The XOXO New Adult Collection: 16 Full Length New Adult Stories

by Brina Courtney

  He looked at her. Whatever he read in her gaze had his shoulders sagging.

  “What do you want, Everly?”

  “I want you to leave me and Cole alone. Go back to Venezuela if you want, but get out of my life. And don’t ever ask Pee Paw for money again. When you contact him, you treat him like a son should treat his father. Like you’d have wanted Aiden to treat you.”

  The last words had him looking away. “Is that all?”

  “No. I want you to turn over the evidence you have and document your version of events. I’m ready to move on with my life, and that means tying up all of the loose ends.”

  After a long moment, he nodded. “I’ll have it to you by the end of the day.”

  She got to her feet and studied his profile. He didn’t turn to meet her gaze.

  Part of her mourned the fact that things hadn’t turned out differently between them. She couldn’t help but wonder what might have been.

  As she walked away, she focused instead on Cole and what she had now.

  Chapter 52

  “Cole, I’m so glad that you called.”

  Looking up from his menu, Cole met Abigail’s gaze as she paused next to the table. She looked confused when he didn’t rise to greet her. She smiled to cover her reaction and took the seat across from him.

  He’d invited her to lunch at the restaurant where he’d first kissed Everly. The choice of venue had been deliberate. He hoped it would keep him in the right frame of mind for this conversation.

  “Hello, Abigail.” He looked back down at his menu. “I appreciate you taking the time to come out here.”

  “Of course,” she said, reaching over and taking his hand in hers. “You’re a dear friend. I’d do anything for you.”

  He didn’t respond as the server approached the table and took her drink order, but he did extricate his hand from hers. She ordered a martini and lifted her menu.

  “Marshall told me that you had your physical a couple of days ago,” she said in a low tone. “How did it go?”

  “I passed with flying colors,” he said, raising his glass of ice water in a mocking toast and taking a drink.

  He didn’t add that the doctors found only minimal inflammation in his shoulder. There was so little evidence of an injury that they redid several of the scans. In the end, nothing they saw supported the content of the article. Cole expected a retraction by Joan in the next day’s paper.

  “I’m thrilled to hear it,” she said. “I’ve been so worried about you.”

  The server returned with Abigail’s martini and took their orders. Once he left, Abigail studied Cole’s face with an assessing eye as she sipped her cocktail. Her lipstick left a blood-red half-moon along the rim of her glass.

  “I know you’re upset about all of this, Cole. But it’ll blow over soon. That waitress got her fifteen minutes of fame. Now that you’ve passed your physical, everything will go back to the way it was.”

  “And how is that, exactly?” he asked with a slight inclination of his head. “Me, all alone?”

  She frowned. “I don’t know why you’re thinking of it that way. You know it won’t take you long to find someone else. Surely that’s better than being with the woman who shattered your trust.”

  He quirked an eyebrow. “Surely.”

  Her hand fluttered up to fiddle with her necklace when he just stared at her. She took a longer sip of her drink.

  “Speaking of finding someone else, I saw Rebecca a few days ago,” he said.

  “Yes. She mentioned it. She said you apologized for the inconvenience caused by the investigation into the waitress’s supposed attacks.” She shrugged and brushed a stray hair back behind her ear. “I think it’s clear now that the incidents were engineered by the waitress to get your attention. If she lied to you about keeping your secret, she would have no compunction about slashing her own tires.”

  “Her name is Everly.”

  She blinked. “What?”

  “I said, her name is Everly. Not ‘The Waitress.’”

  “I...all right.” Her cheeks reddened and her eyes sparked with irritation. But she kept her face schooled into an accommodating expression. “Everly, then.”

  “As I was saying, I saw Rebecca. It was, indeed, so I could apologize. I’d realized she wasn’t to blame for what happened to Everly. While we were chatting, she said something I found very interesting.”

  “What was that?”

