AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She looks at me over her shoulder and when she reaches for the envelope, our fingers touch. Her eyes flicker, but despite the shockwave her touch shoots through me, I remain stoic.
“I’m sure Mrs. Danbury would be happy to help you with anything you need,” she says crisply, while dropping her hand and turning back around. “And if she can’t help you, I’m sure you can find someone else that can.”
“Thanks,” I can’t help but smirk. “We’ll manage.”
She tucks her hair behind one ear, then folds her arms over her chest, looking past me. When I follow her gaze and realize she’s staring at my Jeep, I let my eyes drift back to her.
The past two years have been good to Ellery. She’s always been pretty, but the last time I saw her she was sixteen. Now, she’s eighteen, and absolutely stunning, with sun-kissed cheeks and plump pink lips.
“I’d put the top on if I were you,” she says almost wistfully. As she starts to turn back to me, I whip my eyes away before she can catch me staring at her. “There’s a storm coming and you know how unpredictable the weather can be down here in the summer.”
When she says it, a memory crashes into me—one I’d tried like hell to bury under time and distance. But nights like that you don’t forget. They become a part of your story, no matter how many chapters you write, and I know she’s thinking about it, too. I can hear it in her voice and see it in her eyes.
Before the past can swallow me, I clear my throat and reach for my keys. “We have to go.”
I don’t wait for her to respond, and honestly, I wouldn’t hear her if she did. My heart is pounding too hard to hear anything other than blood whooshing in my ears as I tap Jake’s shoulder to leave.
After we get back to my Jeep, I start the engine and back out of the parking space, pulling away faster than necessary. But when I look in the rearview mirror and see her standing there, I’m struck by an overwhelming sense of déjà vu.
“Who wasthat?” Jake turns to me as the wind whips around us as I drive.
I grip the wheel as the idea of Ellery watching me leave sends an unwelcome lance of pain shooting across my chest. “No one.”
“Ex?” He presses, ignoring my response. “Summer fling?”
“No.” I shake my head. “Not a fling.” Not even close.
“Okay…” he drawls, motioning for me to say more. “Who was it then?”
Jake knows my dad remarried after my mom died, but I never shared the specifics of who his wife was, or all my new life came with. How did I tell the friend I’ve known for two years, but trust as if I’ve known my whole life, that my past has a secret and the girl we just ran into is it?
I grip the wheel tighter, trying to figure out how to answer, and when none of my responses sound right, I tell him the truth. “That was my stepsister,” I confess.
“Yourwhat?” His eyes bug out. “You have a sister?”
“Stepsister,” I say again. But that is only part of it. The other part—the crux of what I’mnotsaying—is that Ellery Butler wasn’t just my stepsister. She was my obsession.
That knockout we just left standing on the street was once all I could think about and what I wanted, what she and I had that summer before I left for Highland, had the potential to ruin our families. And if I wasn’t careful, if I got too close again, my need for her wouldn’t just ruin the future I’d been planning but bringboth of our worlds crashing down around us in the process.
Chapter 2
Ellery
As I watch Cruz’s Jeep fade from view, it feels like I’m back in time, watching him disappear from my life all over again. Only, I’m not choking on my sobs, because the tears I shed over Bennett Darcy de la Cruz have long since run dry.
As much as I hate to admit it, he looked better in person than he did in all those grainy pictures from his college newspaper that his father kept in the study at home. The past two years had been good to him. He still had that sexy smirk and gorgeous blue eyes, but those lean, tan forearms I once loved, were now well-defined, sculpted through exercise and plenty of time on the pitcher’s mound.
I always hoped the first time I saw him again I would be calm and poised, and up to a point just now I was. But there’s no denying the boy who was my first crush and then love, still rattled me.
Cruz came into my world like lightning. I was fourteen and he was sixteen and despite the fact our parents were dating, his blue eyes and dark hair made me feel things I’d never felt before. With his confident countenance and brooding good looks, he was unlike any of the guys I’d grown up with. Every time he looked at me, my heart skipped a beat and my mind went to places it never had.
But then our parents got married and he became my stepbrother, and the effect Cruz had on me changed. He moved in with us, and began attending Elmhurst Prep, and his looks and charm made him the guy everyone wanted to be around, and my worst nightmare.
He seemed hell bent on making my high school existencemiserable, reminding me every chance he got that I was a freshman and he was a junior. I never got invited to parties or asked out because of his interference, and every interaction between us always ended in some kind of argument. He even got everyone to call me Elle, not Ellie, as I had been called my whole life. But that didn’t stophimfrom using it with a mocking sweetness that both infuriated me and stirred butterflies in my stomach.
Those one and a half years together were long and tiring but then he graduated from Elmhurst and I saw hope on the horizon. With Cruz headed to Pennsylvania for college, I only had one last summer to put up with him and then he’d be gone, leaving me to live my life the way I had before he was in it.
That last summer there was a spring in my step that hadn’t been there since before he arrived and nothing Cruz did bothered me. Not his incessant need to play the same music over and over, nor his penchant for hogging the pool with his buddies from Elmhurst. I didn’t even care when one night during our first weekend there, after our parents had gone to bed and it was just him and I, he turned off the movie I was watching, just so he could put onSportscenter.
