by Brent, Cora
JEDSON
The Ruins of Emblem
Cora Brent
Contents
About this book
Also By Cora Brent:
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Prologue
1. Ryan
2. Leah
3. Ryan
4. Leah
5. Ryan
6. Leah
7. Ryan
8. Leah
9. Ryan
10. Ryan
11. Leah
12. Ryan
13. Leah
14. Ryan
15. Leah
16. Ryan
17. Leah
18. Leah
19. Ryan
20. Leah
21. Ryan
22. Leah
23. Ryan
24. Leah
25. Ryan
Epilogue
Dear Reader,
Contact info
About this book
JEDSON is an Enemies-to-Lovers stand alone full of angst, secrets, revenge and all the heat!
LEAH
When I was too young to know any better Ryan Jedson fascinated me.
After he went on the run I thought I’d never see him again.
I was wrong.
Now that he’s back in town I realize it’s a bad idea to catch his eye.
And yet I can’t help it.
Sometimes you want the one you shouldn’t want.
But there’s a complication.
He has no idea that I’m the reason his life fell apart.
And I don’t know what he’ll do if he ever finds out.
RYAN
Back in the day when we were neighbors she was too young, not even worth a second look.
However, six years have gone by and now Leah Brandeis is fair game.
I see how she looks at me.
I understand she thinks her secret is safe.
And I’m playing along.
For now.
But soon the truth will come out and there will be hell to pay.
Because I know what she did.
I’ve always known.
Also By Cora Brent:
Gentry Boys Box Set Books 1-4
GENTRY BOYS (Books 1-4)
Gentry Boys Series
DRAW (Saylor and Cord)
RISK (Creed and Truly)
GAME (Chase and Stephanie)
FALL (Deck and Jenny)
HOLD
CROSS (A Novella)
WALK (Stone and Evie)
EDGE (Conway and Roslyn)
SNOW (A Christmas Story)
Gentry Generations
(A Gentry family spinoff series)
STRIKE (Cami and Dalton)
TURN (Cassie and Curtis)
KEEP (A Novella)
TEST (Derek and Paige)
The Ruins of Emblem
TRISTAN
JEDSON (Releasing 6/27/19)
LANDON (Releasing early 2020)
Worked Up
FIRED
NAILED
Stand Alones
UNRULY
IN THIS LIFE
HICKEY
Please respect the work of this author. No part of this book may be reproduced or copied without permission. This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Any similarity to events or situations is also coincidental.
The publisher and author acknowledge the trademark status and trademark ownership of all trademarks and locations mentioned in this book. Trademarks and locations are not sponsored or endorsed by trademark owners.
© 2019 by Cora Brent
All Rights Reserved
Cover Design: Wicked by Design
Cover Photo: Sara Eirew
Created with Vellum
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Prologue
Leah
Six Years Ago
I didn’t expect him to notice me and at first he didn’t. He had to be here to visit his mother, Celeste. He never came around for any other reason.
Three years ago Ryan Jedson turned into a rare sight in my world when he skipped out on Emblem High and exited Celeste’s front door with a dirty moss green duffle bag slung over one shoulder and a cigarette hanging from his lips. He was no longer the boy who lived with his mother in a trailer on the edge of my family’s property. Thereafter he was an affiliate of Emblem’s gangsters, dealers and collective hell raisers.
This was just an ordinary non-holiday Saturday evening and no one would be expecting Ryan to show up. He climbed out of the battered brown and yellow Dodge pickup that had just stirred a haze of dirt into the scenery after it burned past the circular driveway and over the dusty acreage before halting in front of the red and grey trailer that looked like a short, miniature house. He was like an adrenaline shot of lethal masculinity and he’d been wreaking havoc on my pulse since the age of eleven, when my heart caught in my chest one day and I learned something new:
I was completely, irreversibly and agonizingly in love with Ryan Jedson.
It didn’t matter that he was five years older, that endless girls had already been draping themselves all over him for years and that I’d never been acknowledged as anything but the little kid living in the big house next door. I hoped that somewhere in my scrawny body lurked the same genetic ingredients that had given my mother her centerfold looks. All I had to do was wait.
At fifteen I was still waiting.
Before Ryan appeared I’d been daydreaming, watching the autumn dusk melt the shadows together from my position atop an empty garden hose box nestled beside the old shed beyond the citrus orchard. The box was just a sagging article of flimsy plastic, capable of giving way beneath me. I hadn’t planned to hang out here. I was only trying to stay out of my mother’s drunken trajectory as she lurched around the house looking for something to get irritated about. With my older sister Daisy long gone and my father spending most of his waking hours working at his bar her targets were limited.
