The Filthy Series: The Complete Dark Erotic Serial Novel (31 page)

“There’s no reason to get angry at me for being honest, Rhett, fuck.” Jim moved past us. Still I clung to Rhett, his arms around me possessively.

“She can have the rest of the day off,” Cayden said a few beats later. “Let me know if there’s anything she needs.”

“I want to sit down.” I moved my head a little, glancing up at the bottom of Rhett’s chin.

“Come on, let’s go to my office.”

Reluctantly, I turned out of his embrace, and started walking that way. It was right around the corner from Cayden’s not as far away as Roger’s. When we stepped inside and Rhett closed the door behind us.

The appropriate thing for me to do was to sit down in the chair across from his desk until I calmed down enough to drive home or go back to work. But I didn’t do that. The second the door clicked closed I wrapped my arms around his middle, pressing my body hard against his. He didn’t act surprised or upset by my movement. He wrapped his arms back around me and held me just like that. Time passed as we stood there, clinging to one another. Or rather I was clinging to him—though something inside me wriggled around telling me that he was clinging to me as much as I was to him. The silence should have been awkward. It should have stifling, overwhelming. But it wasn’t. It was as simple as the stitches on his buttons. Perfect.

I don’t know how long had passed before the vibrating of his cell phone in his pocket disrupted everything.

I stepped back, though I didn’t really want to. I knew that it couldn’t last forever. The moments where I pretended things were okay. Because that was exactly what I had been doing. I’d been pretending that it would all be okay. That Rhett loved me the way I loved him. That Taylor and Sarah, and the rest of the hideous truths didn’t really exist. That it was just him and I in this fucked up world.

But that moment had to end. And I let it go like I did everything else. Let it slip away into the nothingness.

He didn’t move to check the device, but stared down at me instead. His eyes held so many emotions. Hundreds of them. They swam through his eyes with furious speed, ripping from one to the next without warning. I could have drowned in those deep green eyes. It would have been a happy death, one I would have taken gladly over the truth the next few weeks would bring.

“Faye—”

“I want you to kiss me.” I said the words before I thought about them, before I could consider what they really meant. It had been months since anything remotely sexual had transpired between us.

“What?”

I stepped forward lightly touching his chest with my fingertips. He flinched as if I burned him, but I didn’t move away. “Kiss me…please.” My voice trembled.

“Why?”

“I want to know what it’s like.”

“We’ve kissed before.”

As if I could forget. “Those were angry kisses, filled with hate.” I sucked in a deep breath, focusing on his full lips. “I want to know what it’s like without that.”

“Faye—” He took a step back, but I followed him, pressing him up against the door.

“No don’t do that. Don’t turn me down. Not now. Not after everything. After…” I was rambling going on…about what? I didn’t know. I didn’t have a fucking clue. My mind was mush. I needed a cigarette after the news I just heard and something else. That tingling burn of desire for a bump of cocaine singed me to the bone. I wanted to get lost in it all. I wanted to forget. I wanted to pretend like this wasn’t real. “It will be worse this time, Rhett.”

His eyebrows drew together. “What will?”

“When he comes back. When I go back to him. Because I know just how good life can really be. I know what it’s like—” I couldn’t finish, the words got clogged up inside me.
Less than a year.
That’s all the time I would have left. All the time before I went back to Taylor.

“No. No.” Rhett gripped my shoulders hard. “He’s not going to hurt you again.”

“Jim—”

“Fuck Jim! He doesn’t know what he’s fucking talking about.”

But I knew he was lying. I could see it in his eyes. There was this frantic twinkle in them, a desperation. “Don’t lie to me.” I stepped back and ran a trembling hand through my hair.

“I’m going to fix this.”

“Fix what, Rhett? Me?” I hideous cackle of laughter bubbled out of my chest. “No one can fix me. It’s too late. Is that what this is all about?” I tugged at the ends of my hair until my scalp burned. “You want to fix me? Repair the damage your daddy did? Well, you’re a decade too late.”

“That’s not what I’m trying to do.” He looked wounded, destroyed, as if I had physically injured him.

But then it all made sense and I knew I was right. “That’s what this has been about all along. Your guilt. You’re trying to fix the broken pieces of me. Isn’t it? That’s what this case is about. If you can put him away, then you can fix me. Am I right? Actually, no. Don’t answer that. I already know.” I moved to walk around him, but he stepped in front of the door.

“I’m not just going to let you storm out of here.”

“Move.” I looked him straight in the eye.

“No.”

“Yes—”

He cupped my face in his hands. His eyes were suddenly tender, robbing me of my words. “I’m not letting you storm out of here.” He spoke slowly, each word rolling off his tongue like sugar. It mesmerized me and I hated it. I wished I could hate him. Be angry at him, push him away. But I couldn’t do any of those things. Instead I stood completely still, listening, anticipating. Hanging on every word. “I’m not trying to fix you, Faye.” He leaned in closer. “You’re not broken. If the last year has proved anything to me, it’s just the opposite of that. You’re the most driven, charismatic woman I’ve ever met in my life. No one else could have done the things you have in the last ten months. No one.”

“You’re just saying th—”

But he stole the words right off my lips, mashing his own against mine. It took me completely by surprise, even more so that the kiss wasn’t punishing or brutal. It was soft, his lips exploring mine with treacherous slowness that made heart pound in my chest. His fingertips explored my cheeks, leaving tingling trails in their wake as they slipped down to my neck. I shivered, opening my mouth to his tongue when it asked for entrance.

A moan escaped my lips when he entered me. He wasn’t punishing me, hating me. He wasn’t ripping into me with sharp stabs of his tongue, but caressing me, loving me. I folded into him, my arms wrapping around his neck, smoothing against the stubble from his recent haircut.

