Secret Bay High Lies (Secret Bay High - Book #4) Read online

  I was reluctant to answer the knock on my door, then finally gave in and went to see who it was. I expected Susan to be waiting for me in the hall, but when I opened it, I found Damon standing there. His hands were in his pockets and he looked sheepish.

  “Can I come in?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I said as I pushed the door open for him. He walked in, but was silent for a moment before he spoke. I closed the door once more and headed over to my bed, sitting down and waiting for him to say something. There were still a lot of feelings running through me, and I wasn’t sure quite what to do.

  I knew he was still feeling tense about the whole thing, and it didn’t help now that he was clearly feeling bad about what happened between us, too. I understood what it was like dealing with someone talking when I was in the middle of a stressful moment, so I didn’t blame him for acting the way that he had, even if it did hurt in the moment.

  The seconds ticked past and I wondered if I should say something, but he started after a minute of gathering his thoughts.

  “I’m sorry about the outburst I had in the garage,” he said. “I shouldn’t have taken it out on you.”

  “It’s alright,” I said with a shrug. I know you loved that bike, and I can’t believe someone did that.”

  “Me neither,” he said. He leaned close to me. “But I still shouldn’t have taken it out on you, and I’m sorry.”

  Without saying another word, I leaned forward to kiss him. Our kiss started slowly at first, but it wasn’t long before the passion grew and the heat turned up. We couldn’t ever kiss without it leading to more. I just had to have him too much for it to stop at that.

  Though we had made love before falling asleep the night before, we were both feeling aroused again, and I pulled his shirt off, setting it on the bed beside us as he pulled my tank top up over my head. My bra came off next, then we pulled each other’s jeans off and let them fall to the floor.

  We knew we had to be quiet, but we’d gotten used to that. It didn’t matter that Susan and Dean were just up the hall. They were likely still asleep this early in the day, and we were both in need of having each other. We could make it fast and quiet, getting our fill of each other before either one of them got up.

  Damon was over the top of me in an instant, kissing me as he pushed his cock into my pussy. I moaned softly, spreading my legs for him to slide in and out of me, fast and slick with how wet I’d become. Everything about Damon turned me on, and I felt even better knowing I could satisfy his pain with my body.

  He ran his hand down my back to my ass, lifting me into him as he thrust deeper and faster. It was hard not to make too much nose, but I clung to him, wrapping my legs around him as I arched my back as best as I could, taking as much of him as possible inside me.

  His balls slapped against me as he thrust harder, and I came, hard and fast. Being as turned on as I was with him, it didn’t take long for me to climax. And, seeing the pleasure as it ran across my features was enough to make Damon cum, too. He pushed into me, letting out a groan louder than I felt comfortable with as he did.

  I smiled as I put my hand over his mouth, muffling the pleasured sound as he pumped his cum into my pussy. His cock pulsed as he emptied himself fully, and I pressed up against him harder, wanting all of him. I could never get enough of him, and he knew it.

  He stayed inside me as long as he could, only pulling out after he had finished completely. He sank onto the bed with a sigh, and I laid my head on his chest, tracing the tattoos on his arm with my fingers. I loved his tattoos, and I couldn’t wait for the day when I would start getting my own.

  Before, I’d never thought I was the kind of girl who would want them, but seeing Damon’s made me change my mind about that. I wanted to be the adventurous girl he could share his life with, and with tattoos, I felt I would fit with him even more than I did now.

  There was silence in the room for another couple minutes before Damon spoke again.

  “I think Chad did it,” he said.

  My blood ran cold at the thought, but I looked up at him. “Do you really?”

  “I don’t know who else it could be. Chad and Trent are really the only two I have beef with at school, and my beef with Trent isn’t nearly enough to warrant what happened to my bike. Think about it, we saw each other at the party and didn’t say one word to each other, but Chad came in on the fight.”

  “But Chad was also drunk. Do you really think that he would be able to pull off getting into the house without tripping the alarm if he was drunk? And why didn’t anyone hear the racket that had to be coming from the garage when he was tearing the bike apart? That couldn’t have been a quiet thing to do, I’m sure,” I said.

  I didn’t want to argue with Damon, but I had ruled out Chad in my own mind, and I wanted to hear why he thought Chad might be the one to actually have committed the act.

  “Chad is slippery,” Damon said. “I know. I hung out with the guy for three years. There’s some things I’m not proud to admit I was part of, but I can promise you, if there was something like this we wanted to do, we would have Chad set up the scene for us.”

  “Like breaking into places?” I asked in surprise.

  “Don’t judge me,” Damon said quickly. “I’ve done a lot of things in life I’m not proud of, but that’s all in the past. I’m not that guy anymore, and I’m not going back to that life. I’m just saying, knowing the way Chad is, I wouldn’t be surprised if he found out some way to get in the house without tripping the alarm.”

  “Do you think that he would have taken the file?” I asked. Even then, I’d passed off Chad as someone who wouldn’t have any reason to take it, or someone who wouldn’t have been able to pull it off. But, if Damon knew that he was able to break into places without getting caught, then who was to say he wasn’t the one who stole the file?

