never said I wasn’t. Except I’m the type of trouble who will make sure you survive it if only to play another round.”

“And the trouble I might find if you are not around?”

This time, I’m not even surprised by myself. Normally, I hold my tongue. I keep the boldness to a minimum.

Edward is to blame. He coaxes it out of me.

“Let’s hope you never do. That is something you won’t survive. And I like the look of you. It would be a waste for you to die.”

He purses his lips in a facsimile of blowing me a kiss before pushing back from the doorjamb. The darkness swallows him whole, the murky light from the cloudy sky overhead not giving me enough light to track his movements.

He’ll be fine, I tell myself.

He’ll crawl back to whatever den he came from, and I'll stay here dealing with my own demons. Whatever bullshit he and my father get into, it has nothing to do with me, and it’s stupid to get involved when there is no need.

Except Daddy needs me. He’s not fit to do any of this on his own, not anymore.

I stumble on my first step backward, reaching out to grab hold of the corner of the bookshelf to steady myself.

Where do we go from here? How do I proceed?

Daddy forgives me for many things, but if he ever finds out that I snuck Edward into our home, he’ll be furious. Beyond enraged.

The slamming of the front door is the manifestation of these fears and I swallow hard, my tongue knotting itself, my stomach turning to acrobatics.

“Nicola!”

My name is a blur of sound with all the syllables slurred together. He’s back from wherever he’s been drinking, slurring his words, drunk off his ass.

“Nicola, where the fuck are you?” Arden calls. “Scott? Mary!”

It doesn’t matter that it’s the middle of the night. No matter where Daddy stands in the house, his voice carries, and if I’d been in my room, I would have heard him just as well. Nights like these…it’s best to just do as he wants.

Knowing what those fists can do, how they feel in the soft parts of a body, it’s best to steer clear of him. It will be the first smart thing I’ve done today.

Edward

Smoke clouds the air in billowing gusts pushed from too many mouths.

They blur together in a mass of laughter and curses and drunken revelry. Lives are molded, for worse or for better, with money on the table ready to change hands.

It’s been three days since the stolen kiss at Nicola’s, and I can’t get her taste out of my mouth. No matter what I do, she is there, lurking spectral at the corners of my mind and in my fantasies.

I wake up hard and wanting her, and the thought of her practically conjures her scent.

The green felt beneath my fingertips becomes the softest material I’ve ever touched, familiar and comforting and draining at the same time. The bane of my existence and the only thing that gives me pleasure these days.

Well, not the only thing.

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