  “She was surprised by the depth of my feelings for Everly. She said that you almost had her convinced that I would never love anything or anyone as much as baseball.”

  “What?” She brought a hand to her chest. “Rebecca said that I said that?”

  “Yep. Apparently, you implanted a few ideas in her head while the two of us were together.” He took another drink of water, his gaze never leaving hers. “The idea of breaking things off to make me jealous, for example.”

  Abigail let out a brittle laugh. “Why would I advise that? It clearly didn’t work when I started dating Marshall after you lost interest in me.”

  His brain clicked with an Aha!

  “You started dating Marshall to make me jealous?”

  Her mouth opened and then closed. She couldn’t seem to figure out how to set her expression. “You’re reading into things, Cole.”

  “No. In a weird way, that makes perfect sense. You tried that tactic without success. When you saw that my relationship with Rebecca was progressing beyond where mine did with you, you gave her the bad advice. You never wanted us to be together.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” she said. Her eyes were chips of blue ice. “I’m happily married, and Rebecca’s my friend.”

  “If that’s how you treat your friends, then no wonder you slashed the tires of someone you didn’t even know.”

  She stilled. Her gaze narrowed.

  “Are you accusing me of slashing that waitress’s tires?”

  “E-ver-ly,” he repeated slowly. “And I don’t have to accuse. I’ve got proof.”

  “I think you’ve said enough.” She started to push her chair back.

  Cole reached across the table and grasped her by the wrist. “I’ve got plenty of experience stopping a woman’s exit,” he said in little more than a whisper. “Now, if you want to know what I intend to share with the press and the police and what I might keep to myself, I suggest you sit your ass back down.”

  She sat. Her eyes welled with tears. It took a huge effort on his part, but he hardened himself against the sight of them.

  Letting go of her, he sat back in his seat and folded his hands together on the table. When she dabbed at her eyes with the napkin, he decided to make it quick.

  “The next time you partner up with someone to commit a crime, you might not want to choose someone as self-centered as Mason Wallace,” he said. He watched her face drain of color. “He was more than willing to share the details of your plans when he was threatened with jail time.”

  “Jail time for what? I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Save it,” he said. “He told us that he saw you slash Everly’s tires that night at Prix Fixe.”

  Mason had submitted written testimony that he’d been in town since shortly after Thanksgiving. He’d decided to travel to Atlanta once Jake told him that Everly was working with Cole. Funds had been tight for months, and he’d seen Everly’s new “job” as an opportunity.

  The day her tires were slashed, he followed Everly to Cole’s house to confirm what Jake told him. He then tailed her to Prix Fixe that night, planning on talking to her privately before he made his presence known. He’d figured that she’d be willing to offer him some of her newfound money to keep quiet about Cole’s injury and stay out of her life. Catching Abigail while he waited in his rental car had changed his plans.

  “When he confronted you,” Cole continued, “you offered to pay him to keep quiet. Since he needed the money, he didn’t turn it down. Money is pretty easy to track, you know.”
r />   She blinked several times and downed the rest of her cocktail.

  “Mason observed what happened after Everly’s tires were slashed. He saw that I went to her home and spent time with her. I paid for the tires. So he wondered what I might do if Everly was assaulted. In his mind, it would strengthen our relationship.”

  He didn’t add that Mason had reasoned Cole would be more likely to help him out when he asked for money if Cole was in love with Everly. Initially, Mason thought he’d get Cole to pay him to keep quiet about his injury. Then he decided that Cole’s attachment to Everly would make him freer with the cash, and he wouldn’t have to use blackmail at all.

  After staying at Jake’s for a while, he devised the plan of asking Everly to help him get the umpiring job, thinking he would be able to settle in the area and then have plenty of time to get money from Cole. His temper-invoked decision to leak the news story ruined his chances at that, however.

  Abigail frowned as she processed Cole’s statement.

