Reaching out, I take her off guard and grab her by the nape of the neck, hard, and pull her into me. To anyone outside our little chat, we’d look like very intense lovers about to get it on. But only Harloe and I know the truth. I’d rather eradicate her existence than be near her.
The smell of cigarettes bounces off her face and filters up to my nose when I jerk her close to me. I want to make sure she doesn’t miss a thing.
She needs to see the monster she turned me into.
She needs to witness and accept the fact I’ll make her life a living hell if she doesn’t heed my warning. I watch her gulp, her throat bobbing. Hers flicker between my multi-colored orbs, and that’s when I see it. That’s when my lips spread into a threatening smile, baring my teeth.
“What’s wrong, little con?” I lick my lips, tilting my head to the side as I allow my darkness to shine brighter. “Scared? I didn’t think a bitch like you had emotions.”
She flinches and tries to turn her face away from mine, but I won’t allow it. My fingers tighten against the back of her neck, forcing her to look at me, even when she spits out, “Screw you.”
It’s not that I think I’m the king of this town, or the golden boy if you will. I know the town, and the people in it, kneel at my feet. Being a Prince gets you certain liberties, and if she wants to buck up against me, then so be it.
I’ll show her what it’s like to fuck with me.
I smirk and shove her away from me. She stumbles but catches herself before she falls and turns around, looking at me like she doesn’t even know me.
Honey, you don’t, and it’ll be a cold day in hell before you get the chance to again. I simply narrow my eyes at her, my lips thinning in anger. “Two Days.”
“Two days for what?”
My eyes trail over her greedily as I start backtracking toward the school. Dad always said never to take your eyes off the prize—or was that to never take your eyes off your enemies? Either way, it doesn’t make a difference to me. Harloe made the wrong decision coming back here. Don’t give a goddamn why, but she’ll soon find out how deep my hatred for her has grown.
Like a festering wound, I need to cut her out. I should have a long time ago. When I was almost there, to the point she no longer plagued by thoughts, she shows up again. Out of the blue, thinking she had any freaking right to be pissed off at me. I call bullshit. She wasn’t wronged, I was. She didn’t have her heart carved out of her chest while the carver played a game of tennis with it.
I was. I’m so fucked up because of her that I can’t even let someone get close to me! My mom, dad, my brothers—no one! She fucked me up so badly that I crave to see her tears yet hear her laughter at the same time. To punish her yet console the pain that I saw in her eyes.
She needs to go. If I have to, I’ll force her out. I can’t even attempt to heal if she’s right in front of me. Day by day, her nearness will make it worse and worse. The need to hurt her is so fierce, I feel it like a knife digging all the way to the bone. Even the late summer breeze, sun shining in the sky, and birds chirping their sweet little cadences can’t stop me from feeling this storm raging inside me.
She will try to ruin me more if she stays, and I’ve already been ruined enough.
“Trust and believe,” I release, shoving my hands into my pocket, so she doesn’t see them fisting, my nails nearly digging into my skin, “—you don’t want to know the answer.”
CHAPTER 4
Every step he takes, I have the urge to run up to him and jump on his back and just punch the ever-loving shit out of him.
Hunter Prince has always known which buttons of mine to push, and the very first one at the top of my list has always been: don’t say I can’t do something.
Anyone can tell me I can’t do something, or I need to do what they say, and I’ll bust a gut just to prove them wrong.
Hunter wants me to leave? Sucks to be him because I can’t. I refuse to toss my son’s future up into the air because his dad doesn’t want me around. Such a little bitch move. And that’s not something I pegged him to be.
Hurt because I left? Yes. I fully approve and support that emotion. Call me petty all you want, but I wanted Hunter to miss me, to sulk through his high school years feeling like a true asshole. Because, well, he freaking deserved to feel like that after the way he treated me.
But anger? Why is he pissed when he’s the one who ruined everything we had together? I didn’t tell him to cheat on me with Cassandra. Nor did I tell him to treat me like I was nothing more than gum on the bottom of his shoe, irritating and disgusting.
