When other kids found out what happened to Dad they either made fun of me or worse, they felt sorry for me. And Jesse said not to tell anyone Mom was sick again. He said if they knew how sick she was, they might take us away from her.
So I said, “I’m waiting for my brother.”
He glanced around at the empty playground. “Who’s your brother? And why isn’t he here kicking those little shits up the ass?”
“Jesse,” I said. “My brother is Jesse. He’s in detention with Zane.”
He took a step closer, teetering on the edge of the sandbox. “Yeah? How come?”
“They… um… got in an argument with Ms. Nielsen because she said I can’t come to school in dirty clothes. They do that a lot,” I mumbled, wishing maybe I hadn’t said all that, except he looked kind of impressed about the detention thing.
He looked at my jeans; I’d gotten them muddy when I sat in a ditch to listen to music before school. I could pretend it didn’t hurt me if he said something mean about it, but that didn’t mean I wanted to hear it.
Why didn’t he just go away?
“Well, you can come down. Those little shits aren’t coming back.”
I picked at the hole in the knee of my jeans, where my kneecap was poking through.
He leaned over, resting his elbows on Thunderdome. “What’re you doing up there?”
“Playing Thunderdome.”
I knew how stupid it sounded when no one else was there. It wasn’t like I didn’t have any friends to play with when my brother wasn’t around, but they all had parents who picked them up after school. Anyway, I thought it might impress him. Thunderdome was outlawed by the teachers and we only played it after school.
He stepped into the sandbox. “How do you play?”
“It’s quicksand!” I squealed. “You can’t step in it!”
“Oh. Shit.” He jumped up on the dome. “Almost lost a shoe.” He looked up at me and his hair fell over his eye again. Blue; his eyes were a deep, dark blue. He climbed to the top of the dome and sat across from me.
Maybe he wasn’t making fun of me; he just didn’t know the rules of Thunderdome.
“It’s okay,” I told him. “You’re safe up here with me. I’m the princess.”
It was true; my brother and his friends always let me be the princess so I’d stay out of the way while they played, and sometimes they let me decide on the winner in case of a tie. But I figured it sounded more important if I left that out.
He pulled out a cigarette and lit it with a shiny flip-top lighter that had been scraped and dented all to hell, and started smoking. His hands were scraped too, his knuckles split and scabbed over. His fingernails were too short, chewed all down into the nail bed, his cuticles all ragged and blood-encrusted. They were a mess. But his face…
He was so… pretty.
“What happened to your hands?”
He didn’t answer. Just smoked his cigarette and looked out across the school grounds, his arms wrapped around his knees, watching as parents picked their kids up in the distance, along the road in front of the school.
“A princess, huh?”
“The princess.”
“So who’s the prince, then?”
“Don’t need one.”
He looked at me. “Then who’s gonna save you if you fall in the quicksand?”
“I will.”
“What if you can’t?”
“Then you can,” I said. “If you want to. But you might get stuck in there, too.”
He stared at me for a minute. Then he smiled, slowly, and it was like the sun coming out from behind the clouds.
“Then I guess we’ll sink together.” He took a couple of drags of his cigarette, his eyes squinting through the smoke. “You got a name, princess?”
“Jessa Mayes.”
“Jessa Mayes,” he repeated. “Don’t ever let those little shits talk to you that way, yeah? Next time they try, you make a fist, like this.” He showed me, clenching his fist until his split knuckles looked like they might burst. “And you hit ’em, right here, in the nose, as hard as you can. You do it hard enough, they’ll go down. Then you run away. You do that once, they’re not gonna bother you again.”
I shook my head. “I’m not supposed to hit people. My brother says sticks and stones—”
“Yeah?” He flicked the ash off his cigarette and spat on the sand below. “Well, your brother’s a pussy who doesn’t know shit.”
I gaped at him.
No one talked about Jesse like that. The other kids all thought he walked on water because he could play guitar.
“I can’t make a fifth-grader eat crap.” My face was getting hot and I looked down at the sand. “Maybe you can. I can’t.”
When I glanced up again, he was taking something off his jacket. He held it out to me. “Take it,” he said.
I took it from his outstretched hand and examined it. It was a little silver pin shaped like a motorcycle. It said Sinners MC on a banner that wrapped around the tires. There was a woman on the motorcycle but she wasn’t riding it, exactly. She was facing the wrong way and reclined back, her back arched, shoving her boobs out.
I was eight.
I had no idea what Sinners MC meant, so it never occurred to me to wonder why he had a pin that belonged to an outlaw motorcycle club.
“You wear that,” he said, glancing over my shoulder, “no one’s gonna mess with you.” He was looking in the direction of the school, his eyes narrowing as he dragged on his cigarette.
“Smoking on school grounds again Mr. Mason?”
I turned to find a teacher stalking toward us, one of those shit-eating bullies in tow, red-faced, looking anywhere but at us. “What will your parents have to say about this?”
“Can’t wait to find out,” he muttered. His blue eyes met mine as he tossed his cigarette aside. Then he smiled at me again.
I smiled back.
He leapt to the ground, jumping over the quicksand and landing in the grass.
