“It’s okay.” I am quick to forgive, an instant offering I will want to analyze later for signs of my mother, but for right now, it feels right. “I thought after Bristol asked for the ball—”
“The ball is nothing, Brenna. She texted the afternoon I flew out. I said yes. End of story.”
“But I don’t want you to think—”
“I think she needed an auction item, and I have the means to provide one. That’s it.”
“Really?”
“Really. Now can we talk about us?”
I cozy up to the corner of the sofa, draw my knees in and cinch the blanket tighter around my legs. “Us?” I didn’t know there was an “us,” but I’m willing to discuss the possibility.
“Can I come see you on Tuesday?”
I reply softly, “I’d like that.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The week between my phone call with Vance and today, when I’ll finally get to see him, has been a blur of Miracle Days preparations and giddy anticipation. I can’t concentrate or pony up the energy needed to make Miracle Days any better. The festival is still four days away, but seeing as it’s the town’s biggest event of the year, there is a lot to be done, and Tracy’s mom, organizer and chief dictator of Miracle Days, is too keyed up to allow any kind of downtime.
Today, I’m using my Stray Charlie’s shift as a reprieve from Mrs. Dixon’s relentless whip-cracking. Bristol, however, got stuck organizing the auction items all morning with Tracy, and while I’ve received several texts from her bitching about how long it’s taking, she’s surprisingly silent about my date with Vance tonight. I don’t know if she’s using Miracle Days prep as a distraction or if she’s actually not preoccupied with it. The mystery is solved when Bristol shows up to start her shift at Stray Charlie’s just as mine is ending. She’s in a mood.
“So,” she begins, signing in for her shift with a flourish of cuss words as she drops the clipboard. “While you’re out tonight acting like Vance didn’t lie to you, ignore you for two days, and hasn’t blown you off night after night to party, I’m going out with Tracy and her rich, snobby friends. I hope that makes you feel like shit.”
I roll my eyes, shoulder my messenger bag, and open the door aggressively enough to rattle the bell and clink it off the glass. “Nope. Nothing.”
“Why are you doing this? We both know you’re not the easy one. You try to hang with the slutty crowd, but you just aren’t a member. That’s where your similarity with Mom ends. He’s going to find out, you know?”
Standing in the doorway, I prop the door open with my foot. “I hope so.”
After producing a believable smile, she rushes to the other side of the counter to hug me. She throws her arms around me and squeezes me so tight I can’t breathe. “For your sake, I hope so too.” She kisses my cheek. “I know I’ve been a horrible bitch about all of this, but I want to protect you. I hope it goes well. Not so well you fall madly in love, but well enough you can clear out the dust bunnies in your vagina.” She holds a finger up, runs back in the shop and digs through her purse before coming back to me with a sample size Mary Kay perfume in her hand. “You smell like hand sanitizer. You’re not getting any action smelling like rubbing alcohol. And what if there are scratch n’ sniff tabloids? You’ll be a smelly stray with less staying power than Tiffany’s chlamydia.”
She’s all over the place. Mood swings left and right, and I don’t know which way to turn half the time. Is she or isn’t she? Will she or won’t she? I’m thankful that, for the moment, I can relax and maybe enjoy my date with Vance without having to worry about whether or not Bristol is planning our demise.
I nod and try to sneak a word of thanks in, but she shoves me and waves over my head with the other. “He’s here. I want graphic texts. Oh, and take this.” She hands me the perfume and makes me palm it tight. “You never know. It could smell musty down there.” I leave her to head towards Vance, and she hollers after me, “Remember, release not attachment.”
Bristol’s impromptu sex advice and mood-whiplash leave me smiling as I meet Vance outside of Stray Charlie’s. He’s wearing his mirrored aviators and a ball cap that sits low. The tattoos on his arms show beneath a short-sleeved white T-shirt with some sort of black logo on his right pec. Damn, he’s gorgeous.
