Return of the Bad Boy (3 page)

So it doesn’t matter if I’m lying dead in a ditch somewhere, the victim of a horrific car accident. I wasn’t at his beck and call, and therefore, I have failed him.

And the sad thing is, he’s not the only one with attitude in the firm. In fact, I think they have a “douchebag requirement” in order to become an attorney there. I haven’t met a partner that doesn’t look at me like I’m a piece of gum stuck to his shoe. And so yes, while the original plan was to take a year off while deciding what law schools I wanted to apply to, right now, my answer is: None of them.

But I’m going to do it anyway. Anything else would break my father’s heart.

As I’m imagining the major heart attack my dad would have if I ever told him what I really feel, my phone begins to ring. It’s a number I don’t recognize, with a 570 area code, the area code for Northwestern Pennsylvania. I think of letting it ring through, like I always do with unknown phone numbers, but in the last second, I decide to pick it up. “Hello?”

“Hi, Katydid.”

All the air whooshes out of my lungs. His low drawl reaches into my chest and pulls at my heart like he has it on a string. I straighten like a pin on top of my lace comforter. “Dax?” I’m breathless. I swallow.
Calm, Katherine, calm.
“How did you get this number?”

“You gave it to me.”

“What? No, I didn’t.”

He lets out a sigh and says, very condescendingly, “You gave it to the Auto Club, who in turn, gave it to me.”

“Ohhhh. Right.” I’d been getting worried that not only had he become hotter than hell in the past four years, he’d also developed magical telepathic powers. “Can you stop calling me that? I’m Katherine, now.”

“
Katherine?”
He says it like it’s a name he’s never heard before. “What, do all the hoity-toity types in Boston get off on all those extra syllables?”

I wrinkle my nose, annoyed. “Katydid has just as many.” He seems to take it as a personal affront that I want to go and make something of myself instead of being stuck in Friesville forever. “So did you fix my car?” I say, trying to sound stronger and more in control of myself than I actually feel.

“Hold your horses, there,
Katherine,”
he says with a laugh. “Damn, girl. I’ve had your car in my possession for less than two hours.”

“Well, I seem to remember that everyone in town raves about how good you are.”

“True. But I like to go slow, and take my time,” he says, and I can’t help but think of the double meaning behind his words. My pulse increases by a factor of twenty. “Plus I haven’t quite
had
everyone in town,” he continues, his voice getting deeper. “You want to test me out and see for yourself?”

I’m blushing now and I feel a stirring in my lower belly. Actually, even lower than that if I’m honest with myself. I throw my comforter off and stare at my painted toes. I am so
not
letting him do this to me. “Look. Can you fix it, or not?”

“Of course I can. But it isn’t just a matter of cleaning up the clogged oil pumps. The engine’s blown.”

I cringe. “That doesn’t sound good.”

“It’s not. Not to mention that the transmission’s on its last legs.”

“So, you won’t have it fixed by tomorrow?”

He laughs. “I’m good, but I’m not that good.”

“So what are my options?” I ask desperately.

“With me, or your car?”

“Screw you,” I groan.

“If you can afford it, get a new car, Katydid. One that’ll keep you safe in that big ol’ city you call home now.”

“I don’t want a new car,” I tell him, gritting my teeth to the harsh reality that I can’t
afford
a new car. “I want to fix that one. Isn’t there something you can do?”

“Anything I do’ll be more expensive than the car’s worth.”

That was not what I needed to hear right now. “Can’t you do a band-aid? Something cheap that will keep it running so I can use it now and then?”

He pauses. I figure it’s a long shot, so I’m surprised when he says, “Could be.”

I exhale, just as I hear something thump downstairs. A door slams closed. Then I hear my mother, voice high and screeching. I can only make out parts of what she’s saying:
If you hadn’t . . .
Then my father’s voice, calm but strained:
I can only . . .

They’re arguing. The two people who never said a cross word to each other, ever.

