One Eighty (Westover Prep Book 1)

by James, Marie

  Drawn to her when she’s like this, I take several steps in her direction.

  “Wh-what are you doing?” she stammers when I invade her space.

  “You’re sexy when you’re mad.”

  “You haven’t heard a word I’ve said,” she chastises. “Typical.”

  “Oh, baby, I’m listening, but your body is saying something your mouth isn’t.”

  “Oh, yeah? And what’s that?” She props her hand on her hip in agitation.

  “How much you want me, too.”

  I don’t give her the time to deny it before my lips are once again on hers. Instead of shoving me away like I expect, her fingers scrape across my scalp as she scrambles for purchase in my hair. This kiss is nothing like the one we shared the other night. That one was slow and filled with promise. This one is fierce and brimming with hate and anger. Only the animosity rushing through her veins isn’t about me taking something she doesn’t want to give. No, the way her tongue battles with mine, it’s clear she’s upset with herself for wanting it as much as I do.

  “Dalton,” she pants against my mouth when we come up for air, but I don’t let her push me away this time.

  “Shh,” I urge against her mouth before pressing even closer.

  I ignore the dart of pain in my wrist when I lift her from the floor. In the next second, I have her legs around me, and her back pressed to the front door. My cock is at full-mast, but I don’t grind it against her like my brain is urging me to do. She admitted that our kiss was her first, so it’s obvious she’s a virgin. I’m already crossing a line that will give me trouble at a later date. I won’t push things that far right now.

  So as much of a gentleman as I can be in this situation, I keep my mouth on hers and my hands a respectable distance from her ass.

  “Dalton,” she moans again, and this time it’s accompanied with her fingers ripping at my hair.

  “Jesus, baby,” I moan against her neck, licking at the raging pulse point under her ear.

  “Dalton!” she yells this time. “Stop!”

  I pull my head back immediately. “What’s wrong?”

  “Let me down.”

  I swallow the ball of emotion in my throat. “Piper, please don’t do this again. Don’t shove me away and pretend we don’t have chemistry.”

  Her eyes flutter closed, and her chest heaves with sharp breaths. “Please let me go.”

  “You enjoyed kissing me,” I remind her as I let her feet lower to the ground.

  “I did,” she admits. “Too much.”

  She clears her throat before bending to grab the strap of her backpack that must’ve slid off her shoulder at some point.

  “We can take things slow,” I tell her. So long as she isn’t walking away because she regrets it, that’s something I can work with.

  “I have to go.”

  She walks out and leaves, but she doesn’t reject my offer completely, and that’s the single thing I hold onto.

  Chapter 24

  Piper

  I feel like the biggest jerk in the world as I walk to my house.

  I’ve left Peyton in a lurch. She has so little time before her test, but staying in that house with him isn’t possible.

  She can come over here and work on math if she wants. I need to get myself out of the danger zone.

  As expected, my house is as silent as a tomb when I enter. My parents have already left for work, and I’ll have the entire day to stew over what I just let happen, again, with Dalton Payne.

  Take things slow, my foot. There was nothing slow about the way he lifted me and propped me against his front door. We were both traveling at the speed of light when he pressed his mouth against mine.

  I’m angry at myself for enjoying the warmth of his lips on mine, and I hate that I admitted that out loud to him. He shouldn’t know these things. It’ll only get me in trouble.

  My palms itch, remembering the texture of his hair, and my body aches for the promises he never even said.

  Dang it!

  Why does he get to me? Do I react this way to him because my aching heart needs some form of positive to hold onto?

  Needing a voice of reason, I drop my backpack by the door and fly up the stairs. If there’s a person on this earth that can talk me down from the ledge I’m teetering on, it’s Frankie.

  “Hey,” comes her sleepy voice when I call.

  “Did I wake you up?”

  “Yeah,” she grumbles.

  “You’re usually up with the dawn,” I remind her when she sounds agitated about her sleep being interrupted.

