Beautiful Beast by Aubrey Irons (9)

This is wrong.

My pulse thuds like a deep, even drum in my ear. My skin tingling, my breath is caught behind tightly closed lips, and I’m frozen.

Well, frozen except for my eyes. My eyes are very much alive. They dart with his movements, watching the ways his shoulders ripple, the way his biceps bulge, and the way his body coils and springs. Sweat pours down his skin, glistening in the overhead lights of the gym.

His body tenses and dodges, fists flying out to hit imaginary opponents, ducking and weaving to dodge another invisible foe. He roars - again, at nothing, and when he whirls, I shiver at the look of animalistic fury on his face - like a snarling beast.

He’s looking right at me when he turns, still shadowboxing, but I know he can’t see me. I’m in the dark, along the footpath by the side of the pool heading back to the gardeners cottage. But him - he’s all lit up. He’s standing in the glass-walled gymnasium, shirtless, furious, and frightening, fighting shadows and bellowing at the world.

And gorgeous.

I know it’s wrong to think that, like it’s wrong to be staring at him like this, my pulse beating a little faster and my palms getting a little sweatier for my troubles. Wrong because it’s him for God’s sake, but also wrong because Josh literally just dropped me off five minutes ago from our date night.

My boyfriend. And here I am gawking and thinking very wicked thoughts about Bastian Crown.

My nemesis.

My tormentor.

…My shameful, shameful attraction.

What’s worse, as I stand here trying to pretend I’m not getting warmer in very specific places watching a shirtless Bastian Crown flex his muscles, and sweat, and growl like an animal, is that Josh is really nice. It’s not like I’ve come back from a night out with some abusive jerk, on the date from hell. Josh is sweet, and kind, and I know he really likes me.

Even if he does insist on picking me up and dropping me off at the front gates of the Crown Estate instead of at my front door.

…Even if he still did it tonight, even when I invited him over, seeing as my dad’s out of town.

Tonight it was dinner at a really nice place in downtown Sag Harbor - a place I can’t imagine literally ever having the money to go to, but a place that someone in Josh Stedman’s income bracket doesn’t really think about. Josh isn’t rich-rich - not like Bastian, or the Van Der Hauses, or the Forbeses, or the Harringtons - but he’s a level or nine above me and my dad.

We ate expensive seafood, I sincerely tried not to calculate how much each bite of my flounder cost, and we genuinely had a very nice time.

I don’t feel fireworks when I’m with him, but then, that’s just in the movies anyways. The “fireworks” thing is just creative wording in a romance book to make the attraction between two people more of an “it” thing. I have a really nice time when I’m out with Josh. He holds doors for me, he laughs at my dumb jokes, and he likes talking to me about music, even if his tastes are pretty, well, bland.

What we have is mature. It’s an adult relationship - my first relationship, but an adult, mature one nonetheless. Not like, well, Bastian, with his rotating cast of pathetic, plastic, popular girls leaving in the morning carrying the shoes and the shame from the night before.

See what I mean? Fireworks are not real.

Josh has never pressed me on the whole “sex thing”, but I know it’s there. Of course it’s there, like this unavoidable third wheel at the dinner table, or sitting between us in the car on the drive home.

Tonight, I was ready to try. Not, like, sex sex, but at least the first parts. After all, my dad’s out of town, I had a great time at dinner, and it just felt like something I should do.

But Josh said no. Or maybe I wasn’t obvious enough when I asked if he wanted to see my record collection.

Whatever it was, there we were - stopping at the front gates and Josh giving me a sweet but quick kiss. And then I was punching in the code as I watched him drive away.

Maybe I should have gone with “want to come inside and see my pants come off and then maybe we can try this whole second base thing”.

Or maybe that’s third base. Baseball as a metaphor for sex when you’d know sports or sex is extremely freaking confusing.

Confusing like the fact that I’m standing here in the dark, breathing heavily and feeling my pulse beat a little quicker as I watch Bastian like a total creep.

Yeah, it’s time to go.

I yank my eyes away from him and his sweaty, bulging, rippling muscles and growling sounds that do very interesting things to my body, and I start down the path to the gardener’s cottage.

I make it all of one step before I hit the exact spot where the motion sensors pick up movement. I physically wince as the side yard is suddenly lit up with light from the floodlights, freezing me in my steps like a deer in a headlight.

“Texas.”

I cringe, scrunching my face up at the sound of his voice behind me.

“Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it a school night.”

I can hear the jeering, baiting tone in his voice, but I turn anyways.

Hook, line, and sinker, as always.

