ARROGANT BRIT (A BRITISH BAD BOY ROMANCE) (53 page)

I shook my head.

No.
He’d knock Steven out if he were here.

“Of course,
Trent
doesn’t listen to
reason, either
,” Steven continued. “He’s
gonna run this entire thing into the ground for a hot piece of ass, isn’t he?
It’s not even just
him
you’ll drag
back down into the dirt with yourself. You’ll be taking the whole band with
you.”

My breath caught in my
throat.

“No…that can’t…”

“If I were you – and I am
so glad that I’m not
– I’d ditch town.
It’s still fresh in his head. Trent hasn’t
totally
invested in you. You’re still just some groupie to him, you know? You can get
out without hurting his feelings.”

“But that’s not true,” I
answered sadly. “We talked so much… he went out of his way to try and prove how
much he cares…”

“And you
fell
for that? What are you, fucking
eighteen? Do you know how many girls that asshole has made feel special right
before he rips their heart out?”

The sound of his raucous
laughter was like a pail of icy water to my face. It snapped me out of the daze
I’d been in for the last few days – no, the last few
weeks
.

I’m
just a distraction.

A
liability.

His laughter started to die
down, and Steven looked at me with something that vaguely resembled pity.

“You see it now,” he told me
sympathetically. “How stupid you’ve been. You thought you could
change
him? You
seriously
thought that you would be the one girl in the world who
would
improve
him?”

I turned away.

I spoke the only words I
could.

“I don’t have any money,” I
told him.

“Of fucking course you
don’t. Do you think he’d just leave you his credit card or something? He
doesn’t trust you, honey. He never really has.”

The words stung. I wanted to
run and hide and never come back up for sunlight.

 
“I can’t get a bus without money.”

Steven went silent.

I looked up at him, afraid
that he was angry. But no… he was merely calculating, weighing options in his
head.

“Listen. Pack your shit.
I’ll take care of the bus ticket. And I’ll even toss you a few hundred bucks to
get you on your feet when you’re there.”

“You would… do that?”

“Of course,” he told me. He
wasn’t smiling. “You think I’m a bad guy? I’m just doing my fucking job.
Ironing out the creases. Cutting off loose ends. It’s what I’m
supposed
to do. Doesn’t mean I’m a
prick. Trent just paints me that way because he doesn’t like it. Who would? I’m
sympathetic…”

I nodded quietly.

“Like I said, pack your
shit. I’ll have you on a bus in the hour. Where do you need to go? Back to
Riverton, or wherever it was called?”

 
“No,” I shook my head. “I can’t go back
there… Not after the way I left…”

“Smart thinking,” Steven
agreed. “Maybe you’re more intelligent than I would have figured. So, where are
you going instead? Pick a spot, honey. I can have you on a bus to Miami, or
Philadelphia, or wherever the fuck you wanna go.”

I sighed heavily. There was
only one other place in the world for me… one other place where I knew I really
deserved
to be. It’s where I should
have been all along.

A place so terrible I shut
it out.

A place so awful I never
thought about it.

I took a deep breath. “It’s
time I went back home.”

Chapter 25

Trent

Two Days Later

I knew something was wrong
the second that I stepped foot into my house. Compounding, rising
dread
twisted its way up in the back of
my head, like smoke in the darkness.

I’d felt it from a mile
away.

And I didn’t like it.

“Angel?” I called out.

No answer.

Maybe
she’s asleep,
I wondered. I couldn’t bring myself to
believe it, though. No…something was definitely wrong.

I dropped my things at the
door, scouring for any signs of a break-in. The front door was unharmed, and I
didn’t spot any broken windows on my way to the stairs.

Hopping two at a time, I
ascended up to my bedroom.
Our
bedroom.
Flicking on the light, I peered around the room like a hunter sniffing for prey.

There was nothing out of
place.

No signs of a struggle.

Except…

My heart sank as soon as I
spotted the letter on the bed. Scrawled in girlish handwriting, I first spotted
her signature at the bottom as I snatched it up under the light.

Trent,

I’ve
enjoyed our time together. I really have. But it’s time for me to let you be
who you need to be. We both know this wasn’t going to last… Please don’t hate
me. And don’t look for me. You won’t find me.

Angel

My hand clenched, but I
restrained myself from shredding the letter apart in the instant.

And there, on the pillow?

The tablet I had bought her
while we had been on the bus. It was just sitting there, as if it weren’t hers.
She’d left it because she’d honestly thought it didn’t really belong to her.

Fury built up inside.

Boiling, pulsating anger.

No,
I
snarled to myself.

You
don’t get to do this to me.

Irrationally, my mind
boiling with pain and regret, I felt like I had just been stabbed – right in
the fucking heart. The knife twisted again and again as the letter fell to the
bed from my lifeless fingers, and I fought the whipping storm of emotion that
was threatening to tear me apart.

No
, I
repeated to myself with rising hostility.

This
isn’t happening.

This
CAN’T be happening.

But something didn’t add up.

Through the hatred and the
anger, a small spark of rationality spoke through. Like a calming knife through
the bubbling, snarling flesh of my fury, it cut through the bullshit and
whispered something into my ear.

She
wouldn’t do this.

I paused, letting the
thought continue on. It was calming, soothing, but most of all…it sounded like
it was making sense.

This
isn’t Angel.

Not
without interference.

Not
without the right push.

Something had happened…and I
was going to find out exactly what. But I didn’t have to think long or hard
before a single name popped into my head.

Steven.

He’d hated her from the
start.

What was the word he’d used?

Liability.

I picked up the phone,
forcing a friendly smile across my face. It was one of the hardest things I’d
had to do.

“Steven! Are you around?”

“I’m kinda in the middle of
something. Where are you?”

