Love Story(69)
Author: Jennifer Echols

“I’ll cross back through the pasture if it makes you feel better.” Dropping my hand, he draped his arm around me and pulled me close for another kiss on the forehead. He walked me all the way down to his house, backed me against the front door, and thoroughly kissed me good night.

16

I sprang out of bed. Sunlight streamed through the window. I hadn’t intended to sleep so late. I needed to get started on my history paper. I wanted to see Hunter.

I showered and dressed in record time. My stomach rumbled when I saw that Tommy had left me a big breakfast in the kitchen, but I could come back for that later. I shrugged on my overcoat and dashed up the lane.

Outside my grandmother’s mansion, I stood at the foot of the hickory tree, looking through the yellow leaves at my window, two elongated stories above. When I’d lived here I’d never had occasion to sneak out of my room. That part of my stable-boy story had been wishful thinking. But I’d made sure that I could sneak out if I needed to. I had been planning my escape from this place for a long time. Now I could sneak in.

My hip ached as I took massive steps up the hickory branches, careful not to let twigs scrape my face before my first time with Hunter. I snagged my overcoat a few times and panicked all over again at the idea of tearing it and freezing to death in New York City because I couldn’t afford another, but eventually I reached my windowsill. The ancient window, huge panes rippled with age, was unlocked, just as I had left it last June. I lifted it open and dropped inside my room, which looked huge to me now. It was four times the size of Hunter’s room, and sixteen times the size of my mini-bedroom in the dorm. I turned toward my bed.

It was neatly made. Hunter’s suitcase was open on the coverlet. He was up already.

After a disappointing peek around the empty bathroom, I tiptoed out into the hall. He was here somewhere. If I could find him without encountering my grandmother first, I could lure him back to my bedroom, and we could finish what we’d started last night. He had wanted perfection for our first time. This would be it.

After cursory glances into the upstairs parlor and the movie theater and the library, I sneaked down the wide, curving staircase, fingers tracing the banister rubbed silky smooth by a history of trailing hands. When I reached the bottom, I stopped short and sat on the last stair. I could hear Hunter and my grandmother through the arched doorway to the kitchen, saying my name.

“Erin found out I’m majoring in pre-med instead of business,” Hunter said.

“Hunter Allen,” my grandmother scolded him. I could picture the angry line forming between her exquisitely arched brows. “How could you let that happen?”

“I’m in the honors program with her,” Hunter explained in his most persuasive, reasonable, in-control voice, the one that made women fall in love with him. “You asked me to get into a couple of her classes so I could keep tabs on her. But it works both ways. If I’m close enough to find out things about her, she’ll find out things about me.”

My grandmother protested, “But what are we going to—”

“I took care of it,” Hunter interrupted her. Nobody interrupted my grandmother, or so I had thought. “I told her I’m just fooling you into paying for my college, and you have no idea I’m in premed.”

My grandmother cackled. “That’s rich.”

“Well, it worked,” Hunter said. “For now. But I don’t know how long—”

“Just fix it, Hunter,” my grandmother said. “You can fix anything with your charm. All you have to do is convince her to major in business and run the farm. And make certain she’s not fooling me like you’re fooling her! Surely that won’t take so long? You said she’s starving. Let’s see if she can spend a Christmas without my pralines!”

“I’ll step in before she starves,” Hunter said, and I thought I detected a disapproving tone toward my grandmother. Amazing what this boy could get away with. “But you’re right. I’m getting closer to convincing her. Bringing her here was a good idea. It reminded her of how much she loves this place. One of the guys at the stable told my dad she was out for hours on Boo-boo yesterday afternoon.”

“On whom?”

“Boo-boo. Her horse. You know, High and Mighty. By Rocky Mountain High out of Might Is Right.” The breakfast dishes clinked. “Congratulations on your win yesterday, by the way.”

“That horse certainly earned back the cost of the trip to Dubai to buy him,” my grandmother said, and the conversation turned easily enough from manipulating me to buying horses.

I sat on the stair and listened to them for a few minutes more. I could sit here until they finished breakfast and came out of the kitchen to discover me, and I could confront them. Or I could go storming into the kitchen now.

Or I could creep back up the sweeping staircase the way I’d come, because it didn’t matter that they knew that I knew. All that mattered was that both of them had betrayed me even more deeply and blatantly than I had imagined, and that the love I’d thought had grown between Hunter and me was the worst kind of lie.

Every step he’d taken toward me—acting like my stable-boy story had affected him, writing his own sexy stories, taking me to Belmont, kissing me in the hospital, dragging me home—he’d taken to make me fall in love with him so he could advise me to follow in my grandmother’s footsteps. If I did as he said, she gave him a free ride.

As I crossed my room, stepped into the tree, and closed the window behind me, I struggled to pound my feelings for Hunter into a small box, like squeezing my grief into a box when my mother died. I said to myself, Hunter never liked me. I should not want him anyway because he is in cahoots with my grandmother. He has no interest in me romantically. I am still okay, I am okay, I am okay.

It wasn’t working. The further we’d gone, the more I’d realized I wanted and needed him, needed desperately to connect with him, even if it was only physical. I needed his touch, was starved for it.

I was concentrating so hard that I missed my last foothold in the tree and fell on the ground, directly on my sore hip. Pain jabbed through me. Tears stung my eyes.

I limped back down the lane. Just as I reached the path to Tommy’s house, I heard a car topping the hill. My grandmother rode in the backseat of the limo she took to races. She watched me through the tinted window as she passed, eyes hidden by big designer sunglasses, mouth pulled into a disapproving frown.

An hour later I answered a knock on Tommy’s front door. Hunter gestured to the farm truck waiting in the lane. “Your chariot awaits.” Then he pushed me inside, where the driver couldn’t see us, and kissed me hard on the mouth. “Good morning.”

AFTER THE TAXI DROPPED US OFF in front of our dorm, Hunter walked me up to my room and pressed me against the hall wall. “Just because we’re here in New York doesn’t mean we’re going back to the way we were,” he said, nuzzling my cheek. “We have a hard day tomorrow and we need time to work through this, but things will be different between us now. Promise me.”