“I was out,” I meet his eyes. “On a date.” I have no idea why I add the little bit of sass at the end, as if somehow Bastian’s going to give a single shit that I was out on the world’s most wholesome date.

He smiles thinly, his eyes flashing something as he steps out of the sliding door to the gym and pads across the grass towards where I’m still frozen.

“And how is Stedman.”

“He’s wonderful.”

“Of course he is.”

I swallow. “Well, I was just heading back to-”

“Your dad’s in Boston, right? For that flower convention or whatever?”

I pause, biting my lip as I nod.

Bastian grins.

“So, let me get this straight. Your dad’s out of town, you’ve got the house to yourself, you go on a date with your boyfriend, and then you don’t bring him back here to do bad, bad things?”

I blush furiously

“Josh isn’t like that,” I say primly.

“What, straight?”

I roll my eyes. “No, he’s a gentleman. He knows I’m just-”

“Jesus Christ, Texas, I swear to God if you finish that sentence with ‘he knows I’m not ready’, I’m going to slice my wrists with a Dawson’s Creek DVD.”

I scowl at him. “You know not everyone’s like you, Bastian. Some guys are nice, and sweet.”

Bastian grins, and I shiver as he steps closer to me.

“Some guys are pussies.”

“Oh, Josh is a pussy for not coming home with me?”

“Unequivocally. That and an idiot.”

I grit my teeth, trying to be mad at how much of a jerk he is, while also trying to ignore how very shirtless he still is.

“I’m going to bed, Bastian. Bye. Enjoy your boxing.”

I make it another two steps before his voice stops me in my tracks.

“That what you were doing out here, Texas? You watching me or something?”

I shiver, my stomach knotting up, even if I know the easy answer here is “no” and then walking away. But I pause, and I pause a hair too long.

And Bastian picks up on that.

He chuckles, and I swallow as I hear his footsteps on the gravel path stepping closer to me.

“Your date that lame?”

I turn, glaring at him. “I don’t know what you’re trying to imply, but-”

“I’m implying that your date from 1952 with nice sweet Josh Stedman left you a little…” He grins that devil smile of his.

“Wanting.”

I can feel my pulse thud in my ears, my body still tingling.

The heat still pulsing in places I wish it weren’t.

“That why you were watching me box, Texas?” He purrs it quietly, slinking closer to me. My breath comes a little shallower, my stomach knotting a little tighter. I can smell the masculine smell of him - sweat, and man, and…freaking pheromones or whatever.

And whatever it is is playing havoc on my hormones.

“Let me guess,”

I gasp as he moves right into my personal space, his bare, muscled torso glistening in the floodlights.

“Josh just left you high and not-so-dry, you’re walking home to go write in your journal or whatever about it, and you see me.”

He grins, his eyes burning fiercely.”

“And listen, Texas, I get it. And look, if you ever get tired of Stedman-”

“That’s my boyfriend, Bastian,” I hiss quietly.

“Then maybe he should act like it,” he spits back.

He takes another step towards me, and I shiver, somehow unable to move - unable to just walk away from this.

“What I was going to say is, if you ever get tired of Josh not knowing how to take care of your needs, you know where to find me.”

I swallow thickly.

“You’re disgusting.”

“And you’re blushing.”

He leans down, and I gasp - I actually gasp - as his breath teases over my ear.

“I’m curious where else on you the blood is pumping a little faster right now-”

His hand grips my wrist quicker than I thought he would, before I can land my palm against his face.

“Before you slap me,” he growls, heat flashing across his face as he leans down and looks me right in the eyes.

“Ask yourself if you’ll be able to stop putting your hands on me after you do.”

I blink, breath caught in my throat and my eyes locked onto his for more seconds than I can count, before I finally pull my wrist free of him and back away.

The spell breaks.

“Go to hell, Bastian,” I say quietly, turning and speed-walking back to the cottage.

I scold myself later, for letting him get to me. I know it’s just his thing - that charming, foul-mouthed arrogance that brings girls in like moths to a flame. And I know him trying to turn the charm on me tonight was just to fuck with me and watch me get all flustered.

Yeah, mission accomplished.

I tell myself I was just curious when I stopped to watch him box.

I tell myself the heated feeling and the heaviness of my breath was just the humidity in the air, or me just being tired after a long night.

I tell myself it was Josh I was thinking about, because there’s no way Bastian Crown makes me wet.

No way. Not a chance.

I tell myself all these sweet, pretty lies and more as I try and fall asleep, twisting under the covers and squeezing my thighs together.

The lies don’t help.