Two seconds later, I hear the door to the basement slam shut, footsteps slamming down the staircase, and the whirring of the treadmill starting up. My dad always ran down there after a hard day teaching, and some nights, he’d run for miles and miles and not come back up until I’d been asleep for hours. A second later, I hear my mom climbing the stairs. She knocks on my door and comes inside, holding the dress she’s going to work her miracles on. “I’m going to turn in, dear. I’m tired.”

I drop the phone to my chest, covering the display as if she might be able to tell it’s Dax I’m talking to, and look at the alarm clock at my bedside. It’s only eight-thirty. “Okay.”

She closes the door, leaving me to wonder if this could get any weirder. My mom was the night owl, and now she’s going to bed early. They’re arguing so much that I don’t think they can be in the same room together. What the hell happened here? This feels like a war zone. Or worse than that, The Twilight Zone.

“Kate—Fuck.
Katherine
?” Dax says.

I’m holding the phone in a sweaty death-grip. I’d spent a long time dreaming about moving to the city, thinking how glamorous it would be. In a few weeks, my house will be gone, and I won’t have any reason to set foot in Friesville again. Boston might as well be my real home, because once my parents sell this place, I won’t have one. “I’m sorry. What?” I ask, my forehead sweaty from the sudden anxiety that’s gripped me.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah. My parents were just arguing.”

He laughs. “
Your
parents? I didn’t think those two did that.”

“Nobody’s relationship is perfect, I guess,” I mutter. “It’s . . . things are a little strained around here, to say the least.”

“Yeah? What’s up?”

I don’t speak. I can’t tell him this. If I tell him this, and it’ll just make me tell him more, and more, and more, knocking down every wall between us. It’ll be like the domino effect, the floodgates will open and then all of my quickly weakening resolve will be gone and it won’t ever come back.

But at the same time, as much as I want to keep him away, right now I can’t think of any other person I’d rather talk to than him.

“You want to get out of there? I’ll pick you up,” he offers, as if he read my mind.

I suck in a breath. No. I can’t. I won’t. I do that, and it’s all over. My mouth opens, but instead of the definitive NO my head is telling me to say, “And go where?” comes out.

“Wherever.” When I don’t answer, he says, “I’ll bring you to the shop and go over the options for your car, okay?”

That sounds harmless. But nothing with Dax has ever been harmless. There’s a reason my parents said I should stay away . . . and not only that,
I
said I should stay away.

If only I could remember what that reason was.

I listen for a few moments to my father’s feet pounding steadily on the treadmill downstairs. I think of Dax as he’d looked when he came to tow my car, lifting the hood of my VW, tattooed arms flexing, the way he’d smiled that devilish smile at me through a jawline coated with rich dark stubble.

Despite having nothing in common, there was something we always had an abundance of: Chemistry. I used to think of us as two magnets with opposite charge—impossible to keep apart.

It’s clear he’s no longer that same boy who used to drive me crazy by saying left and going right, who used to kiss me silly under the tree outside the house when I’d meet him out there.

No, he’s probably a lot more dangerous than that now, judging by his manly looks and the subtle changes I sense in his confidence and attitude.

But I guess I could use a little danger right now. “Okay,” I say.

I
t’s
dark by the time Dax comes around to pick me up.

I’m dressed in cut-off shorts to show off my legs, my best feature by far. He used to caress my thigh and tell me how soft and silky smooth my skin was.

The feeling was beyond delicious.

And although I realize that I’m sliding down a very steep hill now, I can’t help it—I want to look good for him.

My mother’s sleeping and my father is still running downstairs, so I easily slip out the front door. Dax’s waiting next to the car, and in the darkness, I can see him faintly illuminated by the porch light from our house.

He’s almost otherworldly in his chiseled strength, and from a distance, I can truly see just how gorgeous he is. Sometimes with Dax, I used to feel so connected to him and so familiar that I was able to forget how absolutely devastating he was in the looks department.

