The Complete Private Collection: Private; Invitation Only; Untouchable; Confessions; Inner Circle; Legacy; Ambition; Revelation; Last Christmas; Paradise ... The Book of Spells; Ominous; Vengeance (239 page)

“Yep,” I said.

“Reed, I’m so sorry we didn’t believe you,” Noelle said.

“Whatever,” I replied. “Is there any more cheese?”

Dash rushed to get me some.

“Thanks,” I said, shoving an entire slice into my mouth.

I could feel them all looking at one another with concern, eyeing me warily.

“Do you think she has post-traumatic stress disorder or something?” Kiran asked.

“You guys, I’m fine. I’m just starving. And I really want to take
a bath and then slather myself in aloe,” I said. “And then I want to sleep. For about two days.”

“I think we can make that happen,” Sawyer said.

“Dash, get your car,” Noelle demanded, standing up with her hand on my back. “Let’s get Reed home.”

I never saw the inside of the hospital. Mr. Lange hired a private nurse named Caroline and flew her in from the States. A big, comfy-looking woman, she was already at the house when we got back from the Ryans’. She got me cleaned up, aloed, and into bed in record time. Then she put in the call to my parents and handed me the phone so that we could all weep in relief together and make plans to see each other the second I was healthy enough to make the trip back to the States. All night long Caroline took my vitals and made me sip water here and there before I drifted back to sleep. She also had this carrot-scented balm that she applied to my entire body every hour on the hour. It felt amazing and it was actually healing my sunburn. I was still red, but it didn’t hurt as much and it looked a lot less awful. Which was nice, since people kept dropping by to visit and I didn’t like the idea of everyone seeing me looking like that horrifying dead girl from
The Ring.

Caroline was also big on sleep. No one could stay for more than a few minutes, which was nice, because I definitely needed my z’s. I was in such a deep sleep when Upton arrived the afternoon after Mrs. Ryan’s arrest, I didn’t even hear him come in, didn’t know he was there, until Caroline woke me up trying to get rid of him. When I peeled my tired eyes open, she had one sturdy hand on his chest and was shoving him backward toward the door of my room.

“It’s okay,” I said, pushing myself up on my pillows. “Please. Let him in.”

Caroline looked at me and
tsk
ed under her breath. “Mr. Lange said to give you whatever you wanted . . . but I’m coming back in fifteen minutes.” She looked at Upton in a scolding way and lifted one chubby finger. “She needs her rest.”

“Of course,” Upton replied.

He had a glass vase full of lilies, which he placed on the table at my bedside. Then he took a step back as if afraid to get too close, shoving his hands into the back pockets of his jeans. He had shaved since I’d seen him last, but he still looked tired. Almost as tired as I felt.

“Are you sure this is all right?” he asked, his brow knitting.

“What?” I asked.

“Me being here,” he said, his voice grave. “I’m sure you hate me, and with good reason. That’s why I’ve stayed away. I assumed you didn’t want to see me.”

I blinked. “Why would I hate you?”

“Because this is all my fault,” Upton replied, clearly distressed. “All of it. She was after you because of me.”

I chuckled and pushed my hair back from my face with both hands. “Upton, it’s not your fault she’s crazy.”

“But it is! You said it yourself the day after you got out of the hospital,” he said, throwing out a hand and pacing away. “You said you weren’t going to wait around for one of my jilted girlfriends to kill you and you were right. It just happened to be a girlfriend you didn’t know about.”

“Upton,” I said calmly.

“I’m going to make this up to you, Reed. I swear it,” he said. “If there’s anything I can do—”

“Upton!”

“What?” He finally stopped moving, stopped rambling.

“Caroline’s going to be back in thirteen minutes,” I said. “Are you going to kiss me or what?”

Upton’s entire face relaxed. He sat down on the bed next to me, touched my scorched cheek delicately with his palm, and kissed my cracked, blistered lips. It would have been romantic if it hadn’t been so agonizing. I winced and pulled away.

“Okay, ow,” I said.

“Sorry,” he replied, biting his lip.

“Maybe just cuddling would be a better idea,” I said.

“Sounds good to me.” He leaned back against the headboard and pulled me toward his side, wrapping his arms around me. I nestled against him until my head was perfectly cradled in the crook of his arm, and took a deep, calming breath.

