Broken Rules (Love Storm series Book 2)

by Victory Storm

  “ In my first driving lesson with the instructor, a car lost control and came at me. The airbag exploded in my face due to the crash and I was hurt by the seat belt. My father also took me to the hospital because of whiplash. I was so upset and frightened that I didn't want to touch a steering wheel ever again. All I have to do is sit in the driver's seat to start shaking uncontrollably," she confessed, trembling stronger than before, as if reliving the event.

  "Hey, it's over," I tried to calm her, approaching her carefully and hugging her gently.

  Alice began to cry harder than before and I felt my heart break.

  "It's all right," I murmured, stroking her hair, while she hugged me for the first time, as if I were her lifeline.

  I could feel her pain and I understood too well her feeling of not being loved or understood by those who had brought her into the world.

  Since my mother died my father had attached himself to work and, if I hadn't had my older brother, I wouldn't have had anyone to take care of me. However that feeling of not being accepted and loved had always been clear to me, clear enough to make react with anger and recklessness so that I would have minimum attention and not feel crushed by my father’s fondness for appearances and that fake respectability behind which he hid.

  I let Alice come to herself and, when she stopped crying, I freed her from my embrace.

  "Sorry about that. It's just that I don't have anyone to let off steam, not even my father, because I don't want to worry him ... and I’m sorry if I took it out on you these days. I shouldn't have reacted that way and made you angry. "

  "It doesn't matter." I let it go just to see her smile again. She had a beautiful smile but never showed it.

  "Peace?"

  “ Only after you've paid for getting me shot with that blood-red shower. I still don't understand how you did it," I replied, making her laugh.

  “ I just put a whole tube of food coloring in your shower head. Now that I have told you, can we be friends?” She tried to calm me, talking to me like I was a child and looking at me with her splendid bright, mischievous eyes.

  "A little while ago you responded to my kiss with too much heat to make me think of you as a friend. Besides, I can't stand you,” I teased her, making her blush again.

  "I can't stand you either, and I can assure you that what just happened will never happen again."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Positive. The first one was just a moment of weakness due to alcohol. I was drunk." Here the storyteller was back! Imagine if she admitted for once that she succumbed to passion because she liked me after all!

  "Are you sure …"

  "Definitely."

  "You don't even know what the truth is," I whispered in her ear as I approached her. “But I guarantee you that I will do everything in my power to get you out. Then let's see if you still have the courage to tell me that kissing me was a mistake,” I promised, getting out of the water. I loved challenges and Alice represented a big one.

  "Poor dreamer."

  "You will regret provoking me."

  "You started it!" She defended herself, offended.

  "And you followed," I said, leaving her stunned. She knew I was right and couldn't say anything to deny it.

  I smiled, satisfied.

  I had just won my first match.

  Euphoric for the victory, I called Ant.

  "Call Logan and Ryo. Come over here tonight. We have a revenge to plan!"

  "Easton, please don't tell me you're still fighting with that girl?"

  "I intend to show her who she’s fighting with."

  "Tomorrow is the last day you’ll be together, come on."

  "Exactly, I have to take advantage of it."

  "Is this a challenge or a bet for you?" Ant snorted, hanging up.

  5

  EASTON

  The following morning, I relaxed in the kitchen over a nice cup of steaming coffee with my three friends.

  "Are you sure Alice wakes up at this hour?" Ryo asked me between a yawn and another.

  "Yes, when I had her cell phone, I saw the alarm was set for now."

  «I really hope so, because right now I just want to go to sleep in a comfortable bed. Your couch gave me a backache. "

  "At least you slept. But I didn't ignore you because you snored," Logan complained.

  "Shut up!"

  "Can you stop arguing at this hour? I have a big headache after spending the night with you deciding how to ruin the last day in this house for Alice," Ant stopped them. "Easton, how can you be so calm?"

  “ I planned this moment all night and had to sneak into Alice's room this morning. With everything I've done, I still wonder how she managed not to wake up," I replied calmly. It was the calm before the storm. I was just waiting to see Alice come through the kitchen door to explode with happiness for my revenge or with nervousness for not being able to take revenge as I wanted.

  “ Anyway, if you want to leave, go ahead. By now what’s done is done. “

  "Well no! After bumping into each trap, I'm curious to see the result," Ryo waved impatiently to savor the victory.

  I was about to reply when I saw Alice enter the kitchen.

  She looked horrible and upset, with her hair all tousled and dirty with cream that had run down her forehead, her cheeks flushed, her eyes watery but blazing with anger and her lips swollen and red.

  As if that wasn't enough, she had a bloody fake mouse tied to her left wrist with a transparent thread and her shorts were wet between her thighs.

  In an instant we all laughed.

  “ I had to expect it. You are bastards,” she exclaimed angrily, even though her eyes had a twinkle of amusement.

  "We didn't do anything. Don't blame us if you still pee in bed like a baby," I provoked.

  «This is not pee. I checked,” Alice laughed faintly, despite her sore lips.

  "You should take better care of your personal hygiene," Ant added, grinning.

  "Let me guess. This is your fault,” she hissed, touching her sticky hair.

