Page 161 of Puck Prince

His lips are cold and hard, smashing my lips against my teeth. Blood bursts in my mouth, and I twist my face away. “What are you doing?!”

When I try to push him away, he grabs my wrists and pins them behind my back.

“I’m going to win that bet.”

The memory takes hold of me, strangles me. I pull oxygen in and out of my lungs in great, heaving gasps.

I don’t know what to do.

Where to go.

He’s out there.

I press my back to the bathroom door, staring at the tiled walls all around me.I’m trapped.

Spencer is doing this on purpose. He planned this whole thing. The paparazzi. The blocked exit. All of it.

After he attacked me in my office, I waited until he was gone—until everyone in the building was gone. And then I left.

When the university contacted me a few days later, I told them I resigned for personal reasons and left it at that. I never told anyone. Not even Kennedy. Uncle Randy knows more of the story than anyone, but even he doesn’t know what happened in that closet.

But rumors simmered until they came to a boil. Someone saw us out to dinner at an Italian restaurant weeks earlier.

Someone else claimed to have seen him slipping into my office.

Without me breathing a word, Spencer was suspected, and he waspissed.

I blocked his number, moved to another city, and got a new job, but Spencer is relentless.

So very relentless.

And as I sit in a shaking puddle on the bathroom floor, I know that he is never ever going to stop.

I put my hand on my stomach and try to catch my breath.

I have to do something. I can’t just sit here and wait for him to find me. I can’t risk what he might do to me… to my baby.

But what can I do?

I can scream, but it would cause a scene, and I’d be in even more headlines. The paparazzi are literally camped out waiting for the juiciest story they can get.

I could tell Kennedy, but I don’t want her anywhere near Spencer Santos again—not if I can help it.

Yelling for the manager, pulling the fire alarm, trying to squeeze myself through a too-small window and having to be cut free—no, no, no.

I hear a noise in the hallway and freeze. I slowly press my ear to the door, trying to listen for any sound of him.

Is he still there waiting for me?

Oh god. Oh god.

I squeeze my eyes shut and pull my phone out.

I know what I want.

What I need.

All I can do is pray he’ll pick up the phone.

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