But he was the wrong brother. I had to remember that.
With some difficulty I’d turned back to the door as a shout went up. It sounded like a fight was about to break out and I drunkenly mustered my training, wondering if I’d be called upon to nurse any head wounds tonight.
Gabe’s voice rose above the shouts. “Drinks are on me!” he’d called, and everyone started cheering.
Another rum and coke appeared and I was drunk enough to lunge at it and guzzle it down. It felt like I was moving even though I was sitting perfectly still. I hummed aloud, not worrying if anyone heard me. I smiled to myself and broke out laughing when someone next to me told a joke. My veins fizzed and my face hurt from smiling. Why didn’t I do this more often? Why wasn’t I a normal girl who went out and drank and laughed and had fun? Why couldn’t I be a person who did these things? Why couldn’t I have the guts to cut loose once in a while?
I wanted desperately to be the kind of girl that this night would come easily to. I’d come out to see Jonah and he still hadn’t shown up. I wanted to not read into that. I wanted to believe there was a simple explanation for why he was late to his one-night-only, special-for-the-town performance, and not that I had somehow fucked up.
And just like that, I flipped from pleasantly drunk to something much darker. Paranoia licked at the edges of my mind, insisting that this, all of this, this whole night was just an elaborate trick. That the same tormentors who had hounded me growing up had organized this to mock me. That everyone here was pretending, and they’d all start laughing.
I took a deep sip of my drink. No. That was insane. I wasn’t insane. I was a regular girl who sometimes got really nervous about silly things. Silly. It was all silly. There was a reason Jonah was over an hour late and it had nothing to do with me. He probably got in an accident and was lying in a ditch somewhere. The roads had gotten super bad since I’d come here hours ago.
But the idea of Jonah King in an accident was completely foreign to me. He was invincible. Untouchable. That couldn’t be it. No, there was some other reason. Was Gabe worried too? I turned and tried to find him in the ever-thickening crowd. I could see the sandy brown of his hair but I couldn’t see his face because he’d been swallowed up by the revelers. “Jesus, where is he?” came a loud, drunk voice.
“Probably fucking his girl,” I heard the bartender snarl.
I froze.
Jonah? Was he talking about Jonah?
More voices joined the conversation. I strained my ears to listen in. I even stopped humming.
“He’s dating that girl,” someone else explained. “What’s her name? The kindergarten teacher.”
“Ruby Riley?” came the reply. “Oh, I like her. She’s sweet.”
My stomach dropped to my toes.
Jonah was dating a local girl.
I knew he’d never end up with me. I’d always known I was too ordinary. Too literally the girl next door. But if he wasn’t going to be with me, I always hoped he’d be with some glamorous Hollywood Amazon. Some kind of otherworldly modelesque creature with high cheekbones and a smile that didn’t show so much gum. Not Ruby. I’d met Ruby. Though I doubted she’d remember me, I knew her.
She was one of the nice ones. A nice normal girl. Which was something I knew that I would never be.
I’d stood up with my heart pounding, intent on fleeing, but when I stood the sudden sway of the floor under my feet showed me how drunk I was. There was a burst of laughter when someone cut the sound on the sedate Christmas music that had been playing in the background and plugged in an old King Brothers song. I was suddenly enveloped in a sea of dancing bodies, my own body swaying to its own internal rhythm as I looked around, wide-eyed as Jonah’s recorded voice came on through the loud speaker.
Gabe was watching me again.
The sound of the right brother’s voice crooning to me as the wrong brother looked me up and down was too much. Something inside of me squeezed tight and fell away. I started moving to him.
Him.
The wrong brother.
The crowd parted like the Red Sea and I walked right up to him. “Hey.” It was all my tongue could manage.
He grinned that grin that started at one side of his mouth and spread across his whole face. I’d seen that grin so many times since then, but that night was the first time he’d let me experience it. It was like getting hugged by a smile. That night, his hazel eyes looked the exact same shade as his brother’s. That’s why I could pretend he was Jonah.
