Never Land by Kailin Gow Page B

when she walked through that door in her thousand-dollar camel-colored trenchcoat? I wasn't much of a threat to her right now, I thought bitterly. Even at my best I'd have to struggle to be noticed next to the gazelle-like Roni – and right now I hardly looked anything like my best.  
                I sighed. Was this what Danny saw? After he'd seen Roni in her silk negligee, her legs stretching for what seemed like miles, her hair like a nimbus around her face, golden and shining – would he still want me in this way? Messy, chaotic – still stained with tears?
                Yet as I looked at myself in the mirror, my self-pity gave way to anger as I thought about precisely what Roni had done. How dare she? I couldn't believe her audacity – an audacity that surely bordered on madness. “How dare she?” I said again, aloud this time, at my reflection, letting the weight of her actions sink in. Coming over to my house, telling me to stay away from my own boyfriend – a boyfriend to whom, incidentally, she not only had no right, but indeed was her own stepson. The whole situation was so ridiculous, so utterly sick, that I wasn't sure whether to laugh, cry, or scream.
                Yet more anger seeped through me – this time not at Roni but at Danny. Surely Danny must have known how crazy Roni was – even if he no longer had any feelings for her. Surely he must have known how she'd react to the sight of him with a new girlfriend. And instead he'd chosen to try to handle the situation on his own. He hadn't warned me, hadn't prepared me – had allowed me to walk straight into a trap, to be mocked and humiliated by Joanne Waldegrave and Roni Taylor and goodness knew who else – allowed me to be made a fool of by everyone in his crazy, debauched life.
                How stupid could you be? I recriminated myself. I'd seen this happen a hundred times among the girls and boys I'd grown up with. Always dating “within the group” - other Beverly Hills celebrities – always surprised when somehow people who grew up among models and strippers and playboys and alcoholics turned out to be functionally incapable of holding down an adult relationship. It was just one of many reasons I'd never dated in high school. I hadn't wanted to get sucked down by the dysfunction of yet another celebrity family. And here I was, dating the biggest celebrity of them all, Clarence Blue's son.
                But you didn't know he was Clarence Blue's son when you fell for him. He'd just seemed like a normal guy – a normal, gorgeous, mind-numbingly sexy, talented guy, to be sure, but not the scion of a family of psychopaths. And every step of the way, he'd withheld information. About his identity, about his family, about his past. Letting me get close to him, letting me fall for him, telling me he was “addicted” to me, making me want him – only to push me away when it mattered. The classic bad boy maneuver I'd been warned about from the time I was ten.
                How had I been so stupid? At that moment, all I wanted was to never see Danny again – to go back to where everything was normal, everything was easy, to men like Luc who never let you down. Luc... I felt a pang as his face came to mind. Luc would never have sprung his crazy family on me. He would never have set me up to fail the way Danny had...
                I opened the front door, anxious to find Luc, to talk out my rage. But to my surprise, standing  before me was Danny himself, a look of utter anguish on his face.
                “Neve...” he whispered, reaching his hands out to me.
                Damn it. Just looking at him, the way his piercing blue eyes met my own, the sad look in his eyes that made me want to comfort him – everything about him made me melt. My anger, my fury vanished. All I wanted was for him to hold me tight. He stepped towards me and I could smell his