“So tell me, what’s going on out there in the world?” I asked.

“Well, they let Poppy go,” he said. “Apparently Calis—Mrs. Ryan—planted that cell phone in her bag.”

“What about Red Beard and Stilted English?” I asked, fiddling with a fold in my sheet.

“Who?” he said.

“Marshall and Gravois,” I clarified.

“Both alive. Though Marshall barely,” he replied. “And both going to jail for a very long time.”

“Good,” I replied.

Upton lightly kissed the top of my head and sighed. “I just don’t get it. That night, after she found us in her stateroom, we had this long conversation and I thought she was okay,” Upton said. “She actually wished us every happiness and I believed her. And then, apparently, she turned around and shoved you off the back of the boat.”

I shuddered and Upton held me a bit tighter. “Sorry,” he said.

“It’s okay,” I replied. “I guess people do crazy things for love.”

Upton laughed. “She never loved me. She was just obsessed.”

“Oh, Upton. You’re so adorable,” I said, tilting my head up to look at him.

“Am I?” he said, raising his eyebrows.

“Haven’t you figured it out yet?” I said. “Everyone loves you.”

Upton pulled back a bit to see me better. “Even you?”

I sighed, my heart full. “Yes. Even me.”

He smiled. “Oh, bollocks.”

“What?” I asked.

“I’d really like to kiss you,” he said.

I grinned and lifted my right arm. There was a wide band of white skin that had been protected by my blindfold most of my days on the island. “You can kiss me there.”

He tilted his head, brought my wrist to his lips, and kissed the spot on the inside, right near the heel of my hand. A shiver of delight raced up my arm.

“Good?” he asked.

“Perfect,” I replied.

So he kissed it again. And again and again and again. Until I dissolved in a fit of giggles and forgot all about the island, the kidnappers, the sunburn, and everything bad in the world.

I rinsed the two-hundred-dollar-an-ounce moisturizing masque from my face and blotted my sensitive skin with a towel. When I looked into the mirror, Kiran was staring at me from over my shoulder, a red silk robe cinched around her waist. It was her product, after all, so she had a vested interest in making sure it had done the trick. Unfortunately, her disappointment was written all over her face.

“Well, at least we got your hair looking normal,” she said in a resigned way.

“Shut up!” I said, whipping the towel at her.

“I’m just kidding!” she replied, her arms crossed in front of her face to protect herself. “You look a thousand percent better.”

“Really?” I glanced at my reflection. After two days my face was almost entirely healed, except for my nose, which was red and peeling. My lips were still cracked and they stung 24/7, but the blisters were gone, which made eating a lot easier. And kissing. Which
Upton and I had tested out earlier that evening while Caroline was on a break.

“Really,” Noelle said, appearing in the bathroom doorway. “By the time we get back to Easton you’ll be almost recognizable.”

Easton. A little shiver went through me at the thought of seeing Josh again. Had he heard about what had happened? I had a feeling that none of the girls had called him, and guys, as a rule, were less reliable gossips. I had to believe that if Dash, Gage, or West had reached him with the news he would have called me. Or at least e-mailed. But there was nothing. Over two weeks since I’d seen him and not one word.

Not that it mattered. I had Upton. And Upton was there for me every day.

“Come on. Taylor’s mixed a special color for you and she won’t shut up about it,” Noelle said. She gathered her hair up atop her head and shoved a hair pick into it to hold it there. Which it miraculously did.

I followed her and Kiran back into my room, where Taylor, Tiffany, and Amberly were hanging out, flipping through magazines as Noelle’s iPod blasted music from the dock on my dresser. Noelle had pulled in a few of the chairs from the dining room, and Taylor had set up a foot spa in front of one of them. Laid out on the floor was her professional manicure/pedicure kit with dozens of tools perfectly lined up and ready to go.

“I never understood why you learned to give pedicures,” I said as I took a seat in the chair. The muscles in my feet let out an almost
audible sigh as the warm, bubbly water closed around them. “Don’t you guys all go to salons to get them done?”

“My mother has this woman Charlotte come in and do her nails every week, and when I was a kid I was kinda fascinated by it, so she taught me,” Taylor said with a shrug. Her blond curls were held back with a skinny black headband, and she wore a black spaghetti-strap nightgown with eyelet cutouts at the hem. She grabbed the bottle of polish she had mixed for me and shook it up, inspecting it closely as the polishes incorporated.

