Scarred (Book 1, #1) by Kylie Walker Page B

mother sometimes. He never touched Daphne though and that made Chloe resent her. Neither Daphne nor her mother ever tried to stop him from hurting her and that made her hate them. She glanced over at Derek while he waited for her to take her seat before he took his and she told herself for the first time in a very long time that maybe caring about someone and trusting someone didn’t have to hurt.
    They watched the movie and when it was over Chloe had to admit that he’d made a great choice. She had laughed and cried and the whole time, even in the dark the only move that Derek had made was to hold her hand.
    As they left the theatre he asked, “Okay, so what did you think?”
    “James Franco is really hot,” she said with a laugh. Derek laughed and before he opened the car door for her he took her chin in his hand and looked into her eyes, “Human,” he said, “I like that.” Chloe braced herself for a kiss, but it didn’t come. She hated to admit it, but she was disappointed.
    When he went around and got in he said, “Are you hungry?”
    “I could eat,” she said.
    “You like pizza?”
    “Who doesn’t?”
    He smiled again and started the car. He drove to a cute little pizza parlor downtown. The place was crowded but they found a table in the back near the arcade games where a little girl and two boys that looked to be her older brothers were playing a shooting game.
    “So what do you like on your pizza?” he asked her.
    “Anchovies,” she said.
    He wrinkled his nose and said, “Okay...”
    Chloe laughed, “Not really. I just wanted to see if you would object.”
    He surprised her, sliding into the booth next to her and slipping an arm around her waist. He pulled her in close and said, “If you don’t believe anything else about me, believe this...I would eat anchovies as long as it meant being able to spend the evening with you.” He kissed her on the forehead then and left her sitting there tingling all over and stunned.
    When he came back to the table he had a pitcher of beer and one of water with lemons floating on top. “I didn’t know what you wanted to drink,” he told her. She was so touched that he’d gotten the water just for her that even had she wanted a beer, she would have drank it.
    As she poured herself a glass of the water she said, “Can I ask you a question?”
    “Anything,” he said.
    “I never saw you at the club before that first night I danced for you, and you seem more than willing to never go back...what were you doing there that night?”
    He smiled and scooted back in his seat.
    “What are you doing?” she asked.
    “I was just getting an arms-length away in case you construed what I was about to say as me being a stalker. I didn’t want to get slammed into the wall...”
    “Ha ha smart ass, answer the question.”
    “I have a colleague who is...I have no idea how to put this nicely...he’s a pervert, quite simply, I’m not going to make excuses for him. I will say that otherwise he’s a nice guy...”
    “Okay, no excuses for the pervert,” Chloe told him. “Go on.”
    “Well, he managed to get a membership to Roxi’s club without his wife finding out...”
    “Oh great, a married pervert.”
    Derek looked embarrassed and said, “Please don’t judge me by the company I keep.”
    “I’ll do my best. The rest of the story...?”
    “So, he would come into work and tell me about all these women he saw there and he kept begging me to go with him...I declined for over a month.”
    “But then you couldn’t resist?”
    “Something like that,” he said. He took out his phone and he pulled up a picture on the screen. He turned it in her direction and she was looking at a photograph of herself. She was wearing a black, one piece lace leotard that pushed her boobs up really high. It was the first and last time she wore that outfit, it had been really uncomfortable. In the photo, she was standing with her back to the pole, maybe just getting ready to start