*~*Four Score by Lili St. Germain Release Blitz & Giveaway*~*

Love and hate aren’t all that different.

 

Two sides of the same coin, the yin and the yang.

 

Once upon a time, Jason Ross loved me. And now that he knows what I’ve done, I see the love and the hate warring within him.

 

I see the way he looks at me.

 

The way he wonders how I could do the things I’ve done.

 

I hear it in the way he begs me to stop, to leave this life and run away with him.

 

But there’s only one way I’m leaving LA.

 

And that’ll be when Dornan and the rest of his sons are dead and buried.

 

Jase might forgive me for what I’ve done.

 

But will he forgive me for the crimes I’m yet to commit?

“You don’t need to be sorry for anything,” I mumble, shaking my head. “Just don’t talk about Elliot like that, okay? If not for him, I really would be dead.”

“Well,” Jase says, his entire demeanor gentler and more cautious as he continues to glance at my wrists. “I suppose I should be thanking him, then.”



I smile sadly.

“I mean, I won’t thank him,” Jase adds quickly. “That fucker wants to kill me. But for you. That was a good thing he did.”

“Yeah,” I say sheepishly. “Well, he knows how I feel—” I catch my faux pas — “felt about you. It’s the reason he broke up with me.”



Jase’s eyes light up at that, his eyebrows practically touching the ceiling above us. “He broke up with you because of me?”

“I kept calling out your name in bed,” I explain. Jase laughs a low, throaty sound that makes me blush as I realize what I’ve just said. “Not like that.”

Jase is still laughing and choking on a mouthful of vodka at the same time. “Are you sure?” he manages in between laughing and coughing.



I roll my eyes. “Nightmares, Jason. Not the other thing.”

His smile vanishes and he straightens again, any bit of humor or lightness completely wiped from his face. Idiot! I fervently wish I hadn’t said what I said.

“

Aw, fuck,” he says, frowning again. “I’m sorry.”

“Stop saying sorry,” I admonish him with a small smile, trying to diffuse the tension that’s once again settled on us like a pillow held forcefully to the face. “You have nothing to be sorry for.”



Only me, and my lies on top of more lies.



He doesn’t seem convinced. “I do.”



I shake my head. “No, you don’t. You almost got killed by your own family trying to save me. There’s no shame in that.”
There it is again. We’ve been dancing around that afternoon, that day when I almost died, that five or so hours of horror and pain.

“I should have fought harder,” he said, his shoulders slumping. “I go over it in my head all the time, you know. I could have taken the gun and shot him. I could have gotten us out somehow.”

I place a steady hand on his knee. He’s wearing thick denim jeans, but I can still feel the warmth of his skin radiating underneath.

“There was nothing either of us could have done differently.” It’s taken me years and many breakdowns to realize that neither of us were to blame for what Dornan orchestrated that day. I’ll forever regret that I couldn’t somehow save my father and the woman he loved, but I forgave myself for being powerless in the wake of our collective destruction around the same time that the abortionist was sucking the remnants of a product of rape from my womb.

I’m momentarily transported back to the past, to the moment the mask was lifted from my face a little under six years ago, the moment the doctor smiled underneath her surgical mask and told me it was done. I’d been emptied of their sins, painfully absolved, but it was still many years before I’d been filled again with the hope of my vengeance against them.

So when Jase clamps his grip on my hand and squeezes tightly, it’s almost as if I’m falling, tumbling back into the present to sit beside him, my hand at his knee, an angry film covering each of his eyes.

“I should have killed them all the first chance I got,” he says, his face twisted into a mask of rage and pain.

I lean forward, placing my hand on his hot cheek, and when he doesn’t recoil, I smile.

“There’s still time,” I whisper softly, to the first boy I ever loved.