I stared back, either unwilling or unable to back down.
Ambrose looked away first, putting his untouched shake in the cupholder before leading us back to the highway.
Ungrateful ass, I thought as I finished my own and got comfortable.
Miles passed in more silence. Before I knew it, I could barely keep my eyes open. So, I stopped fighting it.
I wrapped my arms around myself and dozed off.
At some point, I stirred and shifted my legs. Warmth cocooned me. There was a black and white hoodie spread over me, and it wasn’t mine.
I peeked from beneath my lashes at Ambrose. He watched the road, sharp profile as tense as I’d seen it yet. My gaze dropped to the middle console.
His milkshake sat beside mine. Empty.
I fell back asleep before I could decide what that meant.
7
Ambrose
“A man’s greatest weakness is a woman he can’t bring himself to ignore.”
Dad’s words from years ago ran circles in my mind, prodding at me while the miles passed beneath my expensive wheels. I wanted nothing more than to brush them off. Forget all about their existence the same way I had after he told me the first time.
Accepting their relevance meant accepting that there was a kernel of truth there.
It meant accepting that I might have a weakness.
I don’t, I told myself.
But my eyes sliding to my passenger called me a fucking liar.
Emily Brennan was a blast from the past. One I wished I could say I’d never given a second thought, but that would be another lie.
Even in my gangly-limbed younger years, people knew not to fuck with me. It was why I’d felt completely comfortable escaping from that lame-ass party to find a place I could sit in silence.
Back then, the debt was fresh. My mistake plagued me day and night, haunting my dreams and my waking moments with tragedy.
Peace and quiet gave me the concentration I needed to build walls against the onslaught and not be crushed beneath it.
Then a blabbermouth dressed like a princess had shattered my reprieve. Over a goddamn cupcake, no less.
Ignoring people came to me like a second nature. Most of the world made it easy. People were fake and self-absorbed, always looking for what would benefit themselves no matter who they screwed over.
Not Emily Brennan with her waterfall of strawberry blonde waves cascading down to her waist, her smattering of freckles across her nose and cheeks, and the dumb little bows on her ankle-length dress.
Her earnest digression about cupcakes had been equally as annoying as her passion was intriguing.
She didn’t know it, but she was the only person I’d ever retreated from. My disinterest hadn’t meant a thing to her. Neither had my sharp comments. It had been more than I could process.
I’d learned she was Erik’s sister that same day, although I made sure to never ask about her or why he hadn’t mentioned she existed.
Asking betrayed interest.
I didn’t have time to be interested then.
I certainly didn’t have time to be interested now.
So what was it going to take to get my traitorous eyes to stay on the road instead of drifting to her every few minutes?
She was a briar patch that drew me in and tangled me further the more I struggled to push her away.
Her hair was shorter now, tucked into a ponytail beneath her ball cap. Maybe if that had been the only difference, I could’ve evicted her from the real estate she occupied in my brain.
It wasn’t.
Her lips were redder, fuller, slightly pouty. They parted as a soft sigh escaped her sleeping form, and my dick treated the sound like it was enlisted and a five-star general had just walked in the room.
I drifted out of my lane and tore my eyes from her long enough to correct our course and stop imagining how those striking, turquoise eyes would look peering up at me while I slid inside her mouth.
Might shut her up for a moment. A half-grin formed and slipped away while my eyes wandered.
My hoodie was working double duty. It hid her long, milky legs and full chest. Hid the colorful sleeve of tattoos dropping from her elbow to the fingers of her left arm.
I’d always thought Adam was a fucking tool for accepting the apple from Eve.
At least before a body shaped like the ultimate sin had distracted me. Thankfully, the end result didn’t affect all of humanity. But it cost me a t-shirt. That cupcake stain was never coming out.
I should’ve punished her for that, whether or not her actions were justified. Why I hadn’t was a mystery I wasn’t going to look into.
Emily shifted. I faced the road before I got caught staring like a creeper.
“Take a picture,” she muttered without opening her eyes. Her lips tipped up, amusement given form. “It’ll last longer.”
She’s bluffing. Ignore her. You can’t afford weakness.
She stretched, arms going above her head. My hoodie fell away, revealing the swells of her breasts straining against her shirt. The fabric lifted around her waist, flashing more milky skin that apparently refused to tan.
I looked. I couldn’t stop myself.
Her body was a magnet for my eyes.
I knew the moment I was alone I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from stroking one out to the image of her walking down the street, hips and ass swinging in a mesmerizing display.
Of course, when I managed to lift my gaze she was staring right at me.
I turned most girls and a fair number of grown women into giggling, sighing, blushing messes. It was a natural byproduct of being built like a professional athlete and having looks that would make a model jealous.
The whole thing made my interactions with the opposite sex boring and predictable. Two things I felt oddly certain would never apply to the girl beside me. The one who brazenly called me on checking her out and waited for my reaction with a sleepy smile.
Bags under her eyes and everything, she was so beautiful it aggravated me.
