Broken At Love (Whitman University) (3 page)

“Did someone say drink?” a playful baritone interrupted.

I turned to see Toby, his brown waves tousled and a roguish grin lighting up his face. He held up two plastic red cups. Ruby reached out at the same time I did and we took a couple of big gulps. Watered-down beer. Preferable to the trash can punch that knocked you on your ass inside an hour that some frats preferred, but somehow I’d expected something more from a Quinn Rowland party. Champagne, maybe.

“Is the line the only option?” I wanted him to sneak us in, partly because I didn’t want to wait, but partly to impress Ruby. It was a nearly impossible feat.

“Well, I can’t get you in now, if that’s what you’re asking. But we can take a walk and come back.” He pulls a flask out of his pocket and winked. “It’s better than the cheap keg they’re rolling up and down the line, right?”

We followed Toby down the street. Once we passed what I assumed must be the edge of the Rowland property, he led us down to the beach and flopped down just out of the incoming tide’s reach. The flask contained tequila, which, while not my favorite, was preferable to vodka.

Clear booze made me barf faster than cheap Chinese food.

“I’m glad you decided to come,” Toby said, wiping his mouth after a swig.

“You knew I couldn’t resist. These week-long tennis-major-inspired ragers are legendary. What would I tell my grandkids if I graduated from Whitman without attending a Quinn Rowland party?” I was only half kidding.

“An excellent point, as usual.” He glanced at Ruby. “You know she’s a genius, right?”

“Duh.” Ruby’s standard answer. Not terribly articulate, but she didn’t have trouble attracting guys. Friends were another matter, at least at Whitman, where new money was barely better than having no money at all. It didn’t bother me.

The three of us finished off the flask as the sun sank below the water, purples, pinks, and midnight blues stretching across the surface like a blanket. I drank enough to be sleepy, but not enough to ignore the sand falling out of every crevice when we trekked back.

Toby opened the ornate, carved wooden front door of the Rowland vacation home. The line had dissipated and everyone crowded in the tiled foyer, spilling onto the staircase spiraling up and into the rooms beyond. Warmth from the alcohol found my face, making my cheeks pleasantly numb and the racket from the sound system dimmer.

I turned to say something about the song selection to Ruby—she hated John Mayer more than most sane women—but she’d disappeared into the crowd. Toby was gone, too, which left me alone in a house full of my rowdy classmates. At least some of them would be familiar, but walking through the crowded rooms alone didn’t sound like my idea of fun.

Before the decision to go back down to the beach alone overwhelmed me, a handsome blond guy sidled up with a smile. He wasn’t very tall—only a couple inches taller than my five-eight in these stupid heels—and his chocolate eyes sent a shiver down my back.

Not in a sexy way, although he wasn’t unattractive. Despite his smile, something about him unsettled me.

“Hey, gorgeous. You look lost, and this is half my house. If you’d allow me to be a gracious host, I’ll show you to the bar until you find your friends?”

There wasn’t a good reason to say no, especially not to someone who must be Sebastian, Quinn’s half-brother, and I wanted a drink. I smiled back, shaking off my uneasiness. “I’m Emilie.”

“Yes, Emilie Swanson, I know. I never let the prettiest girls on campus escape me.” The choice of words sounded wrong, predatory, but he quickly moved on. “I’m Sebastian Blair.”

I nodded, anxious to move into the next room and look for Ruby. Sebastian led me past the winding staircase in the generous foyer, my heels clicking on the slick marble flooring. The guests absorbed the sound, making the room feel smaller, but on a normal day it would be vast and intimidating.

Which, based on the media perception of Theodore Rowland—Quinn and Sebastian’s media-mogul father—was likely done on purpose.

Farther into the house, I couldn’t help but gasp at the view. The living room stretched at least a quarter of the length of a football field, paved with creamy carpet and decorated with off-white leather furniture begging to be ruined by someone’s appletini before the end of the night. Pieces of impressive artwork that could well be originals hung on several walls. I wished I could stop and examine each one. Windows lined the entire back wall, revealing a sprawling deck that led down to the beach, the glinting black of the Gulf of Mexico crashing beyond it.

“This way,” Sebastian said, guiding me to the left, where a full-service bar on the deck hopped with activity.

