15. Fifteen

Fifteen

"We used to be friends," Whit began. Funny how his voice sounded so calm, so steady. He let his hands rest against the bumper, laying his palms flat against the cool metal. "Sawyer was actually the first friend I made when my family moved here. His aunt worked as a nanny for the people next door, and she babysat him during the week, so most of the time we got tossed together to entertain each other. Worked out well for me, because I'd have been bored out of my mind otherwise. I had two little sisters, and when you're five years old, that seems like the worst possible fate, believe me." Being an only child, Sawyer hadn't understood the curse of baby sisters, but he'd been more than happy to help Whit escape whenever Allie came toddling after them. And eventually running after them. "So we became friends, and it stuck. Sawyer was kind of the fourth O'Rourke kid growing up—his home life was shitty, so he basically lived at my house when we were in town. Back then, he was as good at baseball as I was. Better, when it came to speed. Get him on first base, and he'd be on third before you could blink. He couldn't pitch worth a damn, but man, he was an incredible hitter. We had this plan to go to college together, get drafted. The whole thing."

"You must have been really close."

"Yeah, well, things change." He flicked a glance toward Nell. She sat huddled in her sweater, hugging her elbows, her feet propped on the edge of the bumper and her hands tucked under her armpits, shoulders hunched. The wind had picked up and the temperature had dropped quickly—something he should have realized earlier, instead of just sitting there and letting her shiver. He straightened. "You're cold. We should wait in the car until my grandpa gets here." Which reminded him he still needed to text Bucky to come pick them up, if he didn't want to end up walking several miles of country roads in the dark.

Nell shook her head. "I'm fine. It's fine."

"Give me a sec." He slipped around the side of the car and opened the rear driver's door, crawling halfway inside to yank down the backseat and access the trunk. After a bit of blind fishing, his fingers caught one of the fleece blankets he kept for emergencies. Snagging it, he returned to Nell and draped it loosely over her shoulders. "Better?"

She wriggled around a bit, drawing the edges of the blanket together to make a snug cloth cocoon around herself. "Thanks," she said, eyeing his thin T-shirt. "How are you not freezing?"

Whit shrugged. "You get used to it."

"I hope that's not your way of calling me a wuss."

"Nah. Minnesotans pride ourselves on being immune to the cold. Except Allie. It drops below forty degrees and she bundles up like she's taking a trip to the North Pole."

Nell reached to tuck away the stray locks of hair the wind had tangled in front of her face. The Blizzards cap she'd been wearing during the game hadn't made it with them to the emergency room, and he could see the faint bruise near her hairline where she'd knocked her head against him. While that debacle had been entirely her own fault—and he definitely wasn't going to let her forget it, at least not as long as he had a bandage stuck to his ass—he couldn't help feeling a little guilty. "How's the head?"

"Nothing a little Tylenol and a lot of coffee won't fix." She tugged the blanket tighter as she looked at him. "Do you want to tell me the rest?"

Did he?

He jammed his hands into his pockets. "Yeah. "

Odd as it was, it felt good to talk about it. He hadn't talked about it, not in years. He couldn't talk about it with his family. Too much baggage there. Definitely not with any of his current or former teammates, either. He was close with some of the guys he played with—he'd even been in a few of their weddings—but not bare your soul and dig up past trauma close. One of his girlfriends? Forget it. His chosen romantic partners didn't have any particular interest in him as a person; that was the whole reason he chose them. The ironic thing was, the one person he could have talked about it with was Sawyer. A lifetime ago, when they'd still been friends.

Whit closed his eyes and leaned back against the car, drawing a deep breath into his chest, savoring the sting of the frosty air as it met his lungs. This was the hard part, what came next. "You know that feeling you have when you're seventeen? Of being invincible?"

"Not really."