But I could be grateful now for my mother’s bad mood, glad that Luanne was the kind of mother one hid from if one wanted to remain sane and intact. If she’d been a different mother I might have missed seeing him.
My knees cramped but I hardly dared to move, to exhale. He stood with his back facing me and gazed out at the horizon even though there was nothing worth staring at in that direction. Just a few shallow hills and some distant trailers that were shabbier than the one he’d grown up in. He remained in one spot for a long time, stretching his arms over his head and then crossing them behind his neck like he was posing.
He was stunning.
He was iconic.
He was every oversexed billboard in Times Square and the ancient gods of Greece.
Ryan Jedson was my dream.
I held my breath while greedily memorizing details. Ryan’s hair was longer than it used to be. And he was bigger now, obviously hitting the weight bench and building more mass into the impressive muscles roping his arms. There was a time when I used to see him every day. Now I had to make do with sighti
ngs around town and his infrequent visits here. He hadn’t approached the door to the trailer yet and I wondered if he still had his own key. It was too bad Celeste wasn’t home. Her face glowed at the sight of her only child no matter what kind of rumors followed him. I used to envy Ryan for the mother he was born to. My own mother usually looked at me like she’d just discovered my existence and found it offensive.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” He spoke loudly. There was no one else around.
Ryan turned and trained his dark eyes on the place where I’d imagined I was invisible. I had never seen his father, the man who’d exited his son’s life eons ago, but everyone said Ryan was the spitting image of Duke Jedson. I believed it because he looked nothing like short, blonde Celeste. Ryan was all coiled muscle and black-haired smoldering vitality.
When I didn’t respond he sighed and scratched his head. “What’s going on, Leah? I never thought you’d be afraid of me.”
I managed to make my tongue work. “I’m not afraid of you, Ryan.”
“Then why are you hiding?”
I unfolded my legs, ignoring my throbbing knees as I stepped down and moved out of the gloom.
“I wasn’t hiding,” I argued, flipping my hair over my shoulder. “I was observing.”
“Observing what? Me?”
Internal flames seared my cheeks. “No. The sunset.” I cleared my throat, buying myself a few seconds. “Your mom isn’t here. She’s always working at the shelter. I don’t even get to see her much.”
He lit a cigarette and took his time exhaling a cloud of smoke. “I know that.”
“Then why’d you come?”
A wild prospect suddenly tore through my mind. I imagined Ryan tossing his cigarette away, crossing the distance between us and reaching out to cradle my face in his big hands.
“I came for you, Leah. I want you.”
But of course he did no such thing.
He took another drag and peered beyond where I stood, at the only house I could ever remember living in. I knew it was a very nice house by Emblem standards. My grandfather died when I was three and my father gained enough from his inheritance to build the custom home his wife demanded and purchase an old money pit of a bar call the Dirty Cactus.
Ryan was still thinking. “Sometimes you just feel like you need to come home, even for a few minutes.” There was a raw quality about the way he spoke. His words became a desolate echo.
I swallowed and swept my eyes over him again, this time noticing something that had escaped my attention before. “That’s blood, isn’t it?”
He shifted his eyes back to me, silently staring, perhaps weighing if I was gullible enough to be lied to and then deciding there was no point. “Yes. It’s blood.”
“There’s…a lot of it.”
How could I not have seen it before? His arms were streaked with dried blood and the stain covered the lower third of his t-shirt.
“Are you okay?”
He shrugged. “I’m fine. The blood isn’t mine.”
The admission gave me a weird thrill. “What happened?”
He dropped his cigarette in the dust, squashing it under his black boot. “Nothing you’d want to hear about. It’s pretty fucking bad.”
The thrill was fading. “Tell me anyway.”
“No. It would give you nightmares.”
“I’m not a kid. I don’t have nightmares.”
He looked me up and down. He wasn’t checking me out. He’d never done that, not once. I always wished he would so I would have noticed. There were other sideling sly glances that came from men besides Ryan; a few of my father’s friends and some of the bar’s customers who hung around outside looking for trouble and women. That’s all they ever were though, just looks, just a fleeting nod that even if I didn’t offer them much of a view I wasn’t a child anymore either.
Ryan still looked at me the same as he ever did. And Ryan was the only one I cared about.
