Twisted Hate (Twisted, #3)

by Ana Huang

Honestly, it was a Pavlovian response at this point. When I heard his voice, my blood pressure skyrocketed.

“You can let go now.” I willed my breaths to come out steady despite the suffocating heat. “Before your touch gives me hives.”

I didn’t care if Jules Ambrose was the last woman in the world. She was one person I’d never sleep with. Ever.

“Don’t be late to Ava’s party on Saturday. I realize punctuality is not one of your few virtues, but it’s important you’re on time.”

“If my face bothers you so much, don’t look at it,” he drawled. “Unless you can’t help yourself, which is understandable.”

It was impossible for an actual human being to have hair that red, eyes that fierce, and curves that lush. Supernatural hijinks were the only thing that made sense.

“I work here. You work in the ER.” Jules arched an eyebrow. “I see you’re going senile already. That’s what happens when your brain uses all its limited faculties on basic upkeep.”

So you can take your sanctimonious attitude and shove it up your ass, Josh Chen, because I’m over it.”

It wasn’t the first time I’d been judged—for my looks and my family, the career I chose and the clothes I wore, the way I laughed too loudly when I was supposed to be demure and asserted myself too boldly when I was supposed to be invisible. I was used to shaking off criticism, but the sneers and side eyes accumulated over time, and I’d gotten to the point where I was just tired.

“How stupid is that? Some rapists only get a few months in jail, but have a little marijuana on you and your record is stained forever. That’s such bullshit. You have weed farmers in Colorado raking in the cash from the sale of marijuana while people like Terence are vilified for it.

No doubt it was a caramel mocha with extra crunch and oat milk because she was lactose intolerant and hated the taste of almond milk.

But that was the thing about guilt. It didn’t give a damn about facts or reason. It sprouted from the tiniest seeds of doubt, slipped through the cracks of your psyche, and by the time you realized what the ugly darkness oozing through your veins was, it’d already burrowed itself so deep you couldn’t dig it out without losing a part of yourself.

Irritation curled in my stomach. It was the resort’s grand opening weekend, and he was loitering in the lobby, flirting with guests. Didn’t he have a job to do?

“On a scale of one to ten, how badly do you want to fuck me right now?”

I thought I’d escaped my past, but at the end of the day, our demons always caught up with us.

“You want someone who can challenge you. Excite you. Keep you on your toes. And as for what you need…” His whiskey-scented breath gusted across my skin, peppering it with a thousand goosebumps. “You need someone to bend you over and fuck that attitude right out of you.”

“What was that?” Josh’s breath grazed my cheek. “You always have so much to say. Where are your words now, hmm?”

“You’re my personal hell, Red.” He gave my hair another sharp tug. “And God help me, I don’t want to fucking leave.”

Every time I saw a waterfall, I pictured fucking Jules under it. Every time I saw a restaurant, I pictured us eating there together like a goddamn couple. Every time I saw a hike, I pictured…well, you got the idea.

I had work to do, trips to plan, and sleep to catch up on. But it’d been four days, eleven hours, and thirty-two minutes since we’d had sex, and all of them had been consumed by memories of cinnamon and heat and the silky slide of her skin beneath my hands.

I scoffed. “Red, you’ll fall in love with me before I ever fall in love with you.” The mere idea was absurd. Jules was the most difficult woman I’d ever encountered. God help whichever poor bastard ended up falling for her.

I was addicted to this. To her. Her taste, her smell, the little breathy moans she let out every time I thrust into her and the way her pussy clamped around my cock like it was made for me. I wanted all of it, all the time.

She was a mess—hair tousled, lips swollen, skin slicked with sweat and marked from my teeth. It was the most beautiful sight I’d ever seen.

The primal, territorial part of me loved that I’d marked her. I wanted to shove it in her old friend’s face and declare her off-limits unless he wanted a highly unpleasant meeting with my fist.

I only half paid attention to what was happening onscreen; the other half was busy gauging Jules’s reactions to my favorite scenes. Her laugh when Marlin met Dory, her gasp when the shark started chasing the pair, her humming along to Dory’s famous just keep swimming mantra. She must’ve seen the movie already, but she reacted like it was her first time. It was oddly charming.

