by LJ Evans
We headed up the stairs, and I opened the door with the key that Abrams had given me before we’d departed.
Inside, it smelled like new paint and new furniture. Because everything was sparkling new. The wood floors were polished to a shine you could see yourself in. The walls were a mix of white shiplap and gray paint, and the kitchen spoke of money and trend all rolled into one.
Truck whistled.
“Didn’t know Abrams had this kind of dough.”
“Just don’t break anything, asswipes. We don’t have the nickels and dimes to pay for any repairs.”
I headed down the hall to the bedrooms. Two shared a Jack and Jill bathroom. The third was the master suite that stared out at the bay. I put my bag down by the dresser in the suite.
“Why do you get the master, Els-worth? It’s not like you’re going to be bringing any girls back here to show off.” Mac was still whining and still using the damn nickname, grating on my nerves.
“Did you make the arrangements? Do you want to suck face with gratitude to Abrams when we get back to school in August?” I asked.
Mac scoffed. “He’s the one who should suck up to us for doing this job for free.”
“In your wet dreams, douche,” I said.
He walked out to pick a room off the Jack and Jill.
I left my bag where it landed and went to the French doors. I opened them, stepping outside so I could breathe in the salty air and hear the waves crashing on the shoreline.
The ocean and me, we’d always been a thing. Twined together like almost nothing else in my life. It talked to my soul like some people said music or art talked to theirs.
I’d been on the water with my dad since I could crawl. And after…when he was gone, it was still the place I felt closest to him. It wasn’t the entire reason that my life goals surrounded the Coast Guard, but it was an undeniably large part of it.
“We need supplies,” Truck said, joining me on the deck.
“Abrams already bought everything we need. It’s in the garage.”
Truck laughed. “Not those kinds of supplies, asshole. We need food. Beer. You know, the two necessities.”
I sighed and headed back into the bedroom.
“Let me unpack, and then we’ll go into town.”
♫ ♫ ♫
When I pulled the black rental into the driveway of Abrams’ house after getting groceries, there was a beat-up red Honda sitting there.
We all grabbed the bags from the back and headed up the stairs. Truck and Mac were already discussing the grilling duties for the night. I was still eyeing the car that they didn’t seem to have noticed or cared about.
We heard the music before we even hit the top of the stairs. Loud. Country music. It was blaring out the open windows, letting the air conditioning cool the humidity instead of the other way around.
The guys and I exchanged a curious look.
I opened the door in time to see a blur of dark hair and tan skin jump off the coffee table, guitar in hand, strumming and screaming along to the lyrics.
Except it wasn’t really screaming. It was the huskiest, sexiest female voice I’d ever heard. Her hair was a tumble of dark curls and waves that flung out about her as she continued to move, swaying with the guitar and the lyrics. Her frame was all lean muscle with small curves in all the right places.
Her shorts barely covered those curves on her rear end, and a striped shirt was tied so that it bared her midriff, showing off more bronzed skin and muscles.
She was dancer and singer and girl all rolled into one. She hit me to my core and wouldn’t let me move. The guys were equally stunned, standing behind me, watching her perform for an audience she hadn’t even registered was there yet.
When she finally turned, mid-strum and mid-word, I was hit once more. This time by the intensity of her eyes that stared at me beneath dark lashes. One eye was as blue-green as a Caribbean island bay, while the other was almost muddy green like a Louisiana swamp. They didn’t match. And yet, they fit her perfectly.
The joy that radiated across her face from her performance slid off, just as her hand slid off her guitar at the sight of us.
“What the hell?” Her husky voice, full of surprise, washed over me in a wave that told of unsteady seas. Of beauty and desire and storms. And I knew I was in trouble.
“Who the hell are you?” Mac asked, and I had to put a hand holding a bag of groceries out to prevent him from striding toward her.
Her face had closed down, the moment of joy disappearing behind a stone wall. A beautiful stone wall.
She slid the guitar behind her, the strap emphasizing her breasts that were small and pert and barely hidden by the knot of the shirt that sat below them. Tempting me. Tempting all of us.
She should have been intimidated by three muscled men at the door. She should have been unsure and maybe a little shaky, but she wasn’t.
Instead, she climbed back onto the coffee table and, from there, stepped onto the couch so that she could get closer. She glared down at me from over the back of it. On the couch, she was barely taller than my six foot three. She put her hands on her hips, balancing on the soft cushions as if she owned it.
“Great. My dad’s asshole recruits. Did he send you to retrieve me like some AWOL cadet?” she asked.
I heard her words, but it was difficult to register them because I was still awash in the waves of emotion that she’d sent through my body. Like being tipped over in an unseen current when you swam into a wave.
“Your dad? You mean Abrams is your father?” Truck asked.
Mac started laughing. “Holy shit, that would mean someone was actually brave enough to have sex with that bastard.”
I dropped the groceries and slammed a fist into his shoulder—not hard enough to be a threat, but hard enough to make a point. “Asshole, that would be her dad you’re talking about.”
