But I hear her sigh behind me. Mom is from that generation that thinks a girl my age needs to be settling down and getting married already. Almost everyone my age around here is already married or well on their way to it. No matter that I’m barely legal. Some of those old South ways have still stuck here in the sticks. Some of the girls I’d gone to school with had actually been barefoot and pregnant at sixteen.
Stuff like that was never for me. I like my freedom, thank you very much. When you get married, suddenly you have to be an adult, popping out kids and taking care of the house. There’d be no more fishing in the mornings with Jake or climbing trees or lazing the day away reading books under the dogwood tree.
The truth was I’d never been ready to give up my tomboy ways for all that domesticity.
I like doing what I want when I want. I like to think I’m an independent woman.
That’s why there’s no way I’m going to let Nick Amorini plow his way into my life and start ordering me around like he owns me.
When I get upstairs to my room, I grab my phone and fall down onto my bed, typing his name into the search bar.
I halfway don’t expect anything to pop up. That’s why my eyes about pop out of my head when I see the sheer volume of search results I’m hit with at a search of Nick’s name.
Software tech billionaire. One of Boston’s most eligible bachelors. His parents died in a car crash when he was just a teen. My heart aches for him there. I can’t imagine what I’d do without my mama and daddy.
I click over to the image search and feel my stomach plummet when there’s picture after picture of him on the arm of beautiful women. He’s never shown with the same woman twice. And the women he’s pictured with are beautiful. Like drop dead gorgeous model types. They’re tall and curvy with generous breasts. Blonde bombshells and brunette babes. The type of women who put my skinny little frame and freckled little redheaded self to shame.
As if I needed any more proof that my inclinations were right all along.
I’m just a little backwoods country mouse who’s probably only so intriguing to him because of the chase of something different. Once he has me, he’ll toss me to the side like all the rest.
But that won’t happen because he’ll never have me. I refuse to be another conquest for a rich playboy.