I pulled into my father’s driveway and parked my car in the garage. Once the thick door was lowered, hiding me from the outside world, I breathed a sigh of relief. Leaning my head back against the seat, I closed my eyes and willed my heart to calm down. If I were being honest, I would have admitted to myself what I was feeling wasn’t completely nervousness.
It was disappointment.
While part of me had dreaded running into Matt, I had been subconsciously willing him to appear. Just one look, that was all I had really wanted. One teeny, tiny look at what I had given up to keep him safely out of jail. A single glance would have given me something to live off for a little longer.
Tears blinded me, and as hard as I tried to hold them back, one still spilled over my lashes. I hastily swiped it away and sucked in a few deep breaths, hoping to calm myself before going inside. My father’s car was still gone, so I knew he was probably at the office—or with his mistress. Either-or, I didn’t care which, as long as he stayed away. We had never really been that close, but after what he had threatened Matt with, I hated him.
Upstairs in my room, I put away my things and then grabbed my books. I needed to get caught up on the reading list, and it seemed I had nothing but time. Like I had at my grandparents’ old house, I felt like a prisoner. I might have grown up in this house, but after my mother died, it had stopped being home to me.
The classes I was taking were boring as hell, so it was little
wonder that I fell asleep while trying to read the material for my class. I woke hours later to the ringing of the landline. One of the cordless phones sat beside my bed, and blindly, I reached for the noisy thing.
“’Lo?” I mumbled, still half asleep.
“Hey, girl!” A high, feminine voice that was only vaguely familiar nearly ruptured my eardrum, and I pulled the receiver away to glance at the caller ID.
Campbell, R.
Figured. Steph was a pain in the ass, and I had only ever tolerated her in the past because she was the only friend my father would allow. Her father was the DA, and my father’s best friend as far as I knew. I hated him just as much as I hated my own father, but it wasn’t completely because of what had happened with Matt that made me dislike him so much. Royce Campbell had always looked at me…that way. I had always felt uncomfortable around the man. Even when I was barely into my teens, he had been looking, and I had always felt dirty.
“Hey, Steph,” I muttered, trying to put a little enthusiasm into my voice but failing miserably.
Not that she actually noticed. “I just saw your dad, and he told me to call you. See if you want to go out with me and Casandra tonight.”
“Really?” I was only half surprised that my father would ask her to take me out with her and her bitchy friend. It was just one more way he could control me—with the offer of a night out, but with his lackey’s daughter to supervise my every move.
But even as I knew it was just a tool to keep me under his thumb, I was desperate enough for a night out of the house to accept. “Sure. Give me about an hour to get ready.”
“Perfect. Dress sexy. We’re going to a frat party just off campus.”
Great, I thought with a roll of my eyes. “Sounds fun. See you soon.”
“Later, girl!”
Chapter Three
MATT
IT’S NOT HER. FLICK GOT it wrong. It was just someone who looked like her. How many damn times had I thought the same thing? How many goddamn times had I seen her walking down Main Street, only to realize the next minute that it was someone else? Rory was gone, and she wasn’t ever coming back.
When Jet and Flick had stopped by the clubhouse, it had taken Flick telling me twice that she had seen Rory at the grocery store before my brain could comprehend what she was saying.
Rory. Back. No fucking way.
But even as I tried to tell myself that Flick was mistaken, hope flickered to life deep in my chest. She was here; I could feel in it my bones. Rory was back.
For the first time in my life, I was nervous as fuck over the possibility of seeing a girl. Three goddamn years was too long to go without the girl who owned my fucking soul. I had gone a little crazy when she left, had done some things I wasn’t exactly proud of, things I would never willingly tell her about. But the past didn’t matter.
She was back.
I sat down the street from the mayor’s house, watching the window that I knew was her bedroom. Her light had come on thirty minutes ago, and like the stalker I suddenly had turned into, I watched her silhouette as she walked past it every now and then. Each time I saw it, my heart would double in speed, and it would be hard to breathe for a few seconds. My palms would sweat, and my cock would press a little harder into the zipper of my jeans.
Easy. I had to take this easy. I couldn’t just run in there and take back what had been stolen from me, even if that was what I ached to do. I had to play this with a cool head. Three years was a long time away from each other. Rory might not even feel the same way about me as she once had. She had been more or less a kid back then, which was the major reason why I had wanted to wait for her eighteenth birthday before we had sex. I didn’t want her to suddenly realize she didn’t even like me, let alone love me. If that had happened, it would have destroyed me—even more so than her leaving had done.
Headlights coming up behind me had me sinking a little lower in my seat, but the driver didn’t even seem to notice me as she pulled into the mayor’s driveway. She honked the horn of her prissy sports car that I knew I remembered but couldn’t place. A minute later, Rory came outside. The floodlights around the house made it easy to see her perfectly.
Her hair was a little longer and bounced when she walked. She was wearing a short-ass dress that showed off way too much skin and a pair of heels that made her a few inches taller. As I watched her walk, the air got trapped in my lungs. I sat there in a daze, drinking in the sight of her for the first time in too goddamn long.