The Lonesome Young (8 page)

Naturally, it scared the crap out of me.

I took a step back.

“Mickey . . .” My voice was barely a whisper, a sound too fragile for the weight of the moment.

He took a step closer.

CHAPTER 8

Mickey

I
had to kiss her. Every instinct was telling me to pick her up so that hot little body was plastered against mine and kiss her until she didn’t remember who she was, or that my last name was Rhodale. She made a tiny sound, almost like a gasp, and I stared down at those lush, parted lips, and wanted her so much my body actually ached with it.

I took a step back, and both of us let out shaky breaths at exactly the same time.

“I’m sorry. I don’t know how to be myself around you,” I muttered. A lame-ass confession that made me wince even as I said it. “You don’t make sense. I barely know you, but I want to know everything about you. You’re smart and gorgeous, and you make my skin too tight.”

The more I rattled on with this stupid confession, the more bewildered she got. She tilted her head and stared at me, and by the time I got to the end, confusion was very apparent in her green, green eyes.

“What do you mean,
I
don’t make sense?” She threw her hands in the air. “You’re the one who doesn’t make sense. You’re always ordering me around, or calling me Princess like you know anything about my life at all. Maybe if you’d quit being such a . . . such a
dumb head
, you might
get
to know me.”

I couldn’t help it. I grinned. “Dumb head? I’m not sure I can recover from such a foul insult.”

She actually growled. Clenched her delicate little hands into fists and growled at me.

It made me want to kiss her even more.

“You . . . you
asshole
!” she finally shouted, and all I could think was that she was even more freaking gorgeous when she was pissed off.

“Asshole. That’s way better,” I said, nodding as if contemplating the subject of insults.

And then I kissed her.

It wasn’t a gentle kiss or a practiced kiss; I suddenly had no moves, no technique. No game. All I had was an overwhelming
want
—an all-consuming
need
.
I needed to taste her lips more than I needed to think or breathe or exist on the planet.

So I kissed her.

And she kissed me back.

For one long, glorious moment, Victoria’s arms wrapped around my neck and she kissed me with a heat and passion I’d never experienced. Never believed was possible.

When the kiss finally ended, I stumbled back a step or two and stared at her in disbelief while everything I thought I knew about girls and myself and, hell, life itself went up in flames.

Her eyes were a little unfocused, so at least it hadn’t just been me whirling around in that tornado of feeling.

“Holy shit,” I said reverently.

She inhaled sharply. “Really? ‘Holy shit?’ Evidently kissing a frog doesn’t always turn him into a prince. Bad boys are called that for a reason, right? I’m the dumb one here.”

“Victoria—”

“Nice,
Mickey
. Really lovely. You might work on your charming ways before you kiss the next girl you’ve lined up, though.”

The warmth in my chest congealed and turned icy, becoming a rock in my gut.

“There’s no next girl lined up, and you’d better not even be thinking about the next guy,” I said flatly. “We need to figure this out. We need—”

“We need nothing. All I need from you is that gasoline,” she snapped.

Over the next five minutes, while I poured the gas in her tank and then watched her drive away, she never said a single word.

Way to crash and burn, Rhodale.

• • •

I wasn’t exactly sure how Victoria managed to sound sexy answering a question about carpetbaggers, but somehow she did. Maybe it was the little blue dress she was wearing.

Or maybe I was just losing it.

Two solid weeks of watching Victoria ignore me would be enough to drive the most reasonable person to distraction, and I was a Rhodale, which meant I wasn’t on even a handshake acquaintance with reasonable. She didn’t speak to me, didn’t look at me, and didn’t answer me when I tried to talk to her. To make things worse, while her campaign of studied indifference kept running longer, her skirts kept getting shorter.

Or maybe that part was just in my imagination, which had been working overtime trying to give me a mental picture of those long legs all the way up.

Everything else in my life felt like it was caught in the same stasis bubble, too. Ethan, for once, had been lying low. My mom was busy with her own students; she said this year’s crop of fourth graders was the most challenging she’d ever had. Pa was around less and less in the evenings, which usually meant he was heading back down inside a bottle of bourbon.

