Hothouse Flower (Addicted #4)(91)

RYKE MEADOWS



We helped the girls clean off their wounds with soap, and we bandaged them. Now they’re in sweatshirts and baggy pants, grouped around the campfire. Lily sits on Lo’s lap, her head to his chest. She keeps dozing off, but faraway howls from the woods and rustles in the trees startle her awake.

“What was that?” she asks with wide eyes, glancing over her shoulder.

“A big bad wolf,” Daisy jokes, her legs kicked up on my lap. Before we were together, she’d playfully do this, but I wouldn’t touch her. So I can’t put my hands on her ankles or pull her closer to me. I just have my hand on the back of her camping chair, watching her pick at a hot marshmallow on a stick. “Oh wait,” Daisy gasps, “he’s right here.” She tilts her head at me.

I raise my brows at her. I can feel my brother watching, and I’m not f*cking sure what’s going on in his head. His expression has been unreadable for most of the night.

She leans forward and licks gooey marshmallow off her finger. My arousal heightens as she quickly grabs my attention. Her eyes lock on me, and she whispers, “Big bad wolf, are you going to eat me?”

You’re a dirty girl, Calloway. My gaze drops to her mouth. “Until you f*cking scream.”

Her lips curve upward.

“It’s dead, Rose,” Connor says. His voice pulls our gaze towards him. Rose is curled on a chair beside Connor, his hand on her thigh, her fingers intertwined with his. In her other hand, she fries a leech on the tip of a stick, her yellow-green eyes murderous.

“Not nearly enough,” she retorts. “This little bitch took my blood.”

“And here, I thought you were roasting it for dessert,” Lo banters.

Rose holds up a hand at him, as though to say silence. She squishes the blackened leech against a log, stabbing it over and over.

Lo looks around at us like what the f*ck? He nods to Connor who sips a Fizz Life, a grin at the corners of his lips. He finds his wife f*cking amusing—even if she’s half-crazy. “How are you not scared to bite her in bed?” Lo asks. “If you draw blood does she grab a fire poker?”

“I’m not a leech,” Connor replies with ease.

Rose tosses the stick into the fire and cleans her hands with a wet wipe. Then she reaches into a grocery bag by her side. “So I bought these on the way here.” She pulls out a tall stack of tabloid magazines. “I wanted all of us to burn them together and purge the bad energy.”

Connor says, “As long as we don’t have to chant afterwards, I’ll participate.”

Rose stands, trying to hide a smile that’s clear to me. She f*cking loves him, arguments and all. “I’d rather you not. Your pessimism is already clouding the process.”

“Realism and pessimism are two very different things, but I’d be happy to explain it to you.”

She covers his mouth with her hand. “Thank you for defining arrogance. You can keep your other definitions to yourself.” She spins around, dropping her hand. “Now where were we?” She starts passing out the magazine, and Connor’s eyes fall to her ass. Even though he acts like he’s better than every horny bastard, he’s still a f*cking guy. Case in point.

Lily holds her marshmallows over the fire, and a flame engulfs it almost immediately. She shrieks and waves it around, as though that’ll snuff it out.

I shake my head at her. “You’re going to fling it in the woods, chill the f*ck out.” Last thing we need is to start a forest fire.

“It won’t extinguish!” she defends. “Extinguish, you mallow! Extinguish!” She flaps it around some more and tries blowing, but she more or less just spits on the thing. And then from behind her, Lo easily blows out the flame himself, leaving her with a burnt marshmallow.

Daisy smiles wickedly. “Wow, who would have thought—Lo blows better than Lily.”

I rub my lips to keep from smiling. Everyone else looks fairly uncomfortable by that statement—only because it came from Daisy. If I said it, it would’ve been fine. If Lily said it—everyone would have f*cking laughed.

Lo glares at me.

I extend my arms. “I didn’t do a f*cking thing.”

“You’re a shitty influence.”

Daisy acts nonchalant, but her gaze flits all over the forest. Every time she tries to be one step closer to us, someone in our group has a way of pushing her back out. It’s unintentional, I think. But it happens, regardless.

“It was a f*cking joke,” I tell Lo. He’s about to open his mouth, ready to chew me up and spit me back out. I mentally start putting on my armor to withstand him.

But then Rose snaps her fingers, cutting off Lo and regaining everyone’s attention. Her eyes meet mine briefly. I know she did that for my benefit. I’m grateful, but I don’t show it. “We’re supposed to be purging bad energy not creating it.” She drops a magazine on my lap. “Here, you can burn this one.”

I read the headline: Ryke Meadows Continues to Play Games. The front page picture shows Daisy hanging over my shoulder outside of the pub in Paris, my hand on her ass. But I can’t get over the smile on her face. The camera caught her mid-laugh.

She’s gorgeous. And she’s mine.

I don’t want to burn this picture. I want to frame that happiness and revisit it every morning and every night for the rest of my life.