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Shit. What a memory. “You’re right. I did say that.”
“Tell me about her. There had to be a girl involved to make you that bitter,” she says. “Trust me, I’ve read enough romance novels to know.”
I blink, hard, not wanting to go back to that time but knowing I have to eventually deal with what happened. And she’s right. Fair is fair. She opened up about Pippa. I swallow back the tightness in my throat. I direct my focus on the world’s sexiest psychologist who just happens to be lying next to me.
“Quinn and I would go to these parties. Thrown by his new acquaintances from his private school. There was this girl at one of the parties. A ballet dancer, studying at Julliard. She took one look at me and called me over.”
I remember the look of determination in her eyes. I was the poor, troubled bad boy from the wrong side of town. She was the beautiful, rich prima donna. She gave me a blow job in one of the bedrooms. I pulled her hair, hard. She loved it. She was addicted to my domination in the bedroom.
But out in the world, she wanted to own me.
And I let her.
She’d call and I’d be right there, waiting.
“I hate her already,” Paisley growls, her loyalty showing through even now, talking about something that happened in my past.
“We started dating. Hanging out every weekend. The parties, the locations changed, but the group of people was always the same. There was a drug bust at one of the parties. It was at her house. In her bedroom. I had nothing to do with drugs, but I remember she’d said that she and the other ballerinas used cocaine from time to time. They’d laugh about it. Calling it their diet drug. She was never high when she was with me, so I thought she was bragging, bluffing to impress her friends.”
“And?” she asks.
I say, “She told the cops the drugs were mine.”
She takes a moment before bursting out with, “That little witch!”
I almost want to laugh. It’s the first time I think I’ve ever heard her cuss. It’s fucking adorable.
She crosses her arms over her chest, sitting back against her lounge chair. “And let me guess. You took the fall for her?”
“Yeah. I thought—doesn’t matter what I thought. Anyway.” I shake the painful memory from my head. The worst part? Waiting for her to visit. She didn’t come. Not once. “They took one look at me and believed her. Locked me up.”
I wanted to take the fall for her. I loved her. I thought she loved me. Now, I know better. It was all lust. And it only went one way. I was with her because I wanted her. She was with me because I made her look dangerous and interesting. I didn’t know that at the time.
No, that took three years of staring at a concrete cell without a single visit from her to figure out.
“Where was your lawyer? Even if you were broke you should have had one. And if you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be appointed to you, and all that stuff?” She sighs. “Trust me, I’ve read enough mystery romance novels to know.”
“I had a court-appointed lawyer. A good one. I took the plea deal,” I say. “That way I served three years instead of more.”
“And that’s where Rockland found you?” she asks. “In prison.”
“Yes.” Thank God he came that day. I don’t know where I’d be now if he hadn’t. “And how I came to find my chosen family.”
“A silver lining to an otherwise very gray cloud,” she says.
“Yes.”
“I want to kill her.” She crosses her arms tighter around her body, exhaling with a loud huff.
“Don’t,” I say. “My life wasn’t going anywhere. It all turned out fine.”
She sits up, her blue eyes blazing. “But you rotted in a prison for three years! For a crime you had nothing to do with. Aren’t you angry?”
Am I?
Angry still?
I think of the line of blondes I’ve been through over the years. I wonder what her PhD would say about them. Paying for their submission. Whipping them with my belt. Trying to get my control back, to get rid of that anger I felt toward her.