“You don’t have to be a kid to have nightmares,” he told me.
I eyed the blood as the dusk continued to chase away the sunlight. “Is someone dead?”
He was troubled. “I guess he might die.”
“What happened?”
“He pissed off the wrong man.” Ryan laced his hands together atop his head and exhaled noisily. “Kind of weird that it ended up being me to get to him. He’s just a lowlife that owed me money. Harry owes a lot of people a lot of shit.”
“Harry?” I couldn’t think of anyone named Harry. “That’s his blood?”
Ryan shook his head. “Never mind.”
I wrapped my arms around myself, grappling with my confusion. Every now and then a fragment of information about Ryan Jedson reached my ears. I’d always seize on it hungrily, starved for details about his life.
He’d had a few scuffles with the law. To my knowledge he’d never done anything violent yet he made people nervous. There were always girls in his orbit, girls with much more to offer him than I had. He was not known to be attached to any of them in particular but they never stopped following him. I didn’t blame them.
Ryan was tall, probably an entire foot taller than I was. And strong. His upper arms were practically busting out of his shirt. He was looking at it now, his shirt. He was scowling at the stain of another man’s blood. With one fluid movement he reached behind his head and yanked it off, balling it up in one fist like he suddenly couldn’t stand to feel it on his skin anymore. He didn’t notice my gasp at the sight of his bare chest and the tattoo sleeves spiraling up and down both arms. A unique sensation tugged inside my belly and pooled lower, the kind of feeling that would sweep over my body under cover of darkness when my mind strayed and I’d allow my hand to drift between my legs. And I would think of him. Always him.
“I saw you,” he said. “A few weeks ago at the Emblem Mart. You walked right by and pretended you didn’t see me.”
“Maybe that’s because I didn’t see you,” I lied.
I knew very well the day at the Emblem Mart wasn’t a few weeks ago. It had happened exactly two months earlier. I was guilty of being the most organized of nerds and had even marked the occasion in my student planner. ‘Saw R today!’, embellishing the entry with wretched purple Sharpie hearts.
During the first week of school I’d stayed late for a student council meeting, stopping at the store on my way home to grab an orange soda. He was standing on the checkout line holding a bag of corn chips and a forty ounce bottle of beer even though I knew he had another nine months before his twenty first birthday. He remained focused on his phone and he didn’t glance up when I walked through the door.
Someone else did though.
Gina Scarpetti and her brain dead trio of cheerleading clingers were clumped together right behind Ryan Jedson, their hopeful eyes all over him as they stuck out their chests and hitched their skirts higher. He ignored them. Gina hissed something to her pals. The group looked my way and snickered. I heard the comment and my fists balled up as I slunk back to the refrigerated section, remaining there until I was sure the coast was clear. I’d rather lick the Main Street asphalt than be humiliated in front of Ryan.
But he’d heard anyway and now, two whole months later, he regarded me with curiosity. “Those girls,” he said. “They called you Bites. Why?”
I hadn’t expected the question. I didn’t want to answer it. My hopes that the insult would die in high school hadn’t come true so far. Gina Scarpetti might not have created the nickname but she repeated it the most often. The source was eighth grade gym class and a brutal observation from Robbie Peterson, who would carelessly play with fireworks the following summer and lose his right hand. But that day in gym class he hadn’t lost his hand yet and he paused with a basketball in his palm and looked my way.
“BAHAHA! Leah’s tits are the size of fucking mosquito bites.”
And because Gina Scarpetti was equal parts cruel and stupid she couldn’t let raw material like that go to waste. She assumed the insu
lt was worse than the last one she’d come up with.
Haircut.
Someone might assume that one didn’t sound so bad. They’d be wrong. Hearing it was even worse than looking in the mirror in those terrible days, worse than seeing the flat-chested short-haired girl who stared back, almost worse than remembering how I’d gotten that way. No power on earth could make me repeat the truth about that story to Ryan Jedson. Not ever.
“I don’t know why the hell they called me that,” I announced. “They’ve got maggots for brains and they’re assholes.”
He liked that answer. “I’m sure they are.”
“Major assholes.” I sighed. “I can’t wait to get out of here.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Are you planning to run away?”
“No. I mean, I have to wait until I graduate from high school. I’m definitely getting out of here for college though.” I paused. “Don’t you ever want to get out of Emblem, at least for a while? Don’t you want to see what else is out there?”
He didn’t even consider the idea. He shook his head. “No. I’ll stay in Emblem. It’s home.”