Rogue (25 page)

“Lust,” a low voice by the door says.

I lift my head to spot Riley Cole at the threshold, Remington’s coach’s second, looking cute as ever. Riley and I are great friends. We’ve gotten into a lot of mischief in the few times we’ve met after a Riptide fight, and not just sexually.

He’s a guy used to guarding secrets. I know, because when I tried to dig out all of Remington Tate’s secrets when he was pursuing Brooke like a battering ram, all Riley said to me was that he’d never seen Remington go after a woman the way he went after Brooke.

So Riley’s definitely a man who knows how to keep a secret. Including, thank god,
mine.

Brooke has always said he looks like a sad surfer boy, and she’s right, he does. Which works for him. But tonight he looks more like Pandora’s angry blond twin brother, scowling at me with the same scowl he wore the day he first met me.

“What’s up with you?” I ask him, returning his scowl with one of my own.

“If this boyfriend of yours ever hurts you, we’ll take care of it.” He cracks his knuckles, and instead of making me scared on Greyson’s behalf, the sound makes me laugh.

“You mean
you’ll
take care of it, or Remy?” I say as I stand, hearing his quiet, familiar chuckle.

“Okay, you got me. Maybe I’ll bring Rem along just for intimidation purposes,” he says jokingly, but his smirk fades into a flat line of displeasure. “No one hurts you, Melanie. Or I punch him. I don’t care how many times I need to punch him to make him bleed, but I’ll make him bleed.”

I laugh as Brooke pulls me out to the living room so I can see her precious baby.

“Barbies don’t hurt, remember. Don’t worry,” I toss past my shoulder at Riley, kicking him playfully as we pass. He’d called me Barbie when we met, and not in a nice way, so flinging it back at him makes him simmer a bit.

Then I hear a baby sound and am filled with glee. I spot Racer proudly sitting on the curled arm of the bodyguard-nanny, Josephine. But he doesn’t want to stay there. Racer throws himself at his father, who was chugging down a blue sports drink, but when he sees his son coming, Remington catches him in one arm and slam dunks the empty sports drink into the kitchen sink.

Lifting Racer up high, he makes a growling sound, then carries him in a football hold, which makes Brooke groan at my side.

“Remington, he’s going to puke up all his dinner,” she chides.

“Ahhhhh,” he says, the sound incredibly cocky as he twists his son into a sitting position and avoids the catastrophe. Looking at Brooke, his smile flashes two sexy dimples at her, making her forgive the transgression, and I swear I’m almost dead.

And then Racer grins and flashes his mom one dimple too.

“Urgh! You’re both killing me!” I tell them. “Remington, I need to touch this baby or else!” I go and grab Racer and as I hold him to me, I make cute baby sounds as I nuzzle his little tummy.

He protests like he’s not exactly thrilled about it, and he looks at his mother, then at his father, then at Pete, with a new, sad dimple in his chin.

“What? He doesn’t like me?” Racer looks at his mother and
his father again and makes a face that deepens that dimple on his chin. “OMG, I’m making him cry!”

I pass him to Brooke. “What a failure!” I laugh.

“You’re fine,” Remington says as he drops on a chair and pulls Brooke to his lap with one arm while he passes a nearby squeaky toy to Racer with the other.

Racer looks at the toy and his Melanie-induced cry morphs into a squeal of delight. Remy smiles down at him and then his eyes slide to Brooke, and what I see there truly, deeply kills me as he kisses the top of her head.

It’s that true,
real
I’d-die-for-you love that I’ve always dreamed about.

“Mel,” I hear from behind me, and when I turn to the sound, I realize Riley has been watching me all this time. He steps closer to me and whispers ominously, “Can I talk to you?”

I nod. There’s no mistaking the look of lust in his eyes. I sense that he wants me, aside from the fact that he also wants to talk to me. The old me would’ve wanted nothing more than another night with a fuck buddy. I can rarely say no to an attractive guy who wants me, but every pore in my body wants just one man now.

But I still nod at Riley, because he’s the only one I can talk to about the one thing that’s been plaguing my thoughts other than Greyson King.

♥  ♥  ♥

“HERE.” RILEY SETS a check atop the white linen of a small round table by the bar of a chic little restaurant just blocks from the hotel. “I’ve been saving up,” he explains.