“I’m just picking up my
car,” I lied. “I should be home in about forty-five minutes. Think you can meet
me there?”

“Now’s not a good time,
man.”

He sounded apprehensive.

Which told me I was right.

“It’s important. I think
you’re right about Angel – she’s a liability. Time I cut her loose. But you,
being my PR guy and all…mind backing me up?”

“What?
R-really? But she’s…I mean, uh…”

“Steven, stop fucking
babbling. She put herself up in a hotel and she’s on her way to my place. Can
you come straight over?”

“I’m
not so sure this is a good time…”

“C’mon, Steven. You and I,
we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot. Help me out here and I’ll make it worth
your while.”

“…Alright. Half an hour?”

“Sounds good to me.”

About thirty minutes later,
there was a knock at my door. Through the peephole, I could see the lanky, condescending
fucker.

“Door’s open!” I called out,
muffling my voice and taking a step out of the way.

The door popped open.

A moment later, Steven
walked in.

“H-hello? Angel? Trent?”

I stepped forward from
behind the door, slamming it shut. He barely had time to turn before I grabbed
him by the scruff of his neck and slammed him up into the wall, knocking a
large photo frame down and shattering the glass.

“Trent –
buddy
– what the fuck are you–?”

Roaring with anger, I threw
him across the room. He hit the ground hard, trying to scramble to his feet as
I rushed towards him.

“
Back the fuck off–
” he started.

I landed a solid punch
against his cheek, sending him sprawling into my sectional couch. As he
struggled to climb back up, I jumped on him, landing a knee in his chest and
knocking the breath from his lungs.

“Oof!” he cried painfully.

As I started to hit him
repeatedly, Steven tried to dislodge me – first by force, then by throwing weak
punches, and finally by attempting to scratch me.

I finally climbed off of
him, and he lunged forwards. But instead of reaching me, he slipped, hitting
his head on my coffee table.

With my anger barely
controlled, I pulled his sniffling, shaken form up from the ground.
Half-expecting him to be whimpering, he was instead snarling – broken but
angry.

“You fucking piece of shit,”
he growled.

I held him by the shoulders,
my enraged eyes matching his gaze with enough strength to apparently surprise
him.

“What. The. Fuck. Did. You.
Do.”

“
What
?” He snarled back.

“Don’t make me ask again,
you spineless, backstabbing, limp-dicked son of a bitch.”

Steven’s furious sniffling
began to settle, and he looked at me with a mixture of fear and absolute irritation.

I
have to give it to him.

At
least he doesn’t back down.

Maybe
he’s less spineless than I thought.

“Angel, right?”

I nodded angrily.

His face curled into a
shit-eating grin.

“You had me worried with
your little phone call. Sorry Trent. Your lovebird is long gone by now.”

Because I couldn’t afford
for him to lose consciousness on me, I delivered a strong punch to his gut. He
crumpled to the ground, moaning and clutching his abs while I stood up and
popped my neck.

“
That’s
for not answering my question,” I told Steven coldly.

I pulled him back up from
the ground, half-supporting him on his knees in front of me.

“Let’s try again. What. The
fuck. Did you. Do?”

Steven’s painful, defiant
glance flipped up towards me. I could already see bruising and swelling
starting to settle in.

He was going to look rough
tomorrow.

“You
know
what I did,” he mumbled. “She’s a distraction. A ticking time
bomb. That bitch is your motherfucking Courtney Love. You have
other
people depending on you. The rest
of your band, the roadies, the label. Ever since you snuck her onto that bus,
your performances have been
shit
.
Critic opinions, not just mine. And then there’s the paparazzi thing.”

“
What
paparazzi thing?”

Steven laughed painfully.

“Have you not been on the
Internet at
all
in the last couple of
days? It’s been all over the gossip sites.”

I pulled him closer.

“Tell me. Now.”

“I’ll do you one better,” he
chuckled before wincing with pain. “I’ll show you. Let me down.”

Reluctantly, I relinquished
my grip.

Once he’d pulled himself up
off of the floor and fished his phone out of his pocket, he did just that. He
showed me what had happened.

The article.

The pictures.

The interview.

I read carefully, twice
over, before handing him the phone back.

“This is nothing. It’s
fixable.”

“It’s a little harder than
that,” he told me.

“No. No, it’s not. This is
your job. You run public relations for us. You manage us. Well, you’re
supposed
to, but you’re so fucking
terrible at it that I can’t believe we got stuck with you…”

Steven opened his mouth to
retort but, after one glance at my eyes, he closed it again quickly.

“So you showed her this,
then.”

Steven nodded.

“And you made up some bullshit
to make her go away?”

“It wasn’t bullshit, Trent.
What makes this girl different? You left her here the first chance you got. No
money, no friends, and a backpack full of clothes. Leaving was
her
choice. All I did was lay out the
facts.”

“The
facts?
”

“Everything I told her was
true. You can believe that I filled her head with complete shit, but my job is
to keep this train moving.”

“My
girlfriend
isn’t some piece of dead weight to be cut loose,” I
growled menacingly, advancing upon him.

I was so furious that I
hadn’t even realized the Freudian slip.

“Well, you have your
professional opinions, and I have mine,” Steven snarled with a slight hiss of
pain. “All I know is, I did my job. You know, you’ve been a hock of shit since
day fucking one. Always making shit difficult. You’re a real piece of work,
Trent Masters. This is the worst fucking gig I’ve had in years!
And I represented The Spitting Pigs,
drug-fueled orgies and all!
”

I grabbed him by the back of
the neck and pulled him close, one last time.

“Steven…
where is she.
”

“I don’t know.”

“Wrong answer,” I replied,
wheeling my fist back.

“No! No!
Wait!
”

He feared for his life now.

“
What?
”