Ruthless Love

  Ruthless Love

  Penelope Bloom

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  Contents

  1. Kennedy

  2. Tristan

  3. Kennedy

  4. Tristan

  5. Kennedy

  6. Tristan

  7. Kennedy

  8. Tristan

  9. Kennedy

  10. Tristan

  11. Kennedy

  12. Tristan

  13. Kennedy

  14. Tristan

  15. Kennedy

  16. Tristan

  17. Kennedy

  18. Tristan

  19. Kennedy

  20. Tristan

  21. Kennedy

  22. Tristan

  23. Kennedy

  24. Tristan

  25. Kennedy

  26. Tristan

  27. Kennedy

  28. Tristan

  29. Kennedy

  30. Tristan

  31. Kennedy

  32. Tristan

  33. Kennedy

  34. Tristan

  35. Kennedy

  36. Tristan

  37. Kennedy

  38. Tristan

  39. Kennedy

  40. Tristan

  41. Kennedy

  42. Tristan

  43. Kennedy

  44. Tristan

  45. Kennedy

  46. Tristan

  47. Kennedy

  Epilogue - Kennedy

  Epilogue - Tristan

  1

  Kennedy

  Our van crunched its way up a gravel path that led to our new home. It looked like the sort of place that was built on a Native American burial ground. Thick forest circled the crooked two-story farmhouse. I could already imagine I’d look out my window in the middle of the night to see darkened silhouettes of creepy children standing along the tree line. Other than the way we’d come in, the only gap in the trees was a thin path near the back of the property where a fancy stone gate stood.

  I squinted toward the gate. Unlike everything else I could see, the gate appeared to be well kept and clean.

  “You know,” I said to my mom, who was hunched over the steering wheel. “This is where Stephen King sets all his novels. Did you intentionally buy a house that would have given him a massive bon—”

  “Kennedy Stills!” My mom snapped. “Watch your mouth.” She huffed, shaking her head. Her hands scrabbled around her bosom for the cross she wore around her neck. She clutched it, muttering to herself. “Lord, I have done everything I can to protect this child from the sin of this world, but she’s still—”

  “Dirty as a chimney sweep,” I added in a bored tone. “But you didn’t let me finish. I was going to say a massive… okay. I’m lying. I was definitely going to say boner.”

  My mom was a mountain of a woman. Thick boned. Thick haired, even. It stood up from her head no matter how she chose to style it, like a wall of rounded red flames. She was also pretty much all I had. Between all the illnesses I was constantly fighting and the homeschooling, I didn’t get out much. Correction. I didn’t get out. Period.

  I hoped maybe I could change that this year. If I wasn’t sick, I’d be starting my senior year of high school in a few weeks. Well, technically, I was turning eighteen next month, so I could’ve enrolled as a junior, but I thought my mom would’ve shot down two years of school instead of one. I’d opted with the less greedy route.

  The van rolled to a stop in front of a slightly run-down farmhouse. “You’re sure this is the right address?”

  My mom got out and went to get my wheelchair out of the back. Even though I knew she was going to snap at me for it, I opened the door and carefully pulled myself into a standing position.

  Getting up made my head swim, but I kept a firm grip on the handle by the door and managed to stay upright.

  My mom rushed to my side and took me under the arms, making a ticking noise. “The only thing you’re going to prove with stunts like that is how easily your head can crack open.”

  “A little dramatic,” I said, grudgingly allowing her to help me sit down into the chair.

  Ignoring me, she rolled me up the path toward the house.

  “What’s with that gate?” I asked.

  She followed my gaze. “Nothing you need to worry about, is what.”

  I stared at it, deciding I wouldn’t just worry about it. I’d most definitely sneak out and investigate it the first chance I got. It wouldn’t be as hard as it used to be when we lived in our apartment back in Chicago. She had half the building trained to keep tabs on me.

  “Kennedy,” she said, kneeling to give me a stern look. “We need to be careful here. Okay? No more stunts. I don’t like scaring you, but I need you to remember your father is not a good man. If he ever finds out where we are…” She trailed off, lips working silently while she searched for the right words.

  “I know, mom. I’ll be careful, okay? Besides, we’re like three miles from civilization out here.” Not that it actually mattered how far I was from people. Whether we were in a cramped apartment building or a bustling suburb, mom would do her best to keep me sheltered. Thank God for internet chat rooms and TV, or I probably wouldn’t even know boys had dangly bits between their legs.

  She kissed my forehead and hugged me to her chest, suffocating me.

  I laughed, fighting my way free. “Okay, okay. I got it. You love me.” I jokingly made a retching sound.

  The movers showed up with our stuff about an hour later, which meant mom was busy micromanaging them, leaving me blissfully free for a while. I wheeled myself out to the back of the house. There was a little patch of plants trying to grow in the dirt.

