“I’m worried about Lily.”
Nick and I were lying on the front of his boat, our limbs entangled, my hair damp from the lake. I could see beads of sweat on his chest and feel them running down my own.
He traced his fingers lightly down my stomach. “More worried than usual?”
“After Campbell and Sadie-Grace left this morning, Lily put in her earbuds.”
He moved his hand to the small of my back, which was the only thing that allowed me to continue.
“She’s just listening to the recordings of her parents, over and over again.”
“And you’re here,” Nick commented. “With me.”
I’d been spending more time here. With him. The reminder was less welcome than his touch. I rolled over on top of him, both hands on his chest. “I’ll stop talking.”
He caught his thumb under the strap of my swimsuit. “I didn’t ask you to.”
He never did. He just let me talk. At this point, I was fairly certain I could tell him that I’d discovered that several key members of high society were actually tigers wearing people suits, and he would have just muttered, “It figures.”
“What if Lily’s parents knew the Lady of the Lake?” I asked Nick. “What if they had something to do with her death?”
It was easier, somehow, to ask him than it would have been to think it myself.
Nick considered my questions, then came back with one of his own. “And if they did?”
I let out a long breath. “I don’t know.”
He stared at me, in that way that made me feel like he was memorizing something about my face.
I tried to focus on the conversation, not on the way he looked, looking at me. “Lily… it’s like she’s barely inhabiting her own body anymore. She just shut down. But I can’t shake the feeling that something’s going to happen, and she’s going to snap.”
“Okay,” Nick replied evenly. “Say Lily snaps. She loses it. She lashes out. What does that look like? Is it really the end of the world?”
I don’t know.
“I’m done talking now,” I told him.
Nick didn’t argue. He never did. Instead, he pulled me nine-tenths of the way into a kiss and waited for me to close the distance. I probably should have pulled back. I probably should have left.
Instead, I lost myself in the kiss and in him.
At some point, we fell asleep. We woke up to a girl standing over us.
“Is this what you meant when you said you had to work?” she asked Nick.
Who the hell is that? My brain was already supplying answers—horrible ones about why another girl might come looking for Nick—when I scrambled to my feet. I flashed back to the text he’d sent me the night of the Gutierrez party.
Something came up.
If it had just been physical, if I hadn’t just been talking to him, confiding in him, this wouldn’t have been a problem.
You knew better, Sawyer. You damn well knew better.
“What the hell?” Nick jumped to his feet.
I am so stupid, I thought, looking at the girl. It was just supposed to be me, repaying what I owed. It was just supposed to be for show.
It was just supposed to be physical.
It was just supposed to be talking.
It wasn’t supposed to hurt.
“Jessi!” Nick’s aggrieved tone barely managed to penetrate the cacophony of reprimands my brain was launching in my direction.
People can only hurt you if you let them.
I grabbed my keys and shoes and was already halfway past him when I processed the name he’d said and the particular shade of annoyance in his tone when he’d said it.
I recognized them both.
“Jessi,” I repeated, turning back to face him. “Your little sister?”
“And you must be the girlfriend.” Jessi grinned. Now that she was no longer backlit by the sun, I could see a resemblance—and just how young she looked.
“She’s not my girlfriend,” Nick told her.
That shouldn’t have hit me hard. It shouldn’t have hit me at all. He’s right. I’m not his girlfriend. I’m really, really not.
“Sawyer . . .” Nick started, then backtracked. “Wait for me at my car, Jess.”
Nick’s sister looked at the two of us, then shrugged and issued a parting shot. “Whatever you say, big brother. I’ve always admired your ‘work’ ethic.”
“Smart-ass,” he grumbled as she turned and flitted away.
“I should go,” I said once she was gone. I didn’t give him a chance to reply. I was halfway to the edge of the boat when his voice stopped me.
“You never asked me why I stood you up at that party.”
I quelled the impulse to turn around and face him again. “I don’t care,” I said.
“That’s strange,” he replied. I could practically hear the smirk in his voice. “Because you definitely cared when Jessi showed up, before you realized she was my sister.”
He sounded just satisfied enough about that, I had to turn around. “Asshole.”
Nick took that as a compliment. “That night, I canceled on you because there was a problem with Colt.”
His brother. “Is he—” I started to ask.
“He’s fine,” Nick told me. “Still comatose. Still not here when he should be, and I still think of that sometimes when I look at you.”
I hadn’t had anything to do with putting Colt in that coma. I hadn’t helped cover it up. But I was who I was, and the Ames family and mine were intertwined, going back generations.
