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Her brows rose.
He shrugged. “There wasn’t enough to do in that town, so we made our own fun. I was having a spring break blowout at my family’s cabin on the Verdant River. A few of us had family cabins out that way, and we took turns throwing parties. It was a regular circuit, but my place was the biggest, so we typically ended up there. Most everyone under the age of twenty-five made an appearance sooner or later.
“You didn’t come inside at first. You were avoiding the crowd in general and me in particular. But Katie told me she’d brought you, kind of running it by me—as if I would mind—so I went looking.”
His voice softened as his mind replayed the memoryin his head. It had been the first warm week of the year and she’d been wearing a yellow and white checkered sundress with a halter top neck.
He’d wanted to strip it off her and lick every inch of her body. But he’d played it cool that night.
“You were at the edge of the hill, looking down at the river. I walked up to you and we spoke for a few minutes. We called a truce.”
Emma frowned. “Just like that?”
“We were no longer classmates.” And she was eighteen going on nineteen and he no longer felt like he had to gouge out his eyes for looking at her the way he did.
“I asked you to bury the hatchet. You were reluctant at first, but the mosquitos were eating you alive, so you came into the den and we had our first real conversation over a glass of wine and a tube of Benadryl cream.”
Her lips parted. “And I slept with you.”
“No.” He shook his head. “Not foryears. We became friends first.”
“Friends?” she echoed in disbelief. “Years?”
“It’s not as hard to believe as it sounds,” he told her, willing her to sit closer to him. “We had more in common than not. We were both driven, gearing up for careers in business. We also liked the same movies and food. I had traveled to places you wanted to go to.”
He paused before biting the bullet. “You grew up without a dad and had a difficult relationship with your mom. I grew up without a mom and my father barely spoke to me.”
This last visibly shook her. “Oh,” she said with tight cheeks. “Sorry. I get along with my mom now.”
“You did most of the time back then too,” he was happy to share. “But not always.”
She was so confused. “What did we fight about?”
“The men.”
His cheek twitched at her expression of consternation. “For the record, I don’t think her reputation was deserved. Had she lived in a big city, her love life wouldn’t have been the subject of so much gossip.”
“But we lived in a small town.” Her mouth was hard.
“That’s right.”
Fuck, he didn’t want to be the one to tell her this. But Emma was finally listening to details of her past. She wasn’t shutting him down. And this was part of the things she needed to know.
“There were rumors of her being involved with married men. Including this scuzzbucket named Theodore Bronson… my aunt’s then husband.”
Emma blinked, her face reddening. She recognized the name. “Shit.”
Yeah, he felt the same way. “We didn’t know about that liaison at the time. We didn’t talk about our parents that night at all.”
Those confidences had come much later. “That night we discussed your first year at school and the classes we were taking. And when you came back for the next party, during summer break, we spoke again, and I finally asked for your number. We started texting.”
Her full lips pursed. “If we got so close, why does everyone still assume we’re enemies today?”
Chapter Forty
GARRETT
“I’m not sure everyone does,” he said finally. “We were seen speaking at my parties often enough. But Fletcher is probably not alone in thinking we still hate each other. Most people didn’t pay close attention.”