  I had no experience in the world of gardening, but I knew the basics. Sunlight, water, and I was pretty sure you were supposed to sing to the plants every once in a while. With nothing better to do, I decided to see if I could help the budding plants along.

  I spent the next half hour using a broom handle that I taped a knife to like a spear to hack away at the weeds. It was horribly inefficient, dangerous, and meant I had to keep reapplying the tape. But we moved from downtown Chicago, and I knew there weren’t any gardening tools waiting to be unpacked.

  I was sweating when the sound of a car engine made me look up. It was coming from the direction of the gate. I shielded my eyes and watched as a sleek, black car rolled down the path past my house. It was one of those cars so low to the ground and so angular that it had to be nauseatingly expensive.

  When I saw the driver-side window was down, I inched my wheelchair closer to the road, hoping to catch a glimpse of my mysterious neighbor. I imagined he’d look something like Willy Wonka, for some reason. Eccentric, older, and mysterious.

  The setting sun shone straight into the car like an orange spotlight, and the boy inside was no Willy Wonka.

  He was also staring straight back at me.

  My hands squeezed tight on the rubber wheels of my chair. He was breathtaking. Before I’d had time to take in much more than his wolfish eyes, he rolled the nearly black window up.

  He revved the engine, then sped around the corner so sharply that the wheels spun, kicking up rocks and dirt that pattered against my legs. The car tore away down the down road.

  I watched it go, nodding slowly to myself. Yeah. My luck was officially shitty.

  I was living in the setting of a Stephen King novel. I was me, with all the obvious drawbacks that brought. I was stuck in a stupid wheelchair and I took more prescription medicine than a geriatric patient getting cancer treatments. Oh, and my social life was about as lively as a corpse.

  The w
orst part was I couldn’t even happily fantasize about some dream guy looking past my chair and falling for me. I didn’t want to be somebody’s burden—like a pathetic little charity case, constantly needing attention and care. I didn’t want to be the broken thing that people had to tip-toe around, or to be the one girl people were afraid to get mad at. I just wanted to be normal.

  Except normal wasn’t in the cards for me. That meant I couldn’t even imagine what it’d be like to date the douchebag with the fast car, or the nerdy guy who spends too much time on his computer.

  I brushed the dirt off my legs and looked toward the house. I was already feeling completely drained, which wasn’t unusual around dinner time. The dizziness and fatigue were the main things that kept me from living a normal life, but mom said it was a small price to pay for staying healthy. At least, that was the line I tried to play on repeat to keep my sanity.

  I looked back to the road where I could still see the faint cloud of dust from the boy’s car settling. I set my eyes on the back porch of the house and gripped my chair tighter. It was maybe twenty steps away.

  Twenty little steps…

  I got to my feet. There was nothing wrong with my legs, which easily took my weight. But my head immediately started spinning. It felt like an invisible current was pushing me from side to side and front to back, until it took every ounce of concentration just to stay upright.

  I took a cautious step forward, then another. I was still on my feet. A shaky smile formed on my face, but my balance faltered. I crashed to the ground in a heap, then rolled to my back and watched the sky spin.

  2

  Tristan

  I leaned against the fence, still dripping sweat. Football practice was over for me, but the special teams unit was still out on the field working on kick offs. They’d done such a shit job of it in practice that coach made them all stay after. It was brutal, even by his standards, considering these were just our offseason workouts. We still had a few more weeks before the season and the school year even began.

  The sun beat on my bare shoulders and there wasn’t so much as a hint of a breeze. It was about as brutally hot as Maine could get, but I didn’t hide from the discomfort. I leaned harder into the fence, letting the triangular points of metal dig into my forearms until it stung. I focused on the way it felt like a slow burning acid was pumping through me, leaking into my muscles with every heartbeat.

  “You good?” Logan asked. He was fresh out of the shower and wearing nothing but a pair of black athletic shorts. His dark hair fell in loose curls to the nape of his neck and around his ears in the careless sort of way that drove girls crazy.

  “Wonderful,” I said dryly.

  “Heads up!” Someone shouted from the field.

  I spotted the football spinning end over end toward where Logan and I were standing. It thumped to the grass and rolled a short distance from our feet.

  Coach Thompson stepped up with a shit-eating grin on his face. “Tristan, show these guys how far you can throw that bitch.”

  I set down my bag and walked over, picking up the football. They might’ve been fifty yards away, give or take a few. Logan watched me, clearly curious if I could make the throw.

  Instead, I let the ball drop to the ground and walked toward my car. “Come on,” I said. “If you’re not in my car in ten seconds, you can walk home.”

  I heard Logan pick the ball up and toss it to the team before he jogged to catch up with me.

  “You seem pissy,” Logan slid into the car beside me. “Even by your standards.”

  “Because I didn’t want to see coach get a hard-on for me?”

  Logan nodded as he grinned. “He does seem to like you a little extra, doesn’t he?”

