“Do I need to kick someone’s ass?” The voice got closer and then Rick’s handsome face appeared beside Andie’s. “You okay, Charley?”
“Hey, Rick, good to see you.” I wasn’t lying. My sister’s fiancé was the shit. He was ten years older than Andie and a Chicago police detective. They met a year ago when Andie’s friend’s car got stolen and Andie had driven her to the precinct. To Andie’s friend’s annoyance, Detective Rick Pertrard, who’d overheard the complaint to the officer on duty, had taken an immediate shine to the damsel-in-distress’s friend and not the damsel herself. He’d asked for Andie’s number and the rest was history. They moved in together after only six months and got engaged two months after that. I loved the changes I saw in my sister. She was far less concerned with being perfect all the time, and she’d definitely loosened up.
As for me, I kept trying to make Rick my mentor but since my parents still weren’t happy with the cop idea, he was fighting me on it, more concerned with being a good son-in-law than encouraging me down a career path he knew would piss off my parents. That sucked, but he was still the shit.
“You too, sweetheart, but I repeat: are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
He frowned and looked at Andie. “Then what’s with the raging?”
“She’s not fine. She’s very far from fine but she’s Charley, so she’s fine.”
Rick’s gaze flickered between us. “As long as you understand each other, I guess.” He kissed her cheek and waved goodbye to me before heading out of shot.
Andie turned as soon as he was gone. “So what’s your plan?”
I shrugged. “No plan. It looks like we might have to be around each other because Claudia is hanging out with Jake’s best friend. A lot. I need to suck it up.”
“Charley, despite what I just said to Rick, this is me you’re talking to. I came home from Dublin to find my baby sister a wreck. What happened with Jake changed you and I never got my old Charley back, so you can say you’re fine to everyone else, but not to me. Okay?”
Her words automatically called on the lump in my throat and I looked away from the screen, fighting tears. I failed and swiped at them. “I’m not doing this again,” I told her harshly. “I already sobbed my guts out to Claudia after the party.”
“Good.”
I looked at my sister as if I’d just discovered she was the devil incarnate. “What?” I snapped.
“I know you think tears make you less badass but screw that. You can’t bottle that stuff up. I know everyone told you to get over him, that he was just puppy love, but your family—never. We never said it because we never believed that. You were young but it was real, and I wanted to hunt him down and kill him for breaking your heart. A heart, I might add, that has never quite been the same since. Look at you and Alex.”
“I’m not talking about Alex,” I groaned.
Andie held up her hands in surrender. “Okay, we won’t talk about Alex. But I will say that I think you are crazy if you spend time with Jake. It would be crazy anyway, but even crazier because he’s there with his girlfriend.”
I nodded glumly. “You’re right.”
“Of course I’m right. I’m a psychiatrist.”
“You’re not a psychiatrist yet.”
“I know. Only two more years.” She grimaced. “God … I don’t think I’m going to make it.”
I thought of the next nine months and spending it avoiding Jake and the knifelike feeling in my chest every time I saw him. “I know what you mean.”
It was almost the end of week one of classes and I was already feeling the weight. Papers were due, tutorial materials were needed. I would actually have to do school work while I was here. The induction week in a foreign city had kind of lulled me into a false sense that I was on vacation.
With classes up and running, Claudia and I had agreed to put our heads down and get organized. We could go back to having fun once we were settled into our academics.
Settling in for me would usually mean my brain was too cluttered with thoughts on classes to be able to concentrate on anything else, but not this time. I hated to admit it, but Jake Caplin was taking up way more of my thoughts than I’d like.
While running my finger along the books in the reserve section of the university library in search of material I needed for an upcoming tutorial, I heard his voice right beside my ear. I jumped, thinking I’d actually conjured him.
“Jesus,” Jake cried out softly, dodging my flailing arm.
I glared up at him, my hand now pressed to my chest as I tried to get my heart rate to normalize. “Are you trying to kill me?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know the words ‘Hey, Charley’ were considered lethal.”
“They are if you sneak up behind me and practically whisper them in my ear. It’s creepy. Creepiness often precedes death.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” he replied in a strangled voice.
“You do that.” I turned back to the bookshelf so I didn’t have to look at his gorgeous face, which happened to need a shave. When Jake needed a shave, he looked beyond hot. It was so unfair.
I felt his head dip close to mine. “Whatcha looking for?”
“The equation for time travel. Some guy just gave me permanent heart failure and I’d like to go back in time and change today so that I’m lying on a beach in Guam being waited on by a hottie named Han with heavy footsteps and an aversion to whispering.”
Jake chuckled and I felt the deep sound in every one of my erogenous zones. “Still a smart-ass, I see,” he said.
I looked up at him and ignored the fact that he was wearing another tight-fitting, long-sleeved shirt and that he obviously worked out. His shoulders and biceps were broader than they used to be and I realized belatedly that even his face was a little different. It was sharper, harder, the softness of youth having melted away.
He was quite possibly more beautiful than he used to be. Wonderful.
My gaze shifted past him and I shrugged casually. “Some things change. Some things don’t.”
“You have and you haven’t.”
His comment brought my eyes back to his. I frowned. “What do you mean?”
It was now Jake’s turn to shrug. “You’re still a smart-ass, still cocky, but you’re quieter about it, more reserved. You’re not … you don’t seem as open to people as you used to be.”