Rush Read online

  Rush

  Tori Minard

  Cover art by Tori Minard from photo by © Efe Can Altuncu

  Enchanted Lyre Books

  Chapter 1

  Caroline

  This party wasn’t exactly foreign territory, but I felt a little like an alien anyway. Someone like me, someone who doesn’t drink, well, we sometimes feel out of place at frat parties, especially when they’re crowded wall to wall with people we mostly don’t know.

  I hesitated in the doorway of the cramped apartment, although my boyfriend, Trent, was already shouldering his way into the room. The hosts were buddies of his, frat brothers, and you’d think I would know most of their guests, but I didn’t. They were a cold sea of indifferent faces...indifferent to me, at least.

  The noise level almost deafened me. Music blared from someone’s iPod, and everyone in the room seemed to be talking at once. A thick haze of cigarette smoke hung in the air. I tugged on Trent’s sleeve, causing him to pause and look down at me.

  “It’s too crowded!” I yelled above the din. “There’s no room for us!”

  He grinned down at me. “Sure there is.”

  I looked around uneasily, hating that he’d sprung this thing on me at the last minute. When he’d picked me up at my dorm, I’d still thought we were going out to dinner. If I’d known we were going to a party, I would have dressed for it. I would have done something with my impossible hair.

  The room was filled with perfectly fashionable, trendy girls who reminded me of my sorority sisters. All of them were dressed in the latest styles, except the ones wearing sexy Halloween costumes bought at the local discount store. Honestly, I sometimes wondered how I’d managed to be accepted by a sorority in the first place. I wasn’t skinny, I hated wearing heels and revealing clothes, and my super-curly hair refused, absolutely refused, to submit to flat-ironing. I was hopeless in the looks department.

  “We won’t be here long,” Trent yelled. “I just have to pick up something from Talbot.”

  His friend Greg Talbot was one of the party hosts. I got up on my tiptoes and craned my neck, looking for him, but saw no sign of him.

  “Maybe the kitchen,” Trent said, leading me deeper into the apartment.

  Girls gave him openly admiring glances as we passed. He had that all-American look, blond and blue-eyed with a great body, and girls were always eyeing him. I couldn’t make up my mind whether I was proud of him for being so hot or jealous over the way other women threw themselves at him. Right now, I was going with jealous.

  Still, I contained my urge to glare at each girl in the room. We reached the kitchen, which was just as crowded as the living room. A guy I didn’t know stood by the fridge, passing out canned beer and red plastic cups of some kind of mixed drink. A girl with wide blond streaks in her perfectly straight brown hair leaned against the worn laminate counter. I smiled hesitantly at her, but her gaze drifted across my face and past me without an instant’s hesitation, as if I were invisible.

  All righty, then. Guess we weren’t going to be BFFs. I looked around for Talbot, hoping we could find him and get out of here ASAP.

  “I’m going to try the bedrooms,” Trent said in my ear.

  He hauled me out of the kitchen and into a tiny side hall that had three doors leading off it. The first door stood open, revealing the bathroom. Trent entered the second room without knocking.

  I flinched. Jeez, you never knew what people were doing in the bedrooms at parties like this, and he just walks in? We could be interrupting something really personal.

  Smoke hung in the air here, too. Illegal smoke. Four guys sat on the stained Berber carpet at the foot of a queen-size bed, passing around a bong. I’d only smelled pot smoke a few times before, but I’d never forget that unique odor, and I recognized it now.

  Two of the guys were people I recognized but didn’t know well. One was Talbot, his dishwater blond hair perfectly styled as always. The fourth, a black-haired guy with a vaguely bohemian look, I’d never seen before.

  Trent barged into the room and stopped cold, staring at the group on the floor. “Max. What the fuck are you doing here?”

  The fourth guy, the one I’d never seen before, looked up with an unsurprised expression on his face. “Smoking weed. What does it look like?”

  “What are you doing at Central Willamette?”

  Max smiled lazily. “Same thing all the other students are doing. Why? You have a problem with me being here?”