  “It’s pathetic.”

  I turned the car on, enjoying the way it roared to life. It didn’t seem to matter how many times I drove this thing—it always felt like I could get drunk on the raw power at my fingertips.

  “Hey, wait,” Logan threw on his best, charming smile and leaned halfway out the window. “I need to ask her something.”

  He was pointing toward a group of about five girls from the track team who were walking back to their cars. They all were wearing tight spandex shorts and had their shirts rolled up to show their bare stomachs.

  They all turned when they heard my car roll up beside them. The hottest two—Lyndsy and Abbie, leaned down to rest their arms on the window.

  Logan ran a fingertip down Abbie’s arm. “You two coming tonight?”

  “Nobody invited us,” Lyndsy pouted.

  “Consider yourselves invited.”

  “If you want to come,” I added, leaning toward them. “Don’t show up empty handed. A bottle of liquor each. Got it?”

  Lyndsy sighed. “I don’t know where I’d—”

  “I can get some,” Abbie gave Logan a meaningful look, then winked. “My dad is out of town and I can just take his vodka. I’ll fill it with water after we drain it and he’ll never know. He hardly ever drinks.”

  “So, you’ll come?” Logan asked.

  Abbie nodded, bouncing on her toes and smiling. “Everybody always talks about how crazy Tristan’s parties are. So, yeah. We’ll be there.”

  “Good.” Logan patted the side of my car with his palm twice, grinning. “Why don’t you two come find me and we’ll hang out tonight?”

  They both exchanged giddy smiles.

  I revved the engine to let them know they should back up. Wisely, they stepped back before I hit the gas.

  Logan leaned his head back on the seat and chewed his lip in thought. “You want one of them?”

  “Pass.”

  “What’s your deal, lately? Used to be you never turned down a pretty girl. Now it’s like you’re trying to go celibate on me.”

  “After a few times, it all starts to feel the same. Besides, they don’t give a shit about you. You realize that, right?”

  Logan shrugged. “That’s your opinion.”

  I could’ve argued the point, but I wasn’t in the mood. My mind was on the girl I’d seen this morning in the wheelchair. Her presence meant the abandoned house in front of my property was now the formerly abandoned house in front of my property. And the girl had looked about my age.

  That meant it was going to be a hell of a lot harder to keep the truth about my little predicament a secret. Unless I could find a way to convince her to keep her mouth shut. Problem was, as soon as I showed up and started making threats, she’d probably just get more curious to know what I was so intent on hiding.

  I knew one thing. If she gave me the slightest excuse, I was going to make sure she wished she had never moved here.

  Logan waited in the car when I pulled up to the gas station on the opposite end of town from my house. I drove a little out of the way because I knew I’d find Kelsey behind the counter. I gave her a slight nod of my head when I came in. She fumbled the customer’s card she was handling in her hurry to smile and wave at me.

  I went to the beer fridge and grabbed two twelve packs, then headed up to the counter. I set them down in front of Kelsey. She looked nervously at them, then glanced over her shoulder toward the back.

  “You coming tonight?” I handed her my card and the obviously faked ID I carried.

  She looked at both, swallowed, and then met my eyes. “Am I invited?”

  “Depends.” I tapped my fingers on the two cases of beer.

  She slid my card through the reader and handed back my ID. “Will I see you there?”

  “Probably not.” I grabbed the beers and headed back to the car, tossing them at Logan’s feet. He grumbled about it but lifted his big ass feet out of the way and made room.

  I drove slower than usual when we passed the little house in front of my property. There wasn’t a car out front, but the light in one of the upstairs rooms was on. I couldn’t see shit through the lacy curtains, though.

  “Hey, look,” Logan leaned over me and pointed to the window. “You’ve got neighbors
now. You should bring them over some cookies and introduce yourself tomorrow.”

  I didn’t bother responding to that. There were a handful of cars already parked outside the gate. I entered my code and drove up.

  I took it slow down the winding, heavily forested path that led from the gate to the house. At the end of the path, the trees opened up for the house. It was a three-story mansion with turrets, winding staircases, and rooms full of heavy, antique wooden furniture. The story everyone got was that my dad lived here alone with me—that he was a reclusive stock trader who worked upstairs on the third floor. I said he didn’t give a shit about loud parties as long as nobody went up and bothered him.

  Surprisingly, nobody ever seemed to question it. Openly inviting people over all the time actually hid the truth better than if I’d made a point of avoiding it.

  The house sat beside a small lake with a dock. There was even a little island in the center of the lake that was so small you could spit from one side to the other. Once the alcohol was flowing, guys liked to swim out there and see who could be the last man standing in a drunken king of the hill style game.

  When we pulled up, there were about a dozen or so people already loitering around. It was normal on a party night. People had started showing up earlier and earlier, and I usually didn’t give a shit. Today, it pissed me off.