“No!” I gasp. “Riley, don’t be ridiculous! I couldn’t!” I push the check back, feeling flustered as the waitress sets down our
drinks. I wait for her to leave before hissing out, in a whisper, “It was my decision. I chose to do it, okay?”

“But
I’m
the idiot who suggested it in the first place,” he counters on another hiss, and he seems so genuinely mortified, he won’t stop shaking his head. “Remington never loses, Melanie. Never. If I’d known he’d throw the fight for—”

“Urgh, to save stupid Nora because he just loves Brooke too much not to do anything. But even if you’d told me he would lose, I’d never put my money on Scorpion. NEVER.”

“Then let me help you pay this debt off.” I ignore his pleading look and push the check back to him yet again, shaking my head too. “At least let me tell Rem,” he urges. “He’d pay on your behalf if he knew. If I hadn’t given you my word I wouldn’t tell anyone . . .”

“Riley, I’ll kill you if you tell anyone. We were
drunk
, out in town, you were making a bet, I was nosy and asked about it, thought it was such a great idea to make a bet of my own, especially when it seemed like such a sure thing! Then we went to your room and celebrated by thinking it cool to get in bed together. I feel stupid as it is. I don’t know what I was thinking!” An image flashes across my mind of a beautiful apartment—the apartment of my dreams—and my car debt paid off, and I add, “Well, I
do
know. I could’ve made a handsome down payment on my very own apartment and maybe even have the balls to start my own design firm.”

“Then let me help, Mel.”

I look at the check and a part of me screams
Take it! Take it, Melanie! Please just save yourself from those monsters!

But what will Riley expect in return? How can I take money from a man when I’m in love with another? “This is very sweet of you, but no. Really.”

He cocks one blond eyebrow. “What about your new boyfriend? Will you at least let him help?”

My chest aches as I think about him and all the reasons why I can’t bear for Greyson to know. I gulp down the rest of my drink and admit, “I think that . . . if I ask for help from anyone . . . he’d be the last.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want him to know I’m
this
stupid! He knows I’m a mess already. Riley, he met me out with my convertible parked on a rainy night without the top—enough said. It’s a miracle he stuck around long enough to get to know me. I don’t want him to . . . lose respect for me. Think less of me.”

Riley’s scowl is getting darker by the second. “I can see he’s tossing diamonds at you already?” He nods to the necklace half-dipping into my top. “You know men do that to
buy
the women they sleep with? It has nothing to do with caring about you.”

“Yes, it does,” I counter. “It means he took the time to go and look for something pretty he thinks will make me happy.”

“You can use that necklace to pay, Melanie. Just tell him you lost it or something and get rid of this debt. Those men kill for five bucks—they’re fucking gangsters! Even the guy Pete deals with, Eric, looks sharp and polished in that suit, but they don’t trust that guy for shit. He just kisses Rem’s ass ’cause he’s their prime moneymaker, but everyone knows his boss Slaughter makes Scorpion look like a teddy bear. They say he’s got an enforcer that’s like some demon straight from hell, and he’ll come collecting whether you want him to or
not
!”

He looks around warily, then leans closer, across the table, lowering his voice. “Pete heard rumors the only guy with a lick of sense was Slaughter’s eldest, but he didn’t want shit to do with the dad and apparently dropped off the Underground years ago. Not even his
son
wants anything to do with a man like Slaughter. I swear I don’t sleep thinking you still owe them.”

My heart starts stampeding in my chest with renewed fear, and I hold my hands up, palms out, to pacify him. “Riley, I asked for more time, okay? We have to just . . . breathe here.”

“What? What
the fuck
? When’d you ask for more time?”

“Last time I came to see Brooke. It’s okay. Really! I just sold my car and can buy more time if I maybe give them half the payment.”

“No you fucking can’t, they’ll take it as interest and demand you pay fully before you can even walk out the door! Don’t ever approach men like these alone. Jesus, just trust me and get out of this, Mel. I paid my debt and I want to pay yours, and if you won’t let me, then at least promise me you’ll let your new boyfriend help. If you’re too proud to ask, just pretend you lost those diamonds on your neck and get rid of this debt;
trust me
.”

