maddox
"It can be fun though, don't get me wrong. Sometimes there's live music, or I meet particularly interesting people."
"I think you're an interesting people," I counter, humor tinging my tone. She seems to be very pensive now that we're back at the apartment, and I'd rather she remain happy.
"You do?" She bites her lip, restraining her smile.
"Very interesting," I affirm, "like no one I've ever come across before."
She shuts the lights off in the bathroom, leading me back into her bedroom: "Surely that can't be true. You've met, what, eleventy trillion people? Too many. I think I'm quite average, if not just absurdly weird."
"Eleventy-trillion-and-one," I correct her.
"It was an approximation," she shakes her head and then bends at the hips to unmake her bed.
I try, I really do, to be a gentleman, but fuck, Violet's ass is something else. And she has no idea what she's doing, I'd bet, which is both endearing and tempting, while also being frightening. She's just so sweet, and charming, and down-to-earth, and I'm sure that being between her legs would be paradise.
***
Violet is eighteen, and a recent high-school graduate. She's goofy, yet calculated, and most of all, innocent. She hasn't done much with her life, based in Washington state, and lives with her older brother, Cameron. She aspires to spontaneity, to be memorable.
Maddox is a twenty-six-year-old international rockstar, with a marred public image. That is, a life opposite of Violet's. He's looking to outsmart his poor publicity, and take a vacation away from L.A., and far away from his trust issues.
What happens when, by chance, Maddox's band mate drunkenly messages Violet?
Maddox:
She was everything I couldn't have. Beautiful, smart, driven and sassy. Super sarcastic, and feisty and pushed my buttons at every opportunity but still, she drove me wild.
The one problem? She's a Silver Spade girl and I belong to the Cardinal Angels.
I wanted to get her out of my mind but her elusive beauty drove me to keep looking. Keep digging and eventually found myself trapped helping her out of a situation she should never have been in when I vowed to leave her be once I knew who she was. Even if she didn't want my help and reminded me so enough times to make me want to hate her, I never could, not when I found myself falling for her instead.
Our paths crossed by chance one night and that was it. I knew I had to talk to her again, to have her. Even if it killed me in the process.
Lolita:
A charismatic stranger and an argumentative conversation at a bar. The kind of place I habitually avoided unless I had no choice. Yet after that one encounter, I can't get the sarcastic and aggravating stranger out of my mind.
Driven mad by thoughts of meeting him again even just to ask for a name, I never imagined that this small thought would develop into an obsessive attraction to the enemy. He never told me his name but he didn't have to, his signature angel wing tattoo told me all I needed to know. He was danger in its most concentrated form, but all that did was get me obsessed more since I'd never been good at staying away from what I couldn't have. I hated him, then it became something more.
I said I hated him, but that was a lie, even if I wish it weren't.
On the wrong side of the tracks one night two paths crossed by accident and ignited a burning flame. You know what they all say: it's a thin line between love and hate.
A Trial of Spades and Angels Novel