A Deal With the Devil (Boys of Preston Prep 2)

I sit back on my heels, eyes dragging down her body as my fist starts pumping. She’s still wearing my jacket, and it’s lame. I know it’s lame. But I feel this hot spike of possessive want shoot right to my cock. Her skirt’s still pushed up, revealing her wet panties and all of her thighs, and I really wasn’t lying before.

This is going to be quick.

My jaw clenches hard as I look, eyes roving from her thighs, to her panties, to her hot, eager gaze, and then back again. My hand moves on its own, slow and languid, trying to draw it out, even though I know it’s futile.

“Does it hurt?” she asks, watching my every move.

“No.” I bite my lip, stroking up the shaft, rolling the tip in my palm. “It feels fucking fantastic.”

“It feels good when I do it, too,” she admits, which causes me to skip a beat. “But the best time was when I did it while watching you.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ.”

I focus on her legs, unable to really process what she’s telling me. It’s too much, too intense. Already, I can see her hips subtly wriggling with me, like they’re magnetized to the rhythm I’m setting. I watch the tattoo as it moves with her, her legs still spread open for me like they want to cradle my hips and take me in and—

I fall forward on my palm, hovering over her as the coil finally snaps. All of the tension I’ve been holding in all day seems to erupt with it. “Fuck,” I growl as I watch my come paint the skin of her thighs, my fist wringing it out.

Vandy makes this airy little, “Oh,” sound as she watches—as she feels it fall on her.

“Sorry.” I feel like I’m half-wheezing from the force of it, sitting back on my heels to commit the vision to memory. I swipe the back of my hand over my mouth. “Sometimes I can’t control where it goes,” I lie.

She gives me a look that tells me just how much she isn’t buying this. “It’s okay.”

It’s probably not, but I’m too wrung out to beat myself up over it. Instead, I fish around in her bathroom for something to clean it off with, offering her an apologetic glance when I do.

She spends a long time in the bathroom—cleaning herself up, I guess—and I set myself to rights and linger around the window. I shouldn’t stay. A cautious glance out her window tells me that my dad isn’t even home, but it can’t be a good idea.

But when Vandy walks out of the bathroom in a thin shirt and a pair of shorts, eyes pinging between me and the window, I know before she opens her mouth what she’s going to ask.

“Stay?”

I know I’m going to give in.

“Okay.”

She rests her head in the crook of my shoulder when we lay down, and it’s a different quiet in here than the one in my room. This quiet is full of Vandy’s soft breaths, the rustle of the sheets when she moves her legs, the gentle sweep of her fingers against the hair on my forearm.

I break it with a soft, “Hey, V?”

She looks up at me, but I can’t bring myself to tear my eyes away from her ceiling. “Hm?”

“Remember earlier,” I ask, “when you made me promise?”

Her hand goes instantly still. “Yeah,” she says reluctantly, voice small and full of something I don’t want to think about.

I swallow. “Never Sebastian, okay?”

There’s a long stretch of silence, and I’m afraid for a moment that she’s going to ask why, and I won’t know what to tell her. It’s not that I don’t like him. It’s not that I didn’t see the way he treated her back there, like she was just any other girl—like the way her leg is was nothing to him. It’s not even that I think he’d hurt her.

It’s because of all those things.

It’s not until she repeats, “Never Sebastian,” and presses a small, “I promise,” into my shoulder that I can finally close my eyes.

23

Vandy

“Don’t forget the meeting tonight,” Emory says, wiping his mouth with a napkin. Our lunch table has grown into something crowded and curious. My brother and Aubrey were one thing, but after the fight—the bonfire—most of the other Devils and Playthings began drifting to our table, too. People around us notice and I can feel their probing gazes, because Vandy Hall does not sit at the popular table.