They never do.

* * *

My dad’s old pickup truck rumbles to a stop in front of The Walrus - an old South Neck mainstay of a bar that’s been around forever. I shut off the engine, my head swimming even if the stiff drink I’ve come for hasn’t even touched my lips yet.

Bastian’s words are still ringing in my head like a horrible song on repeat as I blow into the bar like a storm hitting a shore.

I spent years shutting that night away. And then dragging it back out of the shadows and analyzing it, again, and again, and again, until it’s worn through.

Because for all of Bastian’s cruelness - for all of his perfection of his role as asshole extraordinaire, that night took the cake.

The night he humiliated me.

The night he found that one part inside of me he hadn’t dug into yet, teased it out of me with sweet whispered lies, and then stomped it into the ground.

The TV above the bar flickers, and for a second, I remember the flash of the camera. I remember the nervous smile dropping from my face like a stone. I remember the horror washing over me as I saw the stony indifference on his.

For about the millionth time, I wonder why the fuck I ever came back here.

“Anastasia Bell.”

My thoughts tumble back out of the memory, and my eyes dart from the glass of white wine in front of me up into the cool, piercing, gorgeous blue eyes of Tyler Van Der Haus.

I blink in surprise, startled by yet another ghost of the past. Another Prince of South Neck.

I never had much to do with Tyler, with him being part of Bastian’s crew of high school royalty. And he never had much to do with me, with me being, well, not.

I’m pretty sure neither of us lost sleep over that.

But rich, arrogant, charming prick or not, there’s no denying that Tyler Van Der Haus is gorgeous, in that kind of genetically unfair way that comes from generations of rich, physically perfect people having babies with other rich, physically perfect people. Piercing blue eyes, blond hair, sharp, aristocratic cheekbones and jawline, a perfect flash of straight white teeth in that Armani-model smile.

He’s like a pretty version of Bastian, really - Sebastian without the storm clouds.

He smiles that perfect grin at me, dimples and all - the kind of practiced, honed smiled that’s specially designed to make women’s pulses beat a little faster whenever he flashes it.

…And God damn if it doesn’t work.

I resist the instinct to smile back, though. I resist that part of me that wants to beam right back at this stupidly handsome man. Because this isn’t just “some guy” with a charming smile. This is one of the four Princes of South Neck, but I spent enough time living two hundred feet from their main castle, with their ridiculous parties, no rules lifestyle, and endless parade of girls to know them better as the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

“Tyler Van Der Haus,” I say evenly, my brow still slightly furrowed at actually seeing this man again, ever.

He grins a little wider as he nods his perfect chin.

“I’d heard you were back in town.” He brings his glass of what looks like scotch to his lips before he raises a brow and nods at the booth seat across from me. “Mind if I sit?”

I chew on my lip.

“Look, Ana,” his brow creases. “I owe you an apology.”

The guarded look on my face finally breaks, the smile coming through out of sheer curiosity.

“For?”

“Can I sit first?”

“Sure.”

He grins as he slides into the booth across from me before he clears his throat.

“I was a real dick in high school.”

“You were.”

He laughs. “And that wit hasn’t changed, I see. Look, I just saw you over here, and it brought back what a little shit I was back then. I just wanted to come over and apologize, and tell you I’m a way different guy now, that’s all.”

His eyes dart over my face before he nods crisply and starts to stand.

“Anyway, that’s all. Nice to see you, Ana. Enjoy your drink.”

He’s half-turned back to the bar when I purse my lips and shake my head.

“Hey, Tyler?”

He turns back.

“Thanks.” I shake my head. “Sorry, I’ve just had a weird day. You can totally sit and join me if you’d like.”

He grins, those perfect, sharp blue eyes twinkling. “I would like.”

* * *

In some ways, Tyler is right - he has changed from the arrogant little shit I knew from high school. In other ways, however, he’s exactly the same.

Other ways like the fact that he’s criminally charming. And damn if I’m not eating it right up. One drink turns into him insisting on buying me a second. He flashes that grin again as he comes back from the bar with it, and this time, it does more than make my pulse beat a little quicker.

He sits, rolling the sleeves of his perfectly tailored dress shirt up, the corded muscles of forearms rippling as he reaches for his scotch.

“All right, I have to ask.”

He gives me a curious look and I gesture around us at the dingy old, wood-beamed-ceiling of the Walrus with my eyes.

“Not exactly your speed, is it?”

He laughs. “I’m here all the time actually. It’s the first place in town that took cash instead of an ID when I was a teenager. Call it brand loyalty.”

