Broken At Love (Whitman University)

by Payne, Lyla

  His opinion of me, the fact that he believed me tough enough to handle even a guy like him, pushed me past the point of no return. What would I regret more, sleeping with him or not sleeping with him? It was a tossup, but living meant not being scared. “Okay.”

  Relief flooded his face and the sly grin reappeared.

  I returned it, feeling confident and beautiful for the first time in a long time. “I won’t let you break me, Quinn. But right now I’d let you do about anything else.”

  Before he could comment I took his hand and led him out of the ballroom.

  Chapter Ten

  The carpet in the hallway muted our footsteps. My dress rustled and sounded louder than it should; all of my senses stood on high alert.

  To my surprise, Quinn’s big hand folded around mine a moment later.

  I tugged him along, turning corners and looking for somewhere quiet and dark and with at least the potential for privacy. Frustration spun through my blood. Impatience wasn’t something I enjoyed, and right now every second not spent touching Quinn made my teeth grind together.

  Finally I yanked him into an elevator. As soon as the doors closed and we jerked upward he punched the emergency stop. The next instant he picked me up and we slammed into the wall as my legs went around his waist, holding on for dear life. His sweet salty lips were on mine, then they were everywhere, his tongue teasing my jaw and my collarbone.

  Quinn gripped the puffy sleeves of my eighties prom dress and yanked, tearing fabric and raining sequins on the carpet until he managed to loosen it enough to push it to my waist. My bra straps fell off my shoulders, hanging around my elbows as he shoved the last of the fabric out of his way and moved his demanding mouth lower. When it found my breast my back arched, pushing me harder against his lips.

  I fisted my hands in his hair—gasping, groaning—drowning in a desperate desire for more. When he lifted his face, my trembling fingers yanked at the buttons on his shirt. A giggle escaped, borne of nerves but also his ridiculous pink monstrosity.

  He quirked an eyebrow at me in a silent question. I shook my head, biting my lip to stifle another breathy laugh. “I never imagined I’d be so desperate to tear a pink ruffled shirt off a guy, that’s all.”

  A gorgeous smile lit his face with the kind of honest emotion he’d kept hidden and the following rich laughter spilled over my shoulders. It warmed me further, to share a moment of mirth inside the desire, but it dissolved quickly when I got rid of enough buttons to slide my palms over his muscled chest.

  Quinn—Quinn Rowland—pressed into my palms, biting back his own groan. The proof that he wanted me shifted against my thigh, making me again desperate for fewer clothes, and the fact that he was as frantic as I was in this moment made me impatient again.

  His mouth crushed mine; our tongues tangled as the taste of salt and sweet whiskey made me dizzy. At the same time his hands bunched my dress around my waist. One held it in place, pinning me between him and the wall, while the other made its way underneath the white lace underwear I’d worn just in case.

  I didn’t care. I wanted it all, right now. In a hotel elevator.

  The intensity of his fingers pushed inside me shocked like electricity and I tensed against his mouth, my fingernails digging into his bare shoulders while I tried not to scream.

  Quinn froze and his eyes flew open. He pulled back, blue eyes dark like the sky right after the sun finally sets, hungry but sparked with concern. “Are you okay?”

  The quiet alarm in the question made me smile, and instead of answering I rocked slowly, deliciously, against his hand and kissed him until he kissed me back. “Don’t stop,” I whispered into his lips.

  He didn’t, and apparently no one had lied about Quinn’s proficiency with women. Expert fingers shot waves of pleasure that weakened my legs, shuddered through my limbs until Quinn and the elevator wall were holding me up. When he lowered his lips again and sucked my breast against his tongue, the world exploded in a wash of pleasure and stars. I bit down hard on his shoulder, stifling a shriek as incoherent ecstasy exploded through me.

  I clung to him and waited for sight and sound and oxygen to return. When I trusted my legs I stood and reached for him, intent on more, on everything, but his hand dropped my dress and captured my wrists in a pinch. Even that felt good. I raised a questioning gaze to his and found his eyes closed, his own breath coming in gasps.