"Well, I had it," he said grimly. He felt all the old bitterness rise up, the specter of his former self: cocky, arrogant, angry, reckless. The boy he'd tried so hard to put behind him. "I thought I was invincible. My whole life revolved around sports, and by the time I was in high school, I knew I had a destiny. Having a famous dad helped, but I was good—I was really good—and not just at baseball. All of us were, Sawyer and James and me. Multi-sport athletes, gods of the field and the rink. James was more practical about it; he wanted to go to college, and sports were his ticket out of here. But Sawyer and I had big league dreams. Until…"

Until.

There it was. The one word that changed everything.

He tipped his head back, gazing up at the maze of constellations that mapped the sky overhead. He'd forgotten just how bright the stars were out here, away from the constant, crowded blur of city lights. "I told you how I transferred schools."

"I figured you didn't want to talk about it."

"Yeah, well, this is why," he said. "It was right at the start of my senior year—barely two weeks into September. Something happened, and… well, it doesn't matter, but the result was that I got kicked off the football team. That pissed me off, but I would've accepted it. Understood it, even. I didn't really care about football, and I knew they were going to punish me somehow. Then, a week later, they decided to extend it to every team. Baseball, basketball, hockey… you name it. I was completely banned from sports. They probably wouldn't have let me play ping-pong. It didn't matter much for college—I'd been in touch with coaches and had already decided on Vanderbilt. But I wanted to play. Since they wouldn't let me play here, I changed schools. Just showed up at my grandpa's house and told him I was moving in."

And Bucky, being Bucky, had let him.

His grandpa had been his rock back then, and he'd needed one desperately. He'd been unmoored, untethered, lashing out at everyone. Moving to the farm had been his best choice—almost his only choice—and even now he couldn't view that part as a mistake.

"My friends saw it as a betrayal. It probably was, but I didn't care. I was angry at the world, in full-on teenage rebel mode, convinced that the injustices I'd suffered meant I could do whatever I wanted. I was never what you'd call a model student, but after I got kicked out of sports, I started skipping classes, ignoring homework, getting detention, skipping that. That didn't change much when I switched to Dower Hill. Absolutely killed it on the field, though. They let me get away with it because the athletic department needed me. Your basic asshole jock." He slanted a look toward her. "And let me spare you a bit of commentary by saying—whatever you think of me now, I was a thousand times worse."

"I wasn't going to say anything." She sounded miffed.

A smile hovered at the corners of his lips, then vanished. "Maybe things would've settled down eventually. Sawyer and I weren't speaking by that time, but we'd had arguments before and they never lasted. The bigger problem was James. He took over as quarterback of the football team after I left, and he'd convinced the cheerleaders to chant my name and spell out the word traitor the night we played each other. The schools were huge rivals at the time, and that didn't help matters. Especially after we curb-stomped them." He drew in another of those slow, steadying breaths. "I found out later it could've been a lot worse. Our cheerleaders had been planning to retaliate by outing James as gay."

"God, that's…"

"Shitty?"

"I was thinking more along the lines of unspeakably cruel ." A wry note crept into her voice. "I guess you really didn't sleep with his girlfriend."

"For the record, I've never slept with anyone's girlfriend but my own." As far as he knew. There had been a couple of questionable college hookups, but he wasn't about to admit that when he was already in the middle of telling her the worst thing he'd ever done. "James is open about his sexuality now, but he wasn't back then. Only a few of us knew, and we kept it quiet. Small towns aren't known for being welcoming to gay high school quarterbacks."

"Poor kid."

"Yeah. Thankfully, one of the cheerleaders told the coach what the rest of the squad was up to, and they put a stop to it. But it still sparked some rumors, and James and Sawyer blamed me for it."

"You didn't try to explain things to them?"

"I was an angry seventeen-year-old. I figured they should know me better than that." He felt his fingernails biting into his palms and forced his hands to loosen. "And then, well… then I really did betray them."

"Them? Or James?"

"I didn't out him, if that's what you're asking. I wasn't that much of a douchebag," Whit retorted. "A couple of weeks after I transferred, some of the guys at Dower Hill decided I needed to prove my loyalty. I'd messed up during a game and I guess they thought I blew it on purpose. So one night, we drove out here, drew a giant dick on the football field with diesel fuel, and then broke into the school to trash the locker rooms. Typical rival stuff."