I roll my eyes, but I laugh nonetheless.

We chat about what we’ve been doing since we were eighteen. I tell him about New York, and now LA, and my music. And he listens, raptly, nodding, and smiling, and laughing along with me. He tells me about starting the acquisitions firm with Dylan Forbes, and living in New York, and how he’s just home for a week visiting his mother - how he was engaged briefly a few years ago but now he’s not. And if you didn’t know us and just happened to be sitting at the table next to us, you’d assume we’d been the best of friends back in high school instead of at the opposite ends of the social spectrum.

The second drink goes down faster than the first, for both of us. But when he offers another round, I shake my head.

“No, thanks though.”

“Really? It’s early you know.”

There’s that crazy charming smile again - charming enough to almost make me forget that I’m sitting having drinks with one of the infamous Princes of South Neck.

“I know, I just—”

“We’ve still got the boat in the water at my mom’s place.” His eyes hold mine, just enough of a fire in them to make me shiver. “Got a stocked bar on there if I can interest you in a nightcap.”

Another night, on another boat, with another Prince - darker, more broken, more edged - flashes in my mind. But I quickly chase it away with the last of my drink. I raise my eyes to Tyler, biting my lip, but already knowing what I’m going to say, even if the wine, and that smile, and the pulse beating a little faster in my veins says otherwise.

“I- I should go home, actually.”

His brow furrows a little. “Something I said?”

I shake my head. “No, I just have a big day tomorrow.”

“Working for Crown.”

I shrug. “Something like that.”

He makes a tsking sound with his tongue on his teeth, leaning back in the booth and raking his fingers through his perfect hair.

“C’mon. One drink.”

“I can’t, sorry.”

The number of girls I went to school with who would - to this day even - lose their minds at me saying no to a drink on Tyler Van Der Haus’s boat, and everything that it implies, is almost amusing to me.

His eyes fiercely hold mine for another second or two, before he smiles, nodding.

“Okay, okay. I yield. You just—” he grins, shaking his head. “You look really great, Ana.”

I blush. “Thanks, Tyler.”

“So when’s the next night that fucker lets you off the leash? There’s no gardening at night.”

I laugh, shaking my head and searching for a way to even begin to answer that when he holds his hands up.

“Okay, tell you what. Just give me your number. I’ll text you mine, and you can call anytime you feel like taking me up on that nightcap.”

I nod, biting my lip. “Sounds good.”

We exchange numbers, Tyler gives me a hug that lasts a little longer than a normal one might, and then he’s gone.

I drive home slowly, my dad’s old Patsy Cline tape playing quietly through the rattily old speakers.

And I like this feeling. I like the flirtation, and the lingering smile still on my face, as bizarre as it is with someone like Tyler.

Relationships and I have never really gotten along, I guess. I have no idea what it is about me that sends men running away, but, that’s just the way it’s always been. There was Josh back in high school - the one I thought was the one. And I know how silly it is to think your high school boyfriend is “the one”, but I did. That is, until I walked in on him cheating on me with Kendra Wallace right before prom.

That one hurt. But I guess all first relationships hurt when they end.

There was Sean Harper, the captain of the football team, who, somehow for some reason, pursued me for half of senior year, even if I was the last girl he’d be seen with. He finally asked outright, I said yes, and then he never showed up. Never talked to me again, either.

That one I can chalk up to high school weirdness, or some bizarre prank or something. But since then, this has turned into a pattern in my life. I’ve had boyfriends, but it never takes. That, or guys just like to cheat on me for some reason.

Jason, freshman year of college and the boy I finally ended up losing my virginity to - though I never told him that - was around a while. A while until he suddenly decided to leave me for some girl from his lab sciences class and transfer to Colorado State with her. Garret, the cute boy with the man bun and the gorgeous forearms who played his own songs on the guitar on the same club circuit I did in New York stopped calling. Stole my favorite damn necklace, too.

And then there was Chris, in LA. Chris who I’d spent two years with. Chris who I lived with, whose family I spent Christmas with in Missouri last year. Chris whose stuff was out of our apartment one day about eight months ago, without a single word or sign of warning

“I’m feeling trapped. I just need a change, Anastasia.”

And just like that, two years comes to a close with a single phone call.

This is me. The very cheatable, very leaveable Anastasia Bell.

I know who Tyler Van Der Haus is. I’m not an idiot. I see the charming smile, the perfect hair, the twenty-thousand dollar wristwatch, the Amex black card he casually flashed when paying for our twenty dollar bar tab. I see the practiced, easy laugh, the suggestion of a nightcap, the casual-but-not-so-casual hug at the end for what it is.