So truly out of my league.

But now, with the passage of so much time and the way he’s filled out in all the right places, I’m back to being just stunned. Does he even realize that he has the looks and charisma to make a million in Hollywood if he so desires?

Probably not, and he wouldn’t do it even if he could.

I smile as he opens the door to his car for me, carefully so as not to make too much noise. It’s a ’67 Mustang he’s nicknamed Arrow, a car so dear to him he might as well have it surgically attached to his body. It feels oddly comfortable, sliding into the seat after all this time, almost as if four years haven’t passed.

In the dim light, his eyes slowly roam the length of my legs, up to my cut-off shorts, and I know I’m so in for it. “That’s the Katydid I know and love,” he says.

“
Katherine,”
I correct, shivering. Did he just say he loves me? Really? I know, it’s only a saying, but . . .

“Right. Katherine,” he says the name with some trouble.

I laugh. “You can’t take change, can you? I can’t believe you’re still driving
this
car.”

“Arrow here is a classic,” he explains, patting the dashboard. “She purrs like a kitten.”

“It’s a bucket of rust, though.”

“No,
your
car’s a bucket of rust. Why don’t you just whip out that fancy checkbook of yours and get a new BMW to match your fancy job?”

I cross my arms. “I don’t want a new car,” I lie. “Plus, I have college loans to pay off and law school to think about. Even with my
fancy
job, I don’t have the money to sock into a new car yet. I’m working toward it, though, but it won’t be for a little while yet.”

He cocks an eyebrow at me. “That so?”

Not at all. But whatever. I’m sure as hell not telling him the truth; that my apartment is the size of my hand, my boss is a douchebag, I won’t be able to afford a new car ever, and my checking account doesn’t even have two dollar bills inside it to rub together.

Before long, we’re pulling into Harding’s garage. Time stands still in Friesville, so it’s exactly as I remember, a dilapidated white cinderblock building with three bays and a tiny office adjacent to it, with a neon Penzoil sign in the window. A dim light illuminates my VW, up on the jack in one of the ports, but other than that, the place is closed up and dark. “How are your brothers?” I ask him as we get out of the car. “Your dad?”

He tosses his keys into the air and catches them again, his movements athletic and graceful. “They’re around. Doing the same shit. Well, except Cal. Cal’s up at state.”

“Oh,” I ask, surprised. “He’s going to college?”

He lets out a short laugh. “Prison.”

I blush and want to kick myself over the mistake, but it’s not really all that stupid. The Harding boys are smart, every one of them. Even my parents would say that: They’re smart, but they just don’t apply themselves. Still, it’s not a stretch of the imagination that any of them could get into college. “Spar and Turk work here with me,” he continues. “Wob’s a sophomore in high school. My dad’s my dad.”

That means that his dad is still drunk all the time. Dax has always watched over the other boys the best he could. That was the thing that made me fall for him the most, I think.

Everyone thought he was just a stupid, no-good nobody, and yet he had this whole thing going on that only I noticed. He practically ran Harding’s garage, even back in high school. He did his best to keep his crazy younger brothers in line. And he did all this while going to school.

I’d tried to tell my best friends Nevaeh and Juliet that, but they always just rolled their eyes at me and called me “whipped” by the bad boy. They certainly didn’t understand what I saw in Dax, other than his hotness.

“So let’s take a look at her,” he says, snapping me out of my thoughts and memories, dragging me back to the now. Dax reaches into the pocket of those tight-fitting jeans and pulls out a ring of keys, and easily lifts the garage door, letting me walk inside.

“Thanks,” I murmur as I pass by and smell the scent of him. I feel my skin break into gooseflesh, and it’s not because it’s cold, either.

Dax follows me inside and moves alongside me. “I know why you’re so attached to Little Blue,” he says with a grin. “If it weren’t for her, we never would have met.”