  “You didn’t know that Mason wanted me and Everly to bond when you agreed to go along with his plans,” he said. “He knew of your jealousy over Everly and he played on it. He shared details about how Everly was over at my house all the time, how she had spent the night. That must have really gotten you worked up. You’ve never been in my house. You know my policy on bringing women there.”

  She didn’t comment. Her nostrils flared and her jaw tightened, though.

  “He convinced you to have your brother, the aspiring baseball player, use his bat on Everly.” The words were hard. Angry. He couldn’t speak calmly about that, even now. “Little did you know, that would just push me and Everly even closer together.”

  “If what you’re saying is true,” she said, “then any feelings you thought you had for her were surely destroyed when she went to the press about your injury.”

  He shook his head. “You’re really something else, Abigail. How could you not know that I’d make the connection between you, Mason Wallace, and Joan Shumaker?”

  “I don’t know what—”

  “Oh, give it a rest. You deliberately led Everly to Joan at the ball and abandoned her there, knowing I’d see the two of them and wonder. You’d been planning with Mason how and when you’d leak the story and make it seem that Everly did it. He decided that the money you offered him now was worth getting revenge on his daughter and losing any possible money from me down the road. You added fuel to the flames by conspiring with him to record himself talking about a plot against me. You happen to be one of the few people who have my personal e-mail address. And what do you know? Mason said you gave it to him so he could send the recording to me.”

  “I gave him your e-mail address, yes,” she said in clipped tones. “But it wasn’t for the reasons you’re implying. He just said he wanted to reach out to you. Since you were dating his daughter, I didn’t think twice about it. I shouldn’t have been so careless, I admit.”

  Cole smiled, but there was no humor in it. “Mason figured you’d say as much. Lucky for him, Everly wasn’t the only one he recorded.”

  She couldn’t hold his gaze. Pressing her fingertips to her mouth, she produced two more tears and shook her head.

  “It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” she said in a strained voice. “I was just trying to protect you.”

  “Protect me? How, exactly? By leaking the details that Mason got from Everly’s grandfather to Joan and jeopardizing my career? By hurting the woman I love?”

  The last word had Abigail jerking in her seat. Just then, the server arrived with their entrees. He saw enough between Cole’s quiet fury and Abigail’s tear-streaked face not to linger.

  When he left, Cole picked up his fork. “Here’s the deal. Since Marshall’s one of my best friends, I won’t rip his heart out by saying you started dating him to make me jealous. I won’t tell him that you did those things to Everly because you’ve been carrying a torch for me. You can make up whatever the hell excuse you want to avoid getting together with me and Everly, because we’re clearly never going there.”

  He ate a bite of the chicken salad he’d ordered. She didn’t even look at her food.

  “You’ll call Joan as soon as you leave here and tell her that you gave her information that wasn’t, in fact, true. I’m not injured and Everly isn’t posing as my girlfriend. She is my girlfriend. I don’t care if you lie and give Joan your ‘I’m his friend and I was trying to protect him and jumped to conclusions’ speech. Maybe she’ll buy it. Since the results of my physical came back negative for any injury, she’s going to print a retraction, anyway. You’re just shoring up my case.”

  She stared at him. Wiping her cheeks, she nodded. “And the police?”

  He ate another bite of his salad, letting her stew for a minute. Her complexion had turned a shade of mint green.

  “Everly gave her father the option of handing his evidence over to us and leaving the country rather than turning him over to the police. He decided to take her up on it. So you’re the one left holding the bag, so to speak.” After a pause, he continued, “If you ever come near me or Everly again, that evidence goes straight to the police. I assure you, my attorneys will not only pursue assault charges, they’ll go for attempted murder.”

  Her eyes widened. “You’re out of your mind.”

  “On that, you’ve got me beat by a mile.”

  Insult flared in her gaze. “Fine.” She reached for her purse. “Are we done here?”

  “Abigail, we were done a long time ago. It’s well past time you accepted that.”

  Chapter 53

  Eleven months later...