Nell held up a hand, letting the blanket slip off her shoulders. "Sorry, I'm still at drew a giant dick on the football field ."

He grinned. "Well, we weren't gonna draw a small one."

"I'm so, so glad I don't teach high school."

It was probably a good thing she didn't, Whit mused, letting his eyes graze her body as she adjusted the blanket. He doubted they'd let her walk around in those tight jeans, but he could just picture her flitting about the classroom in a pencil skirt with a short-sleeved button-down open at the collar, like a naughty librarian. She'd have all the horny teenage boys salivating over her.

Not to mention horny formerly-teenage boys, if he wasn't careful.

Whit cleared his throat. "Things got out of hand when a couple of the guys suggested we make a bonfire of the athletic equipment." He hunched his shoulders, letting his body sink lower against the car. "We hauled everything out into the parking lot and piled it up. That's when I found out just what their test was. They wanted me to do it. They all got back in their cars and said they'd see me at practice the next day. Then they left me there with the pile of equipment, the rest of the diesel, and a match."

"Did you do it?"

He closed his eyes. "Yep."

"Oh, Whit."

"That wasn't even the worst part. Sawyer and James had somehow gotten wind of what we were up to. My best guess is one of the guys at Dower Hill tipped them off. Maybe it was some sort of hazing for me, I don't know—however it happened, they showed up in the parking lot barely thirty seconds after I'd lit the bonfire. God knows why I hadn't just left, but there I was, watching everything go up in flames, guilty as hell." Sometimes he thought he could still smell it—that faint, acrid scent, burning away the past. Deep down, some part of him had even enjoyed it. The melting plastic… the flecks of ash. The heat. He'd felt like he was purging something.

Instead he'd been destroying it.

"I was too much of a coward to face them," he continued, voice thick. "The second I saw them, I took off—just dove into my car, turned the ignition, and floored it. Didn't even look back. I was half a mile from the school before I realized they were following me. There had been freezing rain earlier that evening and the roads were slick, but I didn't care. I just kept pushing the car faster and faster, trying to outrun them. It was the stupidest thing I could have possibly done, but I got lucky. Sawyer and James didn't. They took a curve too fast and hit a patch of ice. The car flipped, went skidding across the road, and hit a tree. James was wearing his seat belt and ended up with a broken arm and that slice across his face. Sawyer went through the windshield."

"Oh, god," Nell breathed.

"I stopped when I heard the crash, ran back as fast as I could. James was still in the car. He was unconscious, but he was breathing. But Sawyer…" It was an image Whit would never forget as long as he lived: his friend lying motionless in a cushion of dried grass and old leaves. The only time in his life that Whit had ever prayed. "I called an ambulance and tried to perform CPR, but it didn't do much good. The fire at the school had already been called in, and we weren't far from the fire station, or Sawyer probably would've died. As it was, he spent a month in a coma and the better part of a year in the hospital. The doctors thought he'd be paralyzed. Sawyer proved them wrong. He eventually made a full recovery. But he never played baseball again."

Or any other sport, for that matter. And the boy who had once been greased lightning on the basepaths had become a harsh, embittered man and ended up right back where he started, while Whit had achieved every goal he'd ever set out to.

Yeah, he had some karma coming to him, all right.

"So, there you have it," Whit said with a small, helpless shrug. "I didn't sleep with his girlfriend. I just ruined his life."

Nell's voice was soft. "It sounds to me like you saved it."

"The paramedics did that."

"You can't blame yourself for an accident, Whit."

He pushed himself up from the car, kicking at the red plastic splinters that lay scattered below the bumper. "I didn't tell you this so you could absolve me. I know exactly what I did, and so does everyone else in this town." Being the son of a living legend went a long way, but when Whit had tossed that match, he'd gone from being the pride of the city to its greatest disappointment, and he'd taken James and Sawyer down with him. Three rising stars extinguished in a single act. James had only suffered minor injuries in the crash, but he'd quit playing sports altogether; instead of heading out east to some big name university, he'd gone to a community college in Bemidji. Whit had put Fallen Oaks in his rearview and hadn't looked back.