I refuse to admit that I’m attached to her for that reason, but he’s right, my VW is how we met.

We went to high school together, and though he was only a year older than me, it might as well have been twenty years. I ran with the College Prep kids, and he was the kind of student who flunked everything but shop and hung out smoking with all the other burnouts behind the dumpsters in the back of the school. I heard stories about how those guys did drugs and fought hard and beat up good kids just for existing. I was afraid to so much as
look
at that group, because I liked my arms and didn’t want anyone to rip them off.

But my car had been making a little whistling noise when I pulled into the junior parking lot at my high school, and Dax was sitting at the adjacent senior lot, smoking with a bunch of his friends on the hood of his Mustang. He’d jogged up to me as I got out of the car, and my pulse immediately shot up. My first thought was to put a hand on my purse. I don’t know why I thought he’d try to steal it, in broad daylight.

He gave me that cocky grin and said, “You need new brake pads, sweet thing.”

I blushed like crazy. Guys had barely talked to me up until that point, and he was the first guy my age to ever call me sweet. And those deep green eyes with the baby-doll lashes . . . holy shit. I’d never seen anything so mesmerizing. He was wearing all black, a tight t-shirt with some obscure metal band on the front. He smelled like cigarettes and all the things I’d been telling myself I had to stay away from, but suddenly, my mind was saying something else.

Get closer.

He told me to bring my bug into the shop so his class could take a look at it. He and his equally scary friends fixed it by the time I got out of Honors Pre-Calculus that afternoon. But when I went to pick it up after school, he told me I needed new shocks, and gave me a coupon for his dad’s garage. He even offered to drive me to and from school if I used them.

Nevaeh and Juliet, my two best friends, told me I was nuts to accept. He’d been arrested, they said. He used girls for sex, supposedly—both of my friends had a laundry list of girls who’d given him blowjobs in the back of the school. He drank and smoked weed excessively. They told me to bring a can of mace on the ride because “you never know”.

Still, somehow I must not have quite believed their warnings, because I took him up on the offer to drive me.

And if he was a guy with a rep, you’d never know it from our drive to school. He was gentlemanly, even sweet, opening the door to his ’67 Mustang for me, asking if the wind from the open window was too much, and talking the entire time about how his dad had gotten him into cars. Plus, he was Hot with a capital H, and his deep green eyes and sexy drawl stirred my insides up like no College Prep boy ever had.

My arms prickle with goose bumps as I recall that first drive together, when I realized that I was falling hard for him.

So hard.

So hard that it took years to get over him, and let’s face it—I never quite did get over him all the way, did I?

“I’m not all that sentimental,” I lie, looking at my car so I don’t have to look into those glorious eyes of his. I shiver. “So, what’s wrong with the engine?”

He follows me underneath the lift. “Like I said, it’s blown. Well, if getting a new car is out, you can either get a new engine, or have this one rebuilt,” he explains.

“Rebuilding is cheaper, right?” I ask immediately.

“Yeah.” He rubs the scruff at the back of his neck, grabs a wrench off the nearest bench, and starts to twirl it. “But even that’s not inexpensive. Or easy.”

“Okay. How much?”

“A thousand,” he says, leaning back against the workbench.

“A thousand
dollars
?” I nearly gag. Again, I’m back to thinking of my pathetic checking account. “And that’s the cheap option?”

“Look,” he explains. “If money’s an issue, I can rebuild it in my spare time and just charge you for parts. You know that’s my hobby. But like I said, it ain’t gonna be fast. Two to three weeks, at best.”

“At
best
?” I choke out. I’m going to have a breakdown. I’ve already pissed Fowler off enough by taking the week. I can’t just not show up for
three.
“Can you get me a loaner in the meantime, then?”

He grins. “I’ll be your loaner.”

I snap my eyes to him. “What?”

“You need to be someplace, I’ll take you.”

“What, like a chauffer?” I spit out, shocked at the offer. “Oh, my parents will love that one.”

