ARROGANT PLAYBOY (30 page)

And stuffy—because it’s
too early in the year to turn on the air conditioning, and my father is cheap.

I’m buried under a mountain of
light blankets, as if they could shield my sins from the outside world.

My fingers twitch. Anxious.
Needy. They calculate their next move like criminals shielded by the cover of
night.

That’s what this is—a
crime. A crime so wrong, I deserve to be punished. If I go to hell, at least I
know Jensen will be there to keep me company.

I don’t need my Harlequin
paperback for this.

A deep breath passes through my
half-parted lips and I brush my hand across my belly before slipping it under
the elastic waistband of my pajama bottoms. It travels lower, possessed by a
mind of its own, until it reaches the heat between my thighs.

I slip a finger between my
folds. A zing of anticipation zips through my stomach. I close my eyes tight
and I picture my stepbrother. His broad shoulders and warrior tattoos. His dark
hair. His golden eyes. The outline of his erection hidden behind his towel.

I’m a dirty, dirty girl.

I’m going to hell.

Oh, my God. I’m going to hell.

I retrieve my fingers and open
my eyes. Doing something so naughty makes me feel as if I’m being watched.
They’re going to see it on my face tomorrow at breakfast.

They’ll
know
.

The ache between my legs
intensifies. I’m pulsing down there as if it’s my body’s only way of luring me
back into dangerous territory.

Good AUB girls don’t touch
themselves. Good AUB girls save themselves for their husbands. Sex is not for
pleasure. Sex is for creating families. I should be ignoring these urges.
That’s the right thing to do.

I inhale in a full, sharp
breath and close my eyes again, rolling to my stomach and slipping my hands
under my pillow as if to pin them down.

Only the second my eyes are
shut, all I can picture is Jensen.

He’s a thorn in my side.

He’s obnoxious and a
know-it-all.

He’s annoyingly attractive.

And he commandeers my body,
forcing foreign sensations throughout every inch of me every time he opens his
smug mouth.

Cade… Cade makes my heart feel
warm and happy. Cade gives me the butterflies. Cade makes me spend hours of
valuable class time daydreaming about happily-ever-afters. Cade is the kind of
guy you marry after graduating from college, the kind of guy who makes your
parents proud. Or in my case, a poly version of Cade.

But Jensen? Jensen sends my
nerves into overdrive. He heats my core, forces dirty thoughts into my mind,
and flips all of my beliefs sideways, underneath, and in between the places
they used to reside.

His words echo in my mind,
right along with the words of my father. They align like two opposing views,
rivaling for the big win, and contrasting. It’s almost as if my entire life, my
father has taught me the sky is one shade of blue, and then Jensen comes along
and tells me the sky can be whatever shade I want it to be.

Choices.

That’s the real issue here.

Jensen thinks I have no choice
in regards to what I do with my body. I have to prove him wrong.

I’m wet. My panties are soaked.

But maybe he’s not wrong?

I’m an eighteen-year-old woman,
and I’m afraid to pleasure myself because my entire life I’ve been told it’s
wrong.

My nipples harden, becoming so
sensitive that the mere sensation of the lining of my bra cups against them is
painful.

Is
it wrong?

Am I afraid to think for
myself? Is that what’s happening?

I bury my face head down in my
pillow and scrunch my face. The ache between my legs hasn’t subsided yet. If
anything, it has deepened, becoming more pronounced than before. My right hand
pulls from beneath the pillow and travels down the length of my side until it
wedges beneath my hips. My fingers slip below my waistband once more.

The racing thoughts are gone.

The hemming and hawing is over.

My fingers work between my
folds, pressing along the most sensitive part of me because that’s what feels
best. I’m growing wetter with each massage. I press harder, rubbing until my
face is twisted and all I feel is a buildup of pressure inside. My middle
finger finds my entrance as my palm continues rubbing the rest of me with each
stroke.

I rake my teeth over my bottom
lip as I picture Jensen, imagining his body is weighing me down and we’re both
tangled in a mess of white sheets and covered by the veil of night. I want to
make a noise, but I have to be quiet. If Jensen were here, I imagine he’d cover
my mouth with his strong hand.

