The Devil Series Books 1-4 (Devil #1-4), page 78
When he walks away, my nipples are pinched so tight that I have to fold my arms over my chest as I walk out of the pool. And I’m pretty sure it’s not the air temperature that got them that way.
The party is to be held on the hotel’s long, sloping back lawn. It’s a black and white theme, over Graham’s strenuous objections. He was probably worried someone would enjoy it too much.
Thanks to my spray tan and lash extensions, I didn’t need a lot of makeup tonight, so it’s mostly a soft red lip and some highlighter. I pile my hair high on my head with a few loose strands escaping around my face—the sort of look men will laud for being low-maintenance and natural because they have no fucking clue how long it took. Those are the same guys who will tell you you’re lucky to be “naturally pretty” because you “don’t need all that shit other girls use,” never realizing you spent forty-five minutes on contour alone.
My white dress is sleeveless and fitted, with a v-cut down to my ribs. I lean closer to my reflection to ensure no tell-tale marks from last night are showing, like the hickeys I discovered on my breast and inner thigh this morning. And then I admire the nice hint of side boob revealed by the dress. Oddly, it’s Graham’s reaction I think of first before I shake my head and force myself to focus on Six instead.
I take the elevator downstairs with a small pit of dread in my stomach. When I leave with Six at the party’s end, it will undoubtedly be under Graham’s watchful eye and make me feel as if I’m doing something wrong. Honestly, how could I have chosen him last night? Do I have multiple personalities, one of whom is a deeply boring girl who’d rather talk about inflation than hook up with a rock star?
I walk out the back doors, and the first thing I see on the lawn is Graham, of course, dressed in head-to-toe black and discussing something with the caterer. For a moment—before disgust rushes in—I just look. He wears clothes like a dream and God that mouth is wasted on him. He should be on a movie screen with a mouth like that. Okay, maybe I don’t have multiple personalities. Just one that’s particularly shallow.
He turns then, as if sensing my gaze, and takes me in, eyes drifting from my face and then down—to my breasts, the curve of my waist, and back up. His nostrils flare as if he’s an animal who’s just picked up my scent.
“All set to seduce your rock star, then?” he asks.
For a second, I’d forgotten about Six entirely.
“Well, it would have been easier if you hadn’t nixed the tequila luge I wanted.”
His eyes fall closed. “I don’t think you’d need to get anyone drunk, Keeley,” he mutters. He reaches into a folder and puts a piece of paper in front of me. “We need to go over the seating plan.” He points at one table that is full of little .5 marks. “What’s this?”
I roll my eyes. “That’s the table for people with kids. You know, your concern about this is coming a little late in the day.”
“And they’re far from me?” he asks.
“Far from us both,” I reply. “Thank God.”
He raises a brow. “You don’t like kids?”
I feel a small sigh release somewhere inside me. I do like kids, actually, but since I don’t plan to have any, their presence always produces this tiny voice in the back of my head asking if I’ve chosen the right path. I’d rather not spend the rest of the evening trying to drown it out.
“It’s my understanding they get in the way of attending Coachella and taking spontaneous trips to Cabo.”
“That,” he replies, “is the first sensible thing I’ve heard you say in six weeks.”
The party is a refined, elegant affair that goes without a hitch. I’ll never admit this to Graham, but I suppose it’s a much more Ben and Gemma event than I’d have come up with if left to my own devices.
I also don’t need to admit this to Graham because he already knows and is gloating about it. “It appears a party held in LA isn’t the ‘opposite of fun’,” he says, stepping beside me.
I look up, up, up. It’s really hard to appear condescending or disdainful when you have to practically tip over backward to meet the guy’s eye. “Like you know what’s fun.”
“I didn’t hear any complaints last night.”
My head jerks up toward him again. “First of all, I thought we agreed that last night never happened.” I glance around me. “Secondly, I’m surprised you remember last night.” Surely, taking me back to his room wasn’t a decision he’d have made sober.
His gaze falls to my mouth. “I remember enough,” he says, and there’s something there, in his voice. Something gravelly and interested, and a memory flickers to life: his palm, flat on my stomach as he went down on me, holding me in place. His gaze on me while he did it: hungry, a hundred percent in.
“Huh,” I say aloud, though I didn’t mean to. Because I suddenly know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there’s another side of him, and I liked it. A lot.
Six is waiting nearby and I should be running away from this little chat as fast as I possibly can, but…but… “So, what exactly do you remember?”
His gaze drifts over my face, assessing me. His mouth opens to reply and then Six’s arm is around my shoulders and a tray is shoved in front of me. “Shots,” says Six. He grins at Graham. “You too. Even though you’re hitting on my girl.”
“I didn’t realize she was your girl,” Graham bites out.
“No worries, bud,” Six replies, oblivious to Graham’s tone. “I don’t hold grudges, and your brother got me out of jail on two different occasions, so I consider you family.”
“You’ve been to jail twice?” Graham smirks as he lifts a shot from the tray and toasts me. No one has ever made being a smug prick sexier. “Sounds like you two are perfect for each other.”
Graham’s sarcasm goes right over Six’s head.
