Absorbed(2)

“Sit down,” I order, trying to keep my throat from tightening. She starts to question me, like she always does, but I jerk my head to the couch again. “Sit down.”

She follows my directions, her movements just as numb as they’d been after Sam confronted her in the club, and my chest seizes up. I don’t want to do this shit. This is the last thing I’ve ever wanted to do, and being in this room with her is just making it worse. I need to end things now so I can get her out of my life before she gets hurt. I owe her that much, even if I’m burned to a crisp in the process.

“I f*cked up—“ I begin, but the words fail me. What am I supposed to say? I f*cked up by using you. Fucked up by bringing you here.

I f*cked up by falling in love with you.

She starts crying. Quiet, bitter as hell tears, and I know she doesn’t want to hear any of my shit. But I go forward with it anyway.

As we go back and forth for the next few minutes, I keep from looking into her blue eyes—I can take just about anything she says to me, but I can’t take that. I keep myself detached, not showing her an ounce of emotion. And finally, when I know we’re both at the point of breaking, I clear my throat.

“You’ve got to go,” I say. She says something in response, but my ears are ringing so bad I can’t comprehend what the hell that is. “I’m dismissing you,” I continue, my voice sounding bored, cold. She flinches and hugs herself close. “You’ve fulfilled the terms of our contract.”

She argues. She fights for me. A f*cked-up man who doesn’t deserve even a fraction of who she is. In the end, though, I win. I win when I tell her that I’ll still give her back her grandmother’s house, which was her reason for agreeing to work for me to begin with. I win when I refuse to answer any of her questions, when I let her know I don’t owe her anything else. And I win when I leave.

I walk around Atlanta and try to make sense of things, finally ending up at the grimy old apartment building I once lived in when I was still married to Samantha, before Your Toxic Sequel hit it big. And I’m not so f*cking stupid that I don’t know exactly how much I’ve just lost.





Chapter One


Lucas Wolfe





My life is like a goddamn blur over the next week.

I don’t do much—hell, I spend the majority of my time alone at my house once I go back to Los Angeles—but every move that I do make is haunted by her. By Sienna.

I bet you think I sound like a * for saying that, but I don’t give a shit.

She should be here with me.

So since she isn’t, I do my best to pour myself into my work, to drown out the memory of her with music and whiskey.

This is how my kid sister, Kylie, finds me one evening.

“Ugh, it smells like pot and booze in here,” she complains the moment she slips into my downstairs music room. “You, dear brother, are the epitome of EMO right now. I just thought you ought to know that.”

I’m a little surprised by her arrival—she usually lets me know ahead of time if she plans on stopping by so she won’t barge in on something she’ll immediately regret seeing—but I ignore her, scribbling down a line of shitty lyrics that barely make sense.

My sister catches my attention again by plopping down on the leather couch directly across from where I’m sitting and exhaling heavily. “Have you talked to her?”

Ever since I took Kylie to the DMV to get her replacement license earlier this week she’s been on my ass about contacting Sienna. And for the hundredth time since my sister started hounding me, I hear myself ask, “Why? What good will it do if I get in touch with her?”

Sighing, Kylie slouches over, resting her forearms on her thighs. “It’s never too late to make things right.”

More than anyone, my sister should realize that fixing f*ck-ups is never that simple. I flick my hazel eyes up from my notebook and take in the sight of her pale skin. There are dark circles beneath her brown eyes from lack of sleeping. She looks like she’ll break at any moment.

Yeah, Kylie should know better.

And I’ve been brought into the center of her mess. I’ve had to deal with Wyatt McCrae’s frantic calls about her since she came back from New Orleans last week—he’s messed things up with her again and wants to fix it, she refuses to deal with his shit. I won’t say anything about that today. Not while she’s still so visibly hurt by whatever happened between them.