As I crossed the threshold to the outdoors, someone squeezed past going the opposite direction, brushing warmth across my shoulder. My eyes glimpsed a muscled chest barely hidden by a thin blue t-shirt, then traveled up over a strong jaw, a shock of shaggy, jet-black hair, and the bluest damn eyes I’ve ever seen in my life.

Chapter Three

Quinn Rowland.

God could not be serious with that face, on that body, with those
eyes
.

I’d seen him before, of course, but not in person and could honestly say now that the television did him no justice—and he appeared plenty attractive on the other side of a screen.

His eyes, soft and seductive like a shift of azure silk, slid to my mouth. Heat rushed unbidden into my cheeks, along with a few other places, and I realized I was staring at him. Practically panting like a dog in heat.

Without a word, I tore my eyes away and stepped out into the chilly evening breeze. The cool night helped calm my racing heart and after a moment the reminder that no girl in her right mind wanted anything to do with Quinn Rowland—ridiculously hot or not—eased the heat coursing through my blood.

Sebastian did me the courtesy of not mentioning my ridiculous swooning, instead grabbing me a glass of whiskey and 7-Up. “So, is this your first time here?”

“Yep. I have Art History with Toby Wright. He invited me.” I glanced around, hoping to glimpse Ruby’s red dress, or even Toby’s waves, but the last beams of sunlight disappeared at least an hour ago. Tiki torches sprouted out of the sand around the deck’s perimeter and forged a path onto the beach, but they blurred the scene more than clarified it.

That might have been the tequila, though. Or Quinn’s cobalt eyes going straight to my head. Now that I’d seen the guy in person, it didn’t seem fair to blame Annette for basically falling head over heels in a matter of days.

The way he looked, the air of sexy confidence he exuded, pretty much tipped every scale in his favor. It tipped mine for a minute and I’d heard every single day since September what a seductive, therapy-inducing monster he was.

I shook my head, clearing it and attempting to focus on Sebastian. “What?”

“I said, so you’re an Art major?”

“No. I’m a Graphic Design major.”

“Oh. Why?”

He asked the question as though he already knew the answer. He couldn’t, though, unless he was just very perceptive. Either way, my issues with my parents were not up for discussion. “More money in it, I suppose. I can still create, but be able to eat dinner, too. Win-win, right?”

Sebastian smiled and I felt less creeped out this time. He was being awfully nice, escorting me around when everyone else would have ignored me.

My phone dinged with a text message and I smiled an apology, digging it out of my bra. Embarrassing, but Ruby insisted no purses at parties. They always got lost, or you put them down, got drunk, and your friends spent half the night searching for it. It was a good rule, except for the finding a place to tuck your cell phone problem.

Sebastian raised his eyebrows, letting his gaze linger a little too long on the cleavage I had in this dress, but maybe that was the point of most of Ruby’s clothes. The text message wasn’t from my roommate, as I’d hoped, but from a girl I knew from home—Marla.

Thought I saw you at QR’s Aussie Open party. U here?

I typed a response quickly, curious what she wanted and why she didn’t just come and find me.

Yep. Where are you?

“Another drink?” Sebastian asked politely.

“Sure.”

Can you meet me out by the last tiki?

1 min.

I took the sweet mixture of whiskey and soda from Sebastian. “Thanks for not making me wander around like a loser. I’ve got to go check on a friend.”

“Wait, what? Where are you going?” The way his gaze surveyed the area, as though searching for someone specific, tightened my nerves. He dropped his arm, forcing a smile. “I mean, I was enjoying talking to you.”

Right. Sebastian Blair enjoyed getting to know me. His reputation was only slightly less infamous than Quinn’s, but less often forgiven since he hadn’t just injured out of the pro tennis tour. No girl with half a brain went near either one of them, not without clear eyes and a whole box of condoms. At the moment, I had neither.

I mean, I still had my brain, but my eyes were pretty blurry. And I didn’t have a single condom.

“My friend Marla needs to talk to me. Gotta go, girl code and all that. Thanks again.”

I left him at the bar, an irritated wrinkle between his too-groomed eyebrows, and headed toward the sand. The stairs tripped me up a little, telling me it was time to take at least an hour break from the booze, but finding Marla wasn’t too hard.