  “Give me a second,” he rasped.

  “I don’t want to wait.”

  “God, Emilie, neither do I. I can’t even look at you—that gorgeous skin swollen and sweaty.” He took another shuddering breath. “But we should go.”

  “Go?” The word confused me, like I’d never heard it before now.

  Those blue eyes opened and fixed on mine. Instead of the heady lust he’d shown me since showing up on the front porch of the sorority house tonight, there was anger and resentment there.

  “I’m not fucking you in an elevator.”

  The words slapped me in the face, embarrassing me for a second, like maybe I was the only one who had gotten carried away. When he saw the look on my face, though, the irritation moved to the side and made way for panic. The anger didn’t leave, it only receded.

  “Emilie, no. It’s not because I don’t want to fuck you in an elevator—” I choked out a laugh. “It’s that it shouldn’t be like this. Not our first time. I’m not…I don’t want it to feel like I’m having sex with you and then dropping you at the curb like a hooker.”

  “Okay,” I said, more meekly than I intended, a little stunned that he cared.

  He reached over, helping me pull my clothes back into place and making sure the redesign he’d done on my dress would let it stay on my shoulders. I adjusted my skirt and then buttoned his shirt back up before he hit the emergency stop button to get us moving.

  To my surprise Quinn reached out and took my hand again, threading our fingers together. The thought of where his hands had just been made me hot all over again.

  As the doors dinged he looked over and winked at me. “Plus, I’m not at my best standing up. I’d hate to ruin my reputation now.”

  ***

  “So he said he didn’t have a condom and needed to run to the store…and then he just never came back?”

  Shame burned the back of my throat. “It doesn’t matter if you ask me a fifth time, the answer’s still the same.”

  “I know, but…Quinn Rowland does not give up sex, so I find it hard to believe he doesn’t carry condoms. I can’t believe he didn’t seal the deal in the elevator. Which is totally hot and daredevil of you, Em. I approve.” Ruby smiled like she knew I was about to fall apart.

  It wasn’t that he’d left. I’d expected him to do that—just after we’d had sex, not before, and the result was me going over every single moment in the elevator and searching for what I’d done wrong. It was humiliating.

  “He texted you, though…right?”

  “Yeah.”

  Quinn texted about an hour after he’d left me at the sorority house that there had been an emergency at the Aussie Open party he had to deal with and that he’d be back to pick me up later. That was five hours ago.

  “Well, maybe something really happened. What else could it be?”

  I shrugged, trying to act like it wasn’t a big deal if I never heard from him again, but it wasn’t true and we both knew it. The promise that ran through me on the dance floor tonight returned then, weaker but still present. He would not break me. Not my heart or my confidence or anything else.

  Except now that I’d seen him up close, frantic and vulnerable in his way, I wanted to see it again and again. The way his beautiful face felt against my body, how his silky black hair slid between my fingers, the tensed muscles under my hands. I didn’t care how long it might last, I only wanted one more day.

  “Em.” Ruby tugged on my hand. “Maybe it’s better this way. I don’t like the way he looked at you tonight.”

  “What do you mean?” Curiosity
pulled my mind from the vortex of desire that I couldn’t seem to shake. Quinn had looked at me a bunch of different ways tonight but I didn’t recall not liking a single one of them.

  “I don’t know. Like you belonged to him—and yeah, like he wanted you—but it made him angry.” She frowned, the expression out of place on her normally chipper features. It was mostly her upturned nose that made her appear perpetually happy, because in reality she was snarky pretty much twenty-four-seven. “I’m not explaining it very well, but I don’t think Quinn’s someone you want to be in the way of if he gets pissed.”

  For some reason my mind flashed to Toby. He’d been hurt tonight and no one knew why, at least not yet, and Quinn had showed up to take me to the dance in his place. The two things weren’t connected, surely. They were frat brothers—friends. Toby told me so, and we were close enough that he would have warned me if Quinn was dangerous.

