Mad Love (Slateview High 3)

the edge of the pool as their gazes found me again.

My heart couldn’t decide whether it wanted to gallop or stop beating entirely, so it thudded unevenly in my chest, an erratic rhythm that made me feel like I was dying.

They know.

I wasn’t sure how they’d found out or who had told them—hell, maybe they’d picked up the gossip from Muse, the man who kept his finger on the pulse of both Baltimore’s underworld and its elite.

But they knew.

They knew I was engaged to Barrett King.

My stomach tried to turn itself inside out at the realization, and fear warred with self-disgust in my soul. I knew how much they all hated my father, Bishop especially. When I first met them, they had despised and distrusted my entire family, including me.

That had changed. So much had changed between us in the months that I’d known them. I had distrusted and disliked them at first too, but slowly, all of that had faded into a barely remembered past. They had become my saviors, my lovers, the three people I cared about and trusted more than anyone else in the world.

And what must they think of me now?

I wished desperately that I’d had the courage to tell them what my father had done, that they at least could’ve heard the words from my mouth instead of a someone else’s.

Would they think I had done this on purpose? That I had chosen Barrett over them? That I was no better than my mother, using people when I needed them and discarding them when I no longer needed them? Throwing them away for something better.

Seconds ticked by, each painfully full, but none of the Lost Boys spoke. They just looked at me, their bodies tense and their faces unreadable.

And I couldn’t fucking bear it.

“I didn’t know!” I blurted out, my voice too loud for the quiet pool house. My skin was cold now that I wasn’t moving, but I could hardly register the sensation as every fiber of my being focused on the three boys in front of me. “I didn’t know. I don’t want this. Please, you have to believe me. I don’t want Barrett. I will never want him. I’m yours. I’m yours. You said I’m yours, and I always will be.”

My words were coming out almost faster than my tongue could speak them, tripping and falling over each other in their rush to escape my mouth. I had to make them understand.

I shook my head adamantly, wrapping my arms around myself under the water, heedless of the fact that I was nearly naked. “I belong to you. No one else. Ever. I won’t let this happen—I’ll stop it somehow, I promise I will. I’ll kill myself before I marry Barrett King.”

The last words bounced off the tiled walls around us, and they seemed to shock the Lost Boys into motion. In an instant, all three of them had shucked their jackets and shoes and jumped into the pool with me, still fully dressed. They converged on me, surrounding me on all sides, their bodies pressed so close I was suspended between them.

“Don’t say that, Coralee,” Bishop growled, grabbing my chin with one calloused hand. His touch was rough, his voice rougher, and he tilted my head up to meet my gaze. “Never fucking say that. We’ll figure everything else out, but your life—you—come first. Always. Never say that shit again.”

“You think we’d want that?” Misael murmured, sounding tortured. “That we’d rather you die than be with us? That’s some fucked up kinda shit, Cora. What kind of people would we be if that’s what we wanted?”

The pain in his voice cracked my heart open, and I swore I could feel the poison that’d been welling inside it start to spill out. I dragged in a breath, their unique scents mixing with the smell of chlorine in my nostrils, and for the first time in days, I felt… whole.

A tear slipped down my check, and unlike the other two boys, Kace didn’t even say anything. He just wrapped an arm around my waist and hauled me against his body, pressing his lips to mine in a kiss that nearly eviscerated me. Every nerve ending in my body lit up as the wet fabric of his clothes scratched against my bare skin. They hadn’t even bothered to strip before they’d jumped in with me, in too much of a hurry to reach me to worry about something like that.

The thought made something warm bloom in my belly, and I clutched at Kace’s shoulders, giving back as good as I was getting as I kissed him with a ferocity that matched his own.

When he finally tore his lips from mine, he crushed me to him, wrapping his arms around me in a bear hug so tight I could hardly breathe. Not that I minded. I wished he could hold me tighter than this even, that he could somehow fuse our bodies together the same way our souls were. That all three of the boys could keep me so close that no one would be able to rip me away from them.

“We fuckin’ missed you, Cora,” he murmured roughly. “We knew somethin’ was wrong when you went quiet, but we didn’t find out till today that—”

He didn’t say the words, and I didn’t want him to. I’d already said Barrett’s name twice tonight, and that was two times too many, as far as I was concerned. For just this moment, this blissful, wild moment, I was with my boys again and everything was alright.

It wasn’t. Not in the big picture.

Them being here didn’t negate or undo the arranged marriage my father had set up.

But it gave me peace, and it gave me hope. My boys were here. They still trusted me. They still wanted me.

And for now, that was enough.

Bishop and Misael had stepped closer when Kace pulled me into the hug, and I could feel all three of them touching me, hands roaming my body, breath warming my chilled skin.