Page 22 of Bedding Rose
He’d said he needed me.
Not I like you. Not I want you.
I need you.
Fuck. I’d swooned right into kissing the bastard.
Even now, my core clenches at the memory of that kiss. Then he’d pinned me up against the wall and owned me. I’d been on the brink of an orgasm just from making out with him.
Me.
Me!
It takes me almost forty minutes with a dirty book and my vibrator to eke out an O. But he had nearly wrung one from me with nothing more than a kiss. Off-kilter—and completely at odds with the part of my mind still pacing and swearing and calling Angelo a blackmailer—my pussy pulses gently, begging for a touch. A release after the tease of that kiss.
But can I really touch myself to thoughts of him? Yes, his muscles and his tattoos, those lips—his body was made for naughty thoughts. But what about everything else?
He set up that camera in the bathroom to spy on me!
Yes, it was after I blocked his texts and avoided him for nearly a week, but still. He didn’t have any right to invade my privacy or to try to force me to confess who drove me to cut myself by blackmailing me with the most mind-bleachingly disgusting video of my mother imaginable.
Even as I think about the thumb drive he’d left on my bed with a note that read:Tell me who THEY are or this gets out, my face heats up in anger. But it’s not all directed at him. There’s also a bitter, burnt-tasting edge of the anger that’s reserved solely for my mom.
How many times have I gotten lectures about my life choices? About how we’re under a microscope? How we have to be paper-doll perfect?
How many times did she pull me aside when I was younger, my crush on Angelo so painfully obvious, and tell me that a girl like me is too good for the likes of him?
“Please, Rosalinda. Mija. He’s in construction and his father hires criminals. Criminals! They’re little more than thugs. He’s a sweet boy but you’re going to be a doctor. There’s no future there.”
“Quique’s friends with him.”
“Friends are one thing. This,” she’d pointed a finger and gestured at the expression on my face, “this cannot happen.”
All those lectures about how I should dress, act, speak. And she’s fucking around with a married man?
And with her campaign, her little plans for me have gotten even more involved than they used to be. They’ve included dates with guys who have cardboard cutout personalities but fathers sporting thick pocketbooks. I never slept with them but still … she’s been essentially whoring me out.
And I let her.
I let her because I believed. In her.
I’ve jumped through every hoop she’s ever asked of me, thrown my back into all this campaign crap, getting signatures, putting up signs all over Timbuktu, and asking how high whenever she told me to jump.
I’m not just a bad judge of character, I’m a horrible one. I couldn’t see the truth about my mother and now I’ve kissed my own blackmailer. Well, if I suck at it, I blame my mother; I obviously inherited my broken judge-o-meter from her. She married a drunkard, after all.
I grind my teeth as my fingers twine in the sheets and squeeze, frustration and resentment pitting tiny little holes all over me. It’s a special sort of ire, the kind that a girl can only feel toward her mother.
But just as quickly as I grow angry at her for being a goddamned hypocrite, for dictating my life while she’s out there ruining other people’s marriages, I shift my thoughts back over to Angelo.
He deserves some of this vitriol too. He unmasked her and turned my own mother into a villain. He amped up my resentment toward her and he did it by violating my privacy. God, I wish I could choke him. But, for some reason, the idea of wrapping my fingers around his throat isn’t just about the violence for me. Anger and lust intermingle when I think of him. They don’t separate like oil and water, but swirl and mix with all the sugar-sweet memories I have from years of carrying a torch for him.
Yeah, this stalking is overboard. Wrong to the nth degree. But I still remember the time my swimsuit tie ripped during an intense game of pool volleyball. Angelo stood in front of me, back to me, walking sideways and hiding me so I could climb out of the pool and grab a towel without people seeing everything. He’s always been so protective. It’s just now … he’s taken it to an extreme. It’s an utter mindfuck to hate him after I’ve wanted him for so long and the two emotions combine into something decidedly bad for me.
He’s evil yet delicious.
Deliciously evil.
Angelo Walker is like a … a giant cake—the kind you eat to compensate for all the horridly confusing feelings you have about this bullshit thing called life.