Football practice was same old, same old, and even my job at the gas station had been slow.

“Do you plan to answer me sometime this class period, Mr. Rhodale, or shall I fax you a written request?” Mr. Gerard’s dry voice cut through my mental meanderings, and I looked up from the drawing of a mule I’d been doodling to see that everyone was staring at me.

“Nobody faxes anymore,” I said, not really trying to be a smart-ass but rather buying myself time to think back and see if I could figure out what he’d asked me.

Victoria glanced over at me, and I could almost see a hint of compassion in her eyes.

“Kentucky declared neutrality at the beginning of the Civil War, but it didn’t last,” she said.

He actually smiled. I thought I heard Derek gasp. Nobody had seen Gerard’s teeth in years. There’d been bets as to whether he actually had real ones or if, like fireflies over the Kentucky hills, they only came out at night.

“Very nice, Miss Whitfield. Most people forget that. Perhaps you can manage to stay awake in my class from now on,” he said, directing that last bit at me.

When he walked away, choosing his next victim, I leaned across the aisle. “Thanks. I owe you one.”

She shrugged, but I noticed her cheeks turned pink. The beautiful and brilliant Victoria Whitfield wasn’t as indifferent to me as she pretended.

“Remember outside the school office where you said we’d start over? What happened to that?” I persisted.

“That was before you were such a jerk when you kissed me. Now keep your voice down,” she whispered.

“I will if you promise to talk to me after class.”

“I can’t.”

“You can’t?”

“I won’t.”

“Then I won’t keep my voice down,” I said loudly.

Mr. Gerard turned to peer at me over the top of his glasses. “Yes, Mr. Rhodale? You have something to add?”

“No, sorry. I just get so excited about the Civil War,” I said, straight-faced.

When he turned around, I turned in my seat and faced Victoria. “Well?”

“Leave me alone,” she demanded. Ice cubes would have been a few degrees warmer than her voice, and something inside me snapped.

“I don’t think so, Princess,” I drawled, being sure to put a lot of Kentucky-hills accent in there. “I need to talk to you, so I can quit wondering what in the hell I did to offend you.”

She opened her mouth to say something, probably something really rude, and I deliberately cut her off.

“Or are you just afraid I’ll Hulk out and beat you up?”

Heat turned her cheeks pink again. “I’m not afraid of you.”

“Good. After class?”

The bell rang before she could reply, and I followed her out of the room. I was determined to figure out what was going on, and why the only girl I’d been interested in for a long time was shutting me down before I’d even had a chance to get to know her.

Usually it took me a while longer to piss people off.

I knew that at least a couple of the guys watching me in the hall were probably Ethan’s thugs. The last thing I needed was for him to hear that I was chasing after a Whitfield down the school hallway. I realized I was clenching my fists at the thought, and I deliberately forced my fingers to relax. I would not impress Victoria by getting into a fight with these idiots.

As I watched Victoria disappear around the corner, though, the flash of blue skirt flaring out behind her was enough to make me realize that I didn’t give a shit about Ethan and his flunkies, anyway.

I went after her.

I caught up to her and grabbed her arm just before she got to her math class. She looked down at my hand and then up at me, and slowly her eyebrows rose.

“I have to go to class,” she said.

I glanced inside the room. “It’s a substitute. Substitutes never know anything about calculus, or so Derek tells me, so you won’t be missing anything.”

“It doesn’t matter. I need—”

“Please.” I couldn’t believe I’d said it, even as the word came out of my mouth. I was practically begging a girl to spend time with me. A
Whitfield
girl.

Great. Now I sounded like Ethan.

But apparently Mama hadn’t called it the magic word for nothing, because Victoria was nodding. I froze, not wanting to act too eager or do anything else that would make her quit speaking to me again.

“Okay,” she said, biting her lip. “I agree that we should talk. Let’s go now, before the sub sees me.”

Before she could change her mind, I grabbed her hand and practically dragged her down the hall toward the staircase that nobody was allowed to use until the cracked handrail was fixed. I had forty-eight minutes until lunch, and I intended to use them to get to know Victoria Whitfield.