“Damn straight!” he says, slamming his drink before nodding at Graham. “We’re all heading to this bar downtown since this is wrapping up. You in?”
I brace myself, silently willing Graham to bow out, to excuse himself so he can go chart the comparative GDP of small countries no one’s ever heard of or whatever he considers a fun Saturday night. But instead, his gaze lands on me.
“Yeah,” he says. “Why not.”
To play designated cockblocker once more, I’m sure. No surprises there—ensuring no female leaves pleased is probably his personal motto.
Those hickeys, that ache between my legs…they don’t prove anything.
4
KEELEY
Boom, boom, boom.
The sound is like a basketball hitting a microphone, or cannon fire.
It takes me a second to realize it’s my head making this godawful racket.
My eyes open slowly, blearily, as I struggle to make sense of what I’m seeing. Where am I? Every single room at the Langham faces the golf course, a boring and endless sea of green. Except I’m looking out over…a city.
A city that isn’t LA.
I’d like to claim I’ve never woken up in an unfamiliar room—obviously a lie, since I just did it yesterday—but I can at least say I’ve never woken up in the wrong city, until today.
Please be Six, please be Six, I think as I roll over.
Graham Tate’s pretty face is mashed against the pillow.
Goddammit, Keeley.
Suddenly, music starts, and water arcs high in the air outside the window from a fountain—one I’d know anywhere because I always stay at the Bellagio when I’m in Vegas.
I’m in fucking Vegas.
How? How is this even possible? Vegas is a five-hour drive from LA. None of us were sober enough to make this trip, and as grossly irresponsible as I am, I would never get in the car with someone who’d been drinking.
I close my eyes, willing my stomach to stop rolling and my head to stop throbbing as snippets of the night before materialize: Graham beside me on a dance floor, looking very certain and very serious, which means I probably did something bad. And then, standing outside a nightclub in downtown LA with Drew, Six’s sister-in-law—one of those drunken, emotional conversations, though I have no idea what we discussed, and honestly…it’s unlike me, drunken superpower and all.
I extend a hand blindly, hoping to discover my phone and put this whole mystery to rest, when it clinks against the nightstand.
Even before my eyes open, the horror is spilling inside me like a stain. Because it’s the sound of a ring, which is something I don’t wear.
My stomach sinks as I look at the simple platinum band. I roll over, my head throbbing in protest. Graham’s hand is currently splayed on my pillow. And he’s wearing one too.
No. No, no, no. I squeeze my eyes shut. Keeley, please don’t have done this.
My eyes open and yep, I did this.
Sometime over the course of the night, Graham and I went to Vegas and got married.
It couldn’t have been premeditated. But somehow, we got to Vegas and one of us was drunk enough to say, “hey, we’re walking by this little chapel, and wouldn’t it be funny if we got married by Elvis?” and the other was drunk enough to say, “let’s do it.”
And while I do have some vague memory of walking down an aisle, I decide here and now that this didn’t happen. We talked about it, bought rings, arrived too late and fell asleep. Though judging by the condom wrappers on the nightstand, we didn’t fall directly asleep.
God, why do I remember so little? There are only flashes of last night in my head: a champagne bottle opening and Graham’s dark gaze on me as I tugged at his belt in the back of a limo, his teeth grazing sensitive skin, the urgency of it all. His voice against my ear, saying, “Fuck, I’m gonna come so hard.”
How very Keeley of me to only remember the sex, and not the part where we traveled for five hours from another state and committed to each other for life.
And when Graham wakes, he’ll be even more horrified by this situation than I am, which is when the blame will begin, as I’m pretty sure the wildest thing Graham Tate has ever done is declare a home office deduction on his taxes.
Therefore, only one possible solution exists: to slide out of this bed, find a way back to California, and pretend it didn’t happen.
But, holy Lord, I’ve got to stop drinking.
5
GRAHAM
I wake in a hotel room in Vegas, deeply hungover.
When my mother begged me to relax and have a little fun this weekend, I doubt this was what she had in mind.
The room is a disaster—somehow, we managed to knock over a barstool at the kitchen counter, tear down a curtain rod, and crack a framed picture on the wall. I couldn’t care less. And in spite of the night we just had, I’m already hard as a rock.
I roll over to greet my new wife and discover the bed is empty. I look toward the bathroom, but slowly realize there’s no trace of her: the trail of clothes she’d left around the room last night is gone.
The only surprise here is that I’m surprised. That I ever thought it could have worked out any other way.
6
KEELEY
APRIL
Every movie in which a woman is transformed involves a rock-bottom moment: her heel snaps and she blows the big pitch to a client through no fault of her own. She’s fired immediately and the skies open as she walks outside, drenching her as the cabs blow past, refusing to stop.
My rock-bottom moment, waking up married to the odious Graham Tate four months ago was a little seedier and a lot less blameless. I’ve tried to come up with a way that it isn’t entirely my fault, but I haven’t, just yet.
