The Replacement: A Reverse Harem Bully Romance (The Thorns of Rosewood Book 1)

by Cassie James

  I’m by her side in seconds, fingers wrapped around her bicep as I jerk her up away from the danger. “Tyler?” she says, water dripping from her fingertips as she frowns at me.

  She pushes against my chest and I drop her, taking a big step back as she wraps her arms around herself. You’re losing your mind. Get your shit together, Hamilton. I don’t dare explain what I thought—that she was Piper risen from the grave and about to make me relive the worst night of my life. That I’ve been haunted all night, and this was only the final straw.

  “Sorry, 2.0. Don’t know what I was thinking,” I say with a forced laugh. “Didn’t want you to short-circuit.”

  “Hysterical,” she mumbles blithely, and my gut burns.

  My eyes check out her body in the dim lighting, and I see exactly why I was so confused. I’ve seen this dress before. My brain short-circuits for a moment when my eyes land on her tits, nipples pebbling in the cool night air. “Is that Piper’s dress?”

  2.0 raises her arms up over her chest as if she knows her tits are turning my brain to mush. I drag my eyes back up to her face, surprised to see how irritated she looks. 2.0 doesn’t like to be ogled. Got it.

  “Just stop. Tori’s already given me shit for showing up in Piper’s outfit from last year.” The grit in her tone shoots all the way through me, and guilt roils through me at the memory of Piper standing by this very pool, in that very dress, just a year before. “Did you actually need something, or were you just hoping for your chance to treat me like shit for showing up to a party that I didn’t even want to fucking come to?”

  “Sorry,” I mumble, and she rolls her eyes.

  2.0 turns back to face the pool, ignoring the apology in favor of kicking her shoes off. My stomach shoots to my throat, and I stumble forward when she lowers herself down to sit by the edge of the pool.

  Her feet have barely broken the surface of the water when I drop into a crouch next to her. “Please don’t,” I say, my voice sounding strangled in my ears as I drop a hand on her shoulder. Her head jerks around to me, our noses nearly touching as she stares at me with curiosity bright in her eyes.

  “Don’t,” I repeat quietly, and her gaze softens.

  “Fine,” she mumbles as she turns her head away yet again. She pulls her feet from the pool and tucks them under her instead as she mumbles the word again. “Fine.”

  It doesn’t sound fine, but I’m struggling to breathe in my crouched position, and I can’t make myself focus on whatever she’s feeling. I fall back on my haunches and rest my head in my hands. Guilt burns so hot in my gut that I’m positive I’m going to burn from the inside out.

  I nearly jump when I feel her fingers wrap around my wrists, but I keep my face buried in my hands. I can’t face her right now. I can’t even look at her. Her grip tightens, and I can feel her breath blowing warmth over me.

  “What happened to Piper isn’t your fault, Tyler.”

  My stomach plummets, and my resolve weakens. She sighs as she pulls my hands from my face, but I tip my head down, still not quite ready to face the ghosts of the past. 2.0 sighs again and runs gentle fingers through my hair for a breathtaking moment. Resisting is useless, so when she grabs my chin and pulls my face upward to look at me, I don’t fight it.

  There’s a softness in her eyes I’ve never seen before. But as I stare at her, the reminder of the girl she’s meant to replace hits me square in the chest, and I try to pull my chin from her fingers. Her grip tightens, though, and her gaze hardens.

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “Yes, it is.” My voice is impossibly small, and I wonder when I turned into such a sniveling little bitch.

  2.0’s fingers stroke my jaw, and a violent shudder races through my body. I’m not sure what she’s looking for in my eyes, but after a moment, she seems satisfied that she’s found it. She pulls herself out of her crouch, pulling the impossibly short dress down her legs a little as she does before holding a hand out toward me.

  My eyebrows furrow as I look from her hand to her face and then back to her hand again. She groans before jabbing her hand toward me again. “C’mon, Tyler!” Her frustration that I don’t immediately do what she’s asking is evident in her tone, but I’m somehow not surprised by it. She is programmed after Piper, after all.