  “Well, I don’t think we have to worry about that. Quinn doesn’t have any interest in a girl belonging to him in any sense but in the bedroom.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Quinn

  “I need to talk to you,” I growled at Sebastian.

  He turned toward me, irritation barely concealed due to the fact that my interruption had lifted some random brunette’s hand off his crotch. “What is it, Quinn? And for fuck’s sake, what are you wearing?”

  “Don’t worry about it.” I motioned for the girl to get out, impatient to have this conversation.

  My blood ran hot every time the scene from the elevator pushed into the front of my mind. It made me the weirdest mixture of angry and horny I’d ever experienced in my life.

  If Sebastian would agree to my proposal I’d never feel it again. Emilie would be out of my life forever, and even though she might not agree right now, since I’d run away from her faster than a Kenyan in the New York Marathon, it was the best thing for her, too.

  I’d felt too much. Kissing her, seeing her body swell against my lips, the sensation of her teeth clamped on my shoulder when she’d come in my hand…it was like coming back from the dead and living hurt like hell. I didn’t want to, but somewhere in the past week while I’d been pretending to care about getting to know Emilie Swanson, I’d actually started to like her.

  Not just want her, or respect her as an opponent—which was rare enough—but like her. I wanted to punch her dad in the face for not seeing how amazing an artist she was, and strangle God for taking her sister, and castrate any guy who had her before I did.

  The immensity of it overwhelmed me like nothing I’d felt before or been conditioned to handle. A life devoid of positive emotion had built me into this man; an excess of any feeling had been a foreign concept.

  Until now.

  Anger boiled again, replacing the lust and debilitating pain caused by the reanimation of my flesh. She wouldn’t do this to me. No one would. I didn’t deserve anything good.

  Sebastian dismissed his lady friend and followed me to the library, adjusting his crotch a couple times on the way there, and I took a small amount of pleasure from the fact that he was as uncomfortably unsatisfied as I was right now. He dropped on the couch I’d used earlier, leaving me the desk chair, but I didn’t sit.

  “Well, what is it? Did you win or is this another injury timeout?” His eyes narrowed, raking over my appearance. “You do look a tad disheveled.”

  “I want to change this round.”

  He lit a cigar, puffing several times while peering at me from the shadows. A lamp on the desk was the only source of light, leaving the two of us in what could be a cave. “It’s not possible.”

  “It’s our game, Sebastian. Of course it’s possible.”

  “Convince me.”

  I’d come in here prepared to suggest we simply pick a new girl, and it would even be upping the stakes since I only had about a week remaining before the lights went out on Rod Laver Arena for another year. I closed my eyes for a second and felt the heat of the Australian summer, smelled the sweat and cement, heard the pop of new cans of balls, the murmuring of the crowd, and the squeak of new tennis shoes across the court.

  I should have been there. Winning my way into the second week, poised to take down my second major title on a hard court, going back to the hotel and rolling around in bed with the most objectively hot girl on the tour.

  Not here begging my twisted brother to let me not go to bed with an equally hot girl, albeit in a completely different way. What the hell had gotten into me?

  Emilie Swanson, a voice whispered.

  I shook my head. “I don’t want to sleep with her.”

  His eyebrows went up. “Why ever not? She’s not your type, I realize, but Emilie’s pretty enough, and those tits—”

  “—It’s not that,” I cut him off before he could go further. “She’s beautiful. And I don’t have a type.”

  “Beautiful?”

  My mistake caught his attention, as I should have guessed. He missed nothing.

  Smoke from the cigar wound up from the couch and diffused in the air, sweet and cloying. Neither of us spoke for several minutes, but I’d be damned if he’d beat me at the silent battle-of-wills game. I’d grown up playing it every day with my father. Sebastian might have been my half-brother, but he’d grown up with his whore mother until he was eighteen and couldn’t match me when it came to deflecting emotional manipulation.

