Broken Empire: A Reverse Harem High School Bully Romance (Boys of Oak Park Prep Book 3)

by Callie Rose

  “Fuck. Condom.”

  I blinked. Oh, shit. He was right. I hadn’t even thought of it until he spoke, hadn’t had the wherewithal to remember. I had just needed.

  And I still did. So much so that even as I gasped out, “In my dresser—top drawer,” I was still squeezing my inner walls around him, wrapping my arms around his back, as if I could stop him from ever leaving.

  I felt his body shake as he pulled back, sliding out of me. His hair was a mess, his shirt and tie were still on, and his pants were barely off, pushed down only far enough to free his dick. As he stumbled over to the dresser, I looked down at my own body, which was even more disheveled than his. My shirt was half off, and the skin of my chest was flushed and marked by Mason’s mouth. My skirt was bunched up around my waist, and my panties were soaked and twisted to one side. I still had my shoes and socks on too.

  Mason dug into my top drawer, pulling out a small plastic-wrapped packet. When he turned back toward me, heat and something like regret flashed in his bright green eyes as he took in my appearance.

  He kept his gaze locked on me as he set the condom on top of the dresser and reached for his tie, loosening it and tugging it off. His shirt came next, baring the toned muscles of his chest, abs, and arms. Then he kicked off his shoes and hooked his thumbs into the waistband of his pants and boxer briefs, shucking them in a deliberate movement.

  When he was naked, I couldn’t stop my gaze from drifting downward. He was still hard, his cock standing out from his body, a slightly different color than the rest of his skin. Darker. The texture more smooth. I could see evidence of myself, of my own arousal, glistening on the velvety skin, and I bit my lip as my breath picked up.

  “Dammit. I should’ve done this the right fucking way.”

  Mason’s words were soft, and I wasn’t sure if he was talking to himself or me. But he didn’t look away from me as he grabbed the condom off the dresser and returned to the bed, crawling up to kneel near my feet.

  I felt awkward, spread out so wantonly like this, my legs splayed open and my panties barely covering everything. But Mason didn’t seem to mind at all. The anger and tension that had vibrated beneath his skin for weeks was gone, replaced by a quiet intensity and something else I couldn’t quite identify. His green eyes sparked with an inner light as he picked up my feet, slowly removing first one shoe, then the other. He peeled my socks down my calves and slid them off too, gently massaging my skin in a way that made me start to squirm.

  A small, satisfied smile crossed his lips, and he didn’t stop his slow, deliberate torture as he set my feet down, moving his large palms up my legs, stroking every inch of my skin before finding the zipper of my skirt and tugging it down.

  Once my skirt and panties were gone, he moved on to my tie and button-down top, and unlike his previous frantic movements, which had sent several buttons flying, this time he took care with each remaining one.

  It was fucking killing me.

  Did he not know?

  Did he not understand what his touch was doing to me?

  How empty I felt without him inside me?

  But I was pretty sure he did know—almost positive he felt the same way. He was breathing just as hard as I was, and his cock had only gotten harder, more angry looking. As he reached behind me to unclasp my bra, I slipped my hand down and stroked my palm over his length before wrapping my fingers around it.

  I felt his whole body clench, felt tension return to his muscles. But it was a new kind of tension, one I wanted to wind up until it snapped, so instead of letting go, I squeezed a little harder, pumping my hand up and down.

  He let out a choked noise, thrusting his hips hard into my touch.

  When I did it again, he grabbed my chin with one hand, his nostrils flaring before he dropped his head to kiss me. His lips devoured me as he reached for the condom wrapper, only breaking away for a second to tear it open with his teeth.

  Whatever he’d been trying to do, whatever he thought the right way was, he didn’t have the willpower to hold out any longer. He rolled the condom on with quick movements, and I was already reaching for him, digging my fingernails into his back as he plunged inside me again.

  This time, he didn’t hold back.

  I missed the feeling of his bare skin against mine as he moved inside me, hated having any barrier between us, but that thought was quickly swept away by the sensations gathering low in my belly, spreading out to fill every part of me.

