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Bran North knows he blew his chance to be with the girl he loved for most of his life. But when she comes back to town, he can’t avoid her forever—even if she wants him to stay away. They had a false start all those years ago, and he fumbled, but now he thinks maybe he can win her back—even if it takes some trick plays to do it.
False Start by Dee Ellis
© 2022 by Dee Ellis. All rights reserved.
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PROLOGUE
Once you realize that life is not always what you hope it will be, things get a little easier.
Finding that out when life is just getting started for you hurts though, I won’t lie. Just when I thought I had a grasp on things, that I had figured out what my life would be like, what it would look like, and how it would feel, I realized how wrong I was.
Sitting in the hot summer night on the sandy shores of the lake I spent the best summers of my life at, I cried my heart out. It was quiet besides my sadness, and I felt completely alone in the darkness. Only I was not alone.
No, he was there, but he was just there to let me fall apart.
There to show me just how wrong I had gotten life.
“I love you, Pais,” he had whispered against my bare shoulder, both of us shaking even though we were sticky from the heat.
“Not enough. You just don’t love me enough,” my voice was raw from the crying, from the shouting I had done as we had fought that night.
“I guess not. Guess it can never be enough,” his words were full of remorse and pain, but I didn’t care.
“Go. Go to the parties and celebrate. Leave me alone.”
“Pais, baby, please, I don’t want to do this, can’t we just...”
“No, we can’t just wait anymore. Wait to start our lives. I can’t.”
I was so wrong that night.
Telling the love of my life that we were no longer worth the effort to fight, to do what it took to stay together, it was a lie. A mistake. A falsehood that I struggled to keep up until it almost ruined me. We could have worked if we had fought for each other. If we were willing to give it our all but we were not—or at least I was not. But I blamed him that night and, in the weeks, and months after. But that was a lie too.
Because it was me who got up and walked away first that night. It was me who refused to see him again before I left town. I was the one who changed my number and never opened any of his letters. I was the one who gave up on us, but it was easier to blame him.
When I came back home and saw him again, I knew he had spent all those years blaming me too. Seeing him again also proved what a liar I was—because I had been pretending for years that I had stopped loving him. And I never had.
CHAPTER 1
Paisley
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They say you can never go home—and I thought that too until I had no choice.
Fired. Position Eliminated. Talent no longer needed.
A brutal blow to my fragile ego right when I needed the exact opposite. My entire world imploded in one day. My roommate had moved out to be with her new fiancé. We were afraid my best friend was sick again—though she was the most badass bitch I ever met, so if someone was going to beat cancer, it was Hailee Mitchell.
What I needed was a boost, a pick-me-up, a fresh start.