  “Listen,” she says after a few seconds of her hand hanging awkwardly in the air between us. “I get it. You want to beat yourself up for the accident. I stand by the fact that it wasn’t your fault, but you’re going to believe what you want to believe. Can you do me just one favor, though, and pout about it inside the pool house? It’s freezing out here.”

  22

  Piper

  I cross my legs, pulling at the hem of the dress in a futile attempt to cover my body. I mean, it’s not like Tyler’s looking—he’s way too caught up in staring at his hands hanging limply between his knees—but that doesn’t mean I want to flash him if he ever manages to pull himself out of his self-imposed penance.

  My arms rest lazily on the arms of the plush club chair, and I pull my eyes away from Tyler long enough to study the pool house. It’s laughable, really, to call it a pool house. I could move in here and live comfortably. A line of picture windows stretch toward the pool, and a bar stretches over the wall behind the chair I’ve settled in. Naomi Alton called the pool house her little sanctuary when some magazine featured their house years ago. (Thanks, Google.) There’s nothing little about it, but I understand the sentiment. On a sunny day, natural sunlight floods the sitting room, flashing off of the glass and platinum, heating the dark wood accents that make up the lavish space.

  My gaze returns to Tyler, my eyes tracing the tense lines of his body under his joggers and soccer jersey. I’m not surprised that he put so little effort into his costume, but I am a little surprised that he showed up here looking like he’d just rolled out of bed. I nibble at my bottom lip, realizing that he very well might be the one person here that wants to be at the party even less than me.

  “Are you ready to talk about it?” I’m not sure how it’s even possible, but his shoulders tense even more. He doesn’t offer a response, though, and I tap my fingers along the soft material of my chair. “No?” I say off-handedly, staring across the distance of the sitting room as he shifts on the couch but doesn’t look up. “Okay, well I guess I’ll talk. Feel free to pitch in with whatever nuggets of wisdom you have, okay? This is a lot of conjecture for me.”

  He doesn’t stir. Nothing. Huh. If I couldn’t see his hands clenching and unclenching systematically, I might question whether or not he was alive at all.

  “No one has been particularly forthcoming with what happened to Piper in April. Mom, especially, shies away from the subject whenever I try to bring it up. Stan—that’s the man who created me—simply calls it an unfortunate accident. How much more unfortunate can you get, right?” I can see Tyler’s chest heaving from all the way over here.

  I’m not sure what compels me to do it, but I’m pushing myself from the chair as I continue speaking. “Dad won’t talk about it past telling me to always keep my phone on and available. And the cover hasn’t come off of our pool the entire time I’ve been back.”

  Tyler hasn’t budged, and I’m halfway across the room, body trembling. My throat tightens around the words, and I recognize the sting of tears behind my eyes. “The internet exists for a reason, though, right? It’s not a hard thing to search. Piper Hawthorne. Accident. April 26. All you need are keywords.”

  I fall to my knees on the plush throw rug in front of Tyler, shifting uncomfortably to make sure my dress is still covering all the most important bits. I try to catch Tyler’s eye, but he’s still doing everything in my power to avoid looking at me. I lay a hand on his knee, wanting to make sure he knows I’m right here.

  “But do you know what comes up when you search it?” I ask, and the way his breath hitches in his throat tells me that he does know. Like he’s searched it himself a thousand times trying to get different results. My ton
gue sticks to the roof of my mouth for just a moment, and I clear my throat before I continue. “Unfortunate accident. Accidental drowning. After-prom party. She’ll be missed. That’s it. That’s all I know, Tyler. Piper died, and all I know is people freak out when I even come close to a pool.”

  “Do you know what’s consistent in all the things I find about her death?” He flinches and tries to jerk away from my touch. I grip his knee tightly and lean in closer. “The word accident.”

  I nudge closer, breaking his hands apart and settling myself quite uncomfortably between his tensed legs. My hands shake I reach up to cup his face. “Tyler, look at me.”