Nothing turned a crappy day around like a good fuck.

Most women thought men wanted them to taste like berries or lavender or whatever, but if we were eating pussy, we wanted to taste pussy. That was the whole fucking point.

“Stop it, Jules,” I ordered as I walked toward the park where the hospital’s all-staff picnic took place. “Get it together.” A nearby family gave me a strange look and quickened their steps until they passed me. Great. Now I was talking to myself and scaring off parents and children.

Josh laughed, unfazed by my insults. “Glad to see you’re feeling better, Red. Missed that poisonous tongue of yours.”

I sucked in a gasp when he tugged me to his side, his whisper a dark warning in my ear. “Don’t provoke me, Red, or I’ll spread you out on the picnic table and tongue fuck you until you have to fucking crawl home because your legs don’t work anymore.”

“That’s not what you’re saying. What you’re saying is you made assumptions about her intelligence based on her appearance, which is quite unfair, don’t you think?” A lethal edge ran beneath Josh’s otherwise pleasant voice. “For example, if I were to make an assumption about you, I would think you were a pompous jackass based on the Harvard-branded clothing you wear at any opportunity despite the fact you only got in because your last name is engraved on their newest science building. But I’m sure that’s not true. You did graduate from Harvard Med—near the bottom of the class, but you graduated. That counts for something.”

But disrespect Jules again, and I’ll put you in the emergency room myself.”

Sun shining, food in our laps, the emptiness in my chest a little less empty with Jules’s presence filling it up.

“Good girl,” I whispered. “Keep those screams in, Red. I’m the only person who gets to hear how much you love my cock in that tight little cunt.”

“Everyone changes. Without change, we might as well be dead.” It would’ve been an inspiring quote had Alex not delivered it with all the emotion of a block of ice.

“She understands me in a way no one else does, even if our worldviews are fundamentally different. When I’m not with her, I wish she were there. When I am with her, I want that moment to last forever. She makes me want to be a better person, and when I think about a world where she doesn’t exist…” His jaw flexed. “I want to burn every inch of it to the ground.”

Some people smiled with their mouths; Jules smiled with her whole face. The sparkle in her eyes, the adorable crinkle of her nose, the small crease in her cheek…watching her smile was like watching the night sky light up with stars.

Up until this moment, Asher had been one of my sports idols, but I wanted to gouge his fucking eyes out for looking at her like that. Like she could possibly be his when she so clearly, irrevocably belonged to me.

“It means we should date other people. Our arrangement is non-exclusive. It’s time we take advantage of that clause.” A dark, ugly beast reared its head and snarled in my chest. “The fuck we will.”

“Because you’re mine,” I said against her mouth. “Let another man touch you, Jules, and you’ll find out just how easily I can take a man’s life as I can save one.”

seeing her hurting, hurt. More than I thought possible.

Grief wasn’t one emotion; it was a hundred emotions wrapped in a dark shroud.

Of all my favorite sights in the world—the Washington Monument at sunrise, the autumnal blaze of leaves during a New England fall, the expanse of ocean and jungle laid out before me at the end of a long hike in Brazil—Jules wearing my shirt might just be my number one.

Even now, with purple shadows smudged beneath her eyes and lines of tension bracketing her mouth, she was so fucking beautiful I couldn’t stop looking at her.

Now, she was beautiful in a way that made me want to drown in her, to let her fill every inch of my soul until she fucking consumed me. It didn’t matter if it killed me, because in a world where I was surrounded by death, she was the only thing that made me feel alive.

I didn’t know how I ever thought Jules was insufferable, because as it turned out, she was pretty damn extraordinary.

The monsters in our imagination are often worse those in reality.

“Careful, Red.” Pleasurable goosebumps dotted my skin at Josh’s soft warning. “Keep saying things like that, and I might never let you go.”

Somehow, she’d gone from the last person I wanted to be around to the first person I turned to when I needed comfort or just someone to talk to.

“It’s easy to get caught up in old habits and hurts, but you’ll never be happy chasing things that no longer exist. It’s time to move on from the past. I did.”