“I didn’t mean to lead you on.” He looked uncomfortable.
“No. I didn’t think I was your girlfriend, but I thought we were at least beginning to be friends.”
“I don’t think now is the time to talk about it.”
“You have some reason why you didn’t want to talk to me.” I unfolded my napkin.
“Like I had been forbidden to talk to you?” He gave me a meaningful glance and then a nod.
The waitress interrupted us. The girls returned from the bathroom as if they had known the she would be on her way to bring the food over. The bacon smelled great, but it was difficult not to stare at Andrew. His last statement had piqued my curiosity.
“So Andrew, what are you majoring in?” I took a bite of my butter-covered, syrup-drowned waffle.
He glanced up at me. “Law.”
“Hmm, interesting. I’m still not sure what I want to be when I grow up.” Lacee giggled.
I couldn’t help but laugh when Andrew gave her a quick appreciative inventory as if he thought she might have already grown up.
His face reddened when he realized I had caught him.
I nodded at Lacee and lifted my brow.
He shook his head with an eye roll.
I giggled. He liked her a lot better than the stalker girl.
Andrew’s mood lightened the longer we sat at the table.
“Your popularity level just skyrocketed. What other guy on campus has three hot girls on his side at breakfast.” Nicki gave Andrew a wide smile.
The waitress brought the check.
Lacee chimed in. “Yep. The envy of every guy on campus.”
“One in particular,” he said under his breath, but I wasn’t sure that I had heard correctly.
“What was that?” I said.
Andrew pulled out his wallet. As he sifted through credit cards, his gaze was shifty. “Oh, I said I don’t have any small bills.”
He was hiding something.
Chapter 4
I didn’t have another chance that morning to find out what Andrew was up to, but I was sure that he liked Lacee. So I figured I might have other chances to see him and hopefully speak to him, other than in class.
The weekend approached quickly.
Nicki and Lacee were sure to find some wild party to attend.
I tried to think of ways to avoid going with them when the talk commenced about the invitation to the frat party that we all had gotten from Andrew. I didn’t feel like being around a bunch of hormone-enraged guys, but it looked as though I would have to be on my deathbed before the girls would let me off the hook.
“I’ll go, but I’m not going to have fun. I refuse.” I pouted, but it did no good.
They crossed their arms and narrowed their gazes at me.
“It won’t be a party until we get there anyway. You just wait. Tonight is going to change your whole outlook on life,” Nicki said with glee.
I was sure that if those two were involved she was probably correct.
“If either of you start dancing on tables, I’m out.” I flipped through clothes in my closet.
“I don’t do tables,” Lacee said.
“She more the cage kinda girl.” Nicki poked my ribs. They loved to see me get riled up.
“Cages, tables, laps—all the same.” I stepped in the shower.
“You’re going to wear that miniskirt I bought the other day, and I’m going to wear a pair of painted-on jeans,” Nicki said from outside the door.
“And I have the perfect shirt,” Lacee said.
“If it doesn’t have at least four square inches of material, I’m not wearing it.” I jerked the shower curtain closed.
Lacee seemed to be the less-is-more type of clothing girl.
I was exactly the opposite.
“Five square inches, guaranteed,” Lacee said.
They must have had conversations though the bathroom doors where Lacee was from, too.
* * * *
Nicki and Lacee should have been in fashion and makeup, not on some campus studying journalism and psychology.
I could have stepped on a runway with the look they gave me. I loved the clothes but the miniskirt showed way too much leg and the shirt showed more cleavage than I had ever shown in my life. I felt almost naked, but that was an overreaction considering I had more on than most of the girls outside our dorm.
The walks of the Band of Brothers Frat House were lined with lush greenery, and the flowerbeds looked like the ones back home. The front door was heavy wood with a fancy wrought-iron handle.
“What do you have to be to live in this one, a sheik or royalty?” I stepped into what looked like an antique museum with large masculine leather sofas and armchairs with heavy bookshelves lining the sitting room. Through a large doorway, a pool table, a dart board, and other games surrounded the room.
“Rich, rich, rich.” Lacee eyed a few guys over my shoulder. “And there is the man of my dreams.”
I turned to look past her gaze.
I took a deep breath and the room spun around me. And I hadn’t had a drop to drink.
Standing between Andrew and a guy I didn’t know was a much more matured Cole Kinsley.
The music and voices in the room died in my ears. My heartbeat drowned out the music.
Cole’s gaze was glued to me.
He wore a pair of dark blue jeans and a black shirt that clung to his physique as if it had been tailored to fit him.
His messy hair was different now, a little longer and perfectly placed.
His jawline was more pronounced, and his eyes were darker with his gaze narrowed right at me.
All the boyish good looks had transformed into perfectly chiseled masculinity.
I flushed at how aware I was of him compared to any other human, living breathing thing in the room.
I wanted to turn and run away, but at the same time, I wanted to run straight into his arms.
Even they’d changed, folded over his chest. His biceps twitched as he stared.