“It came in handy at Billings when there was too much snow to go out and nothing else to do,” Kiran said, dropping onto my bed and reaching for a chocolate from one of the many open boxes we had tossed there.

“Ah, Billings. I can’t wait to get home,” Tiffany said, tilting her head back as Amberly filed her fingernails.

Kiran and Taylor exchanged a look. They had left Billings last year, never to return. I wondered if, all protestations aside, they actually missed it. I’d only been kicked out for a month, and I definitely had.

“I’ve been thinking about it, and Reed, I think you should move in with me,” Noelle said. She dropped onto the bed near the pillows, sending the boxes of chocolates—and Kiran—bouncing.

“What?” we all blurted in unison.

“You’re going to give up your single?” Tiffany demanded, sitting up so fast Amberly dropped the emery board.

Noelle rolled her eyes like it was no big deal. “I can’t make her and Amberly live together. They’ll kill each other.”

There was an uncomfortable silence, filled only by the sound of the bubbling foot spa. My last roommate had, after all, tried to kill me. At this point there could be a club—a small, very exclusive club—of people who’d tried to off Reed Brennan. I wondered what the meetings would be like—Ariana, Sabine, and Mrs. Ryan all gathered in the same room comparing notes. The very idea made me shudder.

“Bad choice of words,” Noelle said. “But you know what I mean. We’ll just move Astrid in with Amberly and get those girls out of that horrid triple, and Reed can live with me.”

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“Clearly someone has to be looking out for you at all times,” Noelle said, flipping open a copy of
Vanity Fair
on the comforter in front of her. “Who else is going to do it? Besides, if it wasn’t for me convincing you to stay after the whole near-drowning episode, you wouldn’t have even been here to get kidnapped. I think that makes you my responsibility.”

She said this all very cavalierly, like it wasn’t the biggest deal, but I knew her. I knew she never would have said a word about it if she didn’t feel horribly guilty. Of course, it wasn’t her fault. Not really. I made my own decisions. I was the one who had decided to stay. But I didn’t say it. Dwelling on it would probably just piss her off.

Everyone looked at me. It was as if Noelle was asking me to the prom in front of all our friends and everyone watching was on the edge of their seats, wondering if I was going to break her heart. While I doubted that Noelle had anything emotionally invested in what I was going to say next, I felt suddenly nervous.

“Um, okay,” I said.

“Cool!” Amberly blurted, then turned beet red.

Everyone laughed. Clearly she wanted to room with me about as much as I wanted to room with her. Suddenly I found myself looking forward to getting back to school. I couldn’t wait to move back to Billings, to settle in with Noelle. Living with her was going to be amazing. I just knew it. And even if it wasn’t, it couldn’t be worse than living in that crappy single in Pemberly.

“Then it’s settled. But I get the bed by the window,” Noelle said, lifting a finger.

“Of course you do,” Kiran replied with a touch of sarcasm.

“Oh, turn this up! I love this song!” Amberly gushed, waving a hand at the iPod.

Kiran got up and strolled over to the dock, cranking up the volume. It was some doofy pop song I couldn’t believe Noelle had downloaded, but before I could make a crack about it, Amberly was singing along, bopping her head to the music as she filed Tiffany’s nails. Soon the rest of us were watching her, trying not to burst out laughing so she would continue obliviously, amusing us for as long as possible. Finally she must have realized how quiet we had all become, because she looked up at us and turned pink all over again.

“What? I’m a
good
singer!”

We all burst out laughing, and Kiran tossed me a piece of chocolate. As I sat back to enjoy my pedicure, I looked around at my friends and realized this was the last time we’d all be together for a long time—maybe even forever. For a split second it felt like old times. Like the
days when Ariana was my friend—before I knew what she had done to Thomas, before she had threatened my life. It felt like those rare nights when we were all hanging out, letting go, keeping the outside world at bay.

I missed those times. But maybe I could have them again. Not with the same people, of course, but still. I was headed back to school. Back to Billings. And while a lot of my relationships there needed some serious repairing, after everything I’d been through on this trip, the fact that my Billings sisters had wrongfully ousted me no longer seemed like the biggest deal.