When LeVan was done, I closed my eyes and rested my forehead on my knees.

In a way, I guessed it made sense.

Mother had never been one to let go of a grudge.

One of the reasons I’d been transferred to the public school was because my mother had gotten crazy mad over something going on among the members of the school board for the private school I’d attended my entire life, and she felt snubbed. So instead of sucking it up, she’d transferred me to a different school—a public school, something she considered to be totally low-brow, less than two weeks into my sophomore year.

She no longer allowed Alice to do the family shopping at the local Piggly Wiggly because when she had been in there, she’d been asked to step to another line because she clearly had more than the standard ten items allowed in the express lane. They’d even opened a lane just for her.

It didn’t matter.

The store didn’t bend over to kiss her ass suitably, so they no longer had her business.

It had been years and Alice still had to drive the thirty minutes to a Publix in Baton Rouge.

Was it a surprise to me that Melody Kent was still holding some lingering obsession for a man she’d liked when she was younger? That she still held resentment for a woman who’d gotten that man?

Hell, no.

I thought absently of Braxton Vanderbilt—he’d always struck me as oddly familiar, although I’d never been able to figure out why.

He was a nice man, or at least he seemed to be. We’d only met a few times. I felt odd being around LeVan’s parents when I clearly could never introduce him to my mother. If my father—

“Shit,” I whispered, my entire body going rigid. I reached instinctively for my cell phone, but I was sort of naked, so it wasn’t there. “My phone.”

LeVan found it on the floor and I half-expected him to sit beside me after he passed it to me, but he didn’t. He paced the room restlessly, a caged energy coming from him that left me feeling even more on edge than I already was. Pulling up the photo gallery, I stared at the somewhat grainy image of my father. I had a few pictures of him, pictures that I had stolen from the attic and now sat in places of prominence in my dorm room. The picture on my phone was a copy of one of them.

He was sitting with me in his lap when I’d been just a baby. Mother had been sitting next to him, and there had been a smile on her face as she looked at him, brushing his hair back from his face. The seemingly happy expression had always seemed so out of place. She was rarely happy. But the look on her face in that picture was authentic. I wasn’t certain I could call it happy and I wasn’t even sure I could say it was the smile of a woman in love, but she seemed content.

Dad, though, the look of his face was of a man besotted. And his gaze was focused on me.

I loved that picture because of that look.

I’d been loved once.

My father had loved me. I had another picture of him with a similar look, holding Nicky in his nursery, taken just a few months before Dad had died. Nicky had been not quite a year old and I had just turned four when Daddy had died.

Such a short time, but we’d been loved.

Neither of us had inherited his dark hair, but Nicky had his square jaw. We both had the soft, wide mouth—it was a mouth almost too pretty for a man, but my father looked one hundred percent male.

Kind of like Braxton Vanderbilt.

“I’ve always thought your dad looked familiar in a way,” I said softly. “Every time I saw him, I’d think he reminded me of someone.”

As LeVan swung around and started back across the room, I held out my phone.

He came to me and took the device, his gaze sweeping down.

He blinked, once, then twice. “I’ve seen that picture…that’s you and your…” Then he blinked, shaking his head. “Son of a bitch.”

“Don’t worry,” I said sourly. “We’re not related or anything. He emigrated from England when he was sixteen. And I’ve researched the family tree…you know, just looking to make sure we’re not somehow related to the devil or anything, what with how my mother is.”

Mother had been an only child, so I had no idea if her family was as awful as she was. But my father’s side was…wonderful. Just like he’d been.

I could still hear the crisp sound of his voice as he helped me sound out Go, Dog, Go. And the deep, rich cadence as he sang to me at night. “She met him when she went to England after college—he was back home visiting family. For some reason, he fell head over heels in love with her. I never understood why.” Taking a shaky, shallow breath, I said, “But now I know why she married him. She was hoping to find a replacement for your dad.”

The weirdness of it, the wrongness of it, the pain of it had me clambering from the bed. I understood why he couldn’t seem to hold still, but all I wore was my bra and the pathetic excuse for a skirt, which was still hiked up around my waist from earlier. Smoothing it down, I went over to LeVan’s closet and opened it, pulling out a shirt. Dragging it on over my head, I tugged my hair free and turned, only to find him staring at me.