He leans back casually inspects his grease-stained hands. “Last I heard, you’re an adult. You can do what you want.”

“Okay. I need to be in Boston for work. Are you going to drive me there?”

“Yeah,” he says, matter-of-factly. “If that’s what it takes.”

I snort. “Right. I’m sure.” I roll my eyes. He’s looking at me with his wide-eyed, puppy-dog expression, but Dax is never innocent. On him, that expression just makes me more suspicious. I cross my arms. “Are you serious? You’re not, are you? You’re probably just . . .”

Something dawns on me. My mouth drops open. The last time we spoke, years ago, he told me some pretty vile things. He’d said to me that he couldn’t give a shit if I left town.

Of course, by then he was already back on his hamster wheel, screwing every girl he could get his hands on, as if the months we spent together had meant absolutely nothing to him. Every time I’d hear a rumor about Dax Harding and another girl, it was like a knife straight to my heart, but what made it worse was that he didn’t care at all what I was up to.

As hard as it was to leave my parents, to leave home, I’d had to do it. I’d been accepted to Lafayette and Lehigh and Scranton, all universities much closer, but I’d purposely chosen the one that would put as much distance between Dax and me as possible.

I can still remember the indifference on his face when I said goodbye to him.

“What are you, angry at me because I wanted to go away to make something of myself?” I say to him now, my blood boiling as I vividly recall just how badly he hurt me. It feels like a fresh wound again, scar tissue violently ripped open.

He stares at me. “What?”

His evil plan is all congealing inside my head. “I bet there’s nothing that wrong with my car,” I say, my voice growing louder. “Tell the truth.”

He pushes off the workbench, drops the wrench on the table, and grabs a dirty rag. “I’m pretty sure you’re the one who ended up stranded on the road, begging me to save you.”

I clench my fists. My blood is boiling over. He’s the only person on the face of the earth that can get me this riled up. “Okay, but I bet it’s not as bad as you’re saying. I bet it’s probably just a little fix. I need a second opinion.”

He sucks in a breath. “Then get one. And here I thought you were the smart one. You’re unbelievable, do you know that? I offer to fix Little Blue for free, out of the generosity of my heart, and you accuse me of—“

“Admit it. You’re just trying to make trouble for me.”

He throws the rag against wall and glares at me. “What? And why would I do that?”

“Because of how we ended things.”

“How
we
ended things?” He lets out a short laugh. “I got news for you,
Katherine,
but
we
didn’t end things and you damn well know it.”

I can pinpoint the day it all fell apart, a few months before the end of my junior year. We went together for five months, if it could be called that. Ninety-nine percent of the time it was just Dax and me, alone. We never could go out with his friends or mine, because they wouldn’t understand. Eventually, though, everyone found out and . . . everything just went haywire.

By the end of it all, he was expelled from school, my parents were notified of the incident, and it was like every single person in my life was not just begging, but demanding, that I forget him if I wanted to have any sort of future.

So I listened to them. I did what I had to do, because Dax had made it impossible to stay with him. He fought everything and everyone, and in the end he even fought me.

“I don’t want to get into who did what to who,” I sigh, throwing up my hands, as my mind fights for something to hold onto.

I can’t stand the thought of questioning whether I had hurt Dax first, if his reactions were all justified. That’s the kind of horrible mind games that he forces me to play.

That’s why I was trying to avoid all of this in the first place.

My whole body is getting hotter, and I’m not sure if it’s because there’s no air conditioning, because I’m angry as hell, or because I’m with Dax Harding. In our relationship, short as it was, we’d always have the most explosive fights. That clearly hasn’t changed. “Well obviously you don’t like us city people,” I tell him, regaining some of my composure. “You probably couldn’t wait for me to come back so that you could pull more shit on me.”

He vises his head in his hands, breathing hard. His eyes are pure fire. “What? Why would I pull shit on you?”