  Trent’s grasp on my hand tightened so much it started to hurt. “You don’t belong here. You need to leave.”

  “Trent!” I tugged on his hand. He was being an ass, an incredibly rude ass.

  He ignored me. “I don’t know what you’re up to, but you’d better get the hell out of this town.”

  Max’s black brows rose mockingly. “I didn’t know you owned it.” His gaze slid to me and then down my body in a leisurely examination. “Who’s the girl?”

  “This is my girlfriend, Caroline.”

  “Ah. Girlfriend. Guess I’m behind on the family gossip.”

  Family? This guy was part of Trent’s family? I glanced, baffled, at my boyfriend’s angry profile. Who was Max, anyway, and how was he related to Trent? I’d never heard a word about him, even though Trent and I’d been dating nine months already. A year if you counted summer vacay.

  “There’s a reason for that,” Trent said.

  “Aren’t you going to introduce me?” Max continued to stare at me.

  “No.”

  “Trent, don’t be rude.” I stepped forward, holding out my free hand. “I’m Caroline Winters.”

  “Max Kincaid.” His hand clasped mine, his skin warm and slightly callused.

  A strange jolt of energy seemed to travel from his flesh into mine. I stifled a gasp and pulled my hand back to rub it surreptitiously on my jeans.

  “I’m Trent’s stepbrother,” Max said.

  I fixed Trent with a glower. “You have a stepbrother you never told me about?”

  “It’s okay.” Max gave me that lazy smile. “I’m the dirty family secret.”

  Trent turned pointedly away from his stepbrother. “Talbot, you got that thing for me?”

  “Yeah, just a sec.” Talbot set the bong on the carpet and got up.

  Max picked up the bong and took a long hit, holding his breath and then blowing the smoke out in a slow stream. He held the bong up in my direction. “Caro, you want a hit?”

  No-one ever called me Caro. And I didn’t do drugs, or even smoke tobacco. “Uh...no, thanks.”

  “She doesn’t do drugs, asshole,” Trent growled.

  Max shrugged and passed the bong to the next guy. “Whatever, bro.”

  “You knew I was going here. You had to know. So why are you really here? What do you want?”

  Max laughed. “I want to take some classes. Believe it or not, I don’t make all my decisions with you in mind.”

  The other guys in the room were starting to look uncomfortable at the thick tension. Talbot rummaged around in a dresser drawer and pulled out a sheet of paper, which he gave to Trent. “It’s due on Friday.”

  “Cool, man. I’ll have it to you Thursday morning.”

  I sighed. He was doing papers for other students again, taking money for it no doubt, even though he didn’t need the cash. I’d asked him to stop, and he’d said he would.

  Max was still giving me the eye. He caught my gaze and smiled, his eyes going sort of half-lidded and sleepy. Damn, he was beautiful. He had an angular jaw scruffy with dark stubble, straight nose, high cheekbones and long, wavy black hair that fell in his eyes. Spectacular eyes, in some dark color I couldn’t make out in the dimly lit bedroom but large and beautifully shaped, clearly framed by heavy black lashes.

  I shouldn’t be staring at him. I
was taken and truly happy with my boyfriend. So why couldn’t I stop looking at Max?

  He wore some kind of beaded necklace with a silver pendant on it that just peeked out of the neckline of his charcoal button shirt. I couldn’t see the design of the pendant, just that it was silver. There were a couple of slender leather cords wrapped around his right wrist. Trent would never wear that kind of jewelry—I mean, beads?—or let his hair get that long. It was weird, to be honest, and normally I wouldn’t be attracted to a guy who dressed the way Max did. I forced myself to look at something else. Anything.

  Trent pointed at Max. “You need to get out of this town.”

  “Ain’t gonna happen.”

  “Listen here, you—”

  I took a deep breath and opened my mouth to tell Trent to cool it. Unfortunately, that breath was laden with pot smoke and I started coughing uncontrollably.

  “C’mon, let’s get out of here.” Trent took me by the elbow and hustled me out of the room.

