Hothouse Flower

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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 fucking 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 fucking 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 fuck? He nods to Connor who sips a Fizz Life, a grin at the corners of his lips. He finds his wife fucking 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 fucking 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 fucking 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 fuck 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 fucking laughed.

Lo glares at me.

I extend my arms. “I didn’t do a fucking 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 fucking 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.

But the headline definitely taints it.

They think we’re flirting. We are. But they also think I’m fucking Lily. So I’m a player. I’m fooling around with both Calloway girls. It’s just so fucking absurd.

My jaw locks, and I don’t waste another moment. I fling it into the fire.

“You have to wait!” Rose yells at me. “We’re doing this as a group.” She slaps my arm with another rolled up magazine and then tosses it at me.

“For fuck’s sake you’re high-strung tonight.”

“Talk to me when you’ve had a worm suck your blood off your ass,” she retorts, walking past me to Lily and Lo. I read the headline of my new tabloid: Sara Hale at War with Her Family.

Fucking fantastic.

Daisy rolls up her magazine, hiding the headline from view.

“Everyone,” Rose says, sitting back in her chair and crossing her ankles. Connor is the only one without a tabloid. Rose is sticking to her earlier claim, refusing to give him one. “Take your magazine and read something you find particularly offensive before tossing it into the fire.”

“And what is this supposed to fucking do?” I ask.

“Ward off evil spirits,” Lo says, sipping his Fizz Life while hooking his arm around Lily’s waist. She leans against his chest again. “Too bad it won’t cure your obsessive compulsive personality, Rose.”

She shoots him a scathing look, the flames reflecting in her eyes. “Too bad it won’t cure your alcoholism, Loren.”

He raises his soda can. “Look, it’s already working. You’re practically a licensed witch....shit, I meant bitch.” He snaps his fingers. He might as well have said aw, shucks.

She opens her mouth to argue and Connor cuts her off. “This is all very fun, but the more we talk about witches and spirits, I find myself becoming stupider and stupider. So please, for the sake of all humanity, shut up.”

I shake my head while Lo grins, finding this hilarious.

Rose combats her husband almost immediately, “You really think your intelligence benefits all of humanity? You own a diamond business.”

“And I give a large percentage of my money to charities and research, darling.”

They start to bicker, and Daisy leans closer to me. She folds a napkin into an origami swan, glancing from it to me every so often. “Want to know a secret?” she whispers.

“Sure,” I say, my arm stretching across the back of her chair again.

She smiles and says, “You’re my favorite four-letter word.” Her bold green eyes flit up to me.

She makes the corniest pickup lines sound like the sexiest things I’ve ever heard.

“The word fuck didn’t do anything for you?” I ask, my muscles tensing.

“You’ve desensitized me to it. It might as well be as powerful as the word foot.”

I lean into her ear and lower my voice. “You won’t be saying that when I actually fuck you.”

A blinding smile fills her face, and it stirs my need even more. I want her in my fucking arms. I want to kiss her so deeply that air has trouble reaching both of our lungs, gasping with wild, arresting pleasure.

One day, it’ll happen.

Just not this moment.

“I’ll go,” Lily announces, cutting in Connor and Rose’s bickering. She stands up with her magazine in hand. “Um…so there’s this picture of me in this one that really bugs me.” She flips a couple of pages and then nods. “Yeah, so I’m buying condoms and they captioned it with Lily’s spiraling out of control again.”

Rose claps, excited to have a willing participant. “Okay, now throw it in.”

Lily tosses the magazine into the flames. It falls against the logs and burns quickly.

Connor stands next, snatching a magazine off the towering stack beside Rose.

“Oh so now you believe in it?” Rose asks.

“I believe in you,” Connor refutes. “Not your superstition.” He flips open the magazine. “Connor Cobalt’s seventh sex tape has grossed over twenty million dollars. Making Scott Van Wright, the owner of the tapes, one of the world’s richest pornography distributers.” Scott Van Wright is the reason Connor and Rose have sex tapes leaked every few months. He screwed them over. After Connor dropped the lawsuits and used the publicity to grow both Rose’s fashion business and his own, I offered to personally beat the shit out of Scott. But Connor said that he didn’t want to see me in jail—even if the offer was appealing.

