Forever Golden: Dark High School Bully Romance (Kings of Cypress Prep Book 3) by Rachel Jonas (books like beach read txt) 📗

through the blinds, but when I see West’s face, I’m not so careful anymore, bumping the lamp on my way to the door. I snatch it open and can hardly get the lock disengaged to get to him. Then, the second I do manage to get it right, my arms are around his neck.

“Shit,” he says with a laugh after practically having the wind knocked out of him.

He holds me tight, having no idea how glad I am to see it’s him at the door, and not someone else. If I’m being honest, the idea of it just being me and Scar here alone at night scares the hell out of me.

After maybe half a minute, I come to my senses, realizing I’ve kept him out in the cold all this time. At which point, I loosen my grip and back off. There’s a dark bag in his hand I hadn’t noticed until now. He sets it down a moment while shrugging out of his jacket, but my eyes are on it as I lock up.

“I know it’s late and I could’ve waited to see you tomorrow, but… we both know I’m fucking impatient.”

Nothing more than a perfect silhouette in this dark space, West grabs me and I let a laugh slip. Mostly because he isn’t wrong.

“And we both know I’m glad you came,” I admit. “Let’s talk in my room.”

He flashes a smile I can see even without much light. “Talk—is that what the kids are calling it these days?”

I kiss him once and then tow the perv behind me the entire length of the hallway, where I lock us inside my room.

“You brought me a gift?” I tease, pointing at the bag he’s still clutching. He follows my gaze to it, but instead of explaining, dumps the contents on my comforter.

“Sort of,” he says with somewhat of a solemn sigh. “We’ve all got new phones. Apparently, Dane ‘knows a guy’.”

I meet his gaze when he says that, wondering how we even got here. By the look on his face and that thick vein throbbing, I can tell he’s wondering the same thing.

“We’ll go over how the security system works in a bit, but I already added the app to both our new phones. That way, we can arm and disarm it remotely, double-check that the system’s engaged from wherever,” he explains.

Watching him, listening as he openly admits having granted himself access to my home, one corner of my mouth tugs up with a grin.

“You know, some might say you’ve got just the right amount of stalker in you to get away with it. You’re somewhere on the border between devotion and psychopathy,” I tease.

“Overprotective, possessive, psycho—call me what the fuck you want, but I’m just protecting what’s mine,” he adds, flashing a faint smile.

A sweeping look passes over me then, and even stressed the hell out, he’s still sexy. His hair’s a bit damp from the snow that’s melted in it, and the sleeves of a white thermal squeeze his biceps. Similar to how those perfectly-fitting gray sweats are hugging the muscles in his thighs and… the one between them.

Dude, you can’t seriously be thinking about fucking him right now…

Pretending to have been focused this whole time, my brow gathers when I count three devices instead of two. But before I can ask about the third, West explains.

“One for you, one for Scar, and… one for Ricky,” he adds with a sigh.

As usual, you could cut the animosity between them with a knife—despite Ricky being miles away—but the fact that West put their differences aside for a bit speaks volumes.

A fleeting thought enters my head—that I should mention Detective Roby to West—but no sooner than I think it, I change my mind. Yeah, he seems like he’s trustworthy, but what if I’m wrong? What if telling him somehow only leads to more trouble? It’s very likely that Vin could find out I’ve talked, which could push him to hurt Scar. There are just so many unknowns, which is why, for now, I’m keeping my thoughts to myself.

Instead, I pick up the phone closest to the edge of the bed and study it, trying to figure out how in the world I’ll explain this to Scar in the morning, on top of all the other shit she’s suspicious about. But her misgivings are the least of our worries, I guess.

“I’d say thanks, but that feels kind of weird for some reason.”

A quiet laugh leaves West when he takes me around my waist, pulling me down on top of him.

“Maybe it feels weird because how fucked up are our lives that we have to do weird shit like buy new phones?” he reasons.

Straddling him now, my body collapses on top of his when he leans into the mattress. “Yeah. That’s it in a nutshell.”

He kisses the top of my hair, then I focus on his stare, feeling torn between not wanting to pry into the conversation he had with Vin, and also not wanting him to think I don’t care.

“You want to know how it went, don’t you?” he asks, grinning so big I’m not even sure why I was ever worried about bringing it up.

“Very much so,” I admit with a nod. “But first, tell me if it went better or worse than expected.”

A moment passes while he thinks.

“It was pretty much what I thought it’d be,” he answers. “I approached him, he tried feeding me more bullshit about the two of you being a thing, I got to say about ten percent of the shit I wanted to say to his lying ass, then I left.”

There are details missing, but there’s no need to draw them out, no need to make him relive it. What matters is that he didn’t let Vin get under his skin, didn’t fall for his B.S. Had this been even a month ago, that conversation might’ve gone a very different way. Just goes to show he’s grown leaps and bounds since then.

“I was