One finger is suddenly not
enough. I try two.

Much
better.

My hips buck as the pressure
mounts, but I’m not ready for it to end. It’s the greatest physical feeling
I’ve ever felt in my entire life. My fingers press deeper inside me. Faster.
Harder. The ache is painful almost, building and building until there’s nowhere
else for it to go.

I think of Jensen again.

I think about his big,
hard—

And then my body tingles,
tightens, and quivers. My mind blanks. I’m pulsing below, hard and quick. My
body contorts, and a wave of euphoria rushes over me from head to toe.

When the possessive exultation
subsides, I’m as limp as a noodle, all my energy drained clean. My fingers
still rest inside me, soaked and pruned from my aroused state.

I couldn’t move even if I
wanted to.

My lips twist into a pleasured
grin.

I did that. I
chose
to do that.

Me.

Who knew my body could do
something so amazing?

Choice is a beautiful thing.

JENSEN

“Missed you last night, Waverly.” Mark
unfolds his newspaper at breakfast the next morning. His face is scrunched,
scrutinizing his second oldest daughter as she eats her scrambled eggs in
silence.

She’s been awfully quiet this
morning, and I’ve opted to leave her alone. I think I pushed her too hard the
night before, and I’ve still got five months left of living here. My end
goal—graduating high school and moving to California—is way more
important than convincing some prudish virgin to finger herself.

I stifle a laugh, my gaze
snapping to Waverly. Her cheeks flush and she reaches for her juice. She won’t
make eye contact with anyone.

Oh, my God. She totally did it.

I kick her leg under the table.

“Hey.” Bellamy shoots me a
dirty look.

Oops
.

“Sorry,” I mutter, lowering my
head so she can’t see the shit-eating grin on my face.

“I was just tired last night,”
Waverly says to her father. “Went up to my room and did some homework, and then
I went to bed early.”

Fuck. She’s a terrible liar.
Must be hard being habitually honest. She couldn’t tell a lie to save her life.

“Hm.” Mark is studying her like
a book. Wonder what he’d think if he knew his precious, virginal daughter, the
apple of his eye, his pride and joy, fingered herself last night while she
thought of her new stepbrother? “Went looking for you. You weren’t in your room
after dinner last night.”

“I did some laundry,” she says,
shrugging a shoulder.

“Oh, Mark, did I tell you? The
HVAC technician is coming today around ten to tune up my furnace,” Summer interrupts.

Mark mumbles something to her,
but his gaze is still transfixed on his red-faced, fidgeting daughter.

The man is not stupid. He’s not
naïve or blind to a damn thing that goes on under his three roofs. I know this
because any man who uses religion as a weapon or a manipulative tool is a
freaking mastermind. What man could convince three women to marry him, have his
babies, grow their hair long so they can wash his feet with it in Heaven, serve
and satisfy him, and make them feel like
they’re
the ones benefitting from this arrangement?

Waverly pushes her chair out
from the table and takes her dish to the sink. She grabs her backpack and
slinks it over her shoulder.

“Leaving early?” Bellamy asks.

Their mom, Jane, surveys in
silence. She has “opinionated” written all over her face, but she seems to keep
them all to herself—at least whenever I’m around.

Waverly glances at the clock on
the wall. Her face reads like she’s trying to come up with an excuse, but she’s
so flustered nothing’s coming together in time. “Yep. Leaving early.”

She’s gone.

Just like that.

I shovel the rest of my
breakfast in my mouth and stand to leave, keeping my dirty dishes on the table
because I don’t feel like being yelled at for not letting the women clean up
after me.

House rules are house rules.

I grab my jacket and keys and
run outside. Waverly’s sitting in her car, letting it warm up, and messing with
her radio. I rap on her window, grinning as she jumps up in her seat.

She rolls her window down.
“What?”

“So…” I’ve got a smile a mile
wide. “You did it.”

She shifts her car into drive,
and it lurches until she puts her foot on the break. She’s staring ahead now,
opting not to make eye contact with me a second longer than she has to.

“You’re glowing.” I rest an
elbow on the inside of her window.

