Betting on You (23 page)
Authors: Jessie Evans
Tags: #second chance romance, #steamy romance, #wedding romance, #free contemporary romance, #free wedding romance, #Contemporary Romance
Nash paused for a long second before his breath rushed out. “Oh…I didn’t… I have something. In my wallet, but…”
“But what?” Aria asked. The hesitation in his voice might have made her anxious any other time, but it was impossible to feel anxious with him leaning protectively over her, his big hand running up and down her side in a gentle caress.
“I didn’t think you wanted to…you know…tonight. I thought you might want to wait.”
“Do you want to wait?”
“Hell, no,” he said, with a soft laugh. “But…it’s not my first time.”
“Does that make you nervous?” Aria asked, knowing some guys avoided virgins, thinking they were too clingy or too much responsibility or something lame like that that she had never quite understood.
She might be a virgin, but she didn’t expect to be rendered idiotic and helpless because her privates and a boy’s privates met up for the first time. She was inexperienced, not a fool, and her brain was just as much a part of this decision as the rest of her.
“A little,” Nash confessed after a moment. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You won’t.” Aria snuggled closer to him, wrapping her arms around his neck. “All you ever do is make me feel amazing. I doubt this will be any different.”
“Are you sure?” Nash asked. “I don’t mind waiting. I…”
“What?” Aria asked, letting her fingers play with his spiky, light brown hair, wishing she could see his eyes.
“I really like you. A lot,” he said. “I don’t want this to just be a camp thing, you know?”
“Me either,” Aria said, realizing the words were true.
She and Nash hadn’t talked about anything long term, but now it seemed like a no-brainer that they would last longer than seven weeks. Sure, they went to different schools and lived on opposite sides of town—Aria in a big house in a new subdivision, Nash out in the boonies with his parents and ten brothers and sisters—but there was no reason they couldn’t make a relationship work.
“I don’t have a lot of time during the week,” Nash said. “I have football most afternoons and help out with my brothers and sisters at night, but I could come to Summerville every Sunday.”
“And I could come out and help you babysit some nights,” Aria said, catching Nash’s excitement for their future.
“I’d like that,” Nash said, before adding in a softer voice, “I’d like as much of you as I can get.”
“How about all of me?” Aria asked, tugging gently at his neck. “Come on, Nash. I’m almost sixteen. I know what I want.”
Nash resisted for a moment, but Aria could hear the way his breath hitched. “On one condition,” he said in his husky drawl, his voice enough to make Aria squirm with wanting him. “You’re my girlfriend. It’s official, starting tonight.”
“All right,” Aria said, suddenly feeling shy.
She had never had an official boyfriend before, especially not one who made it sound like such a major deal, a commitment that meant more to him than a casual, high school connection. When Nash called her his girlfriend, it was intimate, possessive, and irresistibly sexy.
“I’m your girlfriend.” The words sent a thrill through Aria, giving her the courage to say, “Now, will you make love to me?”
Nash didn’t say a word, but the next second he was kissing her so hard and deep that, after only a moment, his breath was her breath and Aria swore she could feel his heartbeat echoing inside her chest.
A few moments later, his hand slid beneath her shirt, and not long after her shirt was off and he was kissing her in places no boy had ever kissed her before and it was…mind-blowing. Aria’s head spun and her fingers fisted in Nash’s hair as he kissed and licked and…god, the things he did, and the way it made her feel, it was more amazing than she’d ever imagined.
And then, his hand was sliding beneath the waistband of the old gym shorts she slept in, down until he found the place where she ached and needed and wanted him so badly and his fingers began to move, building the tension inside of her until she was breathing hard, body tensed as his lips trailed hot kisses down her neck, her eyes squeezed so tight that she didn’t see the flashlights coming through the woods until it was too late.
Too late for her and Nash to pull apart; too late to avoid being caught in a
very
compromising position.
What followed was one of the most mortifying nights of Aria’s life.
After scrambling back into their clothes in front of three senior counselors, she and Nash were taken to the camp director’s office and forced to sit silently on opposite sides of the room while they waited for their parents to arrive.
Since the Gearys lived closer to the camp, Nash’s mom arrived first.
She wasn’t anything like what Aria had imagined she would be. She was tiny, for one thing—only coming up to the middle of Nash’s chest—and dressed in cheap, ill-fitting jeans and a faded t-shirt, with her thin brown hair pulled back into a ponytail. It was obvious she had once been very pretty, but now she looked worn out, and not just because she’d been awakened in the middle of the night.
Nash had mentioned that his mom and dad both had to work really hard at their jobs, and often work extra night shifts to pay for everything their children needed, but Aria hadn’t understood how hard, or how poor Nash’s family must be.
The realization came to her in a rush, the moment Nash’s mom’s watery green eyes met hers with a knowing look that made her feel small and stupid and very, very young.
Nash’s mom listened to the report of the incident without saying much then asked, “Am I going to need to take him home?”