  “Back home, I actually have things to get out of bed for. It sucks here, Piper. I figured summer would go by faster if I slept more.”

  “I don’t think that’s healthy,” I hedge.

  “I’m not depressed.” She yawns. “No, that’s not true. I’m utterly depressed. I want to come home.”

  “I want that, too,” I whisper. “Maybe you can call your parents, and they’ll let you stay here while they’re out of town?”

  “I wish.” Sheets rustle on her end of the line, and I wait for her to situate herself. “I already asked last week. They refuse to change the plane ticket and keep giving me this crap about family being important. They act like Granny is helpless. That woman is stronger and healthier than any other eighty-year-old I’ve met.”

  “I’m sorry you hate it there. I’d come to you if I could.”

  I don’t mention that it would only be to get away from Dalton and his plush lips, but she doesn’t have to know that.

  “Shouldn’t you be tutoring Peyton right now?”

  “I left,” I confess. “I couldn’t be there today.”

  Silence fills the hundreds of miles between us.

  “Frankie?”

  “What has he done?”

  I smile at her defensive tone. She may think the guy is smoking hot, but she’s never excused his behavior. Her protectiveness makes me grin.

  God, I want to tell her everything, but I’m not sure how she’ll take it.

  “He had a pool party,” I begin, planning to tell her exactly what I told Dillon.

  “And?”

  “All of the regular deviants from school showed up.”

  “Piper, if you tell me he teamed up against you, I’m going to hitchhike back to Westover and set his house on fire.”

  Another smile spreads across my face. Fierce loyalty and the willingness to maim and kill is hard to find these days. Frankie gives it in spades, and I’m one lucky girl to have her on my side.

  “He didn’t,” I assure her. “He caught them being mean to me, and he made them all leave. I told him about what we saw Bronwyn, Vaughn, and Kyle doing that night.”

  “Really?” Her voice is a squeak, still filled with sleep and not ready for this conversation.

  “Really,” I tell her. “He didn’t seem too bothered by that. He was more concerned about the way they were treating me.”

  “Did he beat the crap out of Kyle? Someone needs to take that jerk down a peg or two.”

  “I left the room, but I don’t think there were any fists thrown.”

  “And what happened next?”

  “Are you living vicariously through my drama because you’re bored being stuck on the farm?”

  “Of course,” she says. “Now get on with the story. What happened next?”

  “We got in the pool.”

  “We?”

  “You know.” I twist my hair around my fingers nervously. I just want to spit it all out, and even I’m growing agitated by retelling the story a couple of words at a time. “Peyton, Preston, and me.”

  “And Dalton?”

  “He kissed me, okay!”

  “Whoa. What?”

  “We kissed. Well, he kissed me twice.”

  “Is he a good kisser?”

  “That is not what you’re supposed to say. You’re supposed to yell at me for letting it happen. You’re supposed to warn me against all evil things Dalton Payne.
Remind me of the horrible things he’s done since the day we met. As my best friend, you’re not supposed to ask me if he’s a good kisser!”

  “So, he isn’t?”

  I sigh in agitation, and Frankie laughs.

  “He’s a great kisser.”

  “I knew he would be. You can’t have lips like his and suck at sucking face, you know?”

  “Jesus, Frankie.” I rub my forehead, but it seems the irritation is there to stay.

  “What do you want me to say?” I can hear the smile in her voice. “So, you kissed Dalton. It doesn’t have to be a big deal unless you make it one.”

  “I hate him,” I remind her. “We hate him. I can’t go around kissing people I hate.”

  “Hate kisses may be the best kisses ever,” she counters. “There are no hard and fast kissing rules. That’s not even a thing.”

  “What do you know about hate kissing?”

  She mumbles something unintelligible.

  “What? Frankie! Have you been kissing on someone in Utah?”

  “No!” she screams, but even on the phone, I can tell my best friend is lying. She’s as bad at it as I am.

  “Who have you been kissing, Frankie?”

