“No,” he said flatly.
“Asshole,” I muttered.
His lips curled into the most wickedly delicious grin. I was spellbound.
“Don’t do that again,” I said, shaking the lust from my head, but it didn’t work, since my entire body hummed. Not even a cold shower would help cool what I was feeling for Brock. How could a single smile make me so weak?
And why him?
My taste in guys completely sucked.
Then again, as I stared at him, I rethought that statement.
Brock Taylor was fucking gorgeous. Arrogant. Aloof. An asshole. And a thousand other different adjectives that started with anA. But he was gorgeous.
That deviously charming grin widened. “What?”
“That!” I replied. “Don’t smile at me. It’s like a weapon of female destruction.”
He chuckled. “I’ll try to remember that.”
“Can you be serious for just a minute?” It was sort of a stupid question, considering Brock was the epitome of seriousness, at least when he was around me.
“Depends.” He glanced at me for a moment before returning his gaze to the road.
My fingers fumbled with the strap on my bag. “I don’t get you. Why would you release those pictures of me but then turn around and put Carter in the hospital? I’m trying to make sense of it all, but I can’t.”
“We didn’t release those pictures,” he told me, eyes flashing with danger. How quick he could go from playful to dickmood. “Trust me, if I had known beforehand, it would have been dealt with before being circulated all over school.”
So he said before. “Then who did?”
His fingers clenched and unclenched against the steering wheel. “Carter and Ava.”
The idea of the two of them teaming up spiked a ribbon of dread inside me.
“Ava took the pictures. She was really sneaky about it. We assumed she was just texting her friends for a ride home,” he explained.
“Okay, what did I do to make this girl hate me so much?” I spluttered.
He gave me a knowing look and arched a brow.
Shit. “Oh, right. That.” How could I have forgotten? I had sex with him. Apparently, that made most of the female population at the Academy hate me. My cheeks warmed, and I cracked my window. “And Carter, how does he play into this?”
Brock turned his stormy eyes on me. “Ava made the stupid mistake of showing the pictures to your stepbrother. He was the one who distributed them, texting them to the football team and printing them out.”
“He texted the pictures to you.” I shook my head. “What a fucking idiot.”
The corner of Brock’s lips curled. He swung the Range Rover into the school lot, getting in the line of cars hustling to find spots to park.
It was the first time I’d been back since Friday night, and I had expected this sense of panic to press down upon me. I stared straight ahead, my fingers clenching the side of the seat. That whole night came rushing back. I could feel Carter’s hands pinning my wrists, smell his breath on my face, and hear his eager and callous voice in my ear.
“Firefly,” Brock whispered.
I closed my eyes to drown out the memories, but it only made them worse.
It was the warmth of Brock’s hand along the side of my cheek that shook me out of my terror. The pad of his thumb ran just under my lower lip. “I didn’t ask for this shit,” I bit out. The tension in my muscles slowly relaxed.
His eyes darkened, lips pulled into a thin line. “No, you didn’t, but you’re not alone.”