That’s all on him. He’s the only person who gets a say in how he reacts to someone. And that night, I had the most wonderful news to tell him.
Glad I didn’t now. No way will I ever subject Maverick to someone like that—a person so vile and uncouth, they would end up teaching him deprecating behavior. Nope. Not my little boy. He’s going to be a refined, intelligent, generous southern gentleman to whomever he comes across. That is my promise to my baby boy.
Muttering filthy expletives under my breath, I don’t even bother going back inside the auditorium, and instead, walk back toward my abandoned car.
As I make my way across campus, people give me side-eyes and wide berths. Good. Right now is definitely not the time to be even remotely forward with me. And just to think, today was going so wonderfully. I’d gotten Maverick to stop crying and be a big boy about my relocation. His bottom lip didn’t even quiver when he told me to “take care now.”
My baby boy. I smile despite the roaring emotions shifting through me. I miss him so much. Even though I know that I’m doing this for him, I can’t help it. It’s always been him and me. Of course, he had my dad and brother, but there was no one to him like me.
Mom never did get to see him. Didn’t even make it past Fourth of July the year Maverick was born. No one, not even my dad, knew the cancer had metastasized in her vital organs. Shit, none of us even knew she had cancer, to begin with. It rapidly spread, and by the time we found out, she was already one foot in the grave. There was no coming back from that.
All within a span of eight months, our lives changed forever. We lost our backbone—the glue that held us together—even though we fought like cats and dogs. And a new, little person joined the Rose pack.
Maverick is the reason Dad, Duncan, and I are still as well-rounded as we are. He saved us. And he’s the only reason I can’t fully hate Hunter, no matter how much I want to. It was Hunter who gave me the chance to be Maverick’s mom. Hunter unknowingly gave me a built-in best friend, and I will forever feel sorry for him because he’ll never know how delightful his son is.
I sigh, stepping up to my car. That’s his loss, I guess. Not going to beg someone to be in my son’s life, regardless of who he is. Maverick deserves more than that.
Hunter may not know that he even has a son, but that’s not entirely my fault. A large portion of it is, sure, but not all of it. He disposed of me, and in turn, he inadvertently disposed of his son. How can someone redeem themselves from something like that?
They can’t.
Unlocking my car door, I slip inside and grab my purse. About time I find where I’ll be staying for the next four years so I can unpack, maybe order some take out, and call my baby boy before he passes out on his poppy.
I sure hope everything is okay there. Maverick is probably reeling about me getting off the phone so quickly. He’d probably be freaking out even more if he knew it was his dad who forced me to.
We haven’t broached that topic yet, and I dread the day it comes around. While I may not want Hunter to be part of Maverick’s life, considering how he is and the way he’s treated me, I won’t keep my son from his dad. I mean, I’m not that cynical yet. A little scorned and a lot broken, but I’d never deceive my son like that.
As I pass by the on-campus apartment complex, I search my paperwork and then look for building three. When I had called, they said that it’d be close to the bot
tom of the hill. That way, when Maverick comes to live with me, I won’t have to lug him as far to the on-campus daycare.
Flitting my gaze from building to building, I finally spot mine after passing a large, ancient maple tree situated in a rare circle of grass with a tiny bench placed at the base—a small smile blooms on my face. Maverick will love playing there.
When the elements behave, we can go outside. I can read while Maverick plays with … My thoughts stop dead in their tracks, heart falling to the pit of my stomach as nausea churns.
Shit. If Hunter is going here, then that means he’ll eventually see Maverick. There’s no way I’ll keep my secret! He’ll put two and two together and realize that Maverick is his son.
He’ll also realize that his betrayal caused him to miss out on my pregnancy and all of his son’s life, but instead of taking it out on himself like he should, he’ll take it out on me.