I wordlessly broke our eye contact and drove. The silence should’ve made me feel right at home. It didn’t. Every move she made, no matter how small, felt like an accusation.
She was getting to me. I couldn’t tell if she knew it, and it didn’t matter.
Her presence provoked me. Ignoring her wasn’t going to work.
But I wasn’t certain I could open my mouth without either picking a fight or admitting I wanted to pull over, find a wall, and fuck her against it until her eyes glazed over in surrender.
Shit, both of those appealed.
Her phone buzzed in her lap, giving me a welcome distraction from the heat in my chest.
As late as it was, it had to either be a friend or...
My jaw popped. “How does your boyfriend feel about you skipping town, cupcake girl?”
Her fingers paused on the keys.
Gotcha, I thought.
I should’ve known better.
“The most crushing defeats come after victories celebrated too early.”
Emily snorted, so unlike the daughters of politicians, business moguls, and upper-crust elite I was around who would never make a sound like that in public.
“Boyfriend?” I could hear the laughter in her voice. “What gave you that idea?”
No man would be dumb enough to let you stay single, cupcake obsession and all.
Since I couldn’t say that aloud without wanting to bash my head against the steering wheel, I stayed quiet. Again.
“Assumptions are dangerous things, Ambrose. You don’t know anything about me.”
“Incorrect.”
Her brows lifted, waiting.
This was what I needed. Neutral ground. Something to shake her unflappable exterior and keep my mind on anything except this unwanted attraction.
“I know it pained you to waste that cupcake,” I started.
“Meh,” came her quick response. “It was for a good cause.”
“I know
you favor your right leg.” The victory in her eyes faded as they narrowed. “I’m guessing you had surgery on the left?”
“How do you know that?”
“The way you walk, and you rub it when you get in and out of the car.”
“You think you’re a detective or something?”
I scoffed. “I look good in a suit. Doesn’t mean I like wearing them.”
She folded her arms, leaning back in the seat. “I find that hard to believe. It would take a designer suit to contain your ego.”
This...wasn’t going as planned.
She had the high ground, and I was splashing her with puddles when I needed a tsunami. Something big enough to put us on equal footing.
I slowed down while I considered everything I knew, grateful for the deserted stretch of interstate. She looked out the window, probably thinking I was out of ammunition. She was wrong.
My attention fell to the envelope in her lap. It was wrinkled and smudged from how often she fiddled with it.
Target acquired.
“I know you’re terrified of opening that letter.” She froze, turning stiff as a board. “I wonder why that is?”
“None of your business,” she hissed between her teeth.
There we go. Not so untouchable anymore.
“Come on,” I goaded with a mean smirk. “How bad could it be? Maybe it’s daddy dearest apologizing for not giving a damn about you once in the last five years? It’s not like he ever mentioned you.”
That was a partial lie. Paying my debt had once demanded I take a closer look at James Brennan. He kept a folder of her grades and achievements spanning the last several years. That didn’t count as not giving a damn.
But she didn’t know any of that.
I could tell by the way her lips thinned and her nails bit into her palms. She looked tempted to claw my eyes out.
Her palpable anger turned my dick to steel.
“Drop it,” she said, turning her whole body away from me.
“I know your brother pretends you don’t exist.” She flinched from head to toe. “I can’t wait to see how that reunion goes.”
“You...” Emily paused, pulling her bottom lip between her teeth. I wanted to be the one biting down on it. “That day at the party. I forget that you knew Erik.”
“We’ve met.”
“How is he?”
I bit back a curse, reorganizing my thoughts. Getting rid of her became my second highest priority, overtaking things she had no business being near.
And yet achieving that goal was downright urgent.
The deal was to get her to the campus, and we were close. Then I could make sure she didn’t stay.
She couldn’t stay.
One question, and I wanted to punch one of my best friends in the face on her behalf.
Unlike their father, I never got the slightest hint that Erik so much as cared she was alive. If I noticed the divide between them, surely she did as well. Yet here she was, asking about him without a speck of deceit in her soft voice.
I shifted into a higher gear.
Ignore her, drop her off, and get on with your life. She’s a liability you don’t—
“Ambrose.” Emily touched my arm. “This isn’t the time to go all vow of silence on me. Is Erik okay?”
I glanced at her hand on my arm. “Answering that question doesn’t require physical contact.”
She drew back, nostrils flaring. “You know, you can be a real—”
“Asshole,” I supplied, focused on the clock tower in the distance. Almost there. “You should get some new material. But he’s fine. You’ll be able to see for yourself soon enough. We’ll be there in a few more minutes.”
Emily shook her head. “I don’t suppose I can expect you to give me a crash course on this place without all the snarling?”
“Do I look like a tour guide?”
Her amused huff infuriated me. “I’ll take that as a no.”
Why are you even here? I wanted to ask. Nothing about her presence made sense.
Calling in a favor from Madeline LaCroix was no small thing. Her reach and influence could quite literally change lives. More than once, she’d been referred to as a genie capable of manifesting a person’s greatest dreams or worst nightmares.
