Strung Out (Needles and Pins #1) Read Online Free PDF Page A

or thoughts, imagined I’d find him high with his pupils dark and dilated, his hands shaking, and operating in some confused, fugue-like state in which he didn’t even recognize me!
    “This
is
Wednesday.” I bit the three words through clenched teeth.
    “Gage? Who is she?” The slutty blonde.
    Distracting myself, I reached for the pop up handle of my luggage, intent on finding the couch to crash on I’d mentioned earlier.
    “Where are you going?” He moved between me and the door, evidently misunderstanding.
    It wasn’t as if I was at liberty to leave. Funny the difference a couple of months could make in someone’s life. I would fall asleep dreaming of the fabulous five star hotel I could have stalked out and carried myself to if the timing of this situation had been a little farther into the future.
    “Just wait, Scar.” His hand landed on my upper arm, and he closed his fingers in a reassuring squeeze as he passed by me again.
    “You bring your car?” He spoke in low tones to the woman who sent at least her twelfth venomous look toward me. The two of them conversed quietly, and again he motioned for me to stay put as he escorted the other woman outside, presumably to the little red sports coupe that matched her little red shirt and shoes. I had assumed the car belonged to Gage when I’d walked past it in the drive.
    Wandering down the hall a bit, I peeked into impressive rooms until I came to a large kitchen. I crossed to the fridge, slid open the door, and was thankful to find an entire shelf of bottled waters. I’d almost emptied one when Gage entered the room.
    “You didn’t have to send your groupie home.”
    “She’s not a groupie.” He took on a hostile tone.
    “Girlfriend?”
    Maybe he was still offended, because he didn’t answer. Instead, he also nabbed a bottle of water, and the fridge made a soft thump as it glided closed. Truly, I shouldn’t have goaded him, but I couldn’t help myself. I was still furious over being left at LAX.
    “Whatever. I didn’t come to get in your way. I didn’t expect you to drop everything for me. But I thought you’d at least pick me up at the airport like you said.”
    “You should have texted.”
    “I DID.”
    “No! I didn’t get a text.” But guilt flashed across his face. He was remembering something. Perhaps his phone had died. Or perhaps he’d been too busy pounding blonde pussy to look!
    “Like you would have noticed.” I sucked down the last of the water. “Go get your phone. The texts are there.”
    For several alternating minutes, I’d seen glimpses of the old Gage. The boy I’d known. But now he exploded full-on into pompous-ass-rock-star mode. “Look, it’s after midnight. Why didn’t you arrange for a cab in the beginning?”
    “Because
y
ou offered
.” Crushing the plastic, I looked for a trashcan to dispose of it, but when I didn’t see one, I closed my fist tighter, abusing the bottle even more. “Furthermore, you
didn’t
give me your address. As if I would hype it all over the internet or something!”
    “I never know!”
    His eyes blazed, and I read in them past betrayals I could definitely relate to. But he had no right to believe that of me.
Or did he?
I was, after all, the spawn of my own mother. Women like Henni Smythe were the reason celebrities now had even their own relatives signing non-disclosure agreements.
    I dropped my gaze away from his, and it landed on his chest. His indecent state had been one of my disappointments earlier—that he would answer his door wearing the ‘engaging smile’ as the media had cleverly dubbed his sexy smirk, and with no care of his near nakedness. But whatever I felt now, prompting my eyes to skitter away from all of that skin, ink, and muscle confused me.
    Sure, I’d seen pictures of my rock star brother and marveled over the tattoos he’d collected. But seeing them on a computer screen and seeing them real on his bare, breathing body were two different things.
    “Where