Never Sweeter (Dark Obsession #1) Read online

  Never Sweeter is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A Loveswept Ebook Original

  Copyright © 2016 by Charlotte Stein

  Excerpt from Never Better by Charlotte Stein copyright © 2016 by Charlotte Stein

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Loveswept, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  LOVESWEPT is a registered trademark and the LOVESWEPT colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book Never Better by Charlotte Stein. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

  eBook ISBN 9781101882788

  Cover design: Derek Walls

  Cover photograph: copyright © Andreas Gradin/Shutterstock

  randomhousebooks.com

  v4.1

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Charlotte Stein

  About the Author

  The Editor’s Corner

  Excerpt from Never Better

  Prologue

  Letty’s heart sank when the headlights illuminated the trail she was walking along. The vehicle behind her was never going to be her dad come to pick her up, after all. She hadn’t told him about her broken-down car—mainly because she was a senior on the verge of graduating, not a child who still needed his help at every turn. And it wasn’t Becky here to rescue her. She doubted Becky had even gotten her message, or would care if she had. No, it had to be them. They were always hanging around up here, drinking their longneck beers and fooling around.

  Not so long ago she’d passed the bluff on the way home, safe inside her rusted-over Camaro, and seen Tate throwing something at Jason’s head. Or at least it had looked that way in the split-second glimpse she’d gotten.

  Lucky her—now she was going to get more than a brief glimpse. They were going to pull some stunt, and she knew it. It made her walk faster, arms tight around her middle as though she could somehow make herself smaller.

  She knew it was impossible, however. She was too big in almost every way: her generous hips and breasts and butt were forever on their radar. Even her nose and hair took up way too much space—the former was far too long and strong for her dimpled face, and the latter refused to stay in almost every clip and tie she owned.

  The dark curls sprawled down her back and over her shoulders, in a way that should have been beautiful. Instead it was forever a mess.

  They probably could have seen her from a mile away.

  And now they were honking the horn. Hollering out of the window.

  Letty heard fatty and thunder thighs and flabby, and tried to speed up. The trouble was—speeding up only made things worse. It made things jiggle. It emphasized how awkward she was. Pretty soon she would have to break into a run, and then the real trouble would start.

  In fact, it already had.

  She heard something clatter against the dirt path behind her, and knew it was something one of them had thrown. Probably Tate, because he was always the one who took things too far. The other day he had put his book bag behind her chair, so that when she got up she stumbled over it. He followed her places and seemed to lie in wait, each time getting steadily weirder until she was sure he was building to something terrible.

  This had to be it. They’re going to run you over, the terrified part of her brain told her. But they wouldn’t take it that far, would they? She glanced back and saw that Jason was behind the wheel, which gave her some hope.

  Jason was the more reasonable one of the three. He usually hung back, tiny dark eyes only assessing the action, and never really contributing. He would probably keep things under control, she told herself, even as the truck edged closer and the laughter got wilder. Plus there was Tate, furiously jabbering in Jason’s ear.

  Go on and ram into her, she imagined him saying, and for one insane second she just wanted to ram them first. A hot vein of anger split the stone she usually kept around it and surged to the surface. It burned through her body, taking out almost everything in its path—her reason and sense of self-preservation and restraint.

  And then suddenly she was stopping.

  No more shrinking down.

  No more running away.

  She came to a dead halt and just stared through the windshield at them: these three guys who had made her years in high school hell. They looked strangely small and almost far away—as though just the act of facing them reduced everything they were down to an insignificant speck.

  And it seemed that they knew it, too.

  The laughing and hollering stopped. All she could hear was the wind keening up from the bluff that was now almost behind her, and the rattle of the leafless trees and brambles that lined that sheer drop.

  It was bliss—for about a minute.

  And then Jason revved the engine once, twice. Like someone firing a warning shot, she thought, though she wanted to laugh once she had. They weren’t ever going to actually do it for real. Bullies like them never really did anything. It was all just safe things that made their target feel like shit.

  Ramming someone off the bluff with a truck wasn’t safe.

  It was dangerous, it was deadly, it could kill.

  They would never kill her.

  No matter how stone faced Jason looked, or how fiercely Tate was urging him, or how queasy Patrick seemed, they wouldn’t—a fact that she was so sure of she was almost grinning when the truck lurched forward. At the very least she felt as if she had won something, about a second before the metal grille hit the middle of her body hard.

  Then there was just air underneath her feet.

  Followed by jagged rocks.

  And finally, bloody silence.