I told myself that’s why I went to him, because I wanted to pretend he was his brother. I’d repeated that lie to myself many, many times after that night, but now I was finally realizing what I was pretty sure I’d known all along. It was a lie. I’d gone to Gabe believing that I wanted him to be like Jonah. But Jonah had never noticed me.
Gabe had.
He’d grinned when he looked down at me. Maybe he was amused by how I was swaying to the music, the rum making my limbs floppy and my movements fluid. At some point, he must have put his hand on my waist but when I finally noticed the warmth of his fingers, they’d felt like they’d been there forever. I leaned in to the pressure of it, liking the way he was holding me up.
We danced. Jonah’s voice filled my ears, but Gabe was filling every one of my other senses.
“I shouldn’t have come out tonight!” I’d said. I wanted to hate myself now that I knew that there was no chance of catching Jonah’s eye that night, but it was hard to hate anything when I was swaying in Gabe’s arms. I tried to imagine Jonah holding me like this, but that wasn’t real. This was.
“I have to study,” I finished lamely, dredging up another reason to hate myself when I was feeling so damn good.
He grinned again, and the last bit of hatred fell away. This was how it could happen. This was how I could be a normal girl. Swaying to the music with Gabe’s hands at my waist and his eyes on my face. I realized my eyes were half-slitted and opened them wide to peer up—way up—at him.
Was his face always that close? I was staring at him, I knew it, but there was no way to stop myself. I’d never been this close to his face before, and even though it was so familiar, there were still things to discover. Like how his eyes actually had way more green in them than Jonah’s did. I liked them. I also liked the way his chest felt under my hands. Warm and real. I liked how he leaned down and rested his forehead against mine. “I feel like I should know your name,” he said. “We’ve met before, right?”
“Yeah.” I tossed my head, laughing. It was the rum that was making this so amusing. “A bunch of times.”
“Really?” He looked distressed. “I would have remembered you.”
This should have bothered me but it didn’t. If he didn’t know me, then I was free to be whoever I wanted. And I wanted to be the girl I was right now, with him. In the whole bar, he’d only danced with me. He was the wrong King Brother, but he felt pretty damn right under my hands. Real, while his brother was a fantasy. I was drunk and I wasn’t going to remember this in the morning. I wasn’t me tonight, so I did what I thought a regular girl would do.
“Kiss me!” I demanded, wrapping my arms around his neck and shouting up to him.
He looked confused, but not disgusted. “What?” he said, but I could tell by the twinkle in his eye that he had heard me.
I pulled him down and pressed my lips to his.
Everything went black.
The music cut out as the lights went dark and everyone started screaming. The power had gone out and everyone went crazy, bumping into each other in the pitch dark, but the only thing I cared about was how Gabe’s lips felt on mine and how good it felt when he kissed me.
I’d been the one to yank him down and press my mouth to his, but he was the one who was kissing me.
And holy hell could he kiss.
Everything slowed down. Time was like taffy getting stretched and pulled so that moments stretched out into infinity and I noticed every detail even as the rum made eve
rything distorted. I knew his hands couldn’t really be everywhere at once, but that’s what it felt like. One hand ran through my hair as the other pressed against my back and still there was his hand caressing my face, tilting my head to deepen the kiss. In the darkness I swore I saw sparks but whether they were in the air or behind my eyes I couldn’t tell.
It was the darkness that made this okay. In the darkness I could pretend I was someone else.
He made a sound in his throat, the kind of sound I’d never heard before but somehow my body knew to respond to. I arched into him, and the way my nipples ached as they pressed into his hard chest made me moan into his mouth. He answered my moan by sliding his fingers into my hair and tugging slightly, messing up my careful curls in a way I welcomed. I wanted to feel him tugging gently as he tilted my head back. I wanted his hand wandering down my side, brushing lightly but firmly against the side of my breast. I pressed into him, sliding my hands down his arms to feel the strength under his skin and he growled something into my neck. In the dark, people were bumping into us, jostling as they shouted for friends and yelled about the lights, but I couldn’t see anyone. The darkness was thick and total, which was why I let his lips wander down my neck.