  “He’s a jerk. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  I allow silence to fill the space between us, knowing that she’ll cave, eventually. She wants to talk about her guy as much as I want to talk about Dalton.

  “He’s no one,” she says quietly. “Just some fool that works here on the ranch.”

  “So now you’re going around kissing fools?” I tease.

  Frankie is always purposeful in how she behaves. She isn’t going to convince me she accidentally kissed some guy.

  “He’s the biggest jerk I’ve ever met,” she snaps. “I hate him.”

  “I think Dalton has the market cornered on the biggest jerk,” I remind her.

  “Zeke is worse,” she mutters.

  “Twelve years of torture worse?”

  “I don’t want to talk about Zeke,” she hisses. “Tell me more about kissing Dalton.”

  “I don’t want to talk about Dalton.”

  “Yes, you do, or you wouldn’t have called me so dang early.”

  “I gave him some of my journals,” I confess, and I swear I could hear a pin drop.

  There isn’t a hint of noise, not a whisper of sound between us for what seems like an eternity.

  “Has he done or said anything mean to you since the accident?” she asks, completely ignoring the questions she really wants to ask. Knowing Frankie, we’ll come full circle, eventually.

  “He’s been nice.”

  “Am I going to have to pull this information from you? Quit wasting both of our time and tell me what is going on.”

  “He wants to be friends.” She huffs. “He wants to be more than friends. He likes me, or so he claims.”

  “Has he done anything to make you doubt that?”

  “Besides years and years of torment?”

  “All of that is in the past.”

  “Now you sound like him,” I mumble.

  “Let the past go.”

  “Did he tell you to say that?”

  She chuckles, and I know it was a stupid question to ask. Frankie would tell me the second our call connected if Dalton was brazen enough to call her. It reminds me that I told him I was dating Dillon, and I also told him Frankie was my boyfriend when I was on the phone with her the first time I saw him at the diner. He hasn’t called me out on that yet, but I have no doubt it’ll come. The fake boyfriend trick with Dillon has already been blown out of the water.

  “What if he really does like you?” Frankie whispers. “What do you do then?”

  “I don’t have a clue. I want to run as far as I can get, but at the same time, I want to see where it takes me. That makes me crazy, doesn’t it?”

  “I think you should—”

  A knock on Frankie’s end interrupts what she was about to say.

  “Cause me to hear thy lovingkindness in the morning,” a husky voice says.

  “Who is that?” I hiss.

  “I have to go.”

  The line goes dead before I can find out who the man was speaking to her, but more importantly, she didn’t finish telling me what she thought I should do.

  “Crap,” I hiss, readying my arm to throw my phone across the room when it rings.

  Peyton’s pretty face flashes across my screen with a request to video chat.

  “I’m sorry.” I apologize the second the video connects. “I just couldn’t be over there today.”

  “I understand,” she says. “Maybe I can come to your house in a little bit?”

  “Of course. How was the funeral?”

  “Sad,” she says with a frown. “Everyone loved Mr. Clark.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Dillon is the hottest guy I’ve ever seen before in my life.”

  “He’s pretty good-looking,” I agree.

  “Why does he have to be so much older than me?” she whines.

  “He’s also gay,” I inform her.

  “All the gorgeous ones are.”

  We both smile.

  “So, see you in about an hour?”

  “Sounds good.”

  “I think I need to focus on—”

  Peyton stops talking, looking up from her phone.

  “Knock much?”

  “I didn’t know you were here,” Dalton says, his voice low and hard to hear across the room.

  “Do you normally creep into my room when you think I’m away?”

  “You know why I’m here.”

  “Of course, the window.” Peyton looks down at the phone, smiling when she sees how wide my eyes are. She winks before looking back up at her brother. “No matter how hard you stare at her curtains, she’s not going to pull them back while standing naked in her room.”

  Oh, Jesus. What is this girl doing?

  Chapter 25

  Dalton

  “I don’t want to see her naked,” I argue.