The director, Phil, a man close to Aria’s daddy’s age who looked sick to his stomach with nerves, exchanged a loaded look with his wife, who stood in the corner across the room, biting her lip. “Well, that’s up to Aria’s parents to decide,” he said. “Since she’s the minor in this situation.”
Nash’s mom frowned. “Nash only turned eighteen last month.”
Phil sighed again, a sound that seemed to pain him. “I know, but she’s fifteen and if Mr. March wants to press charges, I—”
Phil never got to finish his sentence.
Aria’s daddy came roaring into the room like a rampaging rhinoceros, his thinning blond hair standing up in a crazy fuzz-halo around his head, his deep voice making the walls vibrate. Even dressed in suit pants and dress shoes paired with an old
Bob and Sue’s Smokehouse
t-shirt from before Aria was born, back when Mom and Dad opened the first of their chain of BBQ restaurants, he managed to look terrifying, not ridiculous. Daddy was only five ten, and on the slim side for a man with a deep and abiding love of red meat, but he had a presence about him that could knock larger men off their feet at ten yards.
He took one look at Nash and started breathing fire.
He used words Aria had never heard come out of his mouth before, but it was the moment he called Nash a “low life piece of white trash not good enough to lick the ground his little girl walked on” that would always stick with her.
She couldn’t believe her dad would judge someone for having less money than they did. She was still in shock from it when Daddy demanded Nash be removed from the camp immediately, and promised to press statutory rape charges first thing in the morning.
It was then that Aria started to cry, loud, terrified, panicked tears that made her father come sit next to her on the couch. He put an arm around her and drew her in for a hug, finally acting like the dad she had always loved to bits.
By the time she pulled herself together, Nash and his mother were gone, led away by a senior counselor to Nash’s cabin to collect his things.
Nash wasn’t there to hear Aria convince her daddy that he couldn’t file charges against Nash. He wasn’t there to hear her father apologize for saying things he shouldn’t have. He wasn’t there to hear Aria tell her dad that she and Nash cared about each other and wanted to be together, or to hear her daddy say they’d talk more about
that
when she came home from camp in four weeks.
In the days that followed, Aria called directory assistance from the pay phones in the rec room, and tracked down Nash’s number. But for some reason, she couldn’t bring herself to call him, not while she was stuck out in the wilderness. She convinced herself it would be better to call when she was back in Summerville, when she could get a ride from one of her friends to meet him and talk face to face.
She called him the second she got home, but an answering machine picked up. She dropped the phone back into its cradle, too nervous to leave a message.
What if his family hated her for getting Nash kicked out of camp? She didn’t think Nash would blame her, but she didn’t want the first time he heard her voice again to be on an answering machine, either.
So she waited, and called again. And again and again—five times in her first week home—but she was never able to get anyone human on the line.
The first time she saw Nash outside of camp was a week before school started, at the Summerville Mall where she was shopping for a first-day-of-school outfit with her friends. She spotted Nash and a few other boys from River Valley High School in the food court and rushed over. She didn’t hesitate for a second, not imagining Nash would be anything but happy to see her.
Though, looking back on it later, she realized she should have.
She had stayed at camp; Nash had been sent away. Her daddy had made Nash feel like trash, but, out of respect for Daddy’s position on the Arts Council, everyone had pretended that Aria had never broken the rules in the first place. Nash had paid the consequences, while Aria walked away scot-free, and Nash hadn’t heard a word from her for six weeks.
She shouldn’t have been surprised when he greeted her with narrowed eyes and a sarcastic, “Well, if it isn’t the Little Princess.”
But she was.
Surprised, and hurt.
“Nash?” she’d squeaked, sounding about ten years old. “Can we talk?”
“I don’t think so,” Nash said. “Wouldn’t want to piss off your daddy, Princess. Besides, you’re too good to hang out with white trash, remember? Might get those freakishly long fingers of yours dirty.”
His friends laughed; Nash smiled a smile that didn’t reach his eyes.
“How could I forget?” she asked, covering her hurt with a bitchy sneer. “I guess I had to get close enough to smell the cheap detergent.”
Nash flinched, but barely, just enough for Aria to see it and feel bad for a second before he said, “I’m poor, but at least I’m not a spoiled brat. Or a liar.”
Aria wanted to scream that she wasn’t a liar, that what they had shared meant so much to her, and that all she wanted was for him to smile at her the way he used to and be the sweet, wonderful, sexy Nash she’d known at camp before everything went wrong.
But he wasn’t that person anymore, and Aria wasn’t the type to take abuse without fighting back.
For the next three years—while Aria finished high school, and Nash graduated and started working construction with his uncle—Aria and Nash were firmly committed to exchanging hateful words every time their paths crossed. Which, in a town the size of Summerville, was more often than either one of them would have liked.
By the time Aria flew to France to study to be a pastry chef the summer before she turned nineteen, she could barely remember feeling anything for Nash except contempt. She had forgotten the way Nash had knocked her off her feet when she was just fifteen, and refused to admit, even to herself, that no one had made her feel so consumed, or treasured, ever since.
She forgot she’d ever dreamed of a future with Nash…until the night she was forced to remember.
***
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