“See you around, princess.”
I watched him shove his hands in the pockets of his jeans and walk away. But it wasn’t true; I didn’t see him around. He never even came back to school after that day.
Not for two whole years.
Those bullies never bothered me again, though. None of them did. And I was pretty sure it wasn’t because of some pin. It was because of him.
Because he’d made two fifth-graders eat shit for being mean to me, and no one wanted to eat shit.
The next year, when a new girl in my class asked me about my motorcycle pin, she didn’t believe me when I told her where I’d gotten it. As if I’d made up the whole thing about the badass boy in the leather jacket who saved me from a couple of bullies—then mysteriously vanished from school, never to return—just to impress her.
But I knew he was real.
I had his pin, and I had his picture. In the seventh grade class photo in the school yearbook he was standing right next to my brother, staring down the lens of the camera like he was ready to take on the world… and make it eat shit.
His name was Brody Mason.
He was the love of my life.
If only I’d figured that out a lot sooner than I did.
CHAPTER ONE
Jessa
I was late. For my brother’s wedding.
And because I was late, the universe seemed to be conspiring to make me even more late. All three legs of my flight had been delayed. The last was the airline’s fault, the second, the fault of the weather, but the first… well, that was all me, so it was kind of a domino effect.
Once I’d finally touched down in Vancouver—thirteen hours late—it seemed to take an unusually long time for my bags to come down the carousel, and by the time I’d gathered my things, piled them onto a baggage cart and steered my way to the exit doors, I’d been traveling for over twenty-four hours. More than enough time to ponder how pissed off my brother was going to be.
I was weary and uncomfo
rtably hot, sweating in my leather boots and faux fur jacket. I’d worn a thin T-shirt layered over a tank top and knit leggings with the jacket and boots, not sure what to expect with the weather. Vancouver was having a weirdly cold winter but the snow and ice was now gone, replaced with a faint, drizzling rain. The air that greeted me was cool and fresh but not cold as I walked through the sliding glass doors. And everything felt… familiar.
Much more familiar than I thought it would.
I took a breath and tipped my face up to the cloud-bruised sky. I glimpsed the peaks of snow-dusted mountains in the distance. And I felt an overwhelming sense of… joy.
Aside from the fact that I didn’t actually want to be here, that I was carrying the burden of a gut-gnawing sense of dread—the kind that came with knowing you were about to come face-to-face with things you’d never really figured out how to face—it felt good to be home.
Home.
I grinned as the wisps of rain hit my face…
Then I saw him.
Him.
Several feet to my left, there was a cue for the taxis, which I’d planned to get myself into. I’d get my ass to the ferry where I’d meet my old friend, Roni, my “date” for the wedding. On the ferry over to Vancouver Island, she and I would catch up and I’d generally get my shit together for what promised to be the most difficult weekend of my life. In the winding, four-and-a-half hour drive across the island, I’d run through the various tidbits of conversation I’d prepared in my head to get me through this; inconsequential, impersonal stuff like the latest celeb gossip, fashion trends from the front lines, and if I was really desperate, the weather. Canadians were always game to discuss the weather; it was kind of a way of life. Of course, I’d throw in a few decent jokes, too.
My old friends were always good for a laugh.
At the end of the road, maybe Roni would flirt with the boat guy and he’d let us grab a super-quick drink (or two) at the last bar we could find before heading out. On the private boat to the very posh and very remote resort up the coast where the wedding was taking place, I’d give myself the little pep talk I’d also worked out, in preparation for coming face-to-face with the man I’d painstakingly avoided for the last six-and-a-half years.
Basically, my entire adult life.
Along the way, Roni would provide distraction, entertainment and comic relief, as she always did. And when I saw him, him, she’d be by my side, drawing attention and generally providing a loud and lovely buffer.
And everything would work out just fine, right? Because no way seeing him could possibly go as badly as I feared it might.
Right.
That was the plan.
Instead, I was alone. I’d taken all of two steps into my hometown. I was weary and jet-lagged. I’d had not one drink. And my little pep talk? Completely out the window.
Because a dozen feet to my right, he was standing at the curb in the rain, staring at me… and my world fell apart.
“Brody,” I breathed.
Then I more or less went into shock. Because he was right there. In jeans and a black leather jacket, his dark eyebrows furled as he stared me down, rain droplets dripping from his soft brown hair and his full lips… the smoldering, overcast sky casting shadows in his eyes… looking just like he used to look, only… better.
“You’re late,” he said, his voice flat. He took a few steps toward me, then stopped, his gaze flicking down to my breasts. “Is that my shirt?”
I glanced down.
It was an old Led Zeppelin tour T-shirt. It said United States of America 1977 and had a rockin’ angel on it, a naked dude with outstretched wings. It wasn’t the kind of T-shirt you paid too much money for in some hipster boutique because it looked old and distressed. It was old. It was large on me to begin with and was now so stretched out I tied it above one hip to make it fit. The neck fell off one shoulder. It was worn to hell and had a few holes.
And yes, it was his.
I’d picked it up off his bedroom floor one sketchy morning when I was eighteen, and never gave it back. He’d never asked for it back. And even if he wanted it back after I’d worn the hell out of it, I wasn’t giving it back.