A lone figure hunched in the sand, golden grains sticking to her slinky black dress. Shadows hid her face; the circle of flickering firelight ended a few feet away. Marla and I hadn’t been great friends in high school—we were more competitors than anything, both for valedictorian and cheerleading captain—but our friendship had warmed since coming to Whitman. We grabbed coffee occasionally, kept up on gossip. Wallowing over a horrid professor’s inability to make the slightest bit of philosophy even mildly interesting had allowed us to leave high school behind once and for all.

“Hey, Marla. What are you doing out here alone?”

“Jack broke up with me,” she choked, swallowing what sounded like a fountain of tears. “And I thought coming to the party thrown by his stupid frat brothers, maybe hooking up with one of them, would show him I didn’t care.”

Standing over her felt awkward, but sitting would recreate the sand issue I’d managed to shake once tonight. Jack and Marla had been an item since like, fourth grade. Literally. The statement didn’t even sound plausible. “He broke up with you? Why?”

Marla shrugged, sobbing quietly and shaking her head. I put a hand down, my fingertips brushing soft brown curls.

“I can’t even say it. Some bullshit cliché about sowing wild oats.”

“Well…so you decided to come here tonight and sow some of your own?” She nodded. “What happened?”

“One of his friends saw me come in—they checked my invitation twice to make sure I hadn’t forged it because they knew he’d dumped me, but he just forgot to take it back. You know the house rules about invitations, if you have one, you’re in, so…” Marla heaved a shaking breath. “A few minutes ago a guy came to get me, said Jack wanted to talk to me, that he thought he’d made a big mistake. But when I went in the room, Jack was fucking some gorgeous, tall girl with the biggest tits I’ve ever seen.”

Nausea swirled in my gut, mixing badly with the alcohol. Her imagery was a little too good, and that moment wasn’t something I wanted to see through Marla’s eyes. Cripes, that’s harsh. Pushing aside my aversion to sitting on the sand, especially sand in such close proximity to a bunch of drunken frat guys, I dropped gingerly beside her. Her hand closed around mine, cold and trembling. “So what are you doing out here?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. I thought about randomly hooking up with one of the guys, but…it wouldn’t make me feel better. Plus, I kind of hate them all.”

The sound of her crying increased, making me swallow hard a few times as her sorrow infected me. I’d been through a breakup in high school that had been rough, and I hadn’t seen anything as horrible as she’d witnessed tonight. It was clear she needed to go home. Maybe she just needed a little help.

I pulled out my cell phone and punched in the number for our Sober Sister line, even though Marla wasn’t a DE, and prayed Annette wasn’t on duty. When Brooke answered, I let out a relieved sigh. “Hey, Brooke. It’s Emilie. Yeah, I’m fine, but a friend of mine is in a bit of a pickle…a jam. Trouble.” I rolled my eyes at Marla, who managed a wobbly smile in return. “Do you mind? I’ll really owe you one. Okay. Thanks…where are we?”

I bit my lip, knowing the chances that Brooke would spill about our outing to Quinn’s. The girl had a good heart but no sense of propriety when irresistible gossip was involved. “Um, before I tell you, let me remind you about the Sober Sister code…no telling anything about anyone you pick up unless they don’t care.”

Total crap. The code should have read “unless it’s funny,” because that was pretty much how it worked. But Brooke agreed not to say a word, so I told her we were at Quinn’s. She promised to meet Marla out front in twenty minutes.

Annette’s head was going to spin off into another dimension when she found out. It was too much to hope that in a sorority house filled with eighty girls, no one would let it slip. At least she and I weren’t really close to begin with. I mean, I liked her okay, but we weren’t friends.

“Come on,” I said, standing up and hauling Marla to her feet beside me. Instead of threading our way back through the crowded house filled with staring eyes, we stomped through the soft sand and scraggly grass that reached fingers toward the massive house.

A figure down by the water, little more than a dark shadow among shadows, caught my eye. It looked like a boy, and very few had the tall, lean, undeniably tough body of Quinn Rowland. He stood staring out at the horizon, his shoulders straight like he wanted to challenge the waves crashing at his feet. The posture reminded me of the way he’d played tennis. Like he could stick out his jaw and take any punch, keep getting up and hitting the ball back until his opponent simply ran out of steam.