Jax stared at me in silence for a moment. Then he smiled thinly and slowly walked me back until I was pressed up against the wall behind me. “You’re really willing to tank my chances at college over a fucking party?” he said, voice dripping with fury.
I took a deep breath, trying to ignore the way my skin tingled at his touch. “It’s not about the party. It’s about you trying to stop me from living my life here,” I replied. “I’m not going to let it happen. Understood?”
Jax’s cruel smile didn’t waver. “Like I said, Kinsey—you’ll regret stepping foot into Nate’s house on Saturday.”
“Sure I will,” I said sarcastically, looking up at him through narrowed eyes. “You’re just mad because you wanted to make it your life’s mission to destroy me, but so far you’ve achieved basically nothing to that end. You got someone to write a threatening message on my locker and leaked some bullshit rumors to the Dirt app. That’s literally all you’ve got, isn’t it?”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” Jax leaned his face down to my level, lips ghosting over my left ear. “I guess you’ll have to wait and see.”
6
Jax
“Fuck!”
I slammed my foot on the brakes to stop myself from smashing into the car in front of me. The driver had stopped suddenly to avoid crashing into a pedestrian who’d decided to cross the street without looking first.
Ordinarily, I was quick to notice and avoid issues on the road, but right now I was too distracted. My mind was stuck on Kinsey once again. I wasn’t thinking about the usual bullshit, though.
I was starting to think I was wrong about her.
Granted, she was more than capable of being a cunning little snake—she’d well and truly proved that with her coke-sniffing video of my football teammates—but I was no longer sure that my earlier assumptions about her were on point.
She’d been here in Crown Point for almost a full month now, and during that time I hadn’t been able to prove a single thing. I’d kept a close eye on her whenever I could, eavesdropped on her Facetime conversations with her old friends, and gone through her bedroom a few times, but after all that, I’d found zero evidence to suggest that my initial judgment of her was even remotely accurate.
She didn’t seem to be harboring any hatred for my father. Didn’t seem to be plotting any nasty schemes against him. She just seemed like a normal teenage girl trying her best to settle into a new high school.
The more I thought about it, the more it dawned on me that my dad was probably right. Perhaps itwasjust a huge, weird as fuck coincidence that the daughter and ex-wife of his worst enemy were living in our house and playing happy families with us. Perhaps Kinsey reallywasn’tall that close to her father when he was still alive, and she hadn’t heard anything from him about his time in Crown Point as a young man. It was weird but definitely possible. After all, it wasn’t unusual for a child of divorced parents to end up being distant from one of them. I knew that from experience. I hardly ever heard from my mother, and even when she did bother to get in contact, she barely said a word to me.
I peeled into the driveway, pulled into my usual spot, and turned off the ignition. I didn’t get out of the car right away. Instead I blew out a frustrated breath and looked at myself in the rearview mirror, clenching and unclenching my hands in my lap. “Goddammit,” I muttered through gritted teeth.
As much as I hated the thought of it, I knew what I had to do now. Something I should’ve done weeks ago. I had to go to Kinsey, look her right in the eye, and directly ask her about her father.
If she lied about him, I’d be able to tell, and then I’d have to figure out where to go from there. If she told the truth, I’d owe her a big fucking apology.
With a frustrated sigh, I finally left the car and went inside the house. I was about to head upstairs to knock on Kinsey’s door when I heard her voice floating faintly through the air from somewhere downstairs. Another voice followed, though it was too far away to tell exactly who it belonged to. Definitely a man, though.
Frowning, I headed down the hall toward the sitting room. That seemed to be where the voices were coming from.
As I drew closer, I realized Kinsey was speaking to my father. I was going to step inside the room and join them, but then I caught a snippet of their conversation and stopped in my tracks.
“It can be our little secret,” Dad was saying.
I had no context in regard to this so-called secret, so I crept forward, straining to listen to the rest of the conversation.
“I don’t know. What if Mom finds out?” Kinsey said. Despite her words, she didn’t sound particularly worried. In fact, she sounded amused. Flirtatious, even.
“She won’t find out, sweetheart.”
“She could, though.” A slight note of concern crept into Kinsey’s voice. “I mean… she could walk in on us while we’re doing it.”
“That won’t happen,” Dad replied. “We’ll make sure she’s not around when we’re together.”
Furious heat flashed through my body as the meaning behind their words dawned on me. I couldn’t fucking believe it. Just when I was about to swallow my pride and talk to Kinsey—maybe even fuckingapologizeto her—it turned out that I was actually right about her all along. She clearlydidhave some sort of designs on my father, and worse, he was falling for it.
My mind whirled. I couldn’t decide who I despised more in this moment—Kinsey for betraying her own mother in order to enact whatever nefarious revenge scheme she’d plotted against my father, or my father for taking full advantage of the situation and allowing an eighteen-year-old schoolgirl to throw herself at him. How fucking stupid could he possibly be? Did he not see what the little snake was doing, or how it would make him look when she inevitably revealed the affair to the world? It made my blood boil.
I strode into the sitting room, eyes narrowed. Dad was standing far too close to Kinsey, and his right hand was inside her school blazer.Fucking Christ.