I’d never been kissed like this. I kissed many times, for money and out of misguided love, but never as a man and a woman. Never as two people standing alone in an office with everything to lose and nothing to gain from this brief sensual moment of dueling tongues. It was ridiculous that we were here. That he would willingly give me this. Something I asked for. Something that could destroy his whole life, and for what? For the junkie whore? For the fucked up step-sister he couldn’t seem to be rid of. But I didn’t question it. I kissed him back. I put everything I had into that kiss. Because this was it. This was my taste of heaven. I wouldn’t get this chance again. I knew better. I wasn’t the misguided prostitute who was hell bent on fucking her brother anymore. I was a woman now. A woman resigned to her fate. A fate Rhett couldn’t save me from.

He pulled me closer, his hands on my ass, searing me through the thin fabric. His hard cock pressed against my belly, sending a burst of liquid heat straight to my cunt.

I wanted it to last forever. To be lost in this kiss until the end of time and beyond. But it did end. He pulled away. He let me go. He stepped back and I was left gazing up at him wonder, in awe, in sadness, in acceptance.

I didn’t cry when I opened the door a moment later and he didn’t say a word when I walked through it.

NINE

“We need to figure this out. You know we do.”

“No.” I slammed my fist down on the kitchen table and met Sarah’s gaze with fire. I had been trying all evening to keep my cool. To not yell at her like I so desperately wanted to. The kiss with Faye earlier in the day had rocked my world. It had changed everything and nothing all at once.

“You can’t just shut me out, not anymore. This is serious.”

I met Sarah’s gaze. She had her red hair swept up in a ponytail. I could remember when we first met. Her hair had been just like this. I had thought she was the cutest girl I’d ever seen. There was just something about her that struck me. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was that drew me in, but it did. I still didn’t know what that thing was. I was farther away from knowing now than I ever had been before.

“What you’re suggesting—that we ship Faye off to some faraway place—is absolutely off the table.”

“It shouldn’t be. You need to be realistic about this, Rhett. You know as well as I do that the things Jim said today were true.”

I frowned. “How do you know about that?”

“Katie called me. Told me about how upset Faye got when she heard.”

“She’s not going anywhere.”

For once, Sarah surprised me, and she didn’t do that
ever
. “She needs to. She will be in danger here. You know she will. You know he will come for her!” Her voice bordered on hysterical and all I could do was stare at her. I’d never seen her so adamant about anything in our whole relationship.

“We don’t know that. Plus he isn’t getting out soon.”

“Yes, Rhett, he is. You have to face reality. He’s going to get out.”

“Are you trying to piss me off?” Anger bubbled under my skin. Who was she to stand here and say these things?

“I’m trying to be honest and real with you. I don’t want Faye to get hurt anymore than you do. Your father raped her in the bathroom at a party with hundreds of guests, Rhett. If he will do that then—”

“I know what he
fucking
did!” I stood the chair toppling over behind me in my rush. “I fucking saw it, Sarah. I fucking watched what he did to her.”

“Okay, Rhett—”

“No, it’s not fucking
okay
.” The image flashed in my head the way it did so many times a day. Faye on the floor, broken, bloody. Him on top of her. His dick inside her.

“I love you, Faye baby, I love you.”

The words he spoke. The words he said while he hurt her. The image soaked into me until it was all I could see. I shoved at the papers off the table. The precise stacks I had organized and poured over for nearly a year, searching for something, anything to put that piece of shit away forever. But nothing made sense. Nothing had come through. Every time I thought we had something on him it just became another dead end with people who wouldn’t talk and bank accounts and money that disappeared into thin air. There was nothing. We had nothing.

Papers and pens flew everywhere, scattering all over.

They were right. Sarah and Jim. They were fucking right. But I didn’t want to accept it. I didn’t want to accept that in three weeks my father would go to trial with barely a slap on the wrist. That after all this time and all the work I had put into putting him away and saving Faye, I was still going to fail. I had failed her before and I was going to fail her again. Just like I had in my office today. She wanted me to kiss her and I had never wanted anything more in my life. She had wanted something without the hate. And it ripped at me that that’s all I had ever given her. My hate.

I could remember how it used to fester under my skin. Eat at me until there was nothing left but ravenous lust. I had stopped her, turned her away from the thought of kissing me, but then it consumed me. Every second that passed with her and I inside that office, the room had seemed to shrink in on itself, until I knew I would suffocate from all the things we left unsaid. For all the false hope I was trying to give us both. Until there was nothing that could stop me and I was kissing her just like she wanted. With all the love I had in my heart. I wanted to show her that I wasn’t like him. That I was me. That I wasn’t full hate and torture and violence. That I was a man capable of so much more.

But then it was too much and I pulled away and it was over. And there was no getting it back. That was it and then she was gone and I let her go. It was foolish, stupid. I would see her later when I got home, I knew I would and I
had
seen her just for a moment before she went to bed, but everything was different now. That kiss. It was ours. It belonged to us. Those secret stolen moments where we were both so lonely we couldn’t stand it, faced with the reality neither of us wanted to accept. And now it was gone and we could never have it back.

All I would have was this. Stacks of papers scattered on the floor. A girlfriend so fragile I could cough and she would break and a sister I loved from afar. And not in the way brother should love his sister. I
loved
her. Every broken piece of her. I told her she wasn’t broken. But I lied. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her the truth. That she was shattered. I couldn’t tell her that I could see all those tiny fractures. But she didn’t need to be fixed for me to love her. I realized that day after I gave her the car and the cell phone. The day she turned twenty years old. I realized it then, that I loved her. But realization doesn’t change anything, and it didn’t.