  Peyton raises an eyebrow at me. Just mentioning it makes me think of her in the bathing suit and shorts. Even with the naked nerdy girls I found in my phone, I haven’t seen a sexier sight than Piper Schofield in a one-piece. I’m a guy, of course I want to see her naked.

  “Okay. I don’t only want to see her naked.”

  My sister huffs.

  I swear I have more than a one-track mind, but I can’t help where it ends up where Piper is concerned. I want her naked. I want her clothed. I want her in pajamas and in a white dress as I wait at the other end of the church for her. I want it all. And yes, I want her naked.

  Naked and wet, sweaty and reaching for me.

  Peyton clears her throat in irritation, and I force those thoughts and dreams down so I can focus on what needs to be said and done right now. Yes, I came into Peyton’s room for a reason, but I also need to talk with her.

  “I need your help.”

  She’s been a brat to me since the night Piper stayed over, but that has to end. She’s my only connection to the girl, and I’m losing my mind already. They’re both shutting me out, and it’s killing me.

  “I’m not going to help you.”

  I knew she was going to say that. She can’t even stand to look at me recently.

  “Will you at least tell me why you’re mad at me? What the hell did I do to you?”

  One day we were fine, and then the next she hates me, looking at me with pity the same way Piper does when she doesn’t know I can see her.

  Only paying me half attention, Peyton looks back down at her phone before meeting my eyes. She re-situates her body until she’s facing me, and I’m grateful she may be giving this conversation a chance rather than telling me to fuck off and get out of her room. After pressing a few buttons on her phone, she looks at me again.

  “I don’t like the way you treated Piper.”

  Well, that’s a given. I hate the way I treated her, too.

  “I haven�
�t mistreated Piper.”

  “Not since the accident, but before the wreck.”

  I roll my eyes. Will it always come back to that?

  “You sound just like her.” I drop to the floor in front of the window, crossing my legs. There isn’t so much as a draft from the air conditioner in Piper’s room. Her curtains are unmoving, just another barrier between the two of us. “I wish you both would forgive me.”

  “This is hard for her,” Peyton says. “You can’t expect her to forget what’s happened overnight.”

  “Hard for her?” I huff. “What about me?”

  “Really? You’re going to make this about you?”

  “It’s impossible knowing that I love her, knowing that she’s meant for me, and I ruined everything in a past I can’t even remember.” I drop my head, focusing on my hands because I can’t look at my sister, risking the sight of her judgmental eyes on me. I didn’t plan this method of attack, but honesty seems like the best thing, so I go for it. “The reprehensible things I’ve done to her can’t be redeemed. I can’t go back twelve years and take it all back, but if I could, I’d do it in a heartbeat. Not being able to imagine a world where she isn’t mine…”

  I shake my head, unable to put into words what I’m feeling in my soul.

  “Love? Really, Dalton?” The tone of my sister’s voice makes the hair on my arms stand on end in frustration. “It’s been less than two weeks.”

  “What else could it be, if not love?” I snap my head up to look at her.

  “Infatuation? Opportunity? A challenge? Any number of things,” Peyton counters. “You’ve never had a girl turn you down before. Maybe it’s a reaction to your fragile ego.”

  “I don’t remember anyone else!” I roar. “Her first kiss was my first kiss, too!”

  “What?” Peyton’s eyes grow wild, and she looks from me to her phone twice. “She kissed you?”

  “Well,” I begin, embarrassment flushing my cheeks, “I kissed her, but she kissed me back.”

  “Unbelievable,” Peyton mumbles, and for some reason, her shoulders relax a bit. “This changes things, doesn’t it?”

  “All of her firsts could be my firsts, too,” I blurt, unable to control the words coming out of my mouth.

  I’ve dreamed of experiencing everything with Piper. Those fantasies are all I have to draw from. I doubt I’m a virgin, technically. Bronwyn said as much when she was crawling all over me the other day, but does it even count if I can’t remember it?