  It was hard and fast and exactly what I needed.

  Mason had been teetering on the edge of control already, and through the connection between our bodies, I felt the moment his restraint broke entirely. His thrusts fell out of rhythm, and the bed creaked beneath us as he let out a feral, primal grunt.

  The sound and the feel of it pushed me over the edge, and the orgasm that poured through my body felt like liquid fire. I wrapped my arms and legs around him, pinning him to me as I shuddered beneath him. “Fuck. Mason…!”

  Aftershocks quaked through us both, and our heavy breaths synchronized as we slowly came down from the high. When he finally withdrew and tugged the condom off, dropping it in the small trash can near the head of the bed, I felt suddenly empty.

  Then he flopped back down on the bed beside me, lying on his back and pulling me on top of him so my body draped over his. I rested my palms on his chest and let my chin settle on the back of my hand so I could peer up into his eyes.

  He gazed down at me steadily, unblinking, his gaze warm but cautious, as if he wasn’t quite sure what to say.

  I wasn’t either.

  This wasn’t what I’d expected to happen when I’d brought him back here, and even though it’d felt good, felt necessary somehow, I wasn’t sure it had changed anything between us.

  I wasn’t sure it had fixed anything.

  “What happened?” I asked softly, certain I still wouldn’t get an answer. “With Preston. What happened? Please, tell me.”

  Mason was silent for a long time, still as a statue beneath me. If I hadn’t been able to feel his heart thrumming steadily against mine, I might’ve thought he was one.

  Then, finally, he shook his head.

  “You were right. I don’t know. I still don’t know if he or Adena touched your car. I don’t know if it was them. And I fucking hate that.” His arms tightened around me, wrapping me up in something almost like a bear hug. “It was fucking stupid. I’ve known Preston was a jackass since our freshman year, and now that he’s following Adena everywhere, I know he’s a little bitch too.”

  I shifted against him, and he loosened his hold just a little to let me move.

  “I shouldn’t have let him bait me, I fucking know that. But he told me… he told me I’d never be able to protect you. That I can’t keep you safe.” His jaw clenched, his lips pressing together angrily. “Maybe he wasn’t talking about the car. I don’t know. But that’s all I could think about. You, trapped in that hunk of metal, spinning out, rolling off the road.” When his arms tightened again, it was almost hard to breathe. “And he was right. I didn’t protect you then. I couldn’t.”

  Mason’s features twisted in anger, and I knew that although some of it might be directed at Preston, more of it was directed at himself.

  I shook my head, the movement small. “It doesn’t mean you didn’t want to, or that you didn’t try. There’s no way to keep everyone you care about safe all the time, no matter how hard you try. You can’t be everywhere at once, and you can’t prevent what you don’t see coming.”

  “I should’ve seen it coming though. I should’ve fucking seen it.” The consuming pain was back in his eyes, and I knew his guilt would make it impossible for him to hear what I was saying, to believe any of it. To ever stop blaming himself.

  He glanced down at my face, finally releasing his tight grip on me to run a knuckle over the line of my cheekbone. He pursed his lips, his eyes going a bit glassy. Then he murmured, “She was so sad. I should’ve seen it coming.”

  My heart lurched to a stop as a sick feeling twisted in my gut.

  He was talking about his mom.

  As if he could’ve saved her.

  As if, at nine years old, he should’ve saved her.

  My throat closed up, and I wanted to force words past the painful lump, to make him see that none of that was his fault, that he hadn’t let anyone down or done anything wrong—but I couldn’t speak. Instead, I just lowered my head to his chest, wrapping my arms around him and letting his heartbeat drum in one ear while his voice fell into the other.

  “The water was red when I found her. Such a bright red. I’d never seen anything like it. It didn’t—it didn’t look real. And she was so pale. So… pale.”

  His words were strained, and I had a feeling he hadn’t said anything about that day aloud in years.

  Maybe not ever.