It was a piece of him. The only piece I had.
“No,” I lied, pulling my jacket shut. Butterflies skittered in my stomach as he reached past me, scooping my bags off the cart.
“Had a shirt just like that. Disappeared around the time you did.”
His blue eyes met mine and I felt the almost-electric jolt all the way down my spine. I felt it between my legs.
Holy hell.
I still felt it.
That same thing… that thing that should’ve died with all the years and all the miles between us… all the silence… all the time I’d wasted trying like hell to fight it, to deny it, to just plain numb it out. Coiling fast, hot and tight at the base of my spine… in my lungs, at the back of my throat, every cell of my body catching fire… as every nerve, every fiber lit up in protest of every second we’d been apart.
It was exactly the same. Only… worse.
It was more.
That crazy, irresistible pull I’d felt around him back then had only grown stronger.
His eyes darkened as his pupils dilated… and I knew he felt it, too. Then his gaze dropped to my lips. He breathed in, his nostrils flaring. His jaw clenched.
Then he turned and walked away. With my bags.
Oh my God.
I just stood there, watching him go, the air between us stretching thinner and thinner the farther he got, until I couldn’t breathe. At all.
I allowed myself two-point-five seconds to freak out. Then I forced some air, shuddering, into my lungs.
Then I went after him.
I caught up only when he stopped to toss my things in the back of a black Escalade parked at the curb, hazard lights flashing. I stood there, awkwardly, waiting for him to turn around, every part of me throbbing with the force of my heartbeat; my lungs as I fought to breathe, my brain as I fought to think, my clit.
My knees were shaking.
No man had ever made my knees shake before.
Well, no other man.
This was not how my body had ever reacted to other men.
And yes, I was aware that deep, deep down, there was still some part of me—maybe larger than I’d like to admit—that was still that skinny, dorky, lonely girl who’d been bullied on the playground. But making my living as a model over the past decade meant I’d grown a thick skin. Very thick. I’d also learned that no matter how I felt inside, the world did not see me as that skinny, dorky girl; that men, in general, found me beautiful. Way more beautiful than I’d ever felt. I still had a hard time reckoning me with those pictures of model-me in designer lingerie, my long brown hair highlighted with caramel and honey, my eyebrows perfectly shaped, my cheekbones and chin all somehow grown in to balance what I’d feared would always be an awkward nose, my full lips and long limbs somehow all working together to create an image that was something far and away from that girl inside. Even so, I’d learned how to carry myself with confidence, how to compete, perform, win and even lose with grace. I’d learned how to keep my cool under intense scrutiny, and mercifully, how to handle rejection. Because the world I lived in, even for beautiful girls, was rife with rejection.
What I’d never learned how to do, apparently, was look Brody Mason in his deep blue eyes and not lose my shit.
Lucky for me, he barely spared me a glance as he slammed the back of the truck shut. “Get in,” he said, disappearing around the driver’s side.
I walked up to the passenger side door as he got in the truck. Then I stood there, in the misting rain, still kind of in shock, just trying to get a handle on all the reactions set off by his sudden presence.
Because how could I still react to him like this? After all this time?
It was like no time had passed at all.
Worse; I knew exactly how long it had been, and according to my body, I had six-an
d-a-half years without him to make up for. Preferably immediately, nakedly, and repeatedly.
I took a deep breath, fumbled with the door handle and opened the door. “Thank you for the ride,” I managed.
He didn’t smile. He just swiped a hand through his damp hair and stared me down with those intense blue eyes. I started to register how much older he looked than the last time I’d seen him, though his eyes hadn’t changed. Time had been good to him. Very good.
Six-and-a-half years.
It hit me like a kick in the gut, all at once.
It wasn’t something I’d ever allowed myself to fully process: the agony of missing him, of wishing things had gone differently for us. If I did, I’d probably curl up and die, right on the spot. Because how could I live with it?
Now that he was here, though, right in front of me… all my carefully constructed walls, the armor I’d built up over the years against my true feelings, against him, cracked open, and everything came surging into the light. Every moment between us. Every breath I’d taken on this Earth since Brody Mason sauntered into my life.
And it was in those deep blue eyes, that he remembered, too.
He remembered everything.
“Get in,” he repeated, and started up the truck.
I got in.
As we pulled out into traffic he was silent, and I tried to think of something to say to fill the void. It was the perfect time, really, to tell him. The perfect opportunity to explain why I’d left, all those years ago.
I could tell him everything. Just come clean, like I’d told myself I should do… could do. Might do, while I was in town for my brother’s wedding.
Instead, I stared at his handsome profile, afraid to speak. The arch of his brow, his high cheekbone. The strong line of his nose. His square jaw, clean-shaven but slightly shadowed. His stylishly unkempt brown hair. The battered leather of his jacket.
I hadn’t laid eyes on him in years. Not until my brother’s well-meaning fiancée started texting me photos of her and Jesse, and Brody happened to be in some of them. I should’ve deleted those photos, but I didn’t. Instead, I’d gazed at them a thousand times. And now he was here.
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