He laughs and tweaks my nose. “Play me one of your sassy anti-love songs.”
“There’re so many, I don’t even know where to start.” I begin searching when he puts his thumb over mine and swiftly, he starts guiding me.
“I got one for you. The kind you like.”
His voice close to my ear causes pleasant little chills to rush through me. He clicks PLAY on a saucy song like the ones I like, but it’s not a girl power song at all.
It’s Kelly Clarkson’s “Dark Side.”
My insides melt when I hear the music. I love Kelly, but oh, this song. The words. Remy wants to know . . . that I will stay, that I will promise not to run away . . . ?
He looks at me again, with that cocky little smile. But his eyes are not so cocky. His eyes are questioning. He wants to know.
And when he takes my hand and laces his fingers between mine in a very boyfriend gesture that never fails to get me, I go to the ear without the earbud and tell him, “I promise. I promise, you have my heart, and you have me. You will always have me.”
There’s just no song on this earth, and no playlist big enough, to tell him that I truly love him. I love him when his eyes are black, and when his eyes are blue, and although I know—deep down—that he doesn’t believe I’m here to stay—one day, I swear one day I will make him believe me. We smile as we keep listening to this song, and when he squeezes my hand, I squeeze back, telling myself no matter what happens, I will never, ever, let go of this hand.
? ? ?
OUR PHOENIX HOTEL looks like something out of a drawing. The long, twenty-story adobe building spreads out prettily over a desert landscape, surrounded by blossoming cacti with flowers so ginormous and bright, I have the urge to go and touch—just to make sure they’re not plastic.
Inside the marble lobby, two teenage girls whisper and point at Remy as he passes—because of course they noticed him. You notice him like you’d notice a bull walking past you in a hotel lobby. Their gazes quickly seem to scan us—the group that came in with him—and they start checking me out next.
I lift one of my eyebrows with an amused smile, and they seem to determine that I am probably his girlfriend, but I can’t help that my stomach does crazy twisting motions of proprietorship as they give him one last up-and-down with their starved little gazes.
“Look at those two infatuated girls! He’s always drawing eyes,” Diane tells me. “It doesn’t make you jealous?”
“Extremely,” I say, wrinkling my nose in disgust at my own jealousy.
Remy glances my way and winks as he and Pete wait for the keys, and Diane elbows me with a laugh.
“Goodness, that man knows his own appeal!” she says. “But I wouldn’t be jealous, Brooke, the entire team feels the love between you two. We’ve never seen him like this over anyone. No matter how many women paraded through here, he still went back for you.”
“What do you mean?” I frown at her. “Women paraded through where?”
“Our hotel.”
“You mean recently?”
My stomach drops, and I mean, drops, when Diane’s eyes widen, and her face loses all color.
She starts shaking her head, and then . . . then she starts glancing around as if she wants to hide in a fucking flowerpot! “Brooke,” she whispers, her tone apologetic as she backs up a step. Why?
Does she think I’m going to hit her?
Do I look like I’m going to hit someone?
I don’t want to hit someone, I can barely even stand.
Everything blurs as I turn to stare at Remy’s back. Across the lobby. I think of the way he moves, like a predator taking me, when we make love. In my mind, I see his eyes, the way he watches me come for him. I imagine him thrown across a hotel bed while dozens of women pleasure him, his blue eyes—my blue eyes—watching them come apart for him too.
And then, then I think that he might not have been blue. He could have been black. Remy in his rawest form, intense and manic, as reckless as he will ever be.
Because he’s not normal. Not even close to normal. He’s not only fucking Remington “Riptide” Tate—he’s bipolar and he swings from one mood spectrum to the next. When he goes manic, he does not remember, sometimes, what he does. And the month I left, he was very, very manic. His eyes, black and mysterious, looking at me desperately from a hospital bed . . .
My insides twist until my lungs feel jammed in my throat as I remember how he tried to pull his respirator off and stop me.
Heart pounding fight or flight, I locate Riley across the lobby, and he’s scanning his phone while I vividly remember him leading a bunch of glittery, beautiful women into Remington’s suite not so long ago—to “cheer” him up when he had a black episode.
Before I can stop myself, I charge over to him like a bullet, my fists trembling at my sides. “How many whores did you bring to Remington’s bed, Riley?”
“Excuse me?” He lowers his phone in complete puzzlement.