AllFreeNovel
Share Us
ALLIE
“What are you doing here?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper as Jace Harbor approached me.
Rain beat down around us, plastering his hair to his forehead. His pretty dark brown eyes were fixed on me. He should have been at a house party, lighting up a blunt with Poison and letting Jenny suck him off. Not here, not with me.
He shrugged his shoulders and thrust the flowers into my hands. “It’s the anniversary of your dad’s death. I wasn’t going to let you come here alone.”
My chest tightened. Not once this entire week had I told him that I was coming here to see Dad after the game. He must’ve remembered when we used to go a few years ago … unless his dad had told him to come with me.
I glanced down at the flowers in my hands.
But the marigolds? Harlan wouldn’t have known about the marigolds.
My chin quivered, and I couldn’t stop the tears from spilling down my cheeks. I wrapped my arms around his torso and pulled him into a hug, letting myself be vulnerable with him again for just a moment. Times like this … I didn’t know what Jace Harbor thought about me.
If he hated me, like he claimed to, he wouldn’t be here.
But if he loved me, like he used to, he wouldn’t be a dick to me all the time.
Jace tensed, then hesitantly wrapped his arms around my shoulders to pull me closer to him. Rain and sleet were pounding down around us, my toes were numb, and I was crying like a maniac in front of my father’s gravestone, but for that single moment … everything felt a little bit better.
Then, I remembered that Jace Harbor had broken my heart, and I stepped away from him. I placed the marigolds on the ground in front of Dad’s grave and watched Jace nod to the car.
“Why don’t we get back home? You look cold.”
After giving him a curt nod, I said good-bye to Dad and slid into Jace’s Maserati in all my wet and soaked-through clothes. Jace slid in next to me and started the car, glancing over a few times as he drove us home.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Yeah, I’m fine.” I gnawed on the inside of my lip, not liking how nice he was being to me. It made me feel weird and awkward and cared about by Redwood’s cruelest man. “Are you?” I asked, staring at the sleet hitting the windshield. “You got hit pretty hard in the third quarter. Thought you blacked out.”
Jace cut his eyes to me and shut off the car as we pulled up to the house. “Always got to say something, don’t you?”
I trudged out of the car and kicked off my wet shoes and soggy socks at the door to the garage. Beads of water dropped off my raincoat and onto the ground beside me. Jace scrunched up his nose when he saw it.
“Why do you still wear all these cheap fucking clothes?” he asked, tugging on the corner of my jacket from Target.
I looked his expensive ass up and down as he took off his raincoat, his clothes dry, unlike mine, and basically dripping with money—definitely unlike mine. I pulled off my raincoat and stripped off my nasty-ass jeans, not caring that he was staring at me with those intense brown eyes of his.
My jacket might’ve been cheap for him, but I had spent a good thirty dollars on something that barely kept me warm during his football games and didn’t even try to keep the rain away. I rolled my eyes and walked toward the second-floor bathroom near our rooms.
“Unlike you, I don’t have money to spend on expensive clothes.”
“My dad loves you,” he said, following after me.
“I know he does,” I said.
“He’d buy you anything you could ever want.”
And I knew that he would, but that didn’t mean that I wanted or needed any of that shit. Mom might’ve taken it and all the other expensive things he’d gotten her without question, but Dad had raised me better than that. I didn’t take things; I earned them.
“I don’t want them,” I said, shrugging my shoulders and walking into the bathroom.
I went to close the door, but he smacked his hand on it and held it open. Crossing his big arms over his chest, he leaned against the doorframe. I turned on the hot water and narrowed my eyes at him.
“What?” I asked, hoping he’d leave me to shower in peace because that ache in my core hadn’t disappeared since Monday afternoon in the locker room.
It was getting worse. My need for him kept growing, and I couldn’t fucking get a grip. He was my stepbrother, my damn stepbrother. I shouldn’t feel this way toward him. I should never have felt this way toward him.