  "No, I just had the idea," he justified.

  "An idea that someone has translated into reality, since I went to sleep yesterday after taking a shower and I was fine."

  "Alice, what happened to you?" intervened Helena, her mother, shocked to find her daughter in such a condition.

  "I don't know," she replied, feigning indifference, while the woman ran to make herself a coffee and then go to work. "I woke up at the usual time, stretched, rubbed my eyes and touched my hair, where I found a mountain of whipped cream that I unwittingly spread everywhere. But as I raised my arm to struggle with my hair, I found myself with this, a fake dead mouse attached to my wrist. That blew me out of bed with such a jerk that I stretched a muscle in my back," she began to tell. But her mother didn't even seem to hear her as she sipped her coffee quickly and wrote an email on her smartphone. I wanted to take her cell phone and throw it in the pool! Would it have been so difficult to listen to her daughter for five seconds?

  “ And then?” I urged her to continue since Alice had stopped when she noticed that her mother had said goodbye and run away, without even commenting on what she had said.

  “ Then I noticed that someone had tried to make me believe that I had wet myself out of fear, but that's not true. I was about to run looking for you, when I saw the plate with the Oreos, my favorite cookies, on the bedside table with your note: “Now we are even! Have a nice day, Easton.” Stupid as I am, I believed you and ate a biscuit and then discovered that you had removed the vanilla cream filling to replace it with something disgusting."

  “ In some I put mayonnaise. In others, mint toothpaste," I explained, proud of my genius.

  "Needless to say, I ran to the bathroom to rinse my mouth and brush my teeth, but ..."

  At that point we all burst out laughing.

  «... but someone must have run the toothbrush over a chili pepper or something similar because my mouth caught fire. I still have tears in my eyes fr
om the pain and my lips hurt!” she concluded. “I was going to take a shower before going down, but then I found what I think is red food coloring sprayed on all the walls of the shower cubicle together with an old puppet lying on the bottom, as if a murder had been committed inside. I don't even want to imagine what the cleaning lady will think of me when she goes to clean my room."

  "We did a good job, team!" Ryo exclaimed excitedly.

  «The idea of cream was Ant's, Logan's idea was the mouse, Ryo thought of the chili. The rest is all wheat from my sack," I explained to Alice triumphantly, then I saw her come towards me and hit me on the arm, almost making me spill the coffee on the ground.

  "That is for destroying my love affair with Oreos," she said furiously, taking my face in her hands and giving me a kiss on the lips. I was so thrilled by that gesture that I did not rebel.

  In an instant, however, I felt my mouth pinch and burn. Alice still had chili on her lips!

  "Damn it!" I snarled in pain.

  "So, you learn! And now give me some ice! I have crazy pain in my lips!” she pleaded with tears in her eyes.

  "Yes, ice. Now! “I ordered furiously, wiping my mouth.

  Luckily, Logan ran to the freezer to get two bags of frozen food and Alice and I finally managed to get some relief.

  ***

  ALICE

  After my nightmare awakening, I went to clean up.

  Meanwhile Easton's friends returned home, and he was left alone swimming.

  I caught up with him.

  "How is it possible that every time I see you, you're in the pool?" I began.

  "This is the only place where my father would never come, so it's my safe area where I can be in peace.”

  “ Are you afraid of water?”

  “ Yep.”

  “ So why did he put in two pools? This large one and the small one with whirlpool?"

  “ Because this is what society requires. My father is more attached to social conventions than to his own well-being. "

  "I noticed that there is no good blood between you and your father."

  “ Nothing flows between us. We avoid each other. I don't know if you noticed that in these three days, we have not been together even once."

  "Same thing for my mother. I thought she wanted to be with me. It was she who asked me to come to Oregon three days before college so we could get together and I could get to know her new partner. Instead, she treats me some side dish to hide or avoid. "

  "At least you have your father."

  "Yes. And you? Your mother?"

  "She's dead, and I don't want to talk about it."

  "I'm sorry. I didn’t know."

  "I was small, and I hardly remember her."

  “ But you have a brother. I am an only child. I always wanted a sister. "

  “ If you want, I'll give you mine. I can’t stand him. He is four years older than us but he’s an idiot who pretends to be the adult, the manager. Actually, he left for Stanford at the first opportunity and I don't think he will return to Oregon. "

  "Maybe he's suffering too, like you."

  "He doesn’t know what suffering is," he cut me short, sending me a glacial look that made me shiver. There was something about Easton that always managed to upset me. Like the memory of the previous evening.

  I still couldn't believe what I had done.

  In an instant I had broken at least a dozen of my personal rules, including that of never kissing a boy who was not in love with me, much less tighten my legs on his hips and feel his erection against my panties or not crying or letting off steam with a semi-stranger or worse still with a boy who hated me and could not stand me.

  At that thought I blushed as red as a poppy, but luckily Easton was too busy swimming to notice.

  I looked at him, fascinated by his movements, by his arms that were perfectly coordinated with the breath.

  He was breathtakingly beautiful with a dangerous and inscrutable charm that gave him an allure of seductive mystery, capable of making any girl lose her head.