I hope someday that son of a bitch gets what he deserves.

Connor throws the magazine into the fire, hate actually passing through his blue eyes.

Rose is next. “Rose Cobalt is a bitch.” She nods and tosses hers in.

“That’s it?” Lo asks when she sits down. “That’s all you could come up with?”

“Those are hurtful words,” Rose replies.

“I call you a bitch five times a day and you don’t bat an eye,” Lo reminds her. Then he remembers her outburst tonight and corrects himself, “Well, not usually.”

“They’re not hurtful from you,” she refutes. “That was Vogue.” She touches her chest. “I cried for two days straight when I read that.”

“Vogue is her Bible,” Lily says.

“Does that mean I’m like your saint?” Daisy asks with a smile. She was in Vogue a few months ago. On the front of the fucking magazine.

“You’d be more saint-like if you participated,” Rose says.

Daisy brightens and then stands on the seat of her canvas chair. “Daisy Calloway ‘the baby Calloway’,” she reads and adds air quotes, “has been spotted with another male model at a Gucci fashion shoot. Close sources have confirmed that she’s been seeing him. This is the third guy this month for Daisy. Could this be a clear sign that she’s following in Lily’s footsteps? Only time will tell.” She flings the magazine and it spins to the fire like a Frisbee.

Hearing that—it hardens my face. The Gucci shoot was months ago, and even though I know she couldn’t be with those guys—we slept in the same bed every night—the accusations piss me off. Rose wants to expel bad energy, but I don’t read these tabloids for a reason.

“You go,” Daisy tells me. She tries to kick my chair over with her foot, but she doesn’t have enough strength when she’s standing up high. I don’t rise. I just look down at the magazine in my hands after finding the center article. “Ryke Meadows in another fight with a photog. And they show a picture of me yelling at some cameraman.” I lazily toss the magazine in and lean back in my chair.

“Do you feel any different?” Daisy asks as she hops off her chair.

“Nope.”

Daisy gasps and looks to Rose. “It didn’t work on him. Can we cast a spell to protect him from evil?”

Rose rolls her eyes now and then she looks at my brother. “Loren, please go.”

He reluctantly rises, but only because Lily climbs off his lap and physically pulls him from the chair. When his eyes fall to the magazine I see how they change. They sharpen and turn cold. “Another source confirms molestation rumors. Jonathan Hale and Loren Hale continue to deny them. Jonathan’s first son has yet to comment.”

No one speaks. An uncomfortable tension blankets our campsite. I wait for Lo to throw the magazine into the fire or curse me out or both. But his eyes remain on the tabloid and his brows furrow as he continues to read silently. He starts shaking his head.

“What is it?” Connor asks.

“A psychiatrist specializing in sex addiction was interviewed,” Loren reads, “and confirms that most sex addicts experience sexual trauma. We have confirmation that…” He rubs his lips to hide emotion, his eyes reddening. He shakes his head. “We have confirmation that Lily Calloway spent much of her time with the Hales. It’s suspected that Jonathan Hale might have bene an influence in her addiction.”

They’re implying that Jonathan abused her too.

I can’t see that happening. I shake my head as much as Lo. My dad may be a bad fucking guy, but he wouldn’t do that to Lily, to his best friend’s daughter. It’s something unthinkable.

And if Lo saw that happen, he wouldn’t roll over and stay quiet. He would go absolutely crazy. He would have, without a fucking doubt, killed our father.

“What?” Lily says, gaping. “Lo, that never happened.”

Lo looks up at her and his gaze immediately softens. “I know, Lil.” He doesn’t even hesitate. Doesn’t question her or think otherwise. There’s complete loyalty between them. But it doesn’t break the pain that they share between their gazes. They’re both being dragged through this.

“Throw it in,” Rose says quietly.

He does it. And I watch it burn, right along with my thoughts.

I don’t know what or who to believe anymore.

Everything’s just dark.