I guess I look as hopeless as I feel, because he adds, more direly now, “I vow, Melanie, if that debt isn’t gone before you leave, I’m telling Tate and we’re taking care of it for you, him and me.”

I gasp in outrage. “I will not let you or my best friend’s
husband
step into this, do you hear me? And I will not involve my boyfriend either. This necklace means something to me.” I touch my diamonds with an awful wrenching sensation in my chest as I wonder—
Is this the only way I’m going to be free, letting go of the only thing the man I want with all my heart has given me?

“Riley,” I whisper, almost plead with him, “I’m just not this girl who swindles her boyfriends out of expensive things to turn them into money.”

He glowers at my precious necklace, and my stomach starts to hurt just thinking about parting with anything that has to do with Greyson.

“That gift didn’t mean to him what it means to you, I assure you,” Riley says with annoying self-confidence. “I’ve never seen a
guy more in love than Remington, and he doesn’t need to throw dollars at Brooke to show it.”

“Well, Grey has a different style, so what? The end is the same. I feel pampered and taken care of and he gets a look in his eyes when he sees me wearing them that I absolutely
adore
.”

I can’t stand having another person in my life criticize Greyson to me! So I stare at him narrow eyed and add, so that he at least gets the true depth of my feelings for my man, “When he looks at me like that, I swear it’s all so perfect I sometimes have nightmares that I dreamed it all, that he’s too good to be true.”

“Maybe he is, Melanie. Maybe he’s two-timing you right now, meeting with some chick in secret as we speak.”

“Ha!” I lift my glass and sip my drink. “He’s a workaholic. If I have anything to worry about, it’s that mistress of his called Work Myassoff.”

Riley smiles at me, a chilling smile, a very unfriendly smile, and he nods to the entry of the restaurant.

I turn about ninety degrees to get a look . . . and that’s when I see
him
walking into the restaurant.

Him.

Grey-fucking-son.

All my recognition flares into disbelief, excitement, and then, anger combined with a bolt of nearly blinding lust.

It feels as though an energy source clings to his skin, for the entire air shifted the moment he materialized in the room. Over six feet of pure male perfection. Greyson. Fucking. King. My hormones burst awake when he starts walking forward, following the mâitre d’, his eyes directly on a table at the far end.

I can’t believe it. My eyes run up and down his form. There is no word for the way Greyson walks, with a hand in his pocket, his face somber, his cheekbones chiseled, his jaw smooth and tan, his mouth perfection, his dark hair carelessly tousled; I swear that
awesome hair is the only thing careless and playful about him. The rest of him is Bond 007 perfection, even those narrowed, hazel-green eyes, which seem beautifully self-contained and remote. Even now, two months after going out with him, I can sense he’s still holding back the most crucial part of him,
but
I can visualize an “us” and what we can be so perfectly, and I’m determined to make it happen. Greyson and Melanie, living Happily Ever After.

Then I see the woman at the table. Waiting. A redhead.

My blood pools at my feet when Greyson bends to kiss her cheek.

Riley and I only stare.

And I’m certain it’s not him. He’s working . . . somewhere. It can’t be him.

But it sure looks like him.

He’s wearing all black, his hair shining under the light, and he settles down in his chair, leans back in that self-assured way of his, and starts talking over a fucking candle to a redhead. A fake redhead. One who looks older and expressionless.

Mrs. Botox.

OMIGOD!

It cannot be Greyson!

I never get cheated on, I’m the one they cheat
with
.

My belly muscles are rigid with anger as I try to breathe and force my lungs to expand. I scan the restaurant around me for something to throw, but the best thing I can think of is throwing myself at that no-good whore.

My eyes blur and ache with the sudden urge to cry. It’s almost midnight. In fifteen minutes, I am twenty-five years old and my boyfriend is sitting at another table with another woman. I really, really want to cry now.

No. And let him see me snivel and cry like a hurt baby girl again?
My mind churns with ways to make this hurt go away.
How does it go when he’s in your veins? How?!! I laugh out loud, hard, and grip Riley’s hand, but Greyson’s not even looking in my direction, he’s not within hearing distance. He and his elderly whore are deep in conversation in their own little world. Their own Melanie-less world. A part of me still refuses to believe he would do this to me.