  He hit the goddamn lottery the day he’d learned Teddy Rowland had fathered him. And I’d lost half of the fortune I’d earned with my silent childhood and every single time I’d been cast aside since.

  “You like her.” He held up his hand when I started to protest. “Don’t bother denying it. There is no other reason for you to refuse to get between those shapely little legs. And by the state of your hair and misbuttoned shirt, I assume the lady is no longer playing hard to get.”

  “I don’t want anything more to do with her. I’ll bag two or three more girls this week, whatever you think is appropriate. Whoever. Just not her.”

  “No.”

  My heart sank. I’d known he wouldn’t change his mind the minute he guessed it was personal. And not because of the money, although the bets he took over the course of four tennis majors added up to a small fortune. I got my cut of that, not that either of us actually needed the money.

  He wouldn’t change the deal because he liked seeing me squirm. If I refused, then he wouldn’t take half of my inheritance, he’d take his blackmail public instead.

  “I mean, unless you want to stop playing all together. I’d miss the cash but the fallout from your impressively shocking photos would be more than enough to keep me entertained for a while, and every blog, website, news show, and paper in the country—hell, half the world—would love to see your pretty little face on the front page.”

  Sebastian had some rather unflattering photographs of me taken right after my career ended, and if they went public it would be the final nail in my coffin. My father would never allow the future of his company to be jeopardized by an unflattering reputation. He’d paid Sebastian’s mother over a hundred million dollars to go away and never return. She also signed over parental rights on a forged adoption document that made it look like my father had simply adopted a homeless kid off the street out of the goodness of his heart.

  The photos Seb had of me contained various drug paraphernalia, including full-body shots with needles hanging out of my arms, pills crushed into powder on glass tabletops, naked escorts draped across my lap. I hardly remembered the four months it took me to pull my head out of my ass. The photos didn’t lie, though, and my father would disown me. Even if he didn’t, his shareholders wouldn’t be keen on being ordered around by a former drug addict. Goodbye, future.

  When Seb first suggested the game as a way to make some cash, I’d agreed willingly enough, more for the challenge than the money. I’d come up with the idea of using the majors as a way to get back at Alexandria—the representation of all women everywhere—and prove I didn’t
give a shit that she’d dumped me.

  Which, while true in the sense I didn’t care about her whiny ass, was not true in the sense that she had no right to send me packing like a dog that had peed on the carpet one too many times.

  “No. I don’t want to quit.” I sighed. “You’re really not going to be reasonable, I suppose.”

  “On the contrary, I’m being very reasonable. I’d reasonably like to see you go over there and fuck this girl like you’ve fucked all the others. You’ve made her care about poor, misunderstood Quinn Rowland, the rich boy no one ever loved; now is the fun part. Reap your rewards and then leave her without a word. It’ll be good for you. Get her out of your system and we can get back to business.” He stood, ashing his cigar in the tray on the desk, and made for the door.

  “You didn’t have to go after Toby so hard. Putting him the hospital nearly blew my cover. Again.” It was a nitpick, but I wanted something.

  “I merely wanted to ensure he wouldn’t go tattling to his little crush and ruin everything once and for all. I figured you’d feel the same way. Mea culpa, brother.”

  Sebastian left the room. The scent of smoke and pure evil remained in his wake and I sat breathing it for several minutes, trying to soak it in and return to my former self. I was going to have to finish what Emilie and I had started.

  Desire stirred at the thought. So did my anger. I would use them both to get through the next days. If ire took over it would consume my misgivings, eat them the way fire devours an entire structure, and I could prove to Emilie that she wanted nothing to do with me.

  Besides, she was no better than Alexandria.

  Emilie was a girl, and eventually she’d show her true colors. I could get her naked in the next hour, and it shouldn’t take more than a day or so for her to admit she cared about me. Then I would walk away without a backward glance. Like always.