"Why were you kicked off the team in the first place?" Nell asked.

"Drunk driving," he bit off.

"Really? I'm surprised they didn't just sweep it under the rug. I thought even high school athletes pretty much got away with murder."

"The principal had it in for me."

She was quiet a moment. "Were you actually driving drunk?"

"I was booked for it, until my dad got them to throw out the charge."

"You took the fall for someone else."

He couldn't look at her. The last thing he wanted was more of her pity, and if he told her the rest of it, that was exactly what he would get. "I'm afraid that's all the confession I've got in me for tonight. You wanted to know why the town hates me, that's the story. Vandalism, drunk driving, betrayal… take your pick. All those guys I went to school with were just waiting for me to fail. Which, of course, I did." He shrugged again. "But I guess that's why they say karma's a bitch."

A thin laugh skidded out of her. "I think you mean I am."

Whit shot her a sharp glance. "I never said that."

"I am sorry," she murmured, and now she was the one who wouldn't look at him. She sat fidgeting with the edges of the blanket. "Really. I never meant to sabotage your career. I hope you can believe that."

Whit's sigh was bone-weary. "You didn't sabotage my career. I did."

But Nell wasn't finished. "You were right before," she told him. "When you said I was trying to rescue Paige. You were right. I was pissed off by something you'd said about her, and I let anger cloud my judgment. That's why I did it. And I truly am sorry."

His eyebrows drew together. "What did I say about Paige?"

"You implied she was cheating on you."

"No, I didn't."

"You said the two of you had a difference of opinion on what the word exclusive meant."

Shit . "That could've been either one of us," he hedged.

"That's not how the press took it. "

Whit hesitated. He remembered the comment now. Most sports reporters didn't care about athletes' personal lives—even when those personal lives involved swimsuit models and high-profile cosmetic company heiresses. It had been his bad luck to make a thoughtless remark in front of one who did.

The incident with Paige hadn't even been a big deal, just a bit of flirting with a visiting team's athletic trainer that had gotten out of hand. Yeah, she'd made out with the guy, but her relationship with Whit had already run its course anyway. If he hadn't been in such a dark place at the time, it probably wouldn't have mattered to him.

But there was no way Whit was going to say anything remotely negative about Nell's beloved big sis. He'd learned that lesson already. "I think this is a discussion you need to have with your sister," he said. Then he frowned. "I didn't make that comment until after Paige and I had broken up. You hated me before then."

A guarded look came into her eyes. "I didn't hate you."

"Every time you saw me, you looked like you wanted to set me on fire."

"You went out of your way to argue with me!"

"Okay, but in my defense, that was purely for entertainment value. And I didn't start that until after you'd made it clear you thought Paige was slumming it."

She suddenly became very interested in studying the blanket's stitching. "You don't have the best track record with women. I was just being overprotective. I can't help it."

"I don't have a bad track record with women."

"What was your longest relationship?"

"What was yours?" he countered.

"We're not talking about me."

"Which means short . That's a little hypocritical of you, Miss McLean."

"You asked why I didn't like you; that's what I'm telling you. I was worried—"

"So you admit you didn't like me."

He swore he could hear her teeth grinding. "—I was worried that you would break Paige's heart."

"We dated for like two months!" A good chunk of which he'd spent on the road, since it had been during the season.

Though he'd also had a bit of unexpected free time after being slapped with an eight-game suspension when his elbow had accidentally caught an ump during a bench clearing.

Still. His relationship with Paige had been brief and, truth be told, kind of boring—if you didn't count how it ended. No hearts involved. That was the entire point.

"It wasn't two months, it was two and a half," Nell said.

"It was—"

"The end of April to the middle of July. That's two and a half."

Whit's gaze narrowed. "You have an awfully good memory about a relationship you weren't even in."