Every nerve in my body sang. I dug my toes into the soles of my shoes as his lips brushed up against my earlobe. I moaned and arched again and I heard his murmuring laugh and felt his thigh nudge its way between my legs. I gasped and moaned again as he pressed it upward, and he covered my mouth and swallowed my panting with a kiss as he snaked his hands down to my hips and pulled me firmly against his thigh.
My singing taut nerves frayed and I fell against him, gasping in disbelief at what was happening. A searing heat clawed its way through my core. My breath caught and I knew that I was seconds away from having an orgasm right there in the dark, just from the press of his thigh. It didn’t help that he cursed and murmured into my ear as my breath quickened. I turned my head up to stare at him, even though I couldn’t see him, and with some kind of sixth sense he found my mouth again.
A sudden red glow illuminated everything, like we’d wandered into a bordello.
“Backup generator’s on!” came the shout, and there they were, everyone around us in the red glow of the exit lights.
I stepped back and out of Gabe’s hands. His eyes were still closed, like he hadn’t realized I wasn’t kissing him anymore. A soft smile was on his face. He looked...fucking beautiful, different and brand new to me. Something reached into my chest and squeezed my heart so tight I gasped.
He must’ve heard me, because he half-opened his eyes and the mortification of what I’d done flooded in. I was shocked at what I’d allowed to happen between us—the intimacy, the pleasure—and all because I’d wanted to pretend he was his brother. It was wrong. This was so wrong.
I wasn’t this kind of girl at all. I couldn’t do this. Not to myself, and not to him.
Before his eyes had opened fully, I turned and fled. I ran for the door and pushed it open, pushing hard against the whipping wind and driving snow.
I thought I heard him shout when the door slammed. But how could he call for me if he didn’t know my name? If he had no idea who I was, then it could be like it had never happened at all.
But it had happened. And now, somehow, it was happening again.
“It was you.” It wasn’t a question he was asking. It was a statement. He wasn’t unsure, he knew.
I let my fingers trail over his good arm and closed my eyes. I licked my lips. “It was me,” I confessed, and it was like the floodgates opened in my chest. A tightness I hadn’t known was there loosened and I gulped in my first full breath since I’d started working as his nurse.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked, looking wounded and excited at the same time.
That night I’d wanted to pretend he was his brother, but now all I wanted was him. “I didn’t think you remembered, and I didn’t want things to get...weird.”
“But you remembered.”
I blinked. “Of course.”
He opened his eyes wide. For a moment I thought he might start yelling. I would have deserved it. By not telling him, I’d been lying all this while, and he’d have every right to be pissed about it.
But then his smile, that slow, lazy smile that split his whole face into a manic grin, spread across his face. “Holy shit.” He brushed his hands up my arms, as if wanting to be sure I was real. “You looked so different that night.” He squinted. “But now I see it. Your eyes…fuck, I should have known you from the eyes, but...”
“But it was dark,” I said with a small laugh. The leftover adrenaline from my panic attack ebbed away, making me sleepy and sated. “It was dark pretty much the whole time.”
Chapter Seventeen
Gabe
The night I’d kissed Everly without knowing her name was also the night my brother almost died.
I hadn’t known until much later that the reason Jonah was so late for his show was that he and Ruby had gone off the road in the storm. They’d gotten trapped in her car without a cell phone and nearly succumbed to hypothermia before Jonah dragged them through the whiteout to a farmhouse to call for help. He had the scars from frostbite on his fingers to remember that night for the rest of his life, but I’d only had a kiss in the dark.
I’d been pissed at my brother for being so late. I’d had to quell the crowd’s increasing agitation by buying a round for the whole bar. My younger brothers both gave me the eye when I did this, but I gave them the finger. It wasn’t like I was drinking. It was Cokes for me forevermore.
