Page 20 of Ruthless Game

“I don’t know yet,” I whispered back, although based on what happened on the plane, I had an educated guess. I blushed, just thinking about it, how desperate I’d been, how turned on, how I wanted …

… more.

As if I’d summoned him, I felt arms around my waist dragging me backward, away from my brother. I was ashamed of how relieved I was to be out of Jeffrey’s hold, even if it meant I was back in Lawson’s.

He pulled me back against his chest, resting his chin on my head, the very picture of happy domesticity. Like we were a couple again, like everything was fixed between us. Like he wasn’t blackmailing me into letting him do whatever he wanted to me.

Jeffrey glowered, but then, he’d hated Lawson ever since that horrible night. Honestly, I wasn’t sure if they’d ever more than tolerated each other when Lawson lived with us. Lawson had hated Jeffrey, and Jeffrey hadn’t trusted Lawson—for good reason, it turned out. Now, I could feel the tense hatred in the air. The old me would try to fix it, pacify them both. The new me had enough to worry about.

“Do you mind?” he asked Lawson pointedly. “I was saying hi to my sister.”

“Not at all,” Lawson said easily. “But that’s enough.”

“Boys,” my mom chided, but she sounded too happy to really be invested in making them stop. “We’re celebrating!”

“David,” my dad said, since he had always refused to call Lawson by his last name. “Are you the cause of this?”

“I am, sir,” Lawson said. Even though he’d lived with us for two years, he’d never gotten comfortable with calling my dad by his name.

“Does this mean you two are back together? That’s lovely! How did it happen?”

I stared at my mother. My parents loved Lawson, but they’d never been particularly happy about our relationship. I was pretty sure they’d known that Lawson was sneaking into my bedroom at night, and whether they thought we’d been sexually intimate together, I wasn’t sure. Something had shifted since I’d been gone.

“Yes,” Lawson said. “We’ve been talking, and we’re working things out. We realized we couldn’t live without each other.”

Ugh.

“Laying it on a bit thick, aren’t we?” I murmured.

“There’s going to be a lot of laying of thick things in your future,” Lawson murmured back.

Thick things.

Like me. Like my body. Lawson had always been so enamored with my body, even though I’d always been a bigger girl. He said he loved my curves, my rolls, that he wanted to get lost in them one day and never come back out. I’d believed him, but then I’d believed a lot of things about him that weren’t true.

I forced myself not to make myself smaller. I deserved to take up space, and I might be fat according to other people, but that didn’t make me less beautiful. I didn’t let myself get sad or embarrassed, instead, I got angry.

“That’s a bad joke. It’s stupid. And cruel.”

His body jerked. “Why—” he started, sounding confused.

My mom interrupted us.

“Emma, where are your bags? Your room has a lot of, well, exercise equipment and other flotsam and jetsam, but we can make up the bed for tonight and clear it out tomorrow.”

Behind me, Lawson stiffened, his arms tightening around my waist, like he could lock me to him and drag me out of here.

“Emma’s coming home with me,” he announced. “We want to make up for lost time. Isn’t that right, Emma?”

No.

No, it wasn’t right.

I opened my mouth to speak and blow the whole thing up, have my parents fix things, when Lawson breathed into my ear.

“I know what you’re thinking about, Angel. Go ahead and tell them. What do you think is going to happen to Jeffrey?”

I shut my mouth.