  “Bye, Caro,” Max said.

  I gave him a half-hearted wave as Trent dragged me through the doorway and into the micro-hall.

  The party was even more crowded now, something I wouldn’t have thought physically possible. People stood shoulder to shoulder, many of them not talking to each other, just staring into space as they sipped from their plastic cups. Was this really supposed to be fun? I didn’t get it.

  Talbot’s apartment let directly onto a covered outdoor hallway. Outside, the air smelled sweet and clean. I took another deep breath to rid myself of the lingering smoke in my lungs. It was a cool October evening, but I could feel a greater chill in the air that heralded the coming winter. It had been a dry fall, but soon the rain would begin. It rained a lot in Western Oregon winters.

  “You said you weren’t going to do papers anymore,” I said as we walked side by side down the stairs to the ground level of the apartment complex. We didn’t hold hands or put our arms around each other’s waists. Trent didn’t like public touching.

  “I know,” he said. “But Talbot begged me. He’s really worried about this one.”

  “It’s not even the middle of the term. Is he going to come running to you every time he has an assignment?”

  Trent looked annoyed. “I don’t know.”

  He was helping people cheat, and I couldn’t understand why he’d do that. But I didn’t want to argue with him about it tonight. We’d been apart for most of three months, with only texting and occasional phone calls to keep us in touch and we’d only been back together for a few weeks. Let the drama wait.

  “My stepbrother is bad news,” he said. “You should stay away from him.”

  So much for letting the drama wait.

  “How is it you never told me about him?”

  “I hate his guts,” Trent said matter-of-factly. “I never talk about him unless I have to.”

  “Yeah, but we’ve been dating for a while now. I told you all about my family.”

  “Your family probably doesn’t have anyone like Max in it.”

  We reached the bottom of the stairs and started across the central courtyard of the complex. The ground was only beginning to lose its summer-dry texture of cured concrete. A scattered handful of brown leaves dotted the grass.

  “Every family has a Max,” I said, thinking of my Aunt Jo.

  Trent snorted. “No, they don’t.”

  “I have an alcoholic aunt who lives on the street and does drugs.”

  He glanced down at me. “Interesting, but it still doesn’t compare to Max.”

  “What did he do that’s so bad?”

  Trent shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “But—”

  “No, Caroline. Max is off limits.”

  I stopped in the middle of the walkway. “Trent, I’m your girlfriend. I need to know what kind of family you come from.”

  He gave a tremendous sigh. “Look, we don’t talk about him much. He did some really bad shit and ran away when he was sixteen. It’s a seriously touchy subject.”

  “So touchy you all pretend he doesn’t exist?”

  “Yeah. That’s about it.”

  “That’s awful.”

  He glowered at me. “What do you care, anyway? Do you like him?”

  “No.”

  “You seemed to. You couldn’t stop staring at him.”

  Oh, God. Had it been that obvious?

  “I was curious. He gave me the creeps, though. I don’t like him, honest.”

  “Good. His own dad hates him, so that should tell you something.”

  I stared up at him, both appalled and fascinated. What kind of family would exile one of its own children? What had Max done to justify such treatment? I wanted to know more, but I could see that Trent wasn’t going to budge and if I pushed him it would probably result in that fight I was trying to avoid.

  “Okay,” I said. “Fine. We won’t talk about him.”

  “Thank you.” His voice was full of relief. “Let’s get dinner.”

  ***

  We ended up at Primo’s, a little Italian place with great pizza and lasagna. It was packed, as usual for a Friday night. Students loved it, partly for its cheap prices, so it was always busy even though it really lacked in the decor. The place was like a time-warp with its dark walls and floor and the fake black leather on its banquettes. It even had plastic greenery in “planters” between each booth.

  After the waitress had seated us and taken our orders, Trent pulled a small, black velvet box from his jeans pocket and handed it to me across the table top. I took it with some hesitation. It looked an awful lot like a ring box.

  “An anniversary present,” he said. We’d been together for one year now.