She laughed. A sound that was reminiscent of wind chimes lost inside a windstorm, muffled, but still strident. Sinking into your soul. “It’s okay. I often wonder the same thing. What must my mom have been like if she was really willing to put up with him for eight years?”
We all just continued to stare at each other—her on the couch, us with our groceries by the door. “You’ll literally have to drug and hog-tie me if you expect to take me back. Or you can just tell him you failed in your mission and enjoy the ocean view.”
There was a moment where I think uncertainty crossed her face, a flash of something that wasn’t confidence, but it was so quickly replaced with a rebellious look that I wasn’t sure I’d even seen it.
“We weren’t told you’d be here at all.” I finally found my voice.
“I mean it. I’m not—Wait. What?”
“Professor Abrams gave us the place for eight days before our summer cruise in exchange for painting it,” I explained.
She took me in then, really seeing me for the first time. She started at the top with my short hair that needed a cut, then traveled down to my hazel eyes before moving down to my snug T-shirt and tan skin from being near the sea. Once she’d traveled the length of me with her eyes, she returned them to mine, and my stomach flopped over. I wondered, vaguely, if this was how girls felt when my asshole friends looked them up and down in a bar.
She laughed, that husky tone reverberating down my spine once more. “Figures. Just my luck.”
She flung herself down on the couch, her mirth filling the air. Truck, Mac, and I all exchanged a look. We weren’t sure if she was an angel, or a demon, or just simply crazy.
Finally, she seemed to get ahold of herself, and she sat back up, her dark locks of hair swinging wildly about her face, her two-tone eyes taking in the three of us again. A smile brought her pink lips up at the edges in a way that made me want to touch them.
“I’m Ava. And it seems I’ve run away from home at the worst possible time.”
Run away. Shit.
“How old are yo
u exactly?” I growled. I didn’t know if I was growling at her, or my own body’s reaction to her, or at the guys who were staring at her like she was the best thing since dry clothes.
She waved at me like I was asking something inconsequential. “Don’t worry. I’m not jailbait. I’m nineteen.”
That didn’t make her less jailbait in my mind. Messing with a professor’s daughter was always out of the question. No cadet would ever look at a faculty member’s child—girl, guy, or otherwise. It was the unspoken rule. You didn’t shit where you slept.
More than that, though, I wasn’t going to do anything that would get in the way of the life I saw for myself. Nothing.
“Not that I plan on sleeping with any of you, so y’all can pick your chins up off the floor,” she said.
“What exactly did you mean by running away then?” Truck asked.
She looked at our supplies.
“Is that Corona?”
She leaped over the back of the couch, snagged one from the bags I’d dropped, and headed to the kitchen before any of us could really register that she’d even moved. Or that she’d ignored Truck’s question.
It was evident that we were still in shock, because we just let her take the beer. At nineteen. Beer that we’d bought. That was a hell of a lot higher on the list of to-not-be-dones than sleeping with a professor’s daughter. Aiding and abetting the delinquency of a minor. No. Not minor, but underage? All my knowledge of the law was stuck in a no-man's-land that was called Ava.
She turned back, the Corona open at her lips. “Do you have any limes in there?”
“Duh,” Truck said. He was the first of us to move. He dropped his bags on the kitchen counter and started unloading them. When he found the bag of limes, he handed them to her.
She smiled at him, that gorgeous smile with lifted corners twitching, and I almost wanted to slam my best friend into the cabinets—for getting the smile, and for handing her the limes instead of taking the drink back.
Mac exchanged a look with me before shrugging and taking his bags into the kitchen. I was the last to follow. I was still lost in curled lips and a sexy voice and the threat to my unstarted career in the U.S. Coast Guard that was going to have me reaching for her beer and pulling it from those gorgeous lips.
Chapter Two
Ava
FLY
“The road's been long and lonely
and you feel like giving up
There’s more to this
than just the breath you're breathing.”
—Performed by Maddie & Tae
—Written by Dye / Marlow / Vartanyan
I pulled a knife from the drawer and sliced the lime apart into wedges, squeezing and then stuffing one into the top of the Corona bottle.
I could feel them watching me. Mostly the tall, dark one. The man in charge. I hadn’t even needed them to speak to know that he was exactly that. I’d been around my dad’s corps of cadets enough to be able to spot the leader easily.
The leader was always the one in front. The one with an almost casual stride and stance that hid the coiled strength underneath it.
The blonde followed me into the kitchen first. After he’d opened his own beer and stuffed a lime inside, he put out his hand. “I’m Truck, that’s Mac, and the attitude over there is Eli.”
I couldn’t help but bust out laughing. They all gave me that is-this-girl-really-crazy look, but I didn’t care. “Mac Truck, really?”
Truck grinned and pulled Mac to him with a muscled arm.
“No one messes with the Mac Truck. We’re like the superheroes of the cadet world.”
“That’s like saying you’re the world’s greatest sidekicks.”
Truck faked a wounded grimace.
“Are you two…like…you know?” I asked, because who gave themselves a shared nickname in today's day and age unless they were a couple.
Mac pulled out of Truck’s hold and said curtly, “No.”
