Page 25 of Vicious Little Princess

I really wasn’t worried about security as a rule. Not while we were here living on the college campus. I mean, really? But I guess Nico had gotten under my skin where that was concerned.

There was a weird delay before a familiar breathy female voice responded, that breathiness turning me on when I’d first heard it. It was one of the main reasons I’d taken its owner to my bed.

“It’s me, Jules.”

And calling me Jules was the reason I’d only taken her to my bed once. She’d kept screaming that out while we’d been fucking.

“Lindsay?”

“Yeah!” she cried, excited that I’d remembered her name.

Of course, I had. I remembered everybody I’d been with. I wasn’t an asshole, and I didn’t like it when disrespect was present just because it was casual sex. Why couldn’t both parties—or more, in my case—be treated well and enjoyed at the same time? I didn’t get that shit.

I unlocked the door and opened it to find her on my doorstep.

She smiled out at me nervously, her long blonde hair cascading down her bare shoulders, a pink sundress doing her a hell of a lot of justice.

Wait. Nervously?

“What’s up?”

“Nothing, I mean—”

“Sweetheart, I’m already booked for the night. Got a friend over. He’s just getting us some food and he’ll be back any minute.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “He just… this guy… he offered me a lot of money and I… I really needed it and—”

She was suddenly wrenched away as a hand shot out from around the corner.

“You’re done. Get gone.”

I froze at the sound of that awful voice.

He rounded the corner and then stood there right before me. “I knew you wouldn’t open the door if you knew it was me.”

I choked as adrenaline tore through my body like live wires as I stood staring at the last person I ever wanted to have in my vicinity, any-fucking-where near me.

Dirty-blond hair that was like mine was wilder than I remembered it, grown out and unkempt like he hadn’t had a haircut in so long and like he’d been shoving his hand through it repeatedly. Normally clean-shaven, his jaw was now plagued by thick facial hair, verging on beard territory. He stood there in a rumpled black suit with a white dress shirt beneath that had a coffee stain on it right near the loose, plain black tie. Even his shoes were all scuffed up, adding to the down-and-out look.

But it was his eyes that were the main concern to me.

There was that look in them that I remembered all too well.

They were shining with malicious intent.

And an interest that made me sick.

Gabriel Carver.

My father.

“What are you doing here?” I somehow managed to get out.

“Can’t a father miss his son?”

“Not when that father is you.”

His lips twisted. “I see you’ve grown bolder since you’ve been away. I arrived just in time to beat that defiance out of you.”

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