  Chapter 1

  TWO YEARS LATER

  It had to be some kind of hallucination. A trick of the light or not enough to eat. That was the only explanation Letty could accept, because Tate Sullivan was a million miles away. Last she heard he had bagged some wrestling scholarship at somewhere fancy like Stanford, so him being here at tiny Breckenridge College seemed completely impossible. Doubly so, when she factored in the time that had passed—it had been two years since high school, and he hadn’t needed to fill those years with rehab. He should have been deep into his college career, not just starting out like her.

  Yet when she snuck a second look she had to accept it. Barely anyone was as enormous as Tate. He stood six feet five in bare feet, and had shoulders so broad they strained the seams of every shirt he wore. They were straining the seams of his shirt now, which was pretty much confirmation enough.

  But then there was his face, fresh from a million of her nightmares.
Nobody else looked the way he did, so ugly and handsome at the same time. His jaw was too big and brutal for that butter-soft mouth; those sultry, soft-focus blue eyes did not belong above his busted nose.

  And the ears…

  She used to dream up insults about his ridiculous jug ears. In fact, that was the first thing she thought of when she snuck another glance from her seat at the back. All the things she wanted to say to him, in return for every fat ass and thunder thighs. Every bit of her rage distilled into one perfect, beautiful rant, aimed right at his stupid, smug face.

  Like a preemptive strike, before he got his digs in.

  Because surely he was here to harass Letty. It couldn’t possibly be a coincidence or genuine interest on his part. He didn’t even like movies, yet here he was in her film theory class. What was he going to do? Tell Professor Harrison that science fiction was for fatties and weirdos?

  No, he had to be here for some nefarious reason. Maybe he thought she was the one who had called the cops on him after the truck incident, and was here for some kind of payback. He’d gone to similar lengths before to get her, after all. Hanging around outside the library until seven at night, just waiting in the dark and freezing cold for her to come out. Missing practice so he could give her hell as she walked down the hallway of doom that went down the middle of school.

  Driving up to the bluff, when he somehow knew she would be there.

  Was this really that different?

  It didn’t feel different. Her heart was already beating her insides bloody. She tried to concentrate on the lecture—her first college lecture about cool things she really loved—and found herself focusing on all the things that were wrong with her instead. She had allowed her dark, curly hair to roam free of pins and clips, and her dark eyes were ringed with mascara. Just a touch, but a touch would be too much for Tate. So would the jeans that clung to her still curvy hips and ass, and the sweater that almost showed off her impressive chest.

  He would have something to say about all of it. He was probably already dreaming it up now. He only looked like he was paying attention to the lecture. Really, he was pretending to write things down—though he made it look good. He wrote in that weird crabbed way he had, hand curled almost into his body. Fingers pressing down too hard on the pen, the pen pressing down too hard on the paper. By the time he was done his notebooks always looked like murder victims, full of inky wounds and ugly punctures.

  Letty would be damned if she was going back to that.

  So she took the stairs two at a time. She pushed past people without apology, dodging satchels and outstretched arms, picking up speed as she went. The double doors of the lecture hall barely knew what hit them by the time she barreled through.

  And she kept going that way, too. She all but sprinted to the nearest stairwell, always looking behind herself as she did. Mind constantly counting down the steps until she was free and clear. Only five more until she was at the north-side exit. Another fifty or so to clear the Bradley Building. Then a straight shot across the grounds to her dorm, where the sanctuary of a locked door awaited.

  Easy, she told herself.

  But that was her downfall, thinking of everything but the most important factor in all of this: Tate was and always had been as cunning as a trapped animal. You could see it when he wrestled—that kind of feral intelligence guiding his every move. Each time the crowd thought him beat, he would blindside his opponent before they ever saw it coming. His greatest strength was looking like someone too stupid to bring a knife to a knife fight. Then snapping a concealed blade right into his opponent’s gut.

  And by god, he did it to her hard here. He didn’t just use a blade. He used a goddamn machete. She rounded the last corner before the exit, absolutely sure she had escaped him. He was still nowhere to be seen in the hallway behind her. Even if he flew on winged feet he had no chance of catching her now.

  Or so she thought.

  But then she turned back to the doors that should have been in front of her and saw only him. An enormous, impossible wall of him, so sudden and terrifying she could barely process it.

  Somehow he had gotten ahead of her. He must have gone around the other way or darted past when she was busy looking in the other direction, and now he was here. All six feet five inches of him stood with his arms crossed and his expression sullen as though he was the one who should be mad.