I don’t know how to greet him. He’s Van Hatfield, cautious of his exposure, and we haven’t established the lines. So, I approach with casual confidence and a smile discernible from any distance.
I’m met with what Vance would call a smile and a softly spoken, “Hey, you.”
We walk a foot apart in silence until we reach his car parked across the street in front of Stricker Bait and Tackle Shop. Vance, utilizing his recently acquired chivalry skills, opens my door, and I climb into the Spyder wondering what the rest of the day is going to hold if he’s already starting out like a gentleman. He climbs into the driver’s seat and immediately grabs my hand and squeezes before shifting into reverse.
Once he hits the street, he places his hand back on my bare thigh. “You okay with another lowkey night at my place? It’s not far from here.”
I place my hand over his. “Sounds great.”
The house Vance purchased before meeting me is located past Grundy Beach in an area the locals dubbed Honey Hill as upper-class homes were being built. Vance’s house sits on the ocean side of the street at the top of Honey Hill. Shielded by flowering shrubs, tall, bushy trees, and a white solid gate that spans his driveway, it’s about as secluded as you can get on a public beach. He pulls in, and the gate slides closed behind us before we’ve pulled into the one-car garage stall where he parks and shuts the engine off.
The hand on my thigh moves to my chin, and Vance leans in for a kiss, wrapping up any insecurities I may have been harboring about his intentions.
“God, I’ve wanted to do that for a week.”
“Why’d you wait?”
“Privacy. Not knowing how you’d respond. I don’t know, lots of reservations, I guess.” He strokes my cheek with his thumb, eyes searching for something he’s not seeing. “I’ll figure it out, I promise. In the meantime, tell me what’s wrong.”
I shake my head. “I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not. Is it the ball?”
“Vance, I . . .” I don’t know how to ask. We’re not exclusive or even really dating. Do I have a right to ask if what the tabloids report is true? Is he dating the other girls the tabloids mentioned? “In Candid—”
He sits back in his seat, tilts his head back against it, and lets out a breath. “Chip mentioned it. I haven’t read it, though.”
“Are you dating them?”
He jerks his head to look at me, face pinched. “Who this time?”
“Nikki Kline, and I can’t remember her name, but she’s a stripper.”
He growls but doesn’t answer.
“Don’t take this wrong. I’m not judging you, and I’m not asking for something from you, but I don’t want to be that girl. If you’re seeing them, I shouldn’t be here.”
His look softens. “Nikki is a friend. Occasionally we hit events together because we don’t want the complication of asking anyone else. It’s easy. We dated briefly a year ago, but there wasn’t anything there for either of us. And the stripper,” he pauses, releasing a breath before taking another, “is my sister.”
I come off the seat and pin him with a wide-eyed look, mouth fully open, waiting for something to land in it other than a string of curse words. “You’re dating your sister?”
He laughs, shaking his head. “No. I just didn’t correct the press. Tabloids don’t research. They got her stripper name and never dug deeper. Had they, they’d have discovered that Amber Dietrich is also my sister, Camille Hatfield. Me being with a stripper was the story. End of story. Truth doesn’t matter.”
My mouth bobs like it’s on strings attached to someone else’s hands. I don’t know what to say and wish that damn puppeteer would speak for me instead of just w
orking the hinges of my mouth.
“It’s not common knowledge outside my family, so I’d appreciate it, for her sake, if you’d keep it between us. I’m telling you because I don’t want that to be a source of contention for us.”
I wouldn’t deny him for a lesser reason. “Your secret is safe with me. But why wouldn’t you correct it?”
He contemplates for a moment before speaking. “Her four-year-old son, Jacoby. My life doesn’t provide a lot of anonymity for those around me.”
“Is she pretty private about what she does for a living?”