“What are you going to do?” he asked softly. The words had been quietly voiced, but there was a world of tension in them.

“I…” Swallowing, I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

He took a step toward me, that tension flowing from him in waves. “I’m not going to let that bitch come between us, Thea. I love you.”

“I love you, too!” Tears burned my eyes. “But I can’t let her come between me and Nicky, either. He needs me!”

“So do I,” he said, such passion in his voice that I knew I’d hear those words, voiced just so, every day for the rest of my life. “Thea, you’re mine.”

He reached for me then, hauling me against him. My body crashed into his and he slammed his mouth down on mine so hard, it knocked the air from my lungs. But I didn’t care. I didn’t need to breath. I couldn’t. The ability to think, to breathe, to even exist, all of it was now tied to LeVan, and I could relax as long as I was with him, in his arms.

He backed me up against the wall between the closet and the window.

The window…this one faced out over a park, but what if…?

I turned my face from his as he went to kiss me and he stopped, voice taut as he demanded, “What is it?”

“The window. What if…”

He snarled and reached over, grabbing the blinds and hauling them down. Then, his mouth took mine as his hands went between us. One worked his pants down. The other worked…me. When he found me wet and waiting, he groaned, then tucked the head of his cock against my entrance, thrusting in.

Like earlier, it was hot, desperate, fast.

We’d never been like this before, but then again, we’d never had the need or such desperation.

I was close to coming when he stopped abruptly. I cried out, frustrated, but then he went to his knees and pressed his mouth to me. I wailed, the sound of his name bouncing around the room. He lashed me with his tongue, nipped my clit with his teeth, and drove me straight over the edge.

Then he hauled me up and pulled me with him to the bed.

But when he started to tug me down on top of him, I pushed his hands away, going to my knees in front of the bed.

I took him in my mouth. He grabbed the sides of my head and thrust up. My throat burned, but I didn’t pull back like I normally did. I needed him, so much of him, all of him. The fear that was burning in me drove me on and I lifted up just enough to grab more air, then sank down lower.

LeVan growled, the sound vibrating through his body, and he muttered something low under his breath, something I couldn’t make out. But I knew he liked what I was doing, so I took more.

“I…fuck…Thea, I’m gonna come. If you don’t want…”

Always before, he’d stopped.

Always before, I’d let him.

But this time, I didn’t let him…so he didn’t.

My eyes were still watering, my throat still burning when he pulled me up onto the bed a moment later.

And he was still hard.

He flipped me onto my back and came inside me, his mouth taking mine.

Desperation, I realized, could be a drug.

So could fear and need and desire and want.

The two of us were lost to it, high on it, binging and crazed.

And for a little while, I stopped thinking about just what had me so, so desperate.

* * *

It was early the next morning before either of us tried to speak about what was going on, what we’d do—what I would do.

LeVan barely slept.

I slept restlessly, but my mind was busy working the puzzle.

She had someone following me.

Someone watching me.

If I could figure out who it was, then I could figure out how to get away…right?

Surely nobody had guessed that the redhead who left the apartment last night had been me. How could they have? We’d deliberately imitated the look of another girl who lived there and I’d taken my roommate’s car instead of mine.

We couldn’t do that forever, but I’d find other ways.

“I’m not giving you up, LeVan.”

He lifted his head and stared down at me.

“I’ll…figure something out. Nobody followed me last night. I know that.” I’d gotten off and on the highway several different times and once, I’d left it behind altogether and not once had anyone stayed with me. “If I have to buy an entire wardrobe of clothes and wigs so I can fool people, then I’ll do it.”

His mouth tightened. “And we’re back to sneaking around. Aren’t we getting too old for that?”

“I have to protect Nicky,” I whispered. “I can’t think of any other way. Can you?”

He opened his mouth, then closed it. Sighing, he lowered his lips to mine. “If this is how you want to play it for now, we can. But don’t expect me to spend my life hiding in your closet, pretty girl. I can’t do it.”