Page 6 of Rebel Romeo

“Holden—”

Mom’s voice broke, but I shook my head. “I don’t want to hear it right now.”

Like a dejected child, Mom turned and walked back to her car, leaving Katherine and me standing there outside her dorms.

I turned back to face Katherine, ignoring the loud engine of my mom’s BMW as she started the car and peeled away from us. The breeze caught her long blond waves and whipped them across her face. Tentatively, I reached out, brushing the errant strand from her face and tucking it behind her ear. She shivered with my touch as I asked, “Were you really going to quit the show?”

She blinked, slowly looking up at me. “I was, yeah. Until your mom offered me money to quit. Stupid pride.” She paused, holding up her phone to show me the email she’d just sent to McCay asking if it was too late to reverse her quitting. “I should have taken your mother’s dingdang money for something I was doing anyway.”

I smirked. “But you don’t like being told what to do.”

Her cheeks tinged pink. “No, I don’t.”

Unless it involves me bossing her around and buying her panties, I thought.

To date, I’d paid her over two thousand dollars for various sexy things. And she liked every second of it, even if she didn’t realize I was her secret buyer with a drawer filled with her used panties beside my bed.

“Don’t quit,” I pleaded.

Great. Now I was reduced to begging. Fucking begging Katherine to stay on as the lead in this show with me.

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“Because you were born to play this role. Because you are Big-Juliet-Energy if I’ve ever seen it. Because if you quit, I’m going to be forced to act with Addison as my Julie.” Right then, something occurred to me. She didn’t quit because of my mom… which begged the question, “Why did you quit in the first place?”

Her gaze snapped up, flames flickering in the center of her eyes. “What did you say?”

“I asked why you qui–”

“Not that. About Addison getting my part.”

I sighed. “Yeah, Addison is now officially your understudy. So if you quit, I have to do this whole show with her as my Juliet.”

She wasn’t my Juliet. She would never be my Juliet.

Kate’s nostrils flared and she nibbled the inside of her cheeks as she looked down at her phone and pressed the send button with her thumb. The email sent with an airplane whoosh sound. “Fine. I won’t quit.”

“Because you’re jealous.”

“No,” she snapped.

I fought my smirk and lost. “You are. You’re jealous at the thought of Addison and me doing these scenes together.”

“I’m protective of the part I’ve grown to love. That’s it.”

“Uh-huh. What’d you expect? You’d quit and they’d cancel Keith’s show entirely?”

I waited for her to answer, but before she did, it came to me. “Wait… you thought I’d quit, too, didn’t you?”

She spun a hundred eighty degrees and booked it upstairs toward her dorm. I was on her heels, following up those stairs taking two at a time. “Come on, talk to me. If it wasn’t because of my mom offering you money, why’d you quit?”

She whipped around, glancing over each shoulder to make sure we were alone. “Bought any good panties lately, Light?” she hissed, using the username I created to secretly buy her panties from her.

It was my turn to go white as a sheet. I stood there dumbfounded. “What did you say?”

“You heard me,” she whispered, then leaned in closer to me. “You’re a liar. A disgusting liar.”

She knew.

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