“Stop.” She rolls her eyes.

“Stop what?”

“Gloating. You’re acting like
you… like you made me… like
you
gave
me the…” She can’t say it.

It’s probably not a word in her
vocabulary, so I’ll say it for her. “Orgasm.”

Her face whips toward mine,
freshly-washed, sandy hair spilling down her shoulders.

“You can say it, Waverly.
Or-gas-m.” I smirk. “And I kind of did give it to you. I mean, not literally.
You did all the work. I can’t take any credit for that.”

I glance up toward the main
house to find Mark standing in the living room window, casting a hard stare our
way. His mouth forms a hard line. I smack the top of Waverly’s car and tell her
to get going, giving Mark a friendly wave and a thumb’s up. He doesn’t return
anything other than a stone cold stare. If he asks later, and I’m sure he will,
I was just checking on her. Making sure she was okay. Just being a good
stepbrother.

It’s not a lie.

I do care about her, in my own
little way. I think beneath her stuffy exterior and Miss Priss attitude, she’s
a good person. I think we’d be friends if the conditions were favorable.

“See you in Chem,” I say as she
pulls away.

***

I’m stopped outside my classroom by Claire
Fahnlander.

“Jensen, hey.” She twirls her
hair around her finger and leans against a red locker. “I know you’re new in
town. I’m having some people over this weekend, like, for a senior party. My
parents are going to be out of town, so I’ll have the whole place to myself.
You should stop by. You know, if you’re bored or whatever.”

She bats her lashes. She’s the
kind of girl who knows she’s pretty—the kind who skirts through life on
her good looks and manipulative charm. She’s the type you could spend a drunk
and rebellious teenage weekend with and not think twice about her again because
underneath her fuck-me façade, there’s nothing at all.

I glance into the classroom to
find Waverly watching. Her eyes veer away the second she’s caught.

Claire turns to see what I’m
looking at and then rolls her eyes. “Ugh, Waverly Miller. Total wannabe.”

“Really?” I scratch the space
above my brow. “She doesn’t seem like that to me. A little uptight, maybe. A
little tightly wound.”

I can’t imagine Waverly wanting
to have anything to do with Claire or her posse of mean girls. There’s a group
of bitches like that in every school across North America.

“Trust me. She’s annoying.”
Claire folds her arms. Her mouth twists into a devious grin. “Anyway, about
this weekend, you should come by around—”

I don’t say another word. I
simply walk away.

“Hey.” I pull out the chair
next to Waverly, leaning in and nudging her arm. “What’s up?”

“I didn’t know we were friends
now.” She flips her notebook open and clicks her pen, staring straight ahead at
the dry erase board in the front of the class where Mrs. Davenport is writing
and erasing something.

“Are you cool with what
happened last night?” I whisper. I hold my breath, anticipating her answer.
She’s clearly bent on making me wait.

Is she punishing me? If so, I
did nothing wrong. I planted a seed. She chose to water it.

I snicker as she scribbles
today’s date on the corner of her paper and throws her pen down. “Yes, Jensen.
I’m fine.”

I don’t believe her.

The eight a.m. bell rings and
Mrs. Davenport takes attendance. Claire Fahnlander watches us from the corner
of her eye. I swear she’s plotting all the ways she thinks she’s going to make
me hers.

She’s in for a world of
disappointment if she thinks I view her as anything other than a piece of ass,
and even then, I have no intention of fucking around with that. She’s probably
been with half the school, or at least anyone with a football jersey and a
half-smile.

“You’re different now,” I
whisper to Waverly. She stares straight ahead at the white board.

“Can’t get anything past you,
huh.” Her voice is hardly audible.

“So you did it. I know that
much,” I cross my arms and sit back in the chair, not even attempting to fight
the grin consuming my lips. I lean over to her, whispering into her ear, “But
the biggest question is, were you thinking of me when you came?”

Waverly jolts and pushes her
chair back, causing a metallic grinding noise to beckon all eyes our way. Mrs.
Davenport stops yammering about reactants and holds her marker in the air. She
scans the classroom and spins around, resuming her lecture with an air of annoyance
in her tone.

