“Kale’s so good for you,” she’d claimed, but it seemed to me that kale was a slow-acting poison, one of those silent killers. There was no other explanation for its vile taste, and you’d never know until it was too late.
I cleared my throat. “Well… ‘Anything’ as long as it’s not kale or Brussels sprout juice or something gross like that.”
“Why would I feed you something so terrible?” Killian said.
I indicated the juicer. “Because you have one of these torture machines.”
He laughed. “Ah. I made some carrot and apple juice and forgot to put it away. Want some?”
I pulled back, my body stiff. “No thanks. Like I said, I don’t do veggies before noon.” Actually, I preferred not to do veggies at all.
“Aye, milady.”
He stowed the juicer and pulled out a couple of presliced bagels. As he put them into the toaster, knocks came from the door.
Probably Mir coming back from the market. “I got it,” I said, since he was busy in the kitchen.
When I opened the door, a tall, dark-haired guy with a pretty, sun-kissed face was standing there. He looked really familiar, but I couldn’t quite place him. He wasn’t from Kingstree—I would’ve remembered somebody this good-looking if I’d run into him in town.
There were several women hovering behind him. They had a rainbow of different hair colors: golden, brown, apple red, black, pink and purple. Gorgeously tanned, the six were dressed in skintight dresses with perfect hair and makeup, their feet in hooker heels that made my feet ache just from looking. The six had such huge breasts and tiny waists that they looked like a collection of living, breathing Barbies.
And they all had their phones out and were snapping selfies in different poses.
I stared, unable to process the scene. Kingstree was a nice, normal small town. It didn’t have people like the women in front of me. Otherwise I would’ve heard about them from some gossip-loving resident. Or one of the cashiers at Sunny’s Mart.
Actually, now that I thought about it, the women reminded me of the groupies I’d seen in some of Killian’s photos on the Internet…
The man was looking at me with puzzlement. “Isn’t this Killian’s house?” He turned to the Barbie Sextet. “Babe, can you check the address?”
All of them moved to do his bidding. “Two-five-zero,” the blonde said, snapping a picture of the numbers. She had a slight accent.
“Huh. Should be it,” he said. “And hey, delete that pic. I told you, no personal info on the net.” The blonde pouted but did as he asked.
Okay, time to get to the bottom of this. “Who are you?”
He didn’t look like a weirdo stalker fan—or a reporter—but it wasn’t as if weirdos always looked like weirdos. But given how many pictures his sextet had taken, the whole tableau was creepy. Maybe he looked familiar because I’d seen his mug shot on the news. Now I wished I was carrying the gun Mom had given me for self-protection. I didn’t know if Killian had anything for home defense.
The stranger stared at me like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “What did you say?”
“I said, who are you?” I spoke more slowly in case he was dim-witted on top of being hard of hearing.
He put a hand over his chest. A silver skull ring flashed on his middle finger. “You gotta be kidding! You don’t know who I am?”
Definitely dim-witted. “Obviously. Otherwise I wouldn’t have asked.”
Now he seemed even more confused. “I’m Devlin Marsh.”
Devlin Marsh? The drummer guy from Killian’s band. He looked very different without black eyeliner and wax in his hair.
“Who are you?” he demanded.
“Emily,” I said.
He frowned. “Emily? There’s an Emily now?”
Weird. Why was he acting like he expected somebody other than me to be here? If Devlin hadn’t been behaving oddly, I might’ve thought Killian was cheating, but right now, I was giving Killian all the benefit of the doubt.
“Has to be the wrong address. Or maybe I’m still drunk. Or…he’s having trouble scoring properly.” Devlin smirked.
Scoring properly?
Before I could respond, he bellowed, “Killian! Come out, you bastard. If I can travel halfway around the world to visit you, you can drag your ass out of your house.”
“Dev?” Killian appeared from the kitchen. “What are you doing here? I thought you were in Spain.”
Devlin took Killian’s hand and did the man hug, bumping shoulders and slapping Killian’s back. “I was,” he said, “but since you weren’t going to come out to Spain to hang with the babes, I figured I’d bring the babes to you.”
Wow. I let the information trickle through my mind, trying to come up with multiple acceptable scenarios. But no matter how much processing I did, I couldn’t think of a single case where I was okay with the “babes” Devlin had brought from Spain, especially after what had happened last night and this morning between me and Killian.
Besides, seeing the kind of women Killian had been around in pictures and seeing them in person was very different. The pictures hadn’t felt real. And I could rationalize that they were in his past. After all, it’d be unreasonable for me to expect Killian to have lived like a monk. Fame and fortune gave men access to lots of hot, willing women. And if the man happened to be as young and sexy as Killian, the world was full of consenting vaginas.
“And you know what’s more inspiring and restorative than a threesome? A foursome,” Devlin said with a grin. “You can have all of them except for two, because I hate sleeping alone.”
How generous of him. And why did he need two women? One would be enough to keep him from sleeping alone. Besides, he hadn’t brought the right number of women for one foursome and one threesome. And I needed to stop thinking about his inability to count, because otherwise I was going to hurl.
On the other hand, seeing him covered in puke would be oh-so satisfying. Was it possible to projectile vomit forcefully enough to hit him in the head on an empty stomach?
I so wanted to find out.
From the way Devlin was talking to Killian, I wasn’t even a bed partner worth considering. I wasn’t the right size or shape. And I was much older than the six he’d brought. None of them seemed a day past twenty, if that. And I was in my late twenties. Ancient to this type of man. I knew from years of watching my dad.
My earlier thoughts about going to Dallas withered away. It wasn’t an option if I was going to have perfect late-teen bodies rubbed in my face twenty-four seven.
Killian just stared at Devlin, his eyes slightly narrowed as he processed the scene.
Devlin leaned closer. “Looks like I made the right move, since you aren’t having any luck with that Emma chick.”
He was trying to whisper, but I could hear him anyway. Then I wondered who “that Emma chick” was. Emma was my pen name, of course, but how would Devlin know that? And if he’d heard about me through Killian, wouldn’t he have recognized me when I introduced myself as Emily?
The women squealed and moved toward Killian, sighing and fawning. They paid as much attention to me as one might a piece of grass. It made me feel small, like when Dad’s girlfriends had patted my head and cooed at me because I was too young to realize what he was doing with them was wrong. Then it reminded me of the times when I’d cook a special meal like lobster pasta or fancy beef stir-fries to get Dad to come home and have dinner with me and Mom, and I’d even tell him it was okay to bring “those nice ladies” because I was just that naïve and stupid. I clenched my fists at the sudden pang that pierced my heart. I was letting Killian’s groupies jog the humiliating childhood memories and making me feel the same hurt and shame.