James Brennan could’ve asked for anything. So, why cash in his token just so his daughter could attend Black Rose? There had to be something I was missing.
They weren’t even on speaking terms.
Fuck it. Even if I wasn’t going to let her stay, I needed to know. Friends close, enemies closer.
“Why Black Rose?” I slowed down as we reached the campus proper and watched her take it in out of the corner of my eye. “You don’t seem like the type.”
She didn’t, either. I could count on one hand the number of girls on this campus with tattoos. A sleeve of them? Not a chance in hell.
That was the kind of rebellion trusts funds were held hostage over, if not done away with completely. Given that most of my privileged classmates had never worked a day in their lives, they couldn’t risk it.
“Why?” She spoke to the window, refusing to look at me. “Worried I won’t fit in with the rest of the snobs? In case your memory is as short as your temper, I should remind you that all of this—” The wave of her hand was too ambiguous for me to know she was talking about the obvious wealth around us, from the imported trees to the stately buildings and gold accents. But I understood anyway. “—was once a part of my life just like it is yours.”
She’d tried to keep her voice neutral. The bitterness seeped through anyway, and curiosity unfurled in my chest before I caught it around the neck and squeezed. I didn’t give a damn about her background, or her life at all, for that matter.
Yet more questions sat poised on the tip of my tongue, straining against a cage that grew weaker by the second. Emily released a heavy sigh, breath fogging the window, and the cage’s imaginary bars groaned.
Fuck this.
I’d compared her to Eve. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Emily Brennan was Lilith, pure ruin in a package so pretty you couldn’t help but want to unwrap it, even knowing there was a bomb waiting.
In another life, I might’ve risked becoming collateral damage. In this one? I was spoken for. My life wasn’t my own. It belonged to the debt I would never be free of, although I tried my hardest.
I’d overcome greater obstacles than intriguing redheads. I wasn’t Death, our keeper of secrets, for nothing. The trick was in getting rid of those obstacles.
I brought the car to another sudden stop that sent her lurching forward in her seat, glaring at me. She parted those distracting lips, but I beat her to the punch.
“Get out.” I unlocked the doors just to make sure my point got across.
Her eyes flared before she tempered her reaction.
I waited for her to fight me, and my blood sang with expectation. This time, she would lose.
She was in my territory now, without a clue of where she needed to go or what her next step should be. I could provide that information of course, once I made her drag it out of me.
So I waited.
Waited.
Waited.
The tension between us crackled, popped, and built on top of itself—a nuclear reactor edging closer and closer to a complete system meltdown.
Her eye twitched.
Victory did the tango down my spine.
Then she got out of the car and started walking, moving so quickly I barely registered what was happening until the door slammed shut.
This fucking girl.
She stopped briefly, hefting her backpack on one shoulder, ponytail swinging while she glanced this way and that in the dark. Emily reached down and absently rubbed at her knee. I couldn’t see the scar from here, but her small movement remained an accusation that scraped against my chest.
You’re going to make her walk?
I rolled the window down, a demand on my lips. “Dorm
s are that way,” I said instead, pointing when she glanced at me.
She took notice of the buildings in the distance. The ones situated on top of a hill. Determination steeled her features and she started walking without so much as another word to me.
I drove off before I could do anything else tonight that I would regret.
But I couldn’t stop seeing the unapologetic swing to her hips.
8
Emily
By the time I reached the two massive dorms situated high above campus, looking like twin estates with their matching lawns, trees, and paved roundabouts, I was a mess.
Sweaty. Sticky. Slightly irate.
August was here, but summer hadn’t turned to fall just yet. Walking almost two miles in the heat, and at a higher elevation than I was used to? I was lucky I hadn’t passed out.
As it was, my knee throbbed with pain and old memories. It always hurt more around bullies. I could tell it was swollen without looking down.
I needed to nurse it with a shower and a bag of ice. Except that meant having access to either of those things. At the moment, I didn’t. I also doubted my ability to acquire them anytime soon.
Dad had pulled a lot of strings, but I wished some of them included extra details.
He’d been right about one thing at least. Ambrose LaCroix was a terror, and I did my best to put the infuriating jerk out of my mind as I picked a building at random and trudged towards it.
Anxiety kept my heartbeat elevated. Would anyone even be awake at this hour to confirm who I was and let me in? Or would I be calling that Uber after all so I could find a hotel?
I wiped sweaty palms on my skirt and adjusted the brim of my hat, trying to appear slightly less disheveled. I wouldn’t let myself in looking like I did, but I chose to have hope.
Something has to go right today, doesn’t it?
I raised my hand to grab the golden door knocker.
“Emily Brennan.”
I yelped and jumped back from the door, eyes darting. My busted knee didn’t appreciate how I’d treated it today. It decided that was the perfect time to give out and send my ass to the ground, helpless in the face of whoever was out here with me.
Defiant Prince: An Enemies-to-Lovers Romance (Black Rose University Book 1) Page 6
