More Than Anything (Broken Pieces #1)(3)

“Whaaa . . . ,” he began to say, his voice sounding thick and slurred. God, he was completely wasted. How had she not seen that before? He had seemed so lucid earlier. Could he have gotten this drunk since leaving her asleep in the room? She doubted it.

This explained why he had approached her in the first place. She had been so naive and stupid to believe he could have been stone-cold sober and still want her. She should have known the entire “romantic” encounter had been too good to be true. The only way Harrison Chapman would ever want Tina Jenson was if he were drunk or high out of his mind.

That seemed about right.

Tina felt used and cheap and so, so humiliated. Her heart shattered into a million pieces, and she mourned the loss of the boy she had idolized. A boy she now knew had never really existed.

The guys bantered back and forth a little longer, all expressing varying degrees of disgust that Harris had had sex with her. Harris himself said very little, his focus still on his cigar. Tina tried to tear herself away, but it felt like her feet were made of lead. She could only stand there punishing herself by listening to their vile garbage. When she realized that they were heading toward the door, she finally forced herself into action and fled, hiding in one of the bedrooms while she listened to them laughingly make their way down the stairs. She waited until she was sure they were all gone and then crept out of the room like a thief.

The study door was wide open. As she once again attempted to pass the room, a slight movement in her peripheral vision snagged her notice. She stopped without thinking, her attention shifting fully to the room, and she was horrified to meet Harris’s slightly unfocused gaze. He was still sprawled on the sofa with the cigar caught between his cruelly beautiful lips. Those lips curved upward at the corners when—after a mortifying moment that lacked anything resembling recognition in his gaze—he finally seemed to figure out who he was looking at.

“Heeeeey,” he said around the cigar, drawing out the syllable in a way that only confirmed that he was under the influence of something. She hadn’t tasted or smelled much alcohol when they had kissed and stuff earlier, so that left some kind of narcotic. Harris had been known to take a puff of something recreational now and then but never enough to impair him this much. And as far as Tina knew, he’d stopped indulging after his eighteenth birthday. All things considered, Harris and Greyson were usually pretty good representatives of clean and healthy living.

Harris pushed himself clumsily to his feet and, after a slight stumble, walked toward her without his usual predatory grace, coming to a standstill directly in front of her. He swayed slightly before lifting his hand and cupping her jaw with casual tenderness, not noticing—or, more likely, not caring—when she flinched away from his touch. He dragged his thumb over her lower lip and kept his eyes intently focused on her mouth.

“Soft.” The word was a gravelly purr. His eyelids drooped, and Tina watched, transfixed, as he lifted his other hand to remove the cigar from his mouth before leaning in as if to kiss her.

Uh-uh!

She stepped back just before his mouth descended, and he staggered, wrong-footed by her move.

“C’mon, Tina, let me taste you again,” he crooned.

“Why? Do you have more money riding on it?”

He looked mystified by her question, and she made a rude sound in the back of her throat at his show of ignorance. She shoved him, her flattened palms against his hard chest, and he stumbled, reinforcing her belief that he must be on something. She wouldn’t have been able to budge him if he were sober. And now she tortured herself by wondering if he’d taken whatever it was after he’d made his disgusting bet. Something to help him blur out the reality of touching her and kissing her. “Don’t you ever come near me again!”

“What the fuck?” He sounded completely outraged by her command, and she swallowed back the hysterical burble of laughter that threatened to escape. It was one of the many bizarre coping mechanisms she’d come up with to make her life a little more bearable. Laughter in place of tears. But if something hurt enough, the laughter would eventually dissolve into tears, so it wasn’t a very effective stratagem. “What’s your problem? You were keen enough an hour ago.”

“That was before,” she snapped, and he blinked, looking confused. “Before I realized I was the evening’s entertainment. Did you and your buddies have a good laugh at my expense? The pathetic loser who thought she could mean something to someone like you?”

“You’re hysterical.” He dismissed her in that horribly casual way some guys had when it came to women and their opinions. It pissed her off. She was humiliated, angry, and very hurt, and hearing him disparage all that as hysteria pushed her over a precipice she hadn’t even recognized was looming right in front of her.

She balled her hand into a fist, hauled back, and completely shocked herself by punching him. He was leaning toward her, which was the only reason she managed to hit her target with such devastating accuracy. Pain shot up through her fingers and reverberated all the way up her arm. Her cry of agony mingled with his, and she couldn’t be sure if the crunch she’d felt was his nose or her knuckles. He reeled back and lost his footing entirely, landing on his butt, with his hand cupped protectively over his nose. There was blood. A lot of it. And that—along with the uncharacteristic violence of her action—made her feel sick to her stomach. Her hand throbbed, and she cradled it against her chest, lifting her left hand over her mouth to force back the nausea.