  “What is it?” Could it be an engagement ring? Probably not. We hadn’t known each other long enough for that...or maybe we had. The idea of marriage made me uneasy, though.

  “Open it and find out.”

  I opened the lid as carefully as if some creature waited inside to bite me. This was shaping up to be the weirdest college term ever, even surpassing my first. So far, nothing had gone as I’d expected.

  A set of pearl and garnet earrings winked up at me from the black velvet. I gaped at the jewelry.

  “They’re the real thing,” he said.

  “They’re gorgeous.”

  “You like?”

  “I—yeah, of course. I love them. But, Trent, they must be so expensive.”

  He waved a negligent hand. “Don’t worry about that. I can afford it.”

  Maybe he could, but I couldn’t afford to reciprocate. My parents made pretty good money, but nowhere near what his parents did.

  “I have a present for you, too,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t be disappointed in the book I’d bought for him.

  “You can give it to me when I take you home.”

  The waitress returned with our lasagna. I dug in my fork as the savory smell of garlic, meat sauce and cheese filled my nostrils. The earrings were lovely. I just wished I could give him something equally expensive.

  “About Max,” he said.

  “We don’t have to talk about that if you don’t want to.”

  “I just want you to know he’s dangerous, Caroline.”

  I raised my eyebrows skeptically. “Dangerous? He looked like a regular guy to me.”

  “Well, he’s not. He’s a manipulator and a liar, and he hates me. He’ll go after you, too, if you let him. So stay away from him.”

  “You realize you’ve just made me more curious, don’t you?”

  “I’m not kidding.” He looked so sober that I couldn’t continue teasing him.

  “Okay, fine. I wasn’t planning to hook up with him or anything.”

  “Like I said, he’s a manipulator. He’ll probably try to get to you now that he knows about you.”

  He sounded like a cartoon villain, or one of those evil alternative universe characters who always seemed to show up on TV sci-fi series. “Does he have a g
ood twin in an alternate universe? One with less facial hair, perhaps?”

  He blinked at me, apparently baffled. “What?”

  “Never mind.” Note to self: Trent doesn’t get my sci-fi references. Most of my sorority sisters didn’t, either. “But you’ve got to know you can’t kick him out of town. You don’t have that kind of power.”

  “Maybe if I make him miserable enough, he’ll leave.” Trent’s eyes glittered in the low light.

  I thought about Max, unloved by his own father, apparently alone in the world. What had he done that was so terrible? Drugs? Well, yeah, there was the weed, but that didn’t seem like enough reason to hate on him. Aunt Jo was a drug addict, and although we didn’t talk to her anymore, we didn’t despise her.

  Mom and Dad kicked her out of our house. They moved and changed their phone number so she couldn’t contact us anymore. Maybe we—they—did despise her. I’d never stopped loving her, but I didn’t tell my parents that.

  Still, I didn’t think drugs would be enough reason for Max’s father to hate him. Violence? Had he killed someone?

  Trent’s lurid hints had aroused my curiosity and now I wouldn’t be able to let it go until I found out the truth.

  ***

  After Primo’s, Trent took me back to my dorm. On my floor, people were running in and out of their rooms, shouting in the hall, slamming doors and generally making a huge amount of noise as they moved in. We had some second and third year students, like me, so some of us knew each other. The rest were freshmen.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see a skinny brunette giving Trent a look up and down as we passed her, like I wasn’t even there. We were holding hands and everything. You’d think she’d have better taste than to mack on my boyfriend right in front of me. I glared at her and she turned red.

  My room wasn’t much of a haven from the noise. The walls in the dorms seemed to be made of cardboard because sound went right through them. But at least no-one was staring at us.

  Trent flopped down on my bed and put his hands behind his head, grinning at me. “Come here.”

  “In a second. I want to give you your present.”

  I crouched down to pull the wrapped book from under the bed. He sat up as I handed it to him. We hadn’t seen each other all summer. He’d gone home to his parents’ house in Montana and I’d gone back to Portland. It had been a long three months with only texting and phone calls to keep us in touch.