There’s nothing I enjoy more
than watching a girl squirm from the heat of my stare. She was a delicate
flower when I met her a few days ago. Now she’s blossoming right before my
eyes.

Quiz sheets are passed to us
and the teacher rains silence upon the classroom and mutters something about an
hour.

An hour to take a quiz? I flip
the sheet over. It’s thirty questions. I hate when teachers give way too much
time for these. She probably wants some quiet time so she can do a little online
shopping or Facebook browsing during work time. No one needs a whole fucking
hour to take a thirty-question quiz.

That’s an hour of sitting here
with my quiz finished and being unable to breathe a single word to Waverly. As
pleased as I am that she touched herself last night, I want to make sure she’s
okay. I’m not a complete asshole.

She finishes her test after
fifteen silent minutes and turns it in before coming back to her spot and
pulling a book out from her bag. I squint to see what she’s reading. Jane
Austen. How classy. Of course she wouldn’t read anything modern. I doubt Mark
Miller allows his precious daughter to be exposed to modern-day romance and all
its oversexed dialogue.

I turn my quiz in and take my
sketchpad from my bag along with a carbon pencil. Observing my surroundings,
I’m left with minimal options. I can either draw a picture of the radiator to
my left, the back of Claire Fahnlander’s narrow head, or Waverly reading. I opt
for the latter.

Leaning back in my seat, I rest
my pad across my lap, making broad strokes and creating the outline of her
book’s profile. Her hair spills down the side of her face, covering all but the
silhouette of her pointy nose and her dark lashes that curl up at the ends.
There isn’t a speck of makeup on her face, but she doesn’t need it. The
fluorescent light isn’t ideal, and the shadows it casts on her aren’t the most
flattering, but none of it matters. She’s still fucking stunning.

Ten minutes pass and I’m almost
done with the outline. I begin shading, finding myself in the early stages of
getting lost and forgetting where I am. I don’t feel like I’m sitting in Chem
class drawing my tragically pure stepsister. My mind is blank as I grip the
pencil. I use my fingertips to smudge certain areas just a little. My hands
will be gray by the time I’m done, but I don’t care.

That’s the beauty of
art—it transports me. It makes me forget. There aren’t a lot of things I
can lose myself in, but this is one of them. When I draw, I’m not an arrogant
bastard. I’m not Jensen Mackey, son of Josiah. I’m not a hundred shades of
fucked up in the head.

I’m just
me
.

Waverly shuts her book and
pulls in a deep sigh as if she’s just read a beautiful passage and needs to let
it marinate for a bit before she can move on. I know that feeling. I get that
way after I draw something I never knew I was capable of drawing.

She turns to me demurely, her
eyes falling on my paper and then narrowing as she realizes the girl on the
paper is her. “You drew me?”

I shrug. “You were convenient.”

She pulls the sketchpad from my
lap and inspects the grayscale drawing. Her eyes soften a bit and she fights a
smile, not unlike the first time Juliette found my drawings for the first time.

“You
do these?” Juliette asked, flipping through the pages of my sketchpad. Women.
Nothing but beautiful women.

I
was sixteen.

Playboys
were contraband in my house and the vast majority of websites were
adult-filtered on our family computer—I had to use my imagination. I held
my breath until she came to the drawing I’d done of her from memory: a sketch
of her seated at the family breakfast table when her peach satin robe had come
untied, gaping open in the front to reveal her ample cleavage as it peeked out
from the top of her matching teddy.

That
was the first time I got hard for my father’s girlfriend.

Only
I never saw her as a mother. She was always just… Juliette. And truth be told,
Josiah treated her like his daughter most of the time, too. He controlled her.
Told her what to wear and how to act. He treated her as if he were raising her,
as if she were a teenager and not a thirty-something woman.

My
only conclusion was that she enjoyed it—that and she had daddy issues up
her tight, stripper ass.

When
Juliette found the picture I’d drawn of her she stopped. I expected her to yell
at me, to take it to my father, to scold me and tell me how dirty and fucked up
I was. Instead she set the pad down gently on my nightstand and shut my bedroom
door.