Page 18 of Return of the Bad Girl (Rock Canyon, Idaho 4)

“Well, I can’t wait to officially meet him. What changed, by the way? Yesterday you were ranting and raving, and now you’re sharing a bathroom. So, what’s he really like?”

Arrogant. Bossy. Hot.

“He’s just a guy. I haven’t even really talked to him, besides the initial argument about who this place belongs to and what our living situation is going to be like.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t run him out of here with an icy glare.”

“I tried. Seems I might be losing my touch.”

“There’s never been a man you couldn’t charm or chase off if you put your right mind to it,” Val said, chuckling.

Except for Daddy . . .

That last fight with her father before she’d left, when she’d fought so hard to go to San Diego for a fresh start, had been a total surprise to her. She’d never thought her father would deny her the college of her choice.

“I’m not paying for you to go to a known party school two states away so you can squander my money and flunk out. Boise State is a perfectly acceptable school.”

It hadn’t been about the parties or the beach. She’d wanted to get away from her past and never come back. She couldn’t go to Boise State, not when Kyle was there. She couldn’t take the chance that she’d bump into him and have to deal with his knowing sneer. She tried everything, from begging to bartering, before finally delivering an ultimatum.

“If you don’t let me go, I’ll walk out that door and do it on my own. I will figure it out.”

She’d been bluffing, of course, hoping he’d change his mind to keep her in his life, but she’d overestimated her father’s fondness for her.

“This is my house, and you will follow the rules or you will get out. And there are no second chances, Caroline. If you leave, you’ll stay gone.”

So she’d gone. A scared seventeen-year-old whose bravado had backed her into a corner. She’d called Val to beg her for some money and a bag of clothes, just so she wouldn’t have to face their father again. Val had made her promise to call, but the calls home became fewer and farther between, partly because she had one of those pay-as-you-go phones for a while, and most of the time, she couldn’t pay.

The other reason was because every time she heard her sister’s voice or listened to her complaints, Caroline wanted to beg her father to take her back. Especially on the nights when she’d gone to bed hungry. But at the time, she’d been too stubborn to give up and admit that he might have been right, that she couldn’t make it on her own.

Like father, like daughter.

“I think the water turned off,” Val hissed, drawing Caroline out of the past and into an entirely new and dangerous train of thought.

Thinking about Gabe in the shower, water trailing down that brown skin, caused her nipples to tighten. Damn, she wished she would stop imagining what the jerk looked like without his clothes on.

Suddenly, the bathroom door opened and out stepped Gabe, a blue towel wrapped around his hips. Caroline’s heart stopped along with her breathing for half a second and then kicked back into high gear. His chest looked even better out of a T-shirt, and the tattoos intermingling along the muscles of his arms drew her gaze all the way up to those wide shoulders. Some of the designs were hard to make out, just swirls of color and black, but the one on his neck looked tribal. She scanned down over the top of his towel and a tiny, evil part of her wished it would fall open so she could see the rest of him.

“Sorry. Didn’t realize you were here.”

His deep voice jerked her eyes back up to meet his amused gaze. Damn it, she didn’t want to be flustered by him or his abs.

“Hey, I’m Caroline’s sister, Valerie. You might remember me as the screeching, half-naked lunatic from this morning,” Val said, her brown eyes twinkling. “You’re Gabe?”

Caroline heard the tone of her sister’s inquiry, as if she had told Val so much about him, and she gave Val a dark look.

Val ignored her and slid her gaze up and down. “You weren’t at all what I was expecting.”

Gabe grinned as he took the hand Val held out, and Caroline got a closer look at his tattoos. The one that drew her attention first was the barbed wire wrapped around his bicep, a cliché that still looked massively sexy on him.

Stop thinking about how sexy he is!

But the barbed wire continued down, wrapping around his whole arm like a rope until it stopped at his wrist, and she saw the red drop on the back of his wrist. As if the tattoo had pierced his skin. Within the loops of the tattoo were smaller colored images, but she didn’t have a chance to study them further before he pulled his arm back.

“Really? You weren’

t expecting a man in a towel?” Gabe asked Val, glancing at Caroline with his eyebrow raised. “Then what were you expecting?”

“Definitely not you,” Val said.

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