It’s pursuit, and I know exactly the kind of guy Tyler is. Rich. Powerful. Used to getting what he wants. He might not be the royal prick he was back in high school, but I sincerely doubt he’s gone through any sort of momentous changes to who he is.

But, is that a bad thing?

I bite my lip, still thinking about it with a small glowing smile on my face as I climb the staircase by the kitchen back at the Crown Estate.

So what if Tyler’s basically a rich, handsome, two-dimensional lacrosse jock turned finance guy? So, yeah, a good-looking guy from high school wants to see me and get drinks on his boat sometime?

Yeah, color me interested.

I take a breath as I undo the buttons of my blouse, shrugging it off and reaching for a T-shirt from the top drawer of my dresser.

Or, at least, color me should be interested, right? I mean, a little fling of romance while I slave away for Bastian the Bastard might be exactly what I—

“Where the fuck have you been?”

I shriek, whirling at the sound of his voice from my doorway and clutching the T-shirt across my front.

“What the hell, Bastian!”

“Where.”

I swallow the heat from my face, my pulse hammering as I meet his eyes, not four feet from me.

“How long have you been standing there!”

“Answer my question.”

“No.”

He tenses, his dark, piercing eyes blazing.

“Answer me.”

“Get out of my room!” I spit, my voice feeling tight in my throat.

“My room, actually,” He says without blinking. “My house, my room. My rules.”

“What rules?”

“The rules that you fucking tell me when you’re going to be leaving.”

“You’re aware I’m not a slave, right?”

“And you’re aware that you are what I say you are, right?

I laugh, even though my blood is pounding in my ears, my body trembling under his ferocious gaze.

“Oh, and what am I, Bastian? Enlighten me.”

“Impossible,” he growls.

My smile fades.

“I was on a date, actually.”

The fire roars in his eyes. And somehow, I knew it would, even if I’m not sure why.

“With who,” he hisses through a clenched jaw. He’s without his cane this time, his hand clutching my doorframe instead with an iron, white-knuckle grip.

“None of your—”

“WHO!” he booms, his lips curling back in a ferocious looking snarl.

I swallow thickly, my whole body shaking a little at his sudden jump from asshole to terrifying. Where I was wasn’t a “date” by any metric, but something tells me that letting Bastian know I was out with one of his friends wouldn’t be a good idea.

“You don’t own me,” I say quietly in the ensuing silence.

“You keep saying that.”

“But you really don’t,” I spit back.

“Who.”

I bark a laugh. “Nine years later, and you're still mad that I was the one girl in school who wouldn’t fuck you, huh?”

I’m not sure what reaction I’m expecting. A grin isn’t it though.

Bastian chuckles, his eyes burning fiercely into mine. “That what you think this is? You think it was just a numbers game for me?”

“Wasn’t it?”

His smile holds, his eyes still blazing into mine. “No, Ana, it wasn’t.” He steps right into my room, and I gasp, taking a step back until I feel the dresser at my back.

I swallow, acutely aware that I’m topless with just a T-shirt clutched over my breasts as he advances on me.

“It was a power game.”

“You’re disgusting.”

“And you didn’t say no to me.”

I freeze, the memories of that one night coming rushing back.

The saying yes.

The ignoring every single warning bell in my head and saying yes to the very last man in the world I should have been saying yes to.

The camera flash, and the sickening embarrassment and dawning horror that followed

The tears the came after that.

Something hardens in my heart like it did those years before, and my face pulls back in a sneer as I glare right up into his smug, asshole face.

“Get the fuck out of my room,” I hiss.

Bastian doesn’t budge.

“You know, it doesn’t matter that you didn’t fuck me, Texas,” he purrs, grinning. “What matters is that we both know you were ready to drop to your knees and worship my—”

I slap him.

Hard.

“Fuck you.”

He roars as he whirls back, rage billowing around him like a storm cloud.

“Do not do that again,” he growls.

I’m shaking my head, tears as hot and as bitter as the ones from that night threatening to spill down my cheeks.

“Why, Bastian?”

It’s the question I’ve never asked him.

“I mean what is wrong with you? Why the hell would you—”

“Do it?”

His lips pull back in a mirthless smile.

“Because I could, that’s why.”

He turns, his steps staggered without his cane.

“Oh, and Texas?”

He half-turns his head over his shoulder, though his eyes don’t meet mine this time.

“There’s a lot wrong with me. I thought you were smart enough to know that before you stepped onto that boat that night.”