Page 49 of Sneak Attack

It one hundred percent absolutely was.

“I went looking for you. Was talking to Hilary and Selma and a handful of other girls surrounding the keg that night and all of them were talking about college. Hilary was going on about how she’d miss you, all these clothes she’d already bought to wear to your games, and how you two had made plans to see each other—”

“I hadn’t agreed to any of those.”

“Didn’t matter if you did or not. I’d been drinking. Got somadat that. She had you. She had the boy I couldn’t have and wanted so desperately that it didn’t matter to me anymore.”

Her eyes turned to me and the pale blue in them turned haunted, so eerily blank a shiver rolled down my spine. “You think you made that first move, but I wentsearchingfor you because I was so damn sick of having to stand there and listen to her talk about how awesome you were when I loved you so much. Iwantedyou. That night. Because screw Hilary and her plans and her dreams. And I didn’t give a shit if she caught us or not. If someone saw us and told her.” She laughed, but it was so brittle it made my ears hurt. “I might have had a spark of conscience the moment I saw you, but I was just a jealous, seething girl. I was theother woman, Cole, and if I had done the right thing all those months earlier, kept my space, never gone back to that damn boulder—or to you—noneof that would have happened.”

Well, obviously. Had we stayed away from each other, none of it would have happened. We’d been kids. Hormonal teenagers who thought consequences were useless, imaginary things parents talked about and assumed would never happen to us. It wasn’t that I hadn’t cared about Hilary or didn’t still grieve her occasionally. I still thought of her. I remembered her. There were times, especially still being in this town, I'd drive by a place we went and have a memory that made me smile. Or go home and want to sit in a dark room and miss her. Feel the weight of my own actions.

But I’d healed. And like my dad had said, I’d done it with a village around me.

Eden had no one…or hadn’t let herself have anyone.

“You said you wanted to know how I moved on. How I let it go.”

Her cheeks had flushed from her rant, from her own guilt, and she was still breathing heavily when I asked the question. If she’d been waiting for me to continue the argument, which of us wasmoreat fault that night, I didn’t have that fight in me.

“Yeah,” she finally sighed and sank back into her chair.

Clasping my hands together, I leaned forward in my own chair and met her gaze. Gorgeous, light blue eyes blinked as I licked my lips and prepared to tell her the not-so-secret healing tactic. “I apologized to her.”

A rapid three blinks fluttered her lashes and her lips parted. “What?”

“That’s it.” I threw my hands out. “It sounds easy, but it wasn’t. I went to the cemetery one day, a couple beers I stole from my dad’s garage fridge when Selma had just learned we were having a boy. I thought of how everything was wrong, and I was getting everything I’d wanted but it was all with the wrong people and in the wrong places, and I just…I needed to talk to someone who would let me talk.”

It’d been brutally hot. I needed to head back to Vanderbilt for our off-season summer training where our coach made us brutally run suicides up and down a soccer field for weeks before we could get pads on. Trying to figure out how I was going to do football, remain a student, all while I’d be having a son in five months’ time had left me more lost than I was before.

“I went to the cemetery, and I plopped my ass down. I didn’t say anything for a long time, but I cried. And then I laughed because I remembered Hilary saying if someone was crying, she had to cry too, so they weren’t alone and I imagined her crying in heaven, sad for me when she was probably perfectly fine, and Italkedto her. Told her everything. I told her about kissing you before I took her back, I told her how I treated both of you so horrible. I don’t know, I got it all out. Everything I’d carried deep inside for so long and by the end, I told her I was sorry. That it ended with us the way it had, that I hadn’t been the kind of my man my parents had raised me to be. That I hadn’t been honest with her for so long because I couldn’t bear the idea of seeing her hurt.”

Tears ran down Eden’s cheeks as I talked and tried to fight back the fist in my gut. A tear gathered at her chin and before I could stop myself, I reached out and brushed it away.

That same damn familiar, and old, sizzle of electricity sparked against my thumb as I did, and I brushed it away before I did something more stupid.

“The truth is, Eden, we both screwed up and we screwed up huge. Hilary hadn’t deserved any of that from either of us. That night was a mess from beginning to end. But we didn’tkillHilary. She got pissed and ran straight into the curve on a road and was hit by a truck. And that sucks. It’s horrific and it shouldn’t have happened and if we hadn’t kissed, she’d probably still be here. That’s all true. We played our parts in a horrible, senseless accident because we were too young and naive to consider the ramifications of our actions. I’m sorry for it every day, but my life didn’t have to stop because hers did. And it won’t. If anything,trustme, it’s made me a better man. A better person and human in general because now Idounderstand the consequences of treating people poorly.”

She nodded, and her throat worked as she swallowed. Her eyes slid toward the trees, and she rolled her lips together.

The silence was peaceful, trees rustling with the breeze, the distant sound of a woodpecker somewhere pecking away at a tree and other birds chirping at each other. Small animals made the leaves crinkle.

Finally, she turned back to me and with a downward twist of her lips and a sad, pathetic little shrug, asked, “So what happens now?”

My resistance, fraying by the minute, snapped. I did the stupid thing. The thing I’d wanted to do for seven years.

Leaning forward, I brushed my thumb over her cheek again, leaned in, and kissed her.

CHAPTER17

EDEN

His lips were on me before I knew what he’d done, and I froze. And then my eyes closed, and I sank into the warm feel of Cole’s lips against mine, the brush of his scruff against my cheek. The scent of his sandalwood cologne or whatever he used that made him smell so damn good.

Kissing Cole was instinct. For seven years I’d dreamed of the feel of his body on mine, and since returning to Marysville, this was the first time I’d felt likehome.

Until a rustling sound came from somewhere and reality crashed back into me.

I shoved back into the chair, yanking my mouth from him and turning away.

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