Rock Addiction (Rock Kiss #1)(34)

“Then”—she took a shuddering breath and buried her face against his shoulder, the memory vicious—“someone set up a page about me on a website we all used, calling me a slut and a whore and saying I’d probably had something going on with my father.” Nauseated, she’d curled over in the computer lab, dry heaving as her classmates stared… or sniggered. “I’d never even been kissed, but boys I didn’t know started posting that I’d done sexual things with them, that I was a ‘freak.’ I knew I had to fight back then or they’d break me.”

“Hey.” Fox’s hand on the back of her head. “The shitheads don’t matter.”

Shaking from the ugliness of the memories, she tried to curl impossibly deeper into him. “It wasn’t the bullies who did the real harm, it was the way the people I’d thought were my friends joined in.” The exclusive all-girls private school her father had insisted she attend, because that was where the child of a man of his “stature” should go, had turned overnight into a toxic hothouse.

Furious her tears wouldn’t stop falling, she swiped her hands across her cheeks. “Suddenly I wasn’t being invited over for sleepovers and birthday parties, and even the people who didn’t join in with the bullies looked uncomfortable when I walked by.” Charlotte alone had never turned her back, Molly’s small, fierce, loyal defender.

“I heard the other students gossiping about how I groomed my friends for my father, even though I didn’t know the girl at the center of it all.” The two of them hadn’t had a single class together. “Then the media reported children’s services had been to the house to see if I needed to be removed, and it was read as confirmation of the rumors. It was ugly.”

“Fuck, baby, you must’ve been strong as hell to stick it out,” Fox said, his voice holding a taut, angry tension. “Most kids would’ve left school for home study.”

“I did that later, when I was told I was being transferred to a public school.” Traumatized from her parents’ deaths after a horrific year, she’d had no resources left to deal with a whole new set of bullies. To their credit, children’s services hadn’t argued with her decision, instead helping her enroll in an accredited correspondence course.

“But back at the start,” she continued through a throat that felt as if it had been shredded by a steel grater, “I was determined to show them all.” It was teeth-gritted rage that had driven her. “Now I look back and wonder why it was so important to me when I hated most of my schoolmates by the end of the first week after it began.”

“No, I get it.” Fox kissed the side of her face, his embrace a living barrier against the darkness. “Part of the reason I raised so much hell as a teenager was to show my mother I didn’t give a shit.”





Chapter 14


Fox never spoke about his mother beyond the obvious, but when Molly raised her head, wiping the backs of her hands over her eyes to rid herself of the remnants of her tears before touching her fingers to his face, he knew she was about to ask for more. He would answer. After the brutal honesty of what she’d shared, to do anything else was unthinkable.

“Your mother, you were mad at her because she left you as a baby?” Her own eyes were yet bruised from the ugly memories of her teenage years, but her voice was painfully gentle, as if she was afraid of hurting him.

Fuck, what the hell was he going to do about this? Because no damn way was he walking away from Molly. “That was the best thing she ever did for me,” he said. “My mother was young, couldn’t handle a child.” He shrugged. “Gramps and Grammy might’ve been old-fashioned, not overly expressive, but I was safe, healthy, happy.”

One of his earliest memories of his mother was of her telling him to “Behave,” because his grandparents had been very good about putting off their retirement plans to look after him. So he’d always known he wasn’t a choice his grandparents had made—but that hadn’t mattered. Not when they’d never treated him as if he was just a responsibility.

“My mother used to come by now and then.” His muscles tensed, anger a dark burn beneath his skin. “She’d bring me gifts, play a game or two, then be gone.” For days afterward, her perfume—floral and rich—would linger in the house. That was how he knew she came to visit other times, too, while he was at school or with friends. He hadn’t been jealous about that. “I knew she was my mother,” he told Molly, “but to me, she felt more like a distant aunt, so I never felt neglected or treated unfairly. Gramps and Grammy were my parents.”

Molly pressed a gentle kiss to his cheek, her hands stroking his nape—as if she knew what was coming was going to be bad.

Holding her close, he opened the doorway to the echoes of a lost little boy’s grief. “When I was seven, my grandmother died, and my grandfather followed three weeks later.” It had destroyed his world.

Molly hugged him tight, her tears quiet. Burying his face against her neck, he breathed in the warm, sweet scent of her and told her the rest. “I went to live with my mother and her family.”

Molly sucked in a breath.

“Yeah,” he said with a twist of his lips, “she’d pulled herself together a couple of years after she had me, married into money and had another child, a girl three years younger than me.” He clenched his hand against Molly’s spine. “Turned out she’d never told her Ivy League husband about me, and the prick refused to bring up ‘some piece of trash’ she’d had off a stranger in a club.”