Hothouse Flower (16 page)

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DAISY CALLOWAY

“
Ryke
, what’s with the
busted lip?” Cameras flash, and paparazzi swarm me.
Mikey
has his arm braced out, standing in front of me with his dirty blond hair and
Bermuda shorts.
Ryke
grips my shoulder, guiding me
towards the glass hotel doors.

“Did you get in a fight with one of Daisy’s ex-boyfriends?”

“
Ryke
, did your brother punch
you?”

“What happened?”

They all ask roughly the same questions, and
Ryke
says nothing. A bruise has begun to form on his
cheekbone from my thumb ring hitting him. I wish I could rewind time, shake my
half-coherent body and tell myself to stop freaking out.

I’ve hit him before in a night terror, but not this badly.

Once we enter the sanctuary of the hotel, the noise dies
down.
Mikey
spins towards me. “I’m going to grab
something to eat before the buffet closes, but I’ll escort you to your room
first just to be safe.”

“You can go eat now,”
Ryke
tells
him. “I’ll watch her.”

Mikey
looks to me for affirmation
since, technically, I’m his boss. “Go,” I say. “Eat something yummy for me.”

“Squid.” He rubs his stomach in mock hunger.

Right now, that actually sounds delicious.

“Hey, stay outside!” a hotel concierge yells at a cameraman
that opens the door. The lenses are pressed to the tinted glass, still trying
to capture photos of us.

“We better go,” I say. We split from
Mikey
and wait for an elevator in the hotel lobby.

Ryke
watches
Mikey
disappear and then nods to me. “It’s good that he’s here, even if he can’t keep
up with you most of the time.”

A camera flashes in my eyes, a large body behind the lens. I
blink, and my heart jolts. I look around for the source, but there’s nothing
around us but people rolling their suitcases to the lobby elevators.

“Daisy,”
Ryke
says. He holds my
face, trying to get me to look at him.

Sweat gathers on my forehead. “It wasn’t real,” I whisper.
That flash was in my head.

He stares at me with more concern. “What’d you see?”

I take a deep breath. This has happened before. “I think it
was when the cameraman broke into my room.” The incident was when I didn’t have
Mikey
, when all six of us were rooming together in
Philly for a period of time. We were under a bigger spotlight than usual, and
pictures of us were worth a lot of money.

“Can you tell me about it?” he asks, his hands warm on my
jaw. I hold his wrist to keep him here, not wanting him to break away from me
just yet.

“You know what happened,” I whisper. “You were there.” I’ve
repeated it to my therapist before, and it still feels the same. It still feels
like the past, but why does it constantly creep up to scare me? I want to let
it go. I’ve tried to let it go, but it won’t let go of me.

“Just two sentences, Dais.”

As I remember the event, cold washes over me, and I shiver.
He draws me closer to his body. I swallow hard and say, “He started taking
pictures while I was sleeping, and I woke up from the flashes. I called you,
and you arrived from across the hall and beat him up. The end.”

“Not the end,” he retorts.

All of my sisters and their significant others think it’s
the end. It should be. The cameraman got fined for trespassing.
Ryke
bruised two knuckles. And my dad hired more security
outside of the townhouse we were living in. It all turned out okay.

Except maybe my head.

“Oh yeah,” I continue with a weak smile, “after that, you
used to watch movies with me every night.”

He rolls his eyes.

But he knows that one night he spent with me turned into a
week and then a month. And we never really looked back. Every night, the
television would play in the background, and I’d drift off. When I woke up, a
blanket would be tucked around me and
Ryke
would be
gone.
 

He says, “And then you moved back to your parent’s house and
everything was a fucking mess.”

I had ten months left until I graduated prep school, until I
could move out. I thought my mom would fight me on it—the idea of me living in
an apartment alone so young. But she saw how much I wanted this.

It was her greatest kindness. One that I won’t ever forget.
She let me live on my own, and in doing so, I was able to live close to
Ryke
. I could have stayed with Rose, but she was already so
worried about Lily and
Lo’s
addictions. I knew if I
lived with her, she’d be consumed by my problems too.