The news traveled through the bar fast and everyone was happy again. The sweet thump of triumphant adrenaline dumped into my veins, that buzzy high of risk-taking the only high I could chase now. In an instant I’d turned the mood from near riot to full-on party.
Jonah owed me, I’d thought.
I glanced toward the front door again.
And that’s when I saw her.
There at the corner, perched on a stool with her whole body tense, was a girl who looked so familiar that I’d done a double take. The way the light shone down on her made her look like she was bathed in a spotlight. Her curly blonde hair fell like a waterfall down her back, with a few shorter tendrils sweeping down to graze her creamy cheeks. Her hair and eyes were all softness but there was a hard edge to her mouth that I liked. A lot. “Who is that?” I leaned in and asked my brother.
“Who?”
“The girl! On the stool by the door?”
Beau looked over as she slid from her stool and melted into the crowd. “What girl?”
“Forget it.” I was still looking at where she was, at the negative space she left there at the very edge of the bar.
Beau watched me watch for her. “You’re actually paying attention to a girl?” I glared at him. He raised his eyebrows innocently. “What?”
“Don’t start.”
He grumbled and headed over to the bar with his twin and Claire, all of them refilling their beers on my dime and leaving me alone.
“Hey.”
I turned and there she was, right in front of me, a strangely purposeful expression on her face. “Hi,” I said, because what else is there to say when the first girl to catch your eye in nearly two years is talking to you? I winced at how rusty I’d grown.
I stepped to her. I wasn’t drunk, but I felt like it. She laughed, a wild sound. What’s so funny? I wondered.
“I usually don’t come out,” she said, shaking her head. She rocked on her heels, bumping lightly against me.
I reached out to steady her and liked the way she felt under my hand. Her skin was really soft. “I feel like I should know your name. We’ve met before, right?”
She’d tossed her head and laughed like this was the most amusing thing she’d ever heard. “Yeah, a bunch of times.”
I knew it. I knew she was right. There was something about her, but I couldn’t place her at all and it was pissing me off because I wanted to kno
w her. I wanted to know everything about her. “I would have remembered you,” I told her, because I would have sworn it was true.
She’d gotten this wild look in her eyes that made me want to press her against the wall and make her scream my name.
She looked at me like she could read my thoughts. I loved the way her eyes were shining at me. I could get addicted to having her look at me like that. I was an addict, after all.
The storm howled outside. Cold air seeped in through the window but she was warm and without discussing it, we started moving, dancing to the cheesy Christmas music piped in through the speakers. I didn’t care about the music. I wasn’t sure why she was in my arms, but it felt right to have her there, just like it felt right to bend and kiss her after only a moment.
“Kiss me,” she said.
I couldn’t believe my luck. “What?” I had to be sure that’s what she really wanted because I was ready to do all that and more.
Our lips connected.
Everything went black.
The darkness was total. Silently I thanked Jonah for being a prick and missing his own concert, because this was way better than any show of his could be. I kissed her with two years’ worth of pent up emotions, all the things I’d bottled up inside and only let out when I jumped out of airplanes or rode dirt bikes on the dunes in the Sahara. Kissing this familiar stranger was the same kind of adrenaline rush.
Bodies thumped and jostled us, rocking us like a boat on ocean waves. I’d only seen her for a second, but sight didn’t seem important right now. What was important was the way she felt in my arms, the smell of her shampoo as I buried my nose in her hair. Her voice, low and husky, was what mattered. The taste of her lips was the most important thing about her.
It felt like seconds, but it was also as long as a lifetime.
The generator kicked in and the emergency lights came on. I blinked as my eyes adjusted, and in the whooping crush of people surging together in celebration, she slipped from my grasp. “Hey!” I growled, shoving a guy to the side. “Watch out for the lady!”
Lost Perfect Kiss: A Crown Creek Novel Page 10