  Or, even beyond that, who was to say he wasn’t the one who had put the note in my locker, either? He had been really angry toward me at the party, and he did blame me explicitly for the fact that he had lost his friendship with Peter and Damon.

  Not to mention the fact that he had been creeping me out for quite some time now. The way he looked at me sent shivers down my spine, and more than once I had left school looking over my shoulder to make sure he wasn’t following me.

  I didn’t realize it, but the worry must have crept onto my face. Damon was quick to notice there was something bothering me, and he asked me what it was.

  “I’m not sure I should tell you,” I said. “It might not be anything, but if you think that it’s Chad, then there might be something you should see.”

  “What is it?” he pressed. “Come on, don’t hide anything from me. I need to see everything you’ve got. Chad isn’t the kind of guy I would ignore, not with some of the crap I’ve seen him pull.”

  “Okay,” I said reluctantly. I walked over to my drawer and pulled out the note I’d gotten from my locker, then I walked back to the bed and gave it to Damon. He read it a few times, his hand starting to shake with anger as he did. I pulled on my clothes, then I folded my arms as I looked at him.

  “What do you make of it?” I asked.

  “When did you get this?” Damon replied.

  “It’s been a few weeks,” I admitted. “I wasn’t sure if it was another prank or something that was just meant to scare me, so I didn’t say anything about it. But if you think that Chad is behind all this, then maybe it’s something you should know about.”

  As I had predicted, Damon was angry with the note, and it wasn’t long before he had himself all worked up again. But, he was angrier over the fact that he felt I was in danger and worried about my safety than the note itself. He wiped his hand over his face before looking back at me with a shake of his head.

  I don’t want you hiding things from me anymore, okay?” he said. “This could be serious, and I don’t want to not know about this sort of thing.”

  “You keep secrets from me,” I said before I even thought about
it. Damon sighed.

  “Fair enough. I’ll tell you everything if you tell me everything. If we’re dating and we’re in this together, then we can’t hide stuff from each other anymore, okay?” he asked.

  “Deal,” I said. he turned his attention back to the note and shook his head. I could see the tension in his face, and the fact that his hands were still shaking put me on edge even more. I hated Chad, and I hated it even more that he scared me. I didn’t like being afraid of anyone. I wanted to give the world the finger and prove to everyone nothing could get me down.

  But, when things like this happened, I just wanted to run away and hide. I didn’t feel strong enough to stand up to it, and I worried about what would happen. I didn’t know what to do. Should I go to Susan? Should I tell her about the file? Should I ignore all of it and try to figure it out on my own?

  Was it even the right thing to do to show Damon? What if this was just nothing, and what if we were wrong about the idea Chad might have been the one to wreck the bike? There were so many thoughts and doubts running through my mind, I couldn’t stand the silence for very long.

  “What do you make of that?” I asked. “Do you think it’s Chad?”

  “That’s not Chad’s handwriting,” Damon said with a shake of his head. “So either he wasn’t the one to wreck the bike, or he wasn’t the one to write the note. Or, maybe he had a hand in both and he’s not working alone.”

  The idea of it made another shudder run down my spine. I hated to think that there might be another person out there I’d have to worry about, but it seemed that my original theory was right. Damon didn’t say anything about Molly, and he had dated her so I knew he would have recognized her handwriting as well.

  But, he didn’t make any mention of that, which led me to believe he didn’t know who it was who wrote the note, which only led to more mystery over who could have taken the file and who could have broken knot the garage to destroy the bike.

  Perhaps it was Chad working with another person, perhaps he had nothing to do with it at all. The only evidence we had was just speculation. We didn’t even have circumstantial evidence in our favor. Sure, Chad didn’t like either one of us, but there were plenty of kids at school who didn’t get along with each other. That didn’t mean they were breaking into each other’s houses and breaking their things.

  Or leaving random threatening notes in their lockers for that matter. And, there was still the mystery as to how they are able to get into these buildings without so much as leaving a trace. I knew the school had a security system, and our house did, too.

  Whoever was doing this was able to get past both security systems and break into my locker without a trace. The only common thread we had among all the clues was that it would be really hard for them to have been able to access where they were without getting caught.

  Yet somehow, they had.

  It only made me believe we were dealing with someone who knew what they were doing. Someone who clearly had experience in breaking and entering, and who definitely didn’t want to get caught. It made my blood run cold. Did that mean this person would make good on their threat against me?

  Was this just the start of all the damage they would do to me if I didn’t give up the search for my real mother and trying to find the person who was responsible for killing my adoptive parents?

  The more things we found that seemed to be helpful, the more complicated the entire situation got, and the less we had to go on. We could speculate all we wanted, and we could try to track down clues, but it seemed that this was getting more and more dangerous, and the closer we got to answers, the more threatening and ominous this person became toward us.

  I didn’t say it out loud, but I wondered if this person really was the same person who had killed my parents, and why they wanted to have them dead. Or, what they had against me as a person and wanted to ruin my life.