And I wanted her to live her own life. I didn’t want to be
the center of attention or cause anyone more grief. Pulling
Ryke
into my mess was enough of a burden. I couldn’t imagine doing that to more
people I love.

Ryke
runs his thumb beneath my
eye. “Those ten months when you moved back home—they drove me fucking insane.”

“Why?”

“It was ten months I couldn’t placate your anxiety, I
couldn’t shield you from anything that came through your doors. I wasn’t a
hallway away, not a floor, not a room. I was a half an hour from you, Dais.” He
pauses. “And we both fucking know it was those ten months that changed you.”

Something happened that I don’t like to talk about. It’s the
one thing that tightens my throat.

It was when my simple fear of nighttime turned into waking
up screaming. It was when every horror in my life met me repeatedly in my
dreams.

The elevator chimes. I flinch, but the noise cuts into the
tension.

We let a family of five on ahead of us, the small children
tugging their suitcases through the doors. I eye
Ryke’s
bruise again and my stomach flips. I slide the gold ring off my finger and put
it in his hand. “
Here.
You can have this back.” I’ve
already apologized for hitting him. And he did what he always does when I say
I’m sorry for things I can’t control.

He glared.

Ryke
appraises the ring, and his
features darken. “I gave this to you. I don’t want it back.” He grabs my hand,
and instead of just handing it to me, he slides it slowly on my finger.

We’re about to be alone together for the first time since
the stairwell.

If the elevator would ever get here, that is.

“You didn’t give it to me,” I rebut. “I won it in a poker
game.”

“Same fucking thing.”

I wear the ring a lot. I had it resized to fit my thumb, and
the jeweler told me that the design on the front was an Irish coat of arms.

A family crest.

I never brought it up, but now that we’re together, I kind
of want to. “You told me it wasn’t an heirloom,” I say while he watches me
closely.

“It’s not.”

“It’s an Irish coat of arms,
Ryke
,”
I say. “Your dad is Irish.”

He shrugs. “So it was my father’s. It’s not like it was
passed down generations to fucking generations. It was his, and he gave it to
me when I was eleven or twelve. I don’t even remember. It means nothing.”

“I know,” I say, “because people don’t put family heirlooms
that mean something to them in poker kitties.” He’s so detached from his dad,
and this proves it. He’s also so unlike Lo, who has an antique pocket watch
from his father that he keeps in a safe. He brought it out once to prove to
Connor that he owns something historic.

Ryke
ignores his mom and dad like
he’s trying to erase them from his life. Maybe it’s easier for him to just
forget the past than be consumed by hurt and hate.

Ryke
hits the “up” button again.
He rubs his lips and then stares down at me with that swirling darkness.
“Truth,” he says, “I don’t want you to take off the ring. I’ve fucking loved
that you wear something of mine.”

I smile.
Loved.
I
wonder for how long. We played that poker game on a flight back from Cancun.

I was sixteen.

I take a step towards him, despite being in semi-public. I
scrutinize his bottom lip, cut from where I slapped him.

“Does it hurt?” I ask.

“No,” he says, looking at me with those brooding features,
reminding me that of all the guys I’ve dated, no one has been as dangerous and
mysterious as him.

The elevator chimes again. I drop my hand and slip inside,
Ryke
behind me. Thankfully an old couple with luggage waits
for the next one.

We stand a few feet apart, and I realize that the fifth
floor is just too close. We’ll have time to make out for
maybe
thirty seconds. He leans forward to press the button, but
instead of hitting my floor, he taps the 28.

“Are we going for a ride?” I ask him, my lips pulling
higher.

“You are.”

The doors shut, and he turns on me with this masculine power
that draws me towards him in curiosity and need.

He’s my wolf.

And instead of biting me, he kisses my lips passionately,
our bodies igniting as soon as they connect. I moan the second his tongue meets
mine, and his hands possess my ass, lifting me around his waist. The air leaves
my lungs. And I grip the back of his hair, yanking hard.

