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“What?”
“Pardon.”
I glance over his shoulder at the fancy sedan behind him. Swallowing down my sheepish embarrassment at his correction, I echo, “Pardon?”
“I’m taking you home.” Before I can protest, he’s prying my violin from me, followed by the backpack hanging off my shoulder.
“No. No…i-it’s fin—”
“You’re going to catch a cold.”
“No, it’s fine. I-I’m fine.”
All joviality falls from his face. The lines that had been soft a second ago are sharper than ever.
“Don’t argue with me, Eve. I don’t have the time or patience for your insubordination right now.”
But he has time to take me home? I don’t get the chance to voice my thought because he’s walking towards his car. Henry places my violin and backpack in the front passenger seat with his driver before opening the back door for me to get inside.
I could protest, but I’m certain he’d trample over my effort to stand my ground. Besides, the cold is seeping into my bones.
“Get in,” he orders with a purposeful glance from me to the open door.
Fuck it, it’s just another means to an end. There’s a lot of that at the minute, and it all revolves around him somehow. Carefully sliding inside, I stare up at him. Henry isn’t smiling or glaring. He’s watching, closely and maybe a little cautiously, as though I’m the one that’s trampling over him.
“Good girl,” he finally says when I’ve buckled my seat belt.
Good girl. The words echo in my head just as they did the first time he uttered them to me. Satisfaction warms my chest, along with a sense of pride I don’t quite understand. But I like the way it makes me feel, as though I have really done something worth commending.
CHAPTER SEVEN
EVE
Grey clouds burst with warm golden rays that blur my vision in the awkward silence of the drive. I’m staring out of the window, trying to distract myself from the fact that this is the closest Henry and I have sat for a long period of time. Meanwhile, he’s scrolling through his phone with a scowl that could make the devil shit his pants.
Something’s wrong. I can feel it roiling in my gut with every grind of his jaw. The whole time, he keeps to his side of the car, like there’s an invisible line he can’t cross. But his stare flits to me once in a while, and it’s gone as soon as it meets mine in the glass.
“You can drop me off here,” I tell him when his driver turns into the estate I live on.
Suddenly, I’m very aware of how stark apart our worlds are. Especially when the horror in his eyes morphs into disgust. Henry doesn’t even try to hide it as he instructs his man to take me to my door.
“It’s really not necessary.”
“Just tell him where you live, Eve,” Henry insists.
In all my life, I’ve never been ashamed of who I am or where I come from. But right now, there’s a lingering trepidation in my chest that makes it hard to breathe as I direct the driver to the door of my building, not that he seems to need the direction because I swear he’s already taking the turns before I even say anything. But it’s impossible for him to know where to go, and it just goes to show how on edge I am about having Henry here.
The cars dotted around the courtyard car park aren’t shiny and pretty. There’s graffiti everywhere and decades of posters plastering the concrete walls. I’m watching Henry take it all in and waiting for the penny to drop. Everything he thought about me is wrong. There’s nothing special or precious about me that’s worth his time or money.
The truth is a scary thing. Scarier than being a fifteen-year-old orphan staring at the prospect of foster care. The car comes to a stop in front of my building, and before I can get out, Henry’s already rounding the car.
He’s still soaked through, with his white shirt stuck to his back, making it impossible to miss the tight muscles corded below it. The powerful lines bulge and coil with his every move. I’m mesmerised by the natural ebb and flow of his athletic body and caught red-faced when he opens my door for me to get out.
There’s a tightness around his eyes and jaw that tells me there’s a lot he wants to say right now, and that is enough to turn lusty thoughts into a sickening turn of my stomach.
“I’ll take you up,” he says, grabbing my belongings from the front of the car and walking me through the battered door of the building.
The overwhelming smell of pee makes me cringe as we walk up the first flight of stairs. I haven’t noticed it this bad before. By the time we reach Clara’s floor, the smell of urine has morphed into fresh laundry from all her air fresheners dotted on the landing and up the stairs leading to my floor.