“Camille doesn’t really care. She just wants to dance. Retail wasn’t cutting it, and she won’t take my money. Not to sound arrogant, but if it weren’t for me, no one would care that she strips to provide for her kid. But because expectations are high for me, they’re high for my family too. I don’t want Jacoby hurt by a witch hunt because of me and people’s intense need to know everything about me. Everyone has an opinion, and trust me, there will be fallout if they find out Camille is raising her son on stripping money. It’s perfectly legal, but some morally superior bitch will want to look into his custody, and because of the far-reaching media, it will become a debated topic.”
I nod, understanding that gossip and rumors can destroy a life, or at the very least, make its path very rocky. I know the fallout well, having lived through it my entire life either through my own mistakes or through another’s. “It makes me sick to think someone who doesn’t know you or them would even have a say.”
“People feel like they know me because I’m on their televisions every Saturday night. I’m on the tabloid in the doctor’s office. I’m an alert on their TMZ app. And when you know someone intimately enough to know who they’re sleeping with, they think they have a say in your life. It sucks, but I chose it. Camille and Jacoby didn’t. I don’t need some religious lawyer trying to make a name for himself using Camille’s life choices as a platform to get elected Attorney General or some shit. I shouldn’t have taken her to the event. We’re usually cautious, but she wanted to see J Trudy’s dance performance, and I relented because that’s her idol.”
Hearing all this humanizes him for me yet again. “Jeez, I barely survived the rumor mill of a small town. How do you survive it at your level?”
“I bought this house. Milagro Beach isn’t exactly a tabloid mecca.”
“Yeah, until me, that is.”
“I don’t think so. Chip said they hadn’t gotten ahold of your name yet. Shitty pictures, I guess. So for your sake, I figured lowkey today would be for the best.”
“Lowkey, boring, uneventful. Call it what you like, I need a day with no crazy in it. Can you manage that?”
“I’ll see what I can arrange.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Normal begins with a change of clothes, and while Vance changes into his swimming trunks, I peek around the second level of his three-story beach house. It’s quaint for a three-story, or at least this level is, with the kitchen and living room in one open space. Decorated in whites, blues, and varying shades of grays and blacks, it’s crisp, neat, and sleek.
Hearing him moving around upstairs, I bag the self-guided tour and peel my top layer of clothes off to get down to my red bikini, the suit my mom considers too risky for the ocean because the ties can loosen in the surf.
Vance descends the stairs, and I turn around to look at him as he steps into the living room wearing blue and white trunks. “You know how to make a guy work for his composure.”
He looks good, every inch of him tight, tanned, and toned. “I could say the same.”
Using the stairs off his back deck, we head down to the beach, me wrapped in a towel and him wearing sunglasses and his hat that I’m beginning to think he wears for anonymity. After our earlier talk, I realize how little privacy he has, so once we get onto the sand, I increase the space between us and lower my sunglasses from the top of my head to my face.
A few yards from the wet part of the sand, we lay our towels out and sit on them facing the ocean. A few approaching beachcombers have put Vance on edge, and his demeanor shifts accordingly. “I know this isn’t ideal,” he says, facing away from me to say it. “Out here, I can at least tell who’s carrying camera equipment or looks out of place enough to be worrisome.”
“It’s perfect.” I dig my toes in the sand and listen for the constant roll and crash of the ocean in the hopes it will ease my nerves.
He looks at me, and I can see myself propped on my elbows in his sunglasses. It’s a rare glimpse of how he sees me, and other than the usual insecurities, I feel okay in my skin.
Vance, unable to relax, heads out to the ocean, and I watch him as he stands alone in the surf. I’m not one to pee on my possessions, but I could be after listening to three girls discussing him as they walk past me. He’s not mine, but I’ll be damned if he’ll be theirs today.
I head out, tramping through the dry sand on a mission to join him in the surf. Keeping a respectable distance to preserve his efforts, I dive beneath the water to get my entire body used to the cold.
We play in the ocean, riding waves for a while like two kids with boundless energy and no interest in each other whatsoever. His hand hasn’t so much as grazed my arm by accident, though not for a lack of trying on my part.