If he was open to any sort of affection from me, he would have probably come to me first—especially since he had known I was here for the last week and hadn’t let on that he knew.
Andrew had been friends with him and had purposely left out that little detail.
I turned and headed for the door.
“Hey, where are you going?” Lacee looped my arm and spun me around.
“I suddenly don’t feel so well.” I slipped around her and her red cup.
The girls would probably drink, but I couldn’t worry about the responsibility of babysitting. I had to get out of there. I needed to think.
Nicki and Lacee let me go.
I made it to the end of the sidewalk and around the dorm to the shadows under the trees that lined the walks when footsteps sounded behind me. I stopped. I knew the feeling. I knew this situation. I had been in it many other times. When Cole had followed me somewhere that he felt maybe I didn’t belong.
I turned slowly.
In the dark, so close I could feel his breath on my face, Cole towered over me.
“Hi.” He didn’t sound surprised that I was there.
My throat closed; my tongue was cemented in my mouth. My hands trembled. I was on a planet that had suddenly stopped spinning.
“Where are you going?” he asked me in a steady even tone. He seemed…different. Colder.
So many different emotions, needs, course through me. I needed to hug him, I needed to yell at him, I needed to cry, I needed away from him, and most of all I needed to not care that he’d known I was here and hadn’t bothered to let me know.
I had to stop rambling on inside my head.
I had to get my thoughts together.
If he wasn’t happy to see me, I couldn’t show him I was affected by his presence.
Cole smiled at me, but it wasn’t warm and pleasant the way it used to be. An almost sinister flicker quicke
ned in the green of his eyes.
“Don’t worry. I won’t bite.” Sarcasm thickened his oddly accented voice. He sounded as if he were from the northern United States. It hadn’t been so long that even that had changed too, had it?
“It’s been three and a half years.” As if he didn’t already know exactly how long he had been away.
He looked me over slowly and then back up to my eyes. “And a lot has changed.”
Covering my chest with my arms, I really felt naked under his scrutiny.
He smirked.
“Don’t tell me you are going to critique my clothing. I thought we were past that?” My voice squeaked at the worst time. I’d wanted to seem sure of myself, not the little girl he’d always chased down, or off the ledge as he’d seen it. I had changed. I wasn’t a careless teenager anymore.
And I wasn’t his.
He’d made that clear by leaving me behind.
“No. You’re a big girl, now.” He said with a smile that was really not a smile.
“Cole, where are you? What are you doing out here in the—”
A tall, blond girl with eyes that might have been blue in the daylight came up to Cole and protectively took his arm. “Who’s this?”
I shuddered as she looked me up and down.
She had on a flashy but expensive suit that made my outfit look like stripper garb.
“Just on old acquaintance I haven’t seen in a while.” Cole nodded at me. He let the girl guide him back to the house without so much as an introduction.
“You aren’t interested in her are you?” the girl asked Cole in a sweet helpless little voice.
“Not anymore.”
The girl tossed a triumphant look over her shoulder.
I had never felt so shot down in my whole life. I wanted to go back in there and rip that blonde’s hair right out of her head, but I didn’t want to get kicked out of college my first week.
In danger of my knees buckling and breaking an ankle in Shelby’s high heels, I leaned against a tree for support.
Cole had never treated me like that nor had he talked to me that way.
I couldn’t believe I had wasted so much time pining away over him. He was a jerk.
Inside the safety of my room, I jerked off the ridiculous club clothes and pulled on pj’s. I looked to my cell phone that had fallen out of my pocket book on the nightstand.
I could call Kaitlyn, but she’d tell Shelby, who would want to hear that her son had turned out to be an ass.
The pain in my chest was back and the breathing technique she had instructed me to do when the pain became too much no longer worked. I pulled the cover over my head and blocked the whole world out. I started to close my eyes when I realized that I knew what had changed.
I jerked the cover off my head and sat up in the bed with a stricken look on my face.
I had been referring to my mother as Kaitlyn, and I no longer thought of her as my mother.
It hit me hard.
I was no longer Allison Night.
I was Allison Ainsley Kinsley.
* * * *
Cole
Everything I had worked so hard to build, the life I had created for myself, and the reality that I surrounded myself with, crumbled the moment Allie had walked into that dorm house.
She’d been the center of everything I’d ever known for so long, that I without the prospect of having her love, I couldn’t go on the way I had. Hoping, wishing, needing, praying that she’d somehow return that love.
She’d made her decision. She didn’t want me. She didn’t need me. She didn’t love me.
Now, she had no right to come into the only world I could exist in and ruin it.
Andrew had known she would be here.
He was the first person I would kick square in the throat as soon as I cleaned up the broken glass from the beer bottles I’d just broken against the back of the house. I’d also dented the trash cans, and possibly broken a window.
I’d replace it, but there was no way to fix what Allie had broken.
She wanted no part of me in her life.
She’d made that clear.