I chuckled. “There’s nothing wrong with that, you know. If you are. I mean, I think you’d still get a lot of flack for it in the military, but—”
“We’re not.” Mac turned back toward me with a wicked smile that I bet many ladies adored. “I mean, there’s nothing wrong with it if we were, but we’re not. I don’t think we’d be opposed to working out something with the three of us, though.”
“Knock it off, Macauley.” Tall and silent, Eli, finally spoke with a not-so-hidden warning in his voice.
Mac smiled at me with a shrug.
Eli made his way into the kitchen and quietly started putting the groceries away. I hopped up on the counter and watched them. Him.
He was leaner than either of the other two with a tattoo that peeked out from the back of his tight T-shirt at the neck. He was really more Jenna’s type than mine: tall, dark, brooding. Normally, I was all about guys like Truck, with mischief in their eyes and blonde hair. But somehow, I found my body actually leaning into Mr. Silent when he opened the pantry beside me.
“I promise I won’t bite you in the middle of the night,” I teased, surprised as the words slipped out of me. There was something about this guy that pulled at the edges of me, daring me to push him. Push myself.
He met my eyes with hazel ones the color of wheat in the summer sun. We were both caught there for a moment, sea and sand and grains of straw mixing together in our eyes.
“There isn’t going to be a middle of the night,” he said.
If I was daring to disobey my father’s commands just by being there, I certainly wasn’t going to be forced to obey this man’s. Not that I intended to spend the night with any of them. That wasn’t why I was there. I was there because I had a couple days before I could head north, and I refused to spend it in the same house as my father. I couldn’t do one more day without losing it. After trying to get past what he’d done earlier this year, the latest catastrophe I’d discovered had pushed me past the yellow, to green light, go.
Those thoughts brought me back to the beach house and the beer in my hand. I sighed and took a sip.
I was surprised when Eli pulled it out of my hand.
“You aren’t twenty-one,” he growled. It was an actual growl. Like one a guy in one of Jenna’s sexy novels would do. It made my insides tighten in an unfamiliar way.
“You only know that because I was honest about my age. The license I have in my wallet says I’m twenty-two. Will that make you feel better?”
I jumped off the counter, landing closer to him than I’d been before. I went to grab the beer back, but he brought it to his lips and chugged it down instead. I watched the movement, his Adam’s apple moving underneath the smooth skin beneath the stubble that dotted his chin and cheeks in a way that it wouldn’t if he was on duty.
When he was finished, his eyes turned down to meet mine again. There was something there. Not just desire. Something more that I didn’t want to identify. Dad’s cadets and I were like pineapple and pizza. They didn’t belong together.
I had plans that were a long way away from cadets, and military colleges, and Texas. I didn’t need anything getting in the way of that.
But I’d also had enough of people controlling my life, so I wasn’t going to let this cadet dictate for me what I could and couldn’t do. I moved away, taking another beer from the six pack in pure defiance. Like defying my father after he’d tried to take my future away. I stuffed another lime inside the bottle and moved out of the kitchen.
When I finally looked back at him, after sitting on top of the small dining room table, he was watching me. I just smiled and raised the beer to him before taking a sip.
I could see his whole jawline clench. I felt sort of bad. It wasn’t his fault that he’d caught me in the middle of one of my worst weeks ever. Scratch that. Worst few months ever.
I took another drink while he eyed me. I wouldn’t finish it. It would make me play sloppy later at the bar, and I never wanted that. I wanted to fee
l every moment of being onstage. It was what I lived for. I was determined to not let my dad, or anyone, or anything take that away from me again.
Maybe after my set it would be good to get drunk. Maybe it would allow me to forget, for a few hours, just how shitty things had been. But without Jenna, I wouldn’t be able to get too drunk. We’d always been each other’s safety valves. Only one of us drank at a time so that neither of us woke up having had something happen that we hadn’t wanted.
I ached to call Jenna. The only remorse I had about what I’d done was leaving without telling her, without giving her my new number. I didn’t want her to have to lie to my dad when he questioned her. She’d be his first line of attack once he realized that I wasn’t at graduation. That I wasn’t sitting in the chairs waiting for them to call my name like every other dumbass senior at that dumbass school he’d forced me to attend.
He'd be furious that I’d embarrassed him.
The three men finished putting away most of the food they’d bought in silence while I fought with my emotions, the pleasure of leaving tainted by the age-old fear and despair that came whenever I went against him. I had to remind myself there was nothing more he could do to me. Nothing I wasn’t prepared for.
My country music was still blaring. It didn’t seem to bother the cadets, but it was making me itch, making me want to pull out my guitar and start strumming along to forget everything but the music. So, I jumped down and went over to where I’d left my phone after syncing it to the expensive equipment Dad had recently bought for the home he rarely visited.
I switched over to a random playlist that Jenna and I used when we were getting ready to go out. Upbeat. Eclectic. Oldies and newbies mixed together. Hoping it would chase away some of the anxiety that had crawled over my skin.
When I turned back to the men, they’d moved on to preparing dinner, working as a team with minimal communication on a simple meal of hamburgers and tots. Eli moved past me to the deck and the expensive, built-in barbecue.