Vance shrugs his right shoulder, rolling it forward, backward, and up and down repeatedly. I watch as he tries numerous times to work something out of it, but he never seems to succeed. Giving up on the shoulder, he dives into a wave, dodging its crest, but it grabs hold of me, tosses me in the middle of its chaos, and before I know it, I’m floundering around in a gritty, brown funnel. Disoriented, I open my eyes trying to find the surface as the churning water subsides and then rebounds, slamming me into something hard. It gives me a point of reference, and as I try to climb up it, I am plucked from the water and held above it.
“Are you okay?”
Gasping for air, I sputter, coughing up enough seawater to float an ark. My eyes sting, and the gritty sand overlay makes blinking painful. Waves continue their assault as I struggle with air intake and subsequent release. “Hold on!” Vance shouts over the noise of the water, and I latch on like a monkey.
Vance’s hands slide down my arms and grip my hips as he moves us closer to shore and out of the big swells. He trudges through the water with me attached, a man on a mission. The waves crash near his hips and then his knees until they lap harmlessly at his ankles.
I find my legs as he sets me down and runs for our towels, probably wondering about my ocean fitness. If I thought it would help, I’d tell him I had my eyes on him and not the wave, but somehow admitting that seems almost worse than drowning in three feet of raging water.
After a slow trek back up to Vance’s house, during which I tripped repeatedly on the steps and nearly coughed my lungs out my ass, I sit in a lounger on the deck.
“Here.” He hands me a chilled bottle of water, and I take it gratefully.
Once I appear recovered, Vance squats in front of me and places his hands on my knees, craning and crooking his neck so he can see my downturned eyes. “You good?”
I nod, laughing. “Perfect. Good thing I skipped breakfast. There’s no way I would have been able to take in that much water if I hadn’t.”
He kisses me innocently on the cheek. “Sucked for you, not so much for me,” he says next to my ear in the voice that makes my sex tighten. He stands up to his full height of six-foot-two, according to his stats online, stretches, rolls his shoulder again, and pops his neck.
“So,” he says like he didn’t just make my entire day, “what’s Bristol doing after she gets off work?” He walks through the doors into the house and reappears again in the kitchen window. He slides the window open and proceeds to do whatever he went in there to do, while I lie back on my lounger to hide the disappointment on my face.
“She’s hanging out with the snooty crew,” I offer. “Why?”
“I thought maybe you’d want
to include her tonight. I’m not used to dating a twin. I wasn’t sure if I was crossing some sort of line by keeping you two apart.”
I relax a little, relief settling my jealous hackles, and his choice of the word “dating” makes my heart race. I could swoon openly over the sweetness of him even thinking about including Bristol, but I refrain because I’m not ready to share him. “She may have mentioned missing me a time or two. But it’s good for her—us, actually. I think you’re good.”
“You’ll let me know if I’m not, right?”
“If I don’t, Bristol will.”
Vance returns with an elaborate icepack and two drinks that he sets on a table between two loungers. He then proceeds to move the lounger I’m not occupying across from me, so that the feet of each meet.
He adjusts the backrest, eases into it with a small wince, and plops the ice pack over his shoulder so that it drapes over both sides, front and back, sort of like a saddle pouch. His legs, long, whiter than his arms and chest, and thinly covered in dark hairs, stretch out in front of him, toes slightly pointed out. He places another ice pack on his elbow, this one smaller, but it wraps around fully.
The sun, thinly veiled behind a gauzy layer of clouds, bathes his skin in muted gold. I have wanted to examine the tattoos on his arms, chest, and back, but haven’t had the opportunity without making it obvious what I’m doing. Not that I’ve ever been casual about checking him out. I’m pretty sure I’m as obvious as an armed, hooded guy in a bank. His eyes are shielded behind a pair of aviators, but I know he’s looking at me, so, I use his apparent pain to my advantage.
Rumor Has It (Jock Star Book 1) Page 14