  The anguish in his green eyes makes my heart hurt so damn bad. My fingers splay on his cheeks and jaw, and I run my thumbs in gentle, soothing caresses over his cheekbones. He sighs, leaning into the touch as his eyes flutter closed, and the gesture takes my breath away. My stomach tightens, and I’m positive my knees would give out from under me if I tried to stand. This whole time, all I’ve wanted was to comfort someone, and for the first time now I’ve got a sincere chance to do just that. Tyler needs comfort more than anyone I know—and I’m not sure how I didn’t quite realize that sooner.

  “Piper’s death was an accident, Tyler. It wasn’t your fault then, and it’s not your fault now. I can’t imagine you think Piper would want you to keep beating yourself up like this.”

  “I left her there,” he murmurs, and his voice is broken. My heart thuds, and I just want to take his pain away. “I tried to get her to come home with me. We fought, and I just left her there. If I’d just dragged her along with me, she’d still be here.”

  “She was her own person, and she made her own decisions.” He opens his mouth to protest, but I shake my head, not wanting to hear him beat himself up over this anymore than he already has. “Listen to me, please. There’s enough of her coursing through me to know that she wasn’t going to do anything she didn’t want to, not even for you. You have to accept that this wasn’t your fault. Please.”

  He sucks in a shuddering breath in one moment and his hands are cupping my face the next. His mouth descends on mine in a searing kiss that while entirely unexpected, lights a fire inside of me in an instant.

  Tyler nips at my bottom lip before running his tongue over the smarting wound, pulling a moan from me. My mind scrambles as his hands leave my face to run the length of my body as he slides from the couch. He crowds me, forcing me back until my back is flat against the floor and he’s hovering over me. His mouth never leaving mine.

  When he does pull back slightly, his hooded eyes study me with a wealth of emotion behind them. The anguish is there, hiding in the back of his heavy-lidded gaze, and I’m tempted to place my hand on his chest and push him away. At my core, I know who I am. But in this moment, as Tyler stares down at me like he’s trying and failing to forget the memory of the person who’s haunted him for six months, I’m not sure that he knows who I am.

  He doesn’t give me long enough to think it through before his grappling hands are fumbling over my body, landing everywhere but not staying anywhere long enough to satisfy the ache building inside of me. I arch into his desperate touch, shuddering when he hooks a finger over the top of the skin tight dress and drags it down and over my breasts.

  The time for insecurities has come and gone as I lose myself to the feeling of Tyler’s lips on my exposed skin. I can feel him through his pants, his length straining towards me as he sends me spiraling into dangerous territory.

  He wedges an arm between my back and the floor, forcing me to arch closer as he grinds against me. There’s a wave of aching need that crashes over me as my own hands tentatively fumble over him. I dip my fingers beneath the hem of his t-shirt, reveling in the way he stills with a grunt when I run my hands over his abs, tracing the lines of his hard body.

  Tyler uses his free hand to reach back and yank his shirt off, the motion taking mere seconds before he’s dragging me back to him, this time with skin-to-skin contact as our topless bodies meet.

  My body’s on auto-pilot as our tongues tangle, and I’m only barely aware that I’m digging my fingers into the waistband of his joggers and pushing them over his hips. The groan that passes from his mouth to mine sets my senses on fire, and the heat that’s pooling in my core is near goddamn unbearable. Tyler deepens the kiss, pulling moans from me as his hands grab where my dress is riding up and drag the whole damn thing down over my hips.

  He leans back, reaching into the pocket of his joggers before he pushes them the rest of the way off. My fingers reach for him as if they have a mind of their own, desperate to keep him close.

  Tyler tears open a condom he must have gotten from his pocket before he comes back to me, his weight settling over mine again. He rolls the condom on, then pulls my thong to the side with deft fingers.

  If I thought the attention Brennan and Jude paid to my body was hot, there was no way to prepare for the total inferno that was Tyler settling between my hips and sliding into me with measured, shudder-inducing strokes. My head lolls to the side, and my limbs turn to mush as he run his tongue along a sensitive patch of skin behind my ear.

