 by Sara Ney.jpg)
Total pages in book: 103
Estimated words: 104766 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 524(@200wpm)___ 419(@250wpm)___ 349(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 104766 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 524(@200wpm)___ 419(@250wpm)___ 349(@300wpm)
From school, from football—from living with roommates, my obnoxious twin brother and our older brothers girlfriend. The only person who I can talk to these days is my best friend from high school, and he’s back in our hometown and halfway across the country. Somehow he convinces me that maybe…
…Maybe it’s time to take a trip. Party. Have some fun.
That fun does not include his sister .
Long black hair and even longer legs, Tess Donahue had lost the braces and gained the confidence she never had as a teenager. She’s hilarious, pretty—and when I see her in those cowboy boots?
Whoa.
Stolen glances. Flirty banter. One drunk filled night.
Suddenly, my uncomplicated weekend of ‘ living a little’ in my hometown becomes a lifetime being tied to the one girl that was off limits.
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
PROLOGUE
TESS
I was eleven years old the first time I met the Colter twins.
My brother Grady had been signed up to play league football because our mom didn’t think he socialized enough, and she was sick of him sitting in his room, gaming all the time.
She wanted him to get exercise.
And meet people.
So that third week of football, she invited all the players over for a pizza party, and I remember the team arriving, one by one, getting dropped off by their parents for the two hours my mother had arranged—and I remember the Colters walking through the door.
Tall, even at the age of thirteen.
Tan from always being outside.
One was quiet and had braces; the other was talking and being loud as soon as he stepped foot in the kitchen where the pizza was being served.
I’d been on the other side of the room, hovering in the doorway where the laundry room was, too intimidated by all the teenage boys to grab a slice of my favorite—cheese, sausage, and pineapple. Mom had ordered it specifically for me, knowing most of the boys wouldn’t want pineapple on their pizza, but I was too chickenshit to steal a piece.
“Who’s that?” one of them asked. I can’t remember who.
Grady had looked in the direction of the kid’s finger, glancing at me over his shoulder.
“Oh. That’s my sister.”
Oh.
That’s my sister…
But I mean, I was his little sister, and I was kind of small at that age. And shy.
I remember that once they’d all lost interest in staring at me, and they’d gone back to devouring the pizzas, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the twins.
They were so cute.
Literally the cutest boys I’d ever seen in my entire life.
My face turned bright red as soon as the one in the gray tee shirt scanned the small group of boys and caught my eye in the corner, smiling after a few seconds of awkward staring.
I was too freaked out to smile back.
That had been Drew.
I found out his name later—the one with the braces—and lay in bed that whole night, staring up at my bedroom ceiling while saying it to myself. Drew.
Drew Colter.
I wondered what his middle name was.
He was the quiet Colter, who didn’t have much to say about anything unless asked. He usually let his louder, more obnoxious brother speak for them, as twins sometimes do.
And I watched number twenty-nine at every game of my brother’s that I went to, silently clapping when he blocked a play or took a hit and got back up on his feet without a scratch.
Drew Colter.
Sigh.
When I was fourteen, and we were all in high school, I prayed every day that I would bump into him in the hallway between classes. But we rarely did because freshmen and juniors didn’t have class on the same floors, and everything was separated by wings. Freshmen ate with freshmen, sophomores ate with sophomores, and on and on and on.
Then one day when I was eating lunch, there was a commotion at the front of the cafeteria near the vending machines, and a small group of football players walked in, wearing their home jerseys and carrying flyers.
Drew Colter was among them.
I knew it was him instantly. He didn’t have the same arrogance his brother Drake had, and he hung back from the group the way he usually did.
I watched as the boys walked around from table to table, handing out those flyers, smiling down at the pretty girls and flirting.
“Oh my god, they are so. Hot.”
My friends Charity, Bev, and Tosha stopped cackling about whatever story Charity had been sharing to stare, all of us holding our breath as the football players weaved in and out, like gods among us, for football was the only thing anyone in this town gave a shit about.
Three tables away.
Two.
“Hey, Tess.” Drew handed me a flyer with a smile, my name on his full, pouty lips, his white teeth peeking through.
I opened my mouth to reply, but they were already gone.
“Oh. My. God,” Charity said dramatically. “Drew. Colter. Said. Your. Name.”
I rolled my eyes, pretending to be unfazed. “I’m Grady’s sister. He has to be nice to me.”
My brother and Drew had become fast friends that night after the pizza party three years ago, spending most of their downtime running plays, hanging out in our basement, or at Drew’s house, swimming in his pool.
The Colters lived on a ranch, and their dad was never around, but it was a sprawling house with a massive pool that even had one of those slides you see at the water park—it even had a pool house with a kitchen full of snacks.
I’d only been there once when the Colters hosted a party. Mrs. Colter had wanted help, so Mom dragged me over as an extra set of hands.
I’d refused to take my tee shirt and shorts off to get in the pool.