CHAPTER 9

Victoria

I
took long, slow yoga breaths as I followed Mickey down the hall, trying not to hyperventilate or
stare at his wavy black hair or his muscular back and shoulders, and especially not at his butt in those well-worn jeans.

It’s just . . . it was a really,
really
great butt.

He pulled me into the stairway through the door with the ABSOLUTELY NO ENTRANCE sign posted on it, and we sat on the steps and looked at each other. Now that we were here, I was chickening out and wanted to escape back to class.

“You wanted to talk, so talk,” I said gracelessly. “Am I really so interesting, just because I’m the new girl, that you had to use all of your dubious charms to get me here? Wait—do I need to define the term ‘dubious’?”

He scowled. “You think I’m stupid? Not quite up to your fancy Whitfield standards?”

“Unbelievable. I just skipped my first class
ever
, so I could talk to you, and you’re giving me crap about ‘fancy Whitfield standards’?” I stood up and brushed off my skirt. “You and your Rhodale prejudices can kiss my fancy Whitfield butt.”

Unexpectedly, he flashed that killer grin that he used so rarely, the one that I’d seen melt freshman girls into swooning puddles in the cafeteria. It ticked me off just thinking about it.

“Your Whitfield butt? There are several parts of you that I’d like to kiss, Princess, but I wouldn’t have started with your
butt
.”

He stood up, too, and stared at my mouth. I suddenly felt way too hot, too confined—claustrophobic, almost—in the dusty stairwell, and I was finding it hard to breathe. I didn’t know whether to kiss him or slap him. Maybe I should do both, like some swooning heroine in an Austen novel.

Mickey Rhodale was the most infuriating person I’d ever met.

“Let’s try this again,” I said, trying to be reasonable. “Why did you want to talk to me? Because you kissed me?”

“You kissed me back. Anyway, you’re good at that, aren’t you? Deflecting your anger?” He raised one eyebrow and grinned down at me, and my pulse went crazy. “Wait. Do I need to define the term ‘deflecting’?”

I had to laugh at hearing him toss my words back at me. I deserved it; it had been a snotty thing to say.

“I happen to be the former third grade spelling bee champ, I’ll have you know,” I said loftily, still smiling. “At least until I was robbed at the district level. Just in case you ever wondered, rhinoceros does
not
end in o-u-s.”

“You
were
robbed,” he agreed, and a tingling sensation of warmth circled around inside me, trying to find a home.

Mickey Rhodale might be dangerous, but he had the most incredible blue eyes I’d ever seen, surrounded by long, dark lashes set in a deeply tanned face that was framed by those too-long waves of silky black hair. He was absolutely, stunningly gorgeous, and I didn’t think he even realized it. Most hot guys acted like they were nature’s gift to women. Mickey had the social graces of a clumsy foal.

The thought made me relax. I knew more about dealing with horses than boys and, as I’d told Pete, I had far too much sense to fall for the town bad boy.

Mickey pushed a strand of my hair behind my ear, and my breath caught in my throat.

Oh, crap, I’m falling for the town bad boy. That kiss . . .

“What’s going on in that mind of yours?” he drawled, and it took me a few seconds to remember what we’d been talking about, because my attention kept getting distracted by the play of muscle in his arms when he shoved his hands in his pockets.

“I’m thinking that my family would fall over in a dead faint if they knew I’d skipped class to talk to the most dangerous boy in school,” I admitted, glancing at the door while hiding my shaking hands behind my back.

Mickey threw back his head and laughed, and I stared stupidly at the column of his throat for a moment before remembering where we were.

“Will you be quiet? Somebody’s going to catch us in here.”

He pretended to shudder. “Oh, no, not that! We might get
detention
.”

“I know you’re mocking me, and I just want to point out that it’s not really the best way to begin a friendship,” I said, and I could hear how brittle I sounded, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself.

A corner of his mouth quirked up. “As you wish. Is that what we’re doing? Beginning a friendship?”

I sighed. “I don’t know. Manhandle me at the fire, mock me in class, smile at me, bait me, kiss me—it’s almost like you’re two different people. Which Mickey is here with me? And everybody keeps telling me to stay away from you. I honestly don’t know what to do.”