  Tears I couldn’t stop slipped from the corners of my eyes, trailing down my face to land on his chest.

  I hadn’t witnessed any part of my mom’s death. She had been there one day and gone the next, and all I knew or understood of what had happened was what my dad had told me. For a while, it’d been hard for me to believe she really was dead, that she wouldn’t walk back through the door at any moment and pick up right where she’d left off.

  I had processed her death mostly through time. The longer we’d lived without her, the more real her loss had felt.

  But Mason?

  He had processed his mother’s death in a single, visceral image. One that would likely haunt him forever.

  “You say I can’t save everyone, Princess… but what if I could have? What if I’d gone upstairs earlier? Just a few minutes earlier. Why couldn’t I have done that?”

  Resignation and desperation battled in his tone, as if those were questions he had asked himself every day for nine years. Wishing, hopelessly wishing, to somehow turn back time and change one small thing.

  If only life fucking worked that way.

  I lifted my head, wiping away the teardrops on his chest before kissing the place where they had fallen. I closed my eyes, lips still pressed against his warm, salty skin as I inhaled the scent of cedar and spice, of sorrow and guilt and determination.

  There were words I wanted to tell him, feelings pressing at the seams of my heart…

  But they didn’t make sense.

  I shouldn’t love him.

  Not after the hurt he had caused me. Not after everything he had done. Not so soon after I had begun to trust him again.

  But in the small, quiet space of my bedroom, with the smell of sex still hanging in the air and our naked bodies pressed together—our hearts and souls pressed together—I didn’t know what else to call what I felt.

  He was broken. Maybe irrevocably so. And he was stubborn and proud and closed-off.

  There was plenty not to love.

  Plenty I had found easy to hate.

  Still, when he ran his hand through my hair as I turned my head and pressed my cheek to his chest, the words slipped past my lips anyway.

  “I love you, Mason.”

  It was hardly more than a whisper, but I felt his body tense for a second beneath mine. Then his muscles unknotted, and his hand resumed its slow strokes through my hair. He gave no other sign that he’d heard me, and he didn’t say anything back.

  I knew he had heard me, but I was grateful for his silence anyway—thankful he’d let it pass.

  Because I never should’ve said it out loud.

  Chapter 15

  We missed seventh period, and eighth period too.

  Wrung out and exhausted, we fell asleep in each other’s arms, and I didn’t even look at the clock on the nightstand until after four p.m., when I blinked my bleary eyes open.

  Mason’s phone buzzed in his pants pocket a few times, and I was sure it was the other Princes calling or texting to see if he was okay. My backpack was still near the entryway, but I was sure I had missed messages from them too. Honestly, I was a little surprised they hadn’t barged into Prentice Hall and come banging down my door, but I assumed they hadn’t because they trusted me to handle Mason.

  That in itself was a somewhat terrifying thought, but as I glanced at the sleeping boy next to me, I had to admit that maybe they weren’t wrong.

  I hoped like hell they’d been able to smooth over whatever fallout there’d been from Mason beating up Preston on campus.

  Adena and her minions had gotten away with jumping me during my first year at Oak Park, but no teachers or staff had witnessed that attack. It would be harder for Dean Levy to turn a blind eye like he seemed to be so fond of doing if the teachers had seen anything too damaging.

  My gaze drifted down to Mason’s right hand, which lay across his stomach, rising and falling gently with his breath. I’d pulled my blanket over our bottom halves, and my head rested on his shoulder. The knuckles of his hand were red, the skin unbroken but bruised.

  Pressing up onto my elbow, I peered down at his face, looking my fill without feeling the need to glance away for once.

  I had never seen him sleep before. His brilliant green eyes were hidden by his closed lids, and his thick brown lashes curved gently over his cheeks.

  He was beautiful.

  But even in sleep, there was a hardness to the set of his features, a tension he carried in his muscles. As if even at his most vulnerable, he kept a shield up between himself and the rest of the world.

  I chewed my lip, tilting my head slightly as my fingertips brushed over his chest.