Fuck. His family is the richest in this town. There’s no way Hunter won’t go to the ends of the earth, possibly getting the court system involved. With the way Hunter has been acting lately, I doubt he’d be inclined to forgive something as massive as not telling him he had a son.
Just can’t win for losing.
Releasing an exhale, I decide that right now, there’s nothing I can do about it. I need to think about it more when it’s closer to Maverick coming to live with me.
Just because Hunter and I are in the same zip code doesn’t mean he’ll find out about Maverick. Hell, I’ve known of people in this town who don’t even know their neighbors. The same neighbors they’ve been living right next to since they moved into Golden Oaks.
This town may be gossip city, but the rumor mill tends to run slow on some things.
For instance, take Mr. Grooger and Mrs. Shelton. They lived next to each other from 1996, when Mr. Grooger moved in, to 2007, without knowing one another. They both had jobs, so they both had to leave the house and travel. So, they should have been introduced before then, right?
Wrong.
Neither one knew the other, but after they met, within the year, Mrs. Shelton was selling her house because she’d married Mr. Grooger. It was all the gossip. “Quite a scandalous matrimony,” my mom used to say.
So, avoiding the obvious is completely doable. I just need to figure out a way.
Things always have to be so flipping hard. Geez.
Pulling into my designated spot, I shut my car off and allow my head to fall back against the headrest. Different scenarios play out inside my mind, but it’s no use. Every image I’m playing around with, Hunter finds out, and he’s pissed. You’ve never seen the devil until you get a Prince pissed off.
This one time, Owen, Emmerson, and Hunter were all playing in their backyard. Of course, I was right there with them—I think we were playing hide-n-seek. Anyway, we were all hiding, and it was Hunter’s turn to find us. Of course, Emmerson and I chose to hide in the same place, and in order to do so, we had to squish together so we wouldn’t be found.
Innocent, right?
Wrong!
By that time, I was right in the middle of … developing, if you know what I mean. So, my breasts were a full B cup and perky. Let’s just say, Emmerson noticed rather quickly that I was no longer the pathetic ugly duckling he used to accuse me of being.
Unlike other girls, I didn’t get pimples or beauty marks on my face. I aged quite well if I may say so. And, like the immature boy Emmerson was at twelve—all sex-crazed and going through puberty himself—he groped me right there without thinking. With his tiny smirk, mischievous eyes, and a pimple on his chin, he grabbed my boob … at the same time Hunter found where we were hiding.
The next event happened so fast, I could barely keep up with it myself. I slapped Emmerson across the face and covered my chest like a scandalized southern belle. Hunter snarled—actually snarled like a feral animal—and punched his younger brother’s lights out, and it took me jumping on Hunter’s back and wrapping my body around him to stop him from killing his brother.
Ever since that day, Hunter threatened anyone who even glanced at me the wrong way. Shit, if they even glanced in my direction. At the end of eighth-grade year, he told me why, and until the winter of sophomore year, he always managed to keep me safe no matter where we were.
I just wished he had kept me safe from himself.
Releasing a sigh, I decide to go ahead and get it over with. Not like I can go to another school. Trust me, I’ve tried. I tried every way in the world not to have to come back to Golden Oaks. But I couldn’t find a school that would take me with such a small child and being single. Too much of a risk, they said.
I spent most of the summer going through rejection letters. Every time I read a rejection letter, my determination grew. I was going to prove all those schools wrong. If I can drop out of school and get my GED early, then I can go to college as a single mother.
Harloe Maree Rose is not a statistic. I refuse to be bunched in with all the other teen moms, not because there’s anything wrong with being a teen mom, but because no two people are the same. I am my own person, and I’ll show every freaking person that told me I wouldn’t make it. That’s where the old do it or bust a gut syndrome comes into play.
Climbing out of my car, I grab my purse and head on into the building to find my apartment. Supposedly, there were no available apartments on the first floor, so I curse when I see there’s no elevator, only rickety metal stares.