“And then,” Nick said, “I think that if Colt were here, he’d tell me I was an idiot.”
I swallowed. “For being with a girl like me?”
“There are no girls like you,” Nick said. “You’re not like other people, Miss Taft.”
He only called me that when he wanted to piss me off, so why did I feel like this time was different? Why couldn’t I shake a single thing he’d said?
“I should go.”
“Should you?” Nick countered, stepping closer to me. “Tell me one thing first, Sawyer. Why is it that you feel everything else so deeply, that you love everyone else in your life—from your grandmother and Lily to godforsaken Campbell Ames—so loyally and so fiercely, but you can’t even admit to a moment of jealousy when it comes to me?”
My mouth felt dry all of a sudden. My skin was humming. “It wasn’t jealousy,” I said.
It was a warning of all the ways this thing between us could go south.
I made myself turn back to the shore, take one step away from him and then another.
“You told me once,” Nick said quietly, “that after your grandfather died, your mother started wearing all black, and your aunt ran away.”
That was just random enough that I found myself able to stop and reply. “For almost a year.”
Nick strode toward me. I could hear him walking, but I didn’t turn back around until he stopped, right behind me.
“You think you’re like your mother,” he told me. “And that Lily’s like hers, but you’ve got that backward. She’s the one who turns things in on herself. You’re the one who runs.”
The tone in his voice was mild, but the intent in those words was not. You’re the one who runs.
“No, I’m not,” I said sharply. “I’m here, aren’t I?”
I was still living with my mother’s family, even though things had pretty much gone to hell. I was here—with him—now.
I’m not running. I’m not scared.
As if in response to the words I’d just thought, he brought his hands to my face, then ran them through my hair. He kissed me, rough this time, in a way that banished every other thought from my mind. Count to seven. His touch turned gentle. His lips pulled away from mine and, moments later, brushed lightly against them again.
And then he spoke. “You’re so afraid of being left, you live life with one foot out the door. That’s why you won’t call Lily on the way she’s been acting, even though you’re worried about her. Hell, that’s why you wanted to find Ana’s baby in the first place. Pregnancy Pact Baby Number Two is your backup plan. Backup family.”
“That’s not true,” I said.
“Really?” Nick brushed his lips lightly over mine again. “Then why won’t you tell Lily how worried you are?” He looked at me in a way that left me no choice about looking back. “Why were you so quick to believe that Jessi was something other than my sister just now?”
“I’m not having this conversation with you.” I pressed my lips to his. He kissed me back but only for a moment.
“What if I told you that I don’t want you to run?” he asked.
You know better than to let him matter, something inside me whispered. You damn well know better.
“What if,” Nick continued, “I told you that I don’t need your help to get Jessi into the Symphony Ball anymore? What if I told you your debt was paid?”
I went very still, and the muscles in my stomach tightened. “What are you talking about?”
“I haven’t needed to play nice with high society for weeks,” Nick told me, his voice as soft as his touch and both like fire to my nerve endings. “Your grandmother told me to consider it taken care of. Turns out she has a soft spot for girls from the wrong side of the tracks with lofty aspirations.”
There was nothing chilling in those words. No reason I should have felt dread pooling in my stomach. “When?” I said.
He knew what I was asking. “The fund-raiser at the Arcadia hotel. While you were outside.”
That was the first time we went out. Weeks ago. I couldn’t make my mind slow down. Before Fourth of July. Before we were ever . . .
I stepped back, away from his touch. Away from him.
“See?” Nick told me, his voice low enough that it was almost lost to a sudden, punishing wind. “When things get real, you run.”
“You lied to me,” I said.
He just looked at me. “That’s not why you’re pulling away.”
I shook my head, feeling cornered and caught and like something horrible might happen—or already had. “I have to go. I told Aunt Olivia I’d be home for dinner. And Lily . . .”
“Lily is dealing with a crap hand life dealt her,” Nick told me. “But we both know people who’ve dealt with worse. She’ll come out of this okay. Don’t make her your reason for walking out of here and away from me.”
I wanted to say something else. I wanted him to be wrong. But he wasn’t.
“I have to go,” I said again.
“I’m not going to chase you,” he told me. “If you’re too damned scared to let this be real, if I don’t get to matter to you, if I have to let this be nothing for you to stay—then go.”
Go.
He called after me as I fled. “I’m done playing, Sawyer. If you’re too much of a coward to stay? Don’t come back.”