Free Beautiful Elixir (Beautiful Oblivion #3) by Addison Moore

sorry your world is crumbling around you. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to help you fix this.” It sounds robotic without meaning to, but I do mean it.
    “What can you do? Can you help take them down?” Her lips quiver. Kennedy is the strongest woman I know, and seeing her so distraught is killing me.
    “Yes.” I’m not sure it’s the truth, but I’m hopeful.
    A sigh of relief expels from her when I say it.
    “And, no,” I add with heartbreak. “I have someone sending out DMCA takedown notices, but things like this tend to proliferate. It’s like a cancer, you want to stop the bad cells from multiplying, but—”
    “It could be too late.” Her eyes snap shut. Her lids tremble. A thin seam of tears lines her lashes.
    “But it could work. The most important thing we need to do is control Keith.” I should have squashed him like a roach years ago. I was a fool for so many reasons, but leaving her in his hands is my biggest regret. I hate that he touched her like that. That he made her a spectacle. “We’re going to slam him with a defamation suit. He’s libel for photographing you, creating videos of your most intimate moments, without your knowledge. That’s where we’re going to nail him, Kennedy. He’s going to wish he’d never known your name by the time we’re through with him.”
    She swallows hard. Her gaze flits out the window. Her beautiful body rises and falls with her next breath.
    “Thank you.” She plays with a loose thread at the base of her sleeve. “This thing with me and you—”
    “Is happening.” I clasp her fingers before she can drift too far away. “All those covert summers are over. We knew we were right even back then, Kennedy.” I want to make her say it. Charge her with the truth and make her regurgitate it back to me. I gave up everything for Kennedy. And, believe me, it wasn’t a conscious effort. I slept around. I tried to get her out of my system by way of putting other girls into it, but that was just a bad rouse in hopes of tricking my heart into believing I wasn’t really in love with her. But still, something in me craved her. I had become addicted to her after just one kiss. I hate that I sound like some ridiculous, sappy teen girl, but damn it all to hell, Kennedy can reduce me to far worse than that. She was worth everything, still is. “I came back for you just like I promised.” I should have never left.
    “I know.” She shakes her head in protest, her voice pitched with soft rejection. “Look, we don’t really know one another. All those summers—it’s sort of a lie.”
    “Nothing was a lie.” A desperation crops up in me that’s been simmering for years, condensing, turning into something just this side of toxic, if not pure. It’s hard to tell. I have never been witness to a healthy relationship. “Let’s start from the beginning then.” I hold out my hand, and slowly she takes it with reluctance in her eyes. Her smile builds, that tiny dimple ignites in her cheek, and I stop myself from leaning in and kissing it, easy as holding up this damn mountain. “Caleb McCarthy.”
    “My name is Kennedy,” she relents with a shrug. Playfulness ignites in her eyes, and just like that she’s in on the game. “Did you say McCarthy? As in Warren McCarthy? My stepsister is dating him. He came in the mail as a part of the asshole-of-the-month club.” Her lips purse, proud of her effort to recant those first words she spoke to me verbatim.
    “Well done.” I marvel before clearing my throat. “Do you want to go for a swim?” That was my next line. That was the exact conversation that landed us next to the marsh where we kissed for hours, where we thought it would be fun to keep the rest of the world in the dark about the two of us, and we became a thing, a very private, exclusive club for two, just Kennedy and me, whittling down the hours while fused to one another’s mouths. I smile at the idea that what we whittled was each