  It didn’t seem to me that this was something against Damon. After all, he had lived in Secret Bay a lot longer than I had, and he hadn’t dealt with any of this stuff until I got serious about finding who killed my parents.

  No, this had to be something someone had against me personally. Something that was far deeper than the file in my room or the bike in the garage. Though it scared me to think that this person might be getting violent, I had to admit, I wanted more than ever to find them.

  I had to.

  This wasn’t okay, and I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder and dreading what was going to happen next. Whoever this person was, whatever they wanted, they had to be stopped.

  There was no other option.

  Chapter 14

  Sutton

  Without Damon’s bike, we were reduced to walking to school on foot. I didn’t mind, I’d done it more than once since moving in, and I walked home after school often, too. Whenever Damon was working down at the board shop he would leave right after his last class, and more often than not that meant I would be walking home myself.

  Susan occasionally picked me up and gave me a ride, and she even offered to let us use her car this morning, but Damon didn’t want to take it out of principle alone. He wasn’t going to give Chad the satisfaction of seeing him driving his mom’s car if he was the culprit who had ruined the bike.

  I didn’t care one way or the other, I just wanted to spend as much time with Damon was possible. And since we were on foot, that meant we would have more time together – and time to talk along the way. We couldn’t have a discussion when he was riding his bike. It was too loud to talk to each other while we were in motion, and the helmets made it harder to talk when we were stopped.

  Even being in a car wasn’t really long enough to have a conversation with each other. We were only a few minutes from the school by car, so we never said much when we drove.

  I was surprised how well it had gone when Susan and Dean found out about the bike. Damon didn’t tell them he thought it was Chad, he only insisted that they figure out some better security system for the house.

  Though he didn’t say anything to anyone, I figured part of the problem was with the note I’d shown him. The bike was bad enough, and the file getting taken right out of my room, but the fact that I had a threatening note and we clearly had a problem with someone able to come right into the house without tripping the alarm made it that much worse.

  I had asked Damon if he thought it would be a good idea to tell Susan about the note, but he still insisted that we keep it to ourselves. She would worry and likely blow it up into something that would cause more drama. If we continued to lie low, we could get this figured out.

  Hopefully, anyway.

  Though I wanted to talk to Damon on our way to school, he was fuming. I imagined he was thinking of all the ways he wanted to confront Chad, and I wanted to warn him to be careful. We didn’t know for sure Chad was the one who had done it, and I didn’t want to see Damon do anything that would get him in trouble with the principle.

  On the other hand, Damon was a loose cannon, and he did what he wanted, when he wanted. He wasn’t going to back down from Chad, and if the guy was behind the bike incident, Damon was going to put him back in his place. I knew it didn’t matter what I said or did, it was just the way things were.

  So, I kept my mouth shut. Even if I didn’t agree with Damon, I supported him, and I would stand by him no matter what. If that meant he was going to do something crazy, I would be there for him, even if it did risk him getting in trouble.

  He was so lost in thought he nearly forgot to give me a kiss before we parted ways for the day. But, I caught him as he started toward his locker up the hall and pulled him to me.

  “I hope you have a good morning,” I said.

  “You too,” he said with a smile. “Really, I hope you do.”

  The smile seemed forced, and I reluctantly let him go, wondering how good of a morning he was really going to have. He shared several classes with Chad during the morning period, so there was potential for a c
onfrontation to break out at any time.

  There was a strange feel to the school that morning, as though a storm was brewing. I wasn’t sure if it was my own imagination because of how Damon was feeling, or if there was really something amiss, but I hoped it wouldn’t be too bad when it finally did break out. I’d gotten into a fight with Molly before, and there was much the same feeling to the air that day as there was now.

  I was glad Molly was once again too wrapped up in Trent to pay any attention to me. I worried that she was going to think the apology and the invitation to her party would be enough to undo all that she had done to me over the years, and it was a relief to see she was back to her old ways.

  And leaving me out of it.

  Since we’d walked, I didn’t have the time to really talk to Abby as I got my books out of my locker. She and Peter were having some intense conversation from the looks of things, and the two of them started for class after she gave me a small wave when the bell rang. She saw me, but clearly, she, too, had her own things going on that morning, and I wasn’t going to try to figure out what was going on there.

  When it came to her and Peter, I figured it was best to stay out of it as much as possible. I would be there to listen to her if she had something she wanted me to know, or if she just needed a shoulder to cry on, but I still was careful not to get too involved in her relationship drama. I still didn’t know what was going on between the two of them with her moving – and I wasn’t sure she was ready to talk about it, either.

  I sat through all the classes of morning period trying to pay attention, though it was hard for me to concentrate. I kept thinking about the smashed bike and Damon, the way he had reacted to the scene and the way he had reacted to me when I tried to comfort him.

  Sure, he apologized to me, but I knew that didn’t make him feel better about what happened with the bike, and if there was any chance he could get even with Chad over it, he would take it in a heartbeat. Part of me hoped that it really was Chad who was responsible for the bike, even though I didn’t see how it was possible.