Nell opened her mouth. Shut it again.

He was going to just let it slide. He'd gotten what he wanted from her—a reason for her bristling animosity and snotty behavior, even if it was (in his opinion) a ridiculous reason. Four years had passed, and they were both a bit older, hopefully a bit wiser, and definitely on much better terms. There was no point in needling her about something that ultimately wasn't important. He should just let it slide.

Except that she wouldn't meet his eyes.

Except that she was blushing.

It could have been the wind. All that crisp air brushing against her, leaving a bright, rosy flush on her skin. But he didn't think so. That wasn't the chilly November temperature putting a bloom in her cheeks. Oh, no.

That was guilt.

The light bulb went off. The lightning bolt struck. And Whit knew exactly why Nell had dedicated so much time to convincing herself—and him—that she disliked him.

"Holy shit," he breathed. "I've figured it out. "

"Figured what out?" She looked nervous. Her tongue poked out, wetting her lips. Was that intentional? His gaze zeroed in on that little dip in her mouth. Intentional or not, it was definitely enticing.

" Damn," he said softly, a rumble of laughter forming deep in his chest. He couldn't believe he hadn't seen it before. All that barely concealed hostility… all those irritable looks. The prickly attitude, the insults—the favored defense mechanism of love-struck boys and girls in playgrounds the world over. What better way to hide interest? "You had a crush on me."

She bolted upright, her hands slapping down against the trunk and the blanket sliding off her shoulders. That flush crept even higher up her cheeks. "You're delusional."

There was no way he was going to let her wiggle out of this. He put a little smoke in his voice and gave her his silkiest grin. "You know, I didn't mention this before because I figured you'd just go ballistic, but you're kinda sexy when you're mad."

Her nostrils flared. "I did not have a crush on you."

"What would you prefer to call it? An overwhelming desire to bump pelvises?"

"Your ego is absolutely out of control."

"Just like your attraction to me."

The look she gave him could have frozen a supernova. "All right, this deal is off. I don't care if it's breaking my word, I am out of here as soon as I can figure out how to hotwire a car."

Time to switch tactics, he decided. Teasing her might be fun—okay, incredibly fun—but there were so many more satisfying ways to torment someone. Several of them popped into his head as he let his gaze roam over her in a long, lazy perusal. "I never said the attraction was one-sided. I'm not trying to upset you. I just think it's time we admit that there's something going on between us, and it's only gonna be worked out in one way."

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

The smart move would be to back off. He knew that. If he hadn't still felt so raw, so totally off-balance, maybe he would have. But his nerves had been stretched taut, his emotions had gone through a blender, and his self-control was barely hanging on. He didn't even care if he was rushing headlong into another mistake. He had a lifetime of bad decisions behind him, and he wasn't about to stop now, not when she was close enough that he could smell that warm, heady fragrance that clung to her hair and skin. His mind shut off and instinct took over. Instinct wanted to taste the forbidden fruit. He inched even closer. "Like it or not, we've got chemistry."

He saw her gulp. "We've also got history. You know, the history where you dated my sister, and also you don't like me?"

She was grasping at straws. Whit crooked an eyebrow. "I like you just fine. And this isn't about feelings. This is about lust. Pure, old-fashioned lust."

"Lust is a feeling. One that, for the record? I am not feeling."

"You're a terrible liar, Nellie."

"Sorry to disappoint you, but you're not nearly as irresistible as you think you are."

"Do you need a demonstration?" he asked.

"I think you need your head examined."

"There's one way to find out."

Without waiting for an answer, he dropped his hands to her hips and tugged her forward, pulling her straight off the car, holding her hard against him.

He felt her breath hitch. Her eyes went huge.

But she didn't attempt to break free.

He lifted a hand, trailing his fingertips along her jaw, his thumb coming to rest on her chin. With gentle pressure he drew his thumb downward, parting her lips. "You really gonna say I can't kiss you?" he asked huskily.

She didn't answer.

"Yeah. That's what I thought," he said, and covered her mouth with his.