  And Letty couldn’t even tell him otherwise. As soon as she saw him everything just seemed to go in slow motion—like she was suddenly Sarah Connor watching in horror as the Terminator emerged from an elevator. She even made a similar sound, and came fairly close to losing her footing in the exact same way. One leg tried to keep going and the other snapped to a halt and she stumbled. She almost slipped.

  She would have gone down if it were not for his hand.

  The one he closed around her arm. Firm, but bizarrely gentle.

  Though his grip was still shocking, all the same. It made her realize something in a great rolling wave: he had never touched her before. Not even at his most despicable; not even when it would have helped him to do it. He had always somehow kept his hands to himself, and after a second of contact she understood why.

  It burned when he did it.

  It burned him.

  He snapped his hand back in an almost fearful way—she saw him do it. Though later she would tell herself it was something else. She would imagine he had done it on purpose, to hurt her. That he had known she was already pulling back hard, and all he had to do to destroy her was let go.

  Because it did destroy her. She went back so fast and so violently her teeth came together around her tongue. All the breath whammed out of her body when she hit the floor, like an echo of their last encounter on that dark road. Back then, she had thought she was dying because of the sudden constriction in her chest. The brief inability to take a single breath, as though maybe the truck had crushed her lungs.

  Followed by the blinding pain as her head connected with something hard. Back then it had been jagged rocks on the way down. This time it was a gleaming parquet floor—not quite as vicious, true, but the effect was almost the same. The world was already narrowing down to a tiny dot, despite her best efforts at holding on. She clawed at the sides of unconsciousness, desperate not to go out like this again.

  What if she didn’t wake up this time?

  He would be the last thing she saw before darkness claimed her. Those soft-focus eyes and that twisted smile; his voice like a reminder of everything she hated. “Letty,” he said as he leaned down, the note of triumph in it so unmistakable she tried to scream. She tried to kick and spit and rage against the injustice of it, but it was already too late. The dot became a pinprick, then finally dissolved altogether.

  Chapter 2

  Letty’s first thought was that she had died and gone to hell. How else to explain the smell of disinfectant and the feel of what seemed to be hospital bedsheets? Only Satan would force her to endure all of that again. The pain and the endless procession of unsympathetic nurses. Discovering each of her injuries in a slow and debilitating procession, culminating in the scar around her ear and the stripe they had shaved to get to the fracture.

  Though when she put one shaking hand up, she could still feel all of her curly hair. She ran her fingers through it, frantically checking and checking for bare patches.

  There was nothing.

  Toward the back of her head she could make out a truly magnificent lump, and it ached under the slightest touch. But that was all. She wasn’t even sure if she had a concussion, considering how easy it was to sit up. The world did not spin; she had no urge to vomit.

  And this wasn’t a hospital. It was the campus med room they’d shown everyone at orientation, with the posters advertising help lines dotting the walls. One of them to her left was the friendliest warning she’d ever seen about contracting VD. Another suggested she come along for hugs and cookies. It was actually quite warm and inviting.

  Until she tu
rned and saw him.

  He just sat in the sagging plastic chair by her bed, like a kindly relative or a really good friend. Even more astonishing, he had apparently been there so long he had fallen asleep. His eyes were closed and his chin was almost touching his chest, so unself-conscious about it she could almost believe it was true.

  If it were not for the years of pure torment.

  And the letting go on purpose.

  He had definitely let go on purpose, which meant only one thing. He was here to do something equally terrible, like take a picture of her bare ass. After all, her ass was almost bare. Someone had taken off her jeans and sweater at some point, and she could feel air against a lot of skin. She pushed the sheets down—slowly and silently—and saw that even her socks were missing.

  Though finding them in the cupboard by the bed barely helped her at all. In order to put them on she would have to take things off. In front of Tate. Who was probably watching her through slitted eyelids. Hell, even if he wasn’t, the whole thing was a huge pain in the ass. She was going to have to be silent and super fast to avoid waking him up. But at the best of times she was neither.

  And these were not the best of times. The ancient mattress creaked when she inched toward the edge. Every attempt at sliding her legs off the bed made the cheap sheets rustle and crackle like a brown paper bag. Even her feet against the tile seemed loud.

  Anything more and he was bound to wake up—it seemed like a miracle that he hadn’t already. She was breathing too hard. She must have whimpered, at least, yet when she checked he looked exactly as he had a minute ago. Chin on his chest, eyes closed, oblivious.

  And he stayed that way as she tugged on the rest of her clothes.