“That’s safe, let me tell ya,” I mutter to myself as I reluctantly ascend to the second floor.
When I get about half-way up the stairs, that’s when I hear it. Moaning and groaning right next to my flipping head. Turning my head in that direction, I can’t help when my eyes widen to the size of saucers. I thought this complex was only for single parents? Just then, a loud bang startles me and causes me to fall back against the railing. Nearly choking on my own spit, I hurry my way up the rest of the stairs, trying my best to ignore the way they sway with my weight.
You’d think with one of their own going to school here that the Prince family would be inclined to donate. Apparently, they’re as tight with their checkbooks as they are with their hearts—frigid bastards.
As I come to the second floor, I pull out the paperwork with my apartment number on it. There’s a four-digit code to open the door—thank God, because needing to open the door with a key while you have a toddler and groceries is not something I looked forward to doing. Number 33 comes in view, and I stop in front of it and input the four-digit pin: 3350.
The light clicks to green instantly.
Smiling, I grab the handle and twist, making my way inside. A giddy feeling courses through my veins and I’m light on my feet. Until I hear a thump, then an “Ah, motherfuck, why?!” shortly before the distinct sound of a child crying.
My grin falls from my face as I come face to face with a man trying to console, what I assume, is his child. “It’s okay, Bryce. Shhh. Shhh.”
I cock a brow. I’m not the type to stay silent, even in a time like this. “What are you doing in my apartment?”
The guy’s face jerks toward mine as he hugs the young boy to his chest. “Get the fuck out!”
“Uh-ha!” I pull a face, crossing my arms over my chest. “Get out of my apartment? Yeah, I don’t think so.”
“This isn’t your place, woman,” he growls.
Woman? Narrowing my eyes on him, it takes everything I have inside of me not to react to his choice of wording. Especially since it wouldn’t be right of me to kick his ass in front of his son. You know, male pride and all.
Instead of arguing, I demand to see his paperwork. Could be he got the wrong apartment number by mistake. If so, since he has a child, I could probably swing things and change apartments with him. However, when he goes and gets his paperwork, looking all smug and stuff—seriously, it’s taking all I can not to wipe that look off his face—I see this guy, a Mr. Derrick Stinson, is absolutely correct. This is his apartment.
“Seems you need to have a chat with Jerricka in housing,” he murmurs, not as angry now over the mix-up.
Sighing, I shoot him an embarrassed smile. “Sorry about the mix-up. This was my apartment when I received the paperwork.”
He nods, then walks me to the door and shuts it softly behind me. Huffing in exasperation, I make my way down the hall, ignoring the sexual noises that sound through the wall to my left. The stairs are just as rickety going down them as coming up, and I can’t help but feel just a small part of me that’s glad about the whole mix up.
At least, until I get to the housing office and the bitch behind the desk practically hisses at me.
It’s been more than fifteen minutes since I left that dude’s apartment, and I’m literally contemplating murder. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say Hunter had something to do with this, because hey, it’s always awesome to blame him for stuff, even if he’s not the reason for it.
“So, what you’re saying is you all made a mistake and now … what—you can’t fix it?” I pinch the bridge of my nose, desperately reining in my inner bitch.
Just because I’m a mom doesn’t mean I’m not a bitch, too. The two kind of go hand in hand.
Staring at her once more, she clicks the keys on her keyboard—probably just trying to pass the time—then flicks up her glasses, as if she doesn’t need them anyway. “I’m sorry” She shakes her head sadly. “We simply don’t have any other two-bedroom apartments available.”
“My son isn’t even three yet, Mrs. Whatever-Your-Last-Name-Is.” Seriously, it’s like Tyudonei—just something I can’t pronounce, okay? “He can bear staying in the same room as me for the year until you all fix your freaking screw up.”
She shakes her head. “I’m sorry. There’s really nothing I can do. All apartments given will be your residence for the next four years.”
Our Secret: A College Bully Romance (Golden Crew Book 1) Page 5