  “How about Satan?”

  Everly glanced at Cole over her shoulder as she hung another ornament on their Christmas tree. He was sitting on the floor, tugging on a rope toy currently clamped in the sharp teeth of their three-month-old chocolate Lab puppy.

  “You can’t name a puppy Satan,” she argued.

  When she reached out, he handed her another ornament from those they’d picked out together the week before. Then he selected another one and managed to get a hook on it with his free hand.

  “Sure you can,” he said over the puppy’s playful growls. “He ate the baby Jesus out of our manger, didn’t he?”

  She considered that as she hunted for another spot to fill on the tree. “I suppose that’s true. But he also ate Joseph and Mary. And a couple of sheep.”

  “Exactly. Satan.”

  Rolling her eyes, she reached for another ornament. She couldn’t help but smile over the sight of Cole grinning like a kid with candy as he played with the dog. He handed her the next ornament he’d hooked.

  “Ms. Margaret’s going to have her hands full while we’re gone,” she said, turning back to the tree.

  They were leaving the next afternoon for a two-week trip to Florida. It was a late graduation present for her, since her graduation had taken place mid-season. They were beginning the trip at Disney World and then finishing it with stops at a few beaches along the Gulf Coast. Everly hadn’t ever seen the ocean in person. She couldn’t wait to experience it all with Cole.

  “Ms. Margaret and Lucifer here will get along just fine,” Cole said. “And since Jonette is now your grandpa’s dedicated nurse, you don’t have to worry about him, either.”

  That was a tremendous relief. When she’d moved in with Cole a couple of months ago, she had asked her grandpa to move with her. He refused, insisting that she and Cole needed their space. Knowing she’d worry, Cole had offered Jonette enough money that she could transition her other patients to other nurses and focus all of her time on Jake. She’d opted to move into Everly’s old room. The arrangement seemed to be going well.

  “We’re not naming our dog Lucifer,” she said as she hung the ornament.

  “How about Piss-Pot? P.P. for short?”

  “Creative. But no.”

  Cole handed her another ornament. “What fun are you, Dr. Wallace?”

  She grinned. “As
my patients frequently tell me, I’m no fun at all.”

  It felt good to say that. Her patients.

  After the news story about Cole’s injury came out, his teammate, Randy Haviland, asked to meet with Everly. They’d talked about his recent Tommy John surgery. He’d read about Aiden’s experience and had connected with it, as he’d been suffering from depression and fear that he’d never pitch again.

  She’d been working with him on rehab ever since. He’d be returning to the team in better shape than ever when he reported for spring training. Since Cole recently signed a new five-year contract himself, they’d be teammates for a while yet.

  Although she worked part-time with Casey at the sports rehabilitation center, the bulk of her work was done in their home gym. Cole had added all of the special equipment she needed to work with her private patients. It had shocked her when he suggested opening their doors to her clientele, but since she only worked with a handful of well-paying athletes, it had proven less invasive than she’d imagined.

  She reached for the next ornament he handed her. As she placed it on the tree, she said, “Are we nuts for hosting Christmas dinner this year?”

  “Hell, yeah,” he said. “We’re traveling up until the week before the holiday, we still have tons of gifts to wrap, and we have to leave the day after Christmas to get to New York for all of the pre-New Year’s festivities. We’re certifiably insane.”

  Their ad for the designer underwear had been such a hit in magazines that it was about to grace a billboard in Times Square. They were being paid to fly to New York for the big unveiling. The ad was meant to be seen by everyone attending the ball drop in Times Square on New Year’s Eve...and the millions of people viewing it on their televisions.

  “Ugh. We really are nuts,” she said, taking the next ornament and searching for a branch. “My grandpa is going to see me in my underwear. He never misses the Times Square bash.”

  “You’re assuming he’ll notice you. Keep in mind that you’re posed next to all of this hotness in that ad.” He gestured to himself before handing her the next ornament.