  A power that was also working on me, I realized with disappointment.

  I was still stupid as I went with him into the heated pool with whirlpool.

  I kept telling myself that it was only a moment of crisis, of weakness, that had knocked me off balance to the point of losing touch with reality and pushing me to enjoy his kisses and his hands on my body. Still, the more I thought about it, the more I felt I still had his mouth on my skin. Nobody had ever touched me in that way, so shameless and without what I considered essential preliminaries, like a dinner and a movie at the theater, a first and chaste kiss, a pledge of love and other things so cloying and romantic they were almost embarrassing.

  Only his hands on my breast, his fingers on the turgid nipples had awakened me to the point of feeling pleasantly painful contractions between my thighs and at the same time the awareness of what I was doing. In an instant I had been overwhelmed with shame for that weakness with my worst enemy. The embarrassment had immediately been added to the anger and resentment towards my mother who had abandoned me for the umpteenth time to go to the opera with Mitchell, leaving me alone with Easton and the fear of what he might have done with my cell phone that he had taken away for hours.

  Finally came the sense of guilt, the feeling of not being able to deal with everything alone, especially of what to do with Easton, of not being understood, of having made a mistake in leaving my father and Book ...

  Yes, I had started to cry. I would have preferred to bury myself in the garden instead of whining in front of my stepbrother, but then he had embraced me and consoled me.

  I would be grateful to him forever for that kindness. I wasn't even angry about all those spiteful moments of a few hours earlier, although I still thought that keeping a certain distance from him would be the wisest choice for the future.

  Too bad I kissed him this morning! Other than distancing yourself!

  I just wanted to take revenge for that hot pepper that burned my lips!

  I would never confess that I wanted to kiss him again after all. Again, and again.

  I loved it. Too much to admit.

  But now I had decided: beginning the following day, when we arrive at the university, that strange relationship with him would definitely end.

  "What are you thinking about?" Easton asked me at one point, pulling me out of my thoughts. I looked him in the face as he dried himself by the pool.

  My eyes met his and then went down to his mouth, and the incessant memory of the previous evening struck me like a jackhammer.

  "Nothing."

  "You're all red."

  “ It's because of the heat. It's too hot to be late September already," I lied.

  "Bullshit! Confess that you were thinking about last night and how excited you were."

  His mania for provoking me and getting on my nerves always worked wonderfully.

  “ I was actually thinking if your IQ was high enough for such a heavy-duty commitment as college. The more I look at you, the more I doubt it. Are you sure you have a diploma? A real diploma, I mean."

  This time I wasn't fooled by his icy gaze. I knew that his apparent calm was only a sheet of thin ice, ready to shatter into a thousand pieces at the first misstep.

  And I had just taken yet another misstep.

  Without waiting for his reaction, I turned on my heels and ran to my room to lock myself in, even if I didn't have the key.

  "Do you really think you can escape me?" Easton called after me.

  I didn't let myself be distracted but kept running. But when I was just one step away from the upper floor, I felt his arms grab me from behind and block me.

  I clung to the handrail of the stairs, but he grabbed my wrist and pulled me away from it.

  "Come on, you're not going to get mad for what I said, right?" I tried to make him think, since I couldn't chase him away. "I was joking, of course."

  "Your jokes have the ability to activate my murderous instincts."
/>
  “ That is because you don't have a minimum of self-control over yourself. Maybe your problem is not your IQ but your inability to manage ... “I was about to say, but he started to bite my neck until it almost hurt, and I found myself laughing and screaming at the same time.

  "What should I do with you?" he asked seriously, turning me around and chaining me with his hot ice gaze.

  "I don't know, but I've already decided what I'm going to do. I’m going to ask for a restraining order against you if you don't take your tentacles off me."

  "I could kill you first."

  "And go to jail for the rest of your days? Hmm, leave it alone. It's not worth it, Neanderthal man."

  "You think? Look, the satisfaction I would get from it would be immeasurable."

  I burst out laughing. It was incredible that our every verbal exchange should always end with threats and insults of all kinds.

  I had always considered myself a somewhat rigid and touchy person, but a good person who always tried to come to an agreement, but with Easton I always wanted to make him lower his sights to show him that I was not some poor idiot, the succubus of his whims. My most combative and less diplomatic side always came out with him.

  “ Ok, you’ve convinced me. I promise that I won't bother you anymore if you don't get back at me” I said as a compromise, even if in my heart I would have liked for the fight to never end. It was fun and tantalizing to have those quarrels with him.

  "Then we don't understand each other. I want you to promise me you won't bother me again even though I get back at you."

  "Forget it! I don't intend to be beaten by someone whose brain is less developed than a narcoleptic hamster," I clarified in a tone that did not allow replies. "When will you stop being bully?"

  "With you? Never, unless you stop insulting me and provoking me!"

  "You're the one who always starts!"

  “ And you follow. Could it be that you really like all the attention?” he whispered softly in my ear, letting his hands slide down my body as he had done in the hot tub, while sliding his mouth down my neck.

  “ With you everything comes down to sex. I can't stand it.” I got angry, dodging it.