  “Come for me, Piper,” he whispers, twisting his hips until he hits a spot inside of me that makes me come utterly undone. I shudder, bright spots blurring my vision as I whimper and twist beneath him—and he wrings every bit of pleasure out of me as he can as he keeps doing whatever the hell it is he’s doing. “That’s my girl,” he mutters as I’m coming down from the high of my pleasure.

  He doubles his efforts, changing things up as he focuses on following me over the edge. I try to meet him the best I can, but his pace is so erratic that I mostly just end up peppering kisses along his jawline as I hold desperately to his biceps.

  This… Nothing’s ever going to compare to this.

  Sex with Jude was rough and sex with Brennan was soft and sweet. But sex with Tyler is like a religious experience and I am more than ready to worship at the alter.

  He whispers my name again when he thrusts into me for the final time, collapsing on top of me so that the weight of his body traps me in place. Not that I’d want to go anywhere even if I could. My fingers tangle in his hair as I try to make sense of what we’ve just done.

  Tyler’s not the middle ground between Jude and Brennan, not by a long shot, but the satisfaction is unlike anything I’ve felt before. And I desperately want to believe that there’s more to it than his connection to the old Piper. As Tyler drags himself off of me, rolling over onto the floor beside me, I try to decide if maybe he could be what Macie meant about finding someone who’s middle ground.

  I try to picture choosing Tyler and leaving behind the feelings I keep trying to fight for Brennan and Jude. The thought of it makes me sick to my stomach. Yeah, sex with Tyler was great, but there’s a selfish part that knows deep down, I’d have sex with all of them all over again if I could.

  There’s nothing logical about it. Brennan and Jude both abandoned me after sex, and I don’t know yet what it is that Tyler wants. Maybe all he needed was comfort in a moment of weakness.

  I shouldn’t be having all of these feelings swirling around inside of me. Even if I don’t understand the obsession with monogamy, even I have to admit that there’s something a little taboo about my interest in three guys who are best friends. Especially since not one of them has expressed a genuine interest in me past wanting to scare me off—and sex.

  Insecurity starts to slip back in with all the comfort of a wet blanket. As Tyler lays silently staring at the ceiling, I climb to my feet and turn my back to him to tug my dress back over my head.

  He doesn’t say a word, doesn’t offer any explanations or excuses. He doesn’t even look at me as I sit down on the edge of the couch to put my shoes back on. I can’t bear to watch another of The Thorns leaving me after intimacy, so the only choice I have is to be the one that leaves first this time. I grab my purse and pad quietly across the floor to the pool house door.

 
I pause, tempted to look back, but I know it won’t do anything to ease the empty space that’s settled inside of me. I close the door quietly behind me, already ordering a car from my phone as I pick my way around the side of the house towards the road. The one thing my mind keeps coming back to as I wait is how can these three guys make me feel so empty and so full, all at the same time?

  23

  Jude

  Thousands of dollars in designer food and the hottest women money can buy, and these two fuckwads still have their heads in their asses. “Did your dicks fall off, or just shrivel into pussies?” I taunt as Brennan and Tyler manage to chase off yet another hot wife looking for some side action. Bored trophy wives can be all the fun without any of the drama, and here they are turning them off before I can make any headway.

  I should have left their sorry asses at home.

  “If the two of you can’t pull your heads out of your asses, you might as well just get the fuck out.” The only reason these charity events are even bearable is because of the opportunity to chase tail. And here these two are robbing me of my one great joy in life.

  “Fuck off,” Tyler mumbles. He’s had one hell of a short temper with me these last few weeks. Ever since the Halloween party, really.

  I roll my eyes at him and turn towards Brennan. He looks about as thrilled to be the object of my attention as Tyler is. But unlike Tyler, I know what Brennan’s problem is. He’s still mooning over 2.0 while simultaneously trying to pretend not to give a shit. Too bad for him, it didn’t go unnoticed when he nearly popped off after me the other day when I was shit talking her. I only did it to get him all worked up, and it worked a little too well.

  It’s nauseating the way he’s been acting. As if the rest of us can’t see the way his eyes follow 2.0 across the room, or the way his whole body goes on the defensive when shit gets said about her. Shit he was saying, too, a couple months ago.