Jesus. “What a douchebag.”
“You know what’s funny? I was going to let him kiss me tonight. I’ve been looking forward to it all week, but I don’t think he would have cared if I had.”
I toss my towel on the counter and lift my chin in the direction of the party. “Point him out to me. I’ll teach him a lesson.” Only assholes try to manipulate girls into sex before they’re ready.
Her watery eyes go wide for a beat before she smiles, and damn . . . That smile. She’s more than pretty. She’s take-me-by-the-nuts-and-own-me gorgeous. “You’d beat up Roman Humphries for breaking the heart of some girl you just met?”
She says his name like it’s supposed to mean something to me, but I shrug. “Sounds like someone needs to.”
She looks me over slowly as if she’s seeing me for the first time. The black oxford and matching dress pants Aunt Lori said I had to wear tonight are new and easily the fanciest clothes I’ve ever owned. This girl probably doesn’t wear anything from Target, and she sure as hell doesn’t know what it’s like to live on the streets. I feel my past written on every inch of my skin. Self-consciousness pricks at the back of my neck. “Marston, you said? You’re the boy who moved in with Ms. Lori. You’re on probation or something?”
I lift my chin. “What do you know about it?”
She treats me to another one of those soul-owning smiles, and my stomach hitches. “Only that you’re the most interesting boy in this town. Not that there’s much competition.” Her fluffy tulle skirt sweeps the floor as she closes the distance between us. She doesn’t stop until she’s a foot away, craning her neck to look up at me. She’s close enough that I could wipe the smudges of makeup from her cheeks. Close enough to kiss. “You’re tall.”
I bite back a laugh. “You’re short.” And without realizing it, I’m cupping her face in my hands and wiping away the tear tracks. She gasps in surprise, and I drop my hands. “Sorry. You had . . . makeup or whatever. From crying.”
“Oh. It’s okay.” She gives me a shy, crooked smile.
Really fucking pretty and really fucking off-limits, Marston. “You should get back to your party.”
“Because you need to get back to work?” she asks, looking at me again.
Because I want to kiss you. Because I think you’d let me. Because I have no business kissing a girl who lives in a mansion and has staff.
But I don’t say any of that. Instead, I say, “So you can tell Roman to get the hell out of your house.”
She giggles, and I don’t know if it’s because she’s scandalized by my use of the word “hell” or if she’s maybe feeling the same contact high from being close to me as I’m getting from her. “My parents would kill me. A good hostess takes disappointment with grace,” she says, clearly parroting a lesson she’s been reminded of repeatedly.
“Then don’t kick him out. Go out there and make it clear you don’t need him.”
She skims her fingertips across my knuckles before taking my hand. “Come with me somewhere?”
I should say no. But I couldn’t refuse her, even if I wanted to.
Brinley leads me to the servants’ stairs at the back of the kitchen. The stairwell is so narrow and her skirt is so big that I have to walk up behind her, but she never lets go of my hand.
We’ve climbed two flights when she opens a door and pulls me through it and down a dark, narrow hall.
“Where are we going?” I ask, because I should care. Because I shouldn’t be willing to follow her anywhere.
Turning, she puts her finger to her lips and winks before pushing open a door I didn’t even see. She leads me into a fancy room with the biggest piano I’ve ever seen. Tall bookcases line the three walls, and a balcony overlooks the ballroom below. Music, laughter, and conversation float up to us.
“Should I be here?” I whisper, even as she pulls me closer to the railing.
“If anyone catches us, I’ll tell them I wanted you to set up refreshments for me and my friends.” She gives a final tug on my hand before dropping it and turning to look out at her party. “When I was a little girl and my parents had parties, I’d sneak out of bed and watch them from up here.”
“They didn’t see you?”
She shakes her head. “No, not with the way the lights in the ballroom are. Mom said it was designed that way by my grandmother so she could spy on her guests.”
With that bit of reassurance, I take the last step to the railing and look down at the party below.
The biggest party I ever went to was Aunt Lori’s wedding when I was five or six. I remember thinking her husband, a schoolteacher, must’ve been spectacularly rich to afford to feed fifty people for dinner. But Brinley’s birthday party is at least three times that big, and everyone in the ballroom below is dressed in formal gowns and tuxedos. It doesn’t look real. It looks like something from TV, and it’s the perfect reminder that I belong back in the kitchen, not here with Brinley.
She growls softly, and I arch a brow in question. “See that?” she asks. She points to the dance floor, where teenagers and adults alike sway to Norah Jones’s “Come Away with Me.”
“Dancing?” I ask.
“No, the guy in the white tux eating the face off the girl in red.”
The white tux makes it easier to single out the couple in question. They’re on the dance floor, but dancing seems secondary to making out.
“That’s Roman,” she says. “Jerk couldn’t even wait until after my party before moving on.”
Roman’s hands move up and down the girl’s back before settling on her butt. “Total ass,” I agree. “You can’t tell me you really want to be with a guy like that.”
“I . . .” She shrugs. “I guess I thought I did, but maybe for the wrong reasons?”
“What were those?”
She cuts her eyes away from me, as if she knows I won’t like the answer. “My parents are friends with his parents. He’s . . . a good match, as my parents would say.”
“I can’t pretend I know what it’s like to have that kind of pressure. The only thing my mom expected of me was for me to leave the house when she had her guys over and that I didn’t call the cops when she was dealing.” As soon as I see the sorrow in her gaze, I regret saying it. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you pity me. We all have bullshit in our lives. Mine’s just a little less shiny than yours.”
“I don’t pity you.” She gives a shaky smile. “If anything, I envy you.”
I scoff. “Yeah, right.”
“You know what I see when I look at you? Freedom. I’ll never have that, not as long as I’m a Knox.”
I want to argue that being on probation hardly makes me the icon of freedom, but I get what she’s saying. There are expectations that come with this kind of money. More money, more problems or whatever. “That’s pretty depressing.”
She shrugs. “My parents are pretty depressing.” She steps closer, and the back of her hand brushes mine. I hold my breath and tamp down the impulse to thread my fingers with hers. I have no business touching a girl like this.