This campus sure as hell wasn’t big enough for the both of us.
No. This planet wasn’t big enough for the both of us.
How in God’s name had she found me?
Had Shelby or Trevor given my location away?
First things first. Andrew had insisted on making the invitation list and had refused to let me see it.
I should have taken my mind-reading block down and found out what that little punk ass was up to.
He’d told me he’d seen her here the first day. Even verified that it was her by the moon she didn’t even realize was a cursed birthmark on her neck.
I never went looking for trouble. I stayed low. I never called home when she was there. I’d done everything right. I’d tried very carefully not to surround myself with anyone who could interrupt my world. I used mind reading only when trouble arose and when girls were around. It helped to keep them away.
In the first few years here, I hadn’t learned how to block the thoughts, so I’d had the opportunity to learn who was nosy, who wanted to make trouble for me, and which girls wanted to be in my bed.
Anytime the girls got too frisky, I backed them up. I always used the sensitive guy who’d just had a breakup excuse. It softened the rejection and kept everybody friends with me.
I used everyone around me in a very short period to create a world in which I could exist. I used the thoughts and the motivations of all the guys and girls, but I didn’t feel bad about it.
They wanted to feel useful. They wanted to be a part of my world so their thoughts were little payment for the life I brought to all of them.
I might possibly have saved them from a long life of misery in alcohol and drugs, but my rules in my house stood.
I ran everything.
My name was on everything.
I led them.
They wanted to be just like me, and I didn’t mind.
Though I was stunted emotionally, I was a fairly good role model. My fellow brothers knew that I rarely ever had more than a few drinks and that I was against drugs. They even thought that I was the biggest ladies’ man they had ever seen. I let them see what they wanted to see, which was that I was always in control.
I knew every step that was going to happen next and had prepared for those steps.
Until tonight.
I don’t know how I missed Allie’s thoughts or that Andrew had arranged this chance meeting, but I would have his ass in a sling when I was done with him.
I kicked a few more cans.
A voice I did not want to hear caused me to jerk. “There’s no reason to even ask what you are so mad about.”
I turned on Andrew and almost swung at him.
Andrew was the one person I had allowed close to me.
One night my first year here, I drank more than my normal alcoholic intake. I had slipped and told him just enough about Allie and myself for him to remember her name. Stories I’d told him must have made quite an impression for him to remember her or go through so much trouble to get her here in my face.
Was he related to Ava Rollins?
“You sorry son of a b—”
“Before you go off all half-cocked, just hear me out. You should have seen the look on your face when you saw her tonight, man. I didn’t even recognize you. I’ve seen a thousand women cross your line of view and never have you had the look on your face that you had when you saw her. As soon as she walked in the door, you looked alive. For the first time, you weren’t some drone, moving through life without feeling. You’ve been moping around here for so long, barking orders, being king of the hill that you have forgotten what brought you here in the first place.” Andrew approached me. He didn’t back down. He never had.
That was why I liked him so well from the start. Now I wasn’t so sure.
“She is not a subject open for discussion.” I shoved by him.
He grabbed my arm. The little punk was surprisingly strong. “You sure didn’t mind that night when you were drunk and believe me, you said more than I told you you did.”
I stepped back and leveled him with a very serious glare.
“You talked for an hour longer than I told you about. I know your secret.”
“You were obviously more drunk than me.” My voice was low.
“You proved it was true,” Andrew said. “You shifted. You also proved you could hear my thoughts. Just like you’re doing right now.”
Inside Andrew’s head was a perfect picture of me shifting into a ferret.
The one animal Allie always wanted for some god-awful reason.
Out of the blue, and probably due to my excessive alcohol consumption for the evening, I laughed.
“Of all the things that I could have demonstrated, I chose a ferret.” I paced with my hand on my forehead, then pinched the bridge of my nose to stop the impending headache that would surely come after either my meeting with Allie or the seven extra drinks I’d downed since.
He didn’t smile.
“So what kind of warped blackmail is this? What exactly do you get out of torturing me?” I leaned on the house. My knees were spongy. Either the Crown Royal and Coke had done a number on me or the sight of Allie after all these years had softened me. It had to be the Crown.
“To see my friend happy.” He crossed his arms.
“You’re kidding.” I read his thoughts on pretty much a daily basis, and I’d learned that he was not exactly a follower. He was a leader. I couldn’t figure out why he stayed in my growing-larger-everyday clique, other than to someday gain power over it when he pushed me out. Tonight, he was being truthful.
“Since when did you become such a damn sap?” I asked him.
“Since a real life freaking fairy tale offered me an invitation into the most well-known frat house on the East Coast. You are a good guy, Cole, but you can be such a dumbass. What other frat house has been built in a matter of a few years and grown in popularity and stature? You turned this nerd-infested house into a playboy mansion. I swear you have the Midas touch. It seems like everything you touch turns to gold. You can have anything you want. If you want her, I say go get her.”
Ever Lasting Page 6