A deep, throaty noise escapes him.

“
Ryke
,” I cry, my head knocking
into the wall as he pins me to the corner of the elevator. His kiss slows,
eking out the tension that clenches my core. And I shut up, being consumed by
his tongue, his hold, his experience.

His hand dips down between my legs, on the outside of my
jean shorts. He cups that spot, and my legs spasm.
Ahhh
!
The smallest nerves react like he drove his dick right into me.

 
I’m usually told to
give hand jobs and go down on guys. I love that I now have choices, able to do
whatever my mind wants. So I kiss his neck, lightly at first while his other
hand rises underneath my shirt.

And then I suck deeply, clenching his hair with two hands.
He stops going towards my breast, and he uses that hand as a support against
the wall.

“
Fuck
,” he
breathes.

I cry again.

His favorite word is so overused, but I melt every single
time he says it like that. Our lips find each other, as though they can’t be
apart for long. If he had more time, I wonder if he would go beneath my shorts.

I think he would.

He pauses so I can control my breathing. “What floor are we
on?” he asks me.

I look over his shoulder. “Twenty-four.”

He kisses my cheek, which turns into our lips locking again.
As soon as we part, he drops me on my feet, and he hits the fifth floor button.
The elevator stops on the twenty-eighth floor, and unfortunately, a hoard of
female models slips in, laughing loudly and wearing clothes to go clubbing.

They speak in Russian and barely acknowledge us.

Ryke
comes back to my side. “So
you like my hair?” he asks with raised brows.

I stand on the tips of my toes and run my fingers through
it, knowing he’ll let me now. But even so, the tension winds between us,
causing my body to curve towards him like a magnetic pull. We really need to
find more time together. “It’s soft, and I love that it’s long enough for me to
grab.”

His muscles tighten, and his eyes flicker cautiously to the
Russian girls, who’ve begun to whisper even more, their eyes flitting to us. He
grabs my hands, forcing them down to my sides. I frown, confused. But he
suddenly speaks, not to me though. To
them.

In Russian.

I can’t understand a word of it, but he has a lilt that
matches theirs.

The tallest girl looks over her shoulder and laughs. “You
make cute couple,” she says in chopped English.

Ryke
replies back in fluent
Russian, his eyes narrowed.

She nods, says something else in the same language, and then
leaves with her friends on the twentieth floor.

As soon as the doors close, I punch his arm. “Why didn’t you
tell me that you can speak Russian?” I knew he was fluent in Spanish, but
Russian isn’t a language commonly taught in schools.

He leans his arm on the wall. “Shouldn’t your first fucking
question be:
what were those girls
saying?”

I shake my head. He glared at the girls after we started
talking in English, so I figured they must have been eavesdropping and
whispering about us. “You accused them of listening to our conversation, didn’t
you? And then she said something snarky back.” I smile wide and wag my brows.
“Am I right?”

He tilts my chin up. “When did you get so fucking smart?”

“Didn’t you hear? It was my second wish when I fell upon a
magical lamp.
Be smarter than Connor
Cobalt.
He doesn’t know it yet.”

“Don’t pad his fucking ego,” he tells me. Connor’s ego is
practically its own life force.

I run my hand up his arm, and then I keep it on the back of
his neck. “Tell me,” I say with a playful smile. “Did you learn Russian in prep
school or are you like a secret badass CIA agent?”

He draws back, any talk of his past like a repellent. But
I’m curious. He can’t just speak Russian and act like it’s no big deal. “Yeah,
I learned some at
Maybelwood
.” He shrugs. “I had an
easy time picking up languages.”

That’s definitely not the whole story. “And?” I prod.

He struggles to open up, but after a long moment he says,
“And when I was six or seven, my mom hired tutors. They were the ones that
taught me.” He stares at the ceiling and then shakes his head. “I curse so
fucking much that people assume I’m just an idiot, a good athlete, but a
fucking idiot. And I don’t really care to prove anyone differently. There’s no
point.”