When a movie is eventually made about my life (Keeley Connolly: The Doctor in Dior), we’ll have to finesse this whole situation so I come across a little more sympathetic. And why not? The movie will bear little resemblance to reality anyway. I will be played by a sixteen-year-old, for instance, which is twenty-nine for women in Hollywood years, and Graham will be played by an actor in his late fifties, which is a Hollywood thirty-four for men. The National Institutes of Health—where I just completed my three-month observership—will be ivy-covered and idyllic rather than a soulless concrete jungle in the middle of DC’s blandest suburb.
I’m sure they can find a way to make my rock-bottom moment sympathetic to the masses in much the same manner.
I still can’t believe it happened, but the one silver lining to this mess is that it provided me the kick in the ass I clearly needed; I haven’t had a single drink since that night. Initially, this was because I was horrified I’d married Graham. Then it was because I was exhausted— something about the long hours and DC’s endless gray winter have sapped my will to live. Thank God I’m finally back in LA.
I drag my bags to the curb at LAX where Gemma now stands, waving.
Her smile fades as I approach. “My God, Keeley, you’re skin and bones.”
Yet my jeans wouldn’t button this morning. I don’t want to think about that now.
I sling my suitcase into her trunk. “DC sucked. The weather was miserable, the food made me sick, even the smell of the air made me sick.”
She raises a brow. “I grew up in DC and I’ve never once noticed a difference in the food or the smell of the air.”
She’s wrong. The smell is revolting. And the smell of the damp paper towels in the hospital bathroom will haunt me the rest of my days. I nearly passed out every time I peed, trying to hold my breath.
“I was busy,” I tell her. “Too busy to eat. And now I need tacos. The Tex-Mex there left much to be desired.”
We go to my favorite restaurant, where I want one of everything on the menu but don’t have the stomach for more than a few bites.
I push the plate away. “I guess DC is still in my blood.” I yawn. All I want in the whole damn world is to sleep.
“Keeley, you look green right now. Has this been going on a while?”
It’s the precise conversation my mother had with her best friend, at our kitchen table. I was fourteen at the time, and I can still recall the way my stomach began to sink, how I went from thinking everything was okay to realizing I could lose my mom, too, just like my cousins lost theirs the winter before.
“I’m just tired. It’s been a long few months.”
Gemma stares at me. “You’re not pregnant, right?”
I roll my eyes…she should know me better than that. “My IUD is ninety-nine percent effective, and condoms are ninety-eight percent effective…which leaves me a hundred and ninety-seven percent unable to get pregnant. I’m pretty sure that means it could reverse an existing pregnancy.”
Gemma’s laugh is muted. “I don’t think that’s what it means. If you’re not pregnant…I mean, given your family history, don’t you think you should get checked out?”
I wince. I’ve tried very hard not to put it all together—the unexplained fatigue, the nausea—but when my pants wouldn’t button this morning, my first thought was of my mom. She’d barely gotten her diagnosis before the build-up of fluid in her stomach began, a sign her cancer was far more advanced than we knew.
“I’m too busy to worry about this now,” I insist, willfully ignoring that I once heard my mom say the exact same thing. “My job starts Monday, and once I get settled here, I’ll be fine.”
But even if I can lie to her, I can’t lie to myself; I’m really dying, or I’m pregnant—and I don’t want to be either of those things.
Knowing your time on this planet will be brief is kind of like taking a trip: you’re not going to house hunt or attempt to make anything meaningful, but you’ll splurge on good restaurants and have a lot more pina coladas at noon.
Honestly, dying young is not all bad. People will still talk about how pretty I was at the funeral, for instance, and I will never have to worry about outliving my retirement savings, not that I’d ever have put money away in the first place.
Okay, I guess the silver linings are limited, but I can deal with that as long as I’m not leaving someone behind. I don’t want to subject anyone to what I went through when my mom died, what my cousins went through when their mom died.
And that’s why I finally take a pregnancy test—many hours after Gemma dropped me off—and burst into tears at the sight of two identical pink lines; because I’m okay with dying, but I can never be okay with saddling a kid with the grief that follows.
“You appear to be about sixteen weeks along,” says Julie, my ob/gyn, the next day.
Sixteen weeks. It’s somehow worse than I was expecting to hear, though I know it’s dated back to the last period, not conception. I’m just a lot further into the stupidest mistake of my life than I imagined.
She continues sliding the transducer over my stomach. I make a point of looking at her, not the screen, because I don’t want to get attached to the sight of something I might not choose to keep. “Due October eighth. I assume you haven’t had a period for a while.”
I shake my head, stunned. I thought it was stress. I just…I don’t understand. “IUDs are foolproof.”
“Only if they haven’t fallen out.”
I blink at her. “Without me even noticing?”
She hitches a shoulder. “Well, it’s out, and you didn’t notice, right? It’s rare, but it happens.”
Only me. This could only happen to me.
She hands me a paper towel. “You didn’t have any nausea? Fatigue?”
I assumed it was cancer so I ignored it. Yes, I just spent three months studying metastatic melanoma, while perhaps ignoring something just as bad inside myself. Sometimes even I am shocked by the insanity of my thought processes.
I wipe off my stomach while she puts the transducer back. “I was busy. I just thought it was stress.”