  In all the time I’d known him, Mason had always looked like this. I had never seen the tension drain from his face.

  Except once.

  Today.

  When he was inside me.

  I dropped my head back to his shoulder again, resting my hand over his on his stomach and curling into his body.

  He had heard my quiet, barely-whispered words earlier. I was sure of it. But I truly was glad he hadn’t said anything, because I was fucked up in the head about it enough as it was.

  Maybe the problem was that there weren’t enough words for love in the English language—not enough variations to express what we truly meant to say.

  I wasn’t in love with Mason. So much more time would need to pass for me to know if that was even possible.

  But what was the word for when a broken soul recognized another just like it? For when they joined together and their jagged edges fit?

  Maybe it wasn’t love. But whatever it was, it made me want to wrap the blanket around the two of us and try to find peace in the storm, to let Mason protect me and to protect him right back.

  I fell asleep in his arms again as those thoughts chased each other around and around in my head, and a few hours later, a loud knock on my apartment’s door jerked us both awake.

  “For fuck’s sake,” Mason groaned, craning his neck to look at the clock.

  My heart had jumped into overdrive when I was startled awake, and it didn’t slow down as the knocking came again. “Is it the other guys?”

  “What do you think?” He rolled his eyes and sat up. Then he hesitated before leaning back down to cover my body with his own and kiss me.

  It wasn’t as desperate as our previous kisses had been, but there was something… intentional about it that made my chest warm. He pulled back and stared down at me, his green eyes un-shuttered and fuzzy with sleep like they had been the night I’d gone up to his dorm to learn the truth about my mother.

  He ran his fingertips over the line of my jaw, studying my face with a serious gaze. “Princess…”

  “You don’t have to say anything,” I told him quickly.

  I didn’t want to hear false words—hell, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to hear true ones. Whatever was going on between me and the Princes was confusing enough already without adding anything else into it.

  He didn’t look satisfied with that answer one bit, but before he could say anything else, someone banged on my front door again.

  “Fucking hell.”

  He shook his head, and I almost laughed at the annoyance in his voice. The four boys were like brothers, and that included being able to irritate each other like brothers.

  Although, in fairness, it was possible the other Princes were just worried—or that they had something important to tell us. Neither of us had picked up our phones for several hours.

  Mason threw off the covers and stood, walking unabashedly across the room to pick up his clothes while I hobbled over and grabbed a worn t-shirt, new panties, and a pair of yoga pants from the dresser. I didn’t look at him as I dressed. I knew how to be naked with someone in the context of sex, but in the aftermath, I felt a little awkward about it.

  He’d already seen everything, but for some reason, I felt suddenly shy.

  He waited until I was tugging my shirt down to stride out the door, and I followed him a second later. Cole, Elijah, and Finn were already pouring into the apartment when I stepped out of the bedroom, and from the looks on their faces, no one had any doubts about what’d just happened between me and Mason.

  Elijah and Finn looked almost amused, but Cole’s face was unreadable. His ice-blue gaze cut back and forth between me and the other boy before he looked away.

  Mason didn’t seem to think there was any need to explain or defend either one of us though, so I decided I wouldn’t either.

  “What’s up?” I asked instead, moving stiffly toward the living room. My ankle was always worst after I woke up, and I rolled it around a few times in gentle circles after I sat, loosening the tight ligaments.

  “None of the teachers saw enough to report anything,” Cole said, coming to sit beside me. Mason was on my other side, and I couldn’t help but notice that Cole sat closer to me than Mason had, as if trying to send the other boy some message.

  “Yeah. And we made sure none of the kids who were in the hall will say anything either,” Finn added.

  He caught my gaze and grinned, seeming so damn amused by me and Mason that I kind of wanted to punch him.

  I still wasn’t sure where along the line it had happened, but Leah had been right. The Princes had become a package deal. Maybe they’d gotten the ball rolling with their dare that I kiss them all, but I had kept it rolling, given it a giant kick down the hill, when I had kissed them all in the ocean on the night of my birthday.

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