Boys And Their Toys: A Dark High School Bully Romance (Troubled Playthings 1)

Chapter Twenty

Rain started falling around us when we were only a few minutes out from the restaurant.

I glared over at Lucas. “Are you going to stop so we can put the cover on?”

Lucas shrugged. He didn’t even need to look back at me. “Why would we? We’re not going to get wet.”

I sat up very straight in my seat. “Excuse me, how do you figure?”

Lucas didn’t answer in words. He just accelerated.

My hair started streaming back, the wind whistling in my ears. I hated the way it felt to ride fast in this car with the top down.

I clamped my hands over my ears. “Why does anyone think this is a better kind of car to have than one that’s properly enclosed?”

Even with all that ghastly racket around, Lucas’s reply came back clearly to me. “This is what I love about you, Callie. You’re so determined to succeed in life yet so resistant to anything that says money, and it’s not even something you’re doing just to make a point of it.”

I wanted to say something to that, but all I had in my head was his voice saying love.

He didn’t mean it in the sense of loving me, I knew that. But… damn it, I wanted him to. Not to protect me, not to prove a point… I just wanted to have it. And there was only one state of mind I could think of that was left to stir up that sort of desire.

Lucas turned his head to me then and smiled, his own perfectly-cropped hair staying perfectly in place, of course.

I was never allowed to enjoy these moments with him. I realised two things in that one: that we were in fact not getting wet, and that Lucas was driving way too fast in the rain.

“Lucas,” I called. My car terror was rising again, unhelpful but unstoppable, and it only left me more afraid when I knew I needed all of my wits to get him to come in line with me. I felt like I was shouting at him from the distant end of a tunnel that was diminishing to a point before my eyes. “You need to slow down. We’re going to crash.”

I could tell he’d heard what I said. His smile was taken away in the wind, and I felt—I was very sensitive to it now—the car was accelerating.

My fingers were digging into the seat. Though it felt firm underneath me, I knew nothing I could reach right now was at all stable. Lucas had gotten into an accident he hadn’t planned at least once before, when it was dark and he was angry. Rain was falling hard enough to make the world around us grey, though it was being deflected from our bodies by some trick of our fast movement. Right now I would rather myself and the car be soaked than this though. It would only take one slip and we were destroyed.

I appealed to Lucas again. He had thrown my world into this turmoil, and only he could safely stop it now.

“You have to slow down.” My fear, I was ashamed to realise, was not only for my life now. I was seeing the true recklessness inside of Lucas Starling in a way I had never wanted to. This was no calculated strike on a single driver with no other potential casualties, or an error in judgement because he was angry. This time, he was just doing something utterly stupid he hadn’t thought through… because he felt like it. Because he wanted to mess with me. Apparently, he didn’t need a better reason.

What was more, Lucas was not just running the risk of killing himself and me if he continued like this. He could kill absolutely anyone who innocently wandered into his path. Strangers. People we knew. Children. And if I couldn’t find a way to get through to him, if he was determined to be this way no matter what… it couldn’t matter how much I decided I wanted to be with him, how much I might think maybe we’d always been meant to be. I couldn’t allow myself to be with someone who had no regard for other people in that way.

I had to get through to him. If I didn’t… who else would?

Surely even Lucas cared about children.

“If you drive like this,” I called, “you won’t be able to stop if some kid crosses the road in front of you.”

“What the fuck kids are out this time?” he threw back at me, almost a growl, which was probably true, but there was something in his voice that made me doubt he was really thinking about what he was saying. He was in that wild place where he didn’t really connect with the world around him as being something separate to him, something not part of his fantasies. It was all just there for him to reach out and play with.

But if you lost your childhood, your memories of the time when you learned to be more than just a wild thing who wanted what he wanted, how easy it must be to slip back into that wild place. How hard, to understand why that was wrong.

And of course, I already knew the key to stop him. The person who was connected to him so deeply he could not see her as just another animal for him to play with. Though I had a feeling he kept her from realising her power over him.

“When you do this, Lucas, when you drive like this.” I had to be decisive, precise, and it was hard because my head was spinning and I just wanted to beg him to stop. “When you drive so fast, when you are careless, you put Lucy in danger too. She could be out on the road. She will be the one who has to bail you out of jail, or identify your body… or support you when you’re charged with killing someone else with your car.”

Lucas was looking at me. “Please,” I said, “your eyes on the road.”

He turned his head back like it was nothing… but, of course, it was the opposite of nothing.

“You’re trying to appeal to my better nature,” he informed me, like it was something tremendously amusing to him.

“Is there something wrong with that?”