“So what happened? How’d you end up here?” The one thing I do know from listening to her, Jodie and Toby talking is that Brianna spent many years living with Jodie and her mum. And that little fact was only confirmed when I ran my eyes down the list of schools she’s attended. At about thirteen, everything seemed to settle down. She stopped moving about and only attended one school right through to her A Levels. It didn’t take much research to discover it was the same one that Jodie went to.
Brianna slumps back in her chair and folds her arm over her chest, making her cleavage fucking mouth-watering and giving me a real hard time focusing on her eyes.
“She finally took it too far and overdosed,” she says, her voice void of any emotion. “I found her, called an ambulance, and I was finally taken away.”
“By Jodie’s mum?” I ask, getting a little too sucked in by this story.
Her eyes flash with surprise. “Yeah, Auntie Jo didn’t bat an eyelid about taking me in. She’d have done it before, if she knew where we were.”
“And your mum?” I ask.
“She survived. But that’s about all I know. She discharged herself from the hospital before she should have and just… disappeared. Haven’t seen or heard anything from her since.”
“And Joanne just took you on as if you were her own?”
“Yes. Why does any of this matter exactly?”
I pause, mulling that question over in my head.
“It all just paints an interesting picture.”
“Interesting, really? I just thought it was fucking depressing. I have nothing, Nico. No parents, just an aunt who thankfully will do anything for me. I have nothing to my name. Everything I own I’ve worked for myself.”
“Apart from what you stole from me,” I deadpan.
She leaps up out of her chair in a rush. “Do you want it back?” she asks, her hands lifting from her sides.“Is that what this is about? You want to rub my past in my face, prove to me that I’m not good enough for the likes of you and the elite students of this school?”
“Wha—”
“You can have it,” she snaps angrily. “All of it. Have it all fucking back, because it means nothing. Nothing,” she hisses as she reaches behind her to pull the zip of her dress down.
The top half immediately falls away from her body, revealing what I was desperate to know not so long ago. Her white lace bra does show me her rosy pink nipples beneath.
“Brianna,” I start, but my words are quickly cut off when she shimmies her dress over her hips, letting it pool around her waist and leaving her standing in just her lingerie and heels.
“NO, Nico. You wanted to prove a point. Well, consider it proved.” She bundles up her dress and throws it at me. “I know I am not worthy of all of this. I know I’m just a council estate kid who grew up freezing cold and starving hungry. I can’t possibly understand the lives of you and all the other students in a place like this, just like I don’t expect you to be able to understand me either.
“All I want to do is make a difference. I want to help kids who have been born into something, or who are living through something that makes them miserable. And quite frankly, it doesn’t matter how much money the parents have. Kids still suffer. Lives are still ruined.”
She surges forward as if she’s actually about to flee this small, enclosed room in just her underwear.
“I don’t fucking think so, Siren,” I growl, reaching for her as she tries to dart around me to the door.
I wrap my arm around her waist and drag her into my body.
“What are you doing?” she gasps, staring up at me with her big blue eyes.
“Not letting you walk out there in your fucking underwear is what I’m fucking doing. No one gets to see this but me.”
All her breath leaves her lungs in a rush before she reaches up and slams her lips on mine.
I’m rendered useless for a second, not expecting her to throw caution to the wind and do something quite so risky. But as ever with Brianna, my self-restraint doesn’t last long and I soon find my hands slipping to her arse and dragging her even tighter to me as my tongue plunges past her lips.
Her taste explodes in my mouth, taunting me with all the things I want but point blank refuse to acknowledge or accept.
Instead, I focus on what happens when we collide like this.
Her grunt of surprise fills my mouth as I slam her back against the wall, sweeping her feet from the floor. I wrap her legs around my waist and she gasps as she discovers just how hard I am for her.