Chapter 4
chapter
four
Donovan
I probably shouldn’t still be standing here wearing only a towel, but it’s making Kathryn nervous. And I’m enjoying that. It means she’s not unaffected by me like she pretends to be. We still have that connection. I thought it might be lost to time and whatever the hell happened between us to piss her off so much.
“I cannot believe we’re stranded here. What are they thinking?”
“That we’re about to be brother and sister.” Somehow I manage to say that without grinning like a jackass. “And we need to get along.”
Her green eyes narrow at me behind her glasses. Then she points at me. “We are not going to be siblings. That’s stupid. My mom is marrying your dad. That’s the extent of it.”
Fuck me if I don’t love it when she’s prickly. And it’s then and there that I decide that I need to resolve things with her because I need her to fall in love with me.
I’ve been fooling myself thinking that what we’d had was just a teenage crush. No. I fell in love with Kathryn when we were kids, and seeing her now brings all of those feelings rushing to the surface.
How have I been living without her this long? Her with those wicked, thick curves and her sharp tongue. She’s got more fire and passion in her fingers than most people do in their whole bodies.
It’s fourth grade all over again when she single-handedly held a protest to protect the ducks in the park by Bluebonnet River.
Only way sexier.
“Seriously!” she shrieks. “Go put some damn clothes on. I can’t take all the man skin right now.”
I take a step closer to her. “Am I too much man for you, KitKat?”
She snorts. “You wish.” Her eyes rove over my bare chest. “Why don’t you have tattoos everywhere like most of the players?”
That causes me to cock a brow. “Keeping tabs on all the players, are you?”
“Whatever. You know I’ve always loved the game.”
“I do know that about you.” I brush past her, and she sucks in a breath. Yeah, she’s so not unaffected by me. She feels this pull between us; I know she does. I just need to get her to admit it. “I’ll go put some clothes on, then I’ll come tell you all about my lack of tattoos.”
“I’m not really that curious,” she murmurs.
And that just makes me smile. I quickly throw on some athletic shorts and an Armadillos t-shirt. But I grab my phone before I go back out there to her.
ME: Okay. I admit it. Y’all were right.
JD: We’re always right.
Hayes: About what, specifically?
Jude: He’s with Kathryn.
Hayes: Oh, yeah, we were totally right about her.
ME: We’re stuck alone in my dad’s cabin. Just me and her.
JD: So now you have her undivided attention.
ME: Exactly. I’m going to find out what happened between us in high school.
Jude: I’m telling you it has something to do with Mona.
Hayes: Oh, I bet you’re right.
JD: I never liked her.
ME: What about Mona? You think Kathryn was jealous because I started dating Mona?
Jude: Obviously.
ME: But Kat’s ghosting started before that. Mona just came along at the right time.
JD: Convenient.
Hayes: Perhaps too convenient.
ME: Mona was always nice to Kathryn. Mona’s the one who told me that Kathryn was tired of hanging out with a dumb jock.
Jude: Does that sound like something Kathryn would say?
Hayes: Or think?
ME: Okay, off to solve the mystery once and for all.
Jude: Good luck.
Hayes: Make us proud.
ME: Fuck y’all!
But I’m grinning as I pocket my phone and head back out to find my KitKat.
When I step into the room, I find her standing over the table peering into a box.
“Really? They thought the two of us could do this? You with your giant man paws and me with my clumsiness?”
“Giant man paws?” I hold up my hands. “These hands are worth twenty-two million dollars.”
She holds up a small glass jar. It’s smaller than a standard eye-drop bottle.
“We have to fill these up with matches,” she says. “Then glue on a tiny sign that says, ‘perfect match.’”
I chuckle. “That’s cute.”
She pulls out a chair and sits. “Which part do you want to do?”
“Either is fine with me or we can both do both.” I sit down across from her. “There’s food and stuff to drink if you want anything.”
“I’m fine.” Then she looks up at me, her face pale. “Um, how many bedrooms are there?”
“Just the one.”
“This is just freakin’ perfect.” She grabs a handful of matches and spreads them on the table.
“Come on KitKat, it’ll be like old times. You do remember how to have fun right?”
“We didn’t used to have sleepovers,” she snaps.
Though we had that one. The day my mom died. I know she remembers it by the way she visibly swallows. We hadn’t talked for weeks before that. But she hadn’t turned me away when she got home and found me on her porch.
As soon as I’d gotten the call about mom’s accident, I’d wanted nothing more than to see my KitKat. Mona had been with me and offered to blow me, which frankly had made me sick to my stomach. I should’ve broken things off with her then. She’d never been more than a sad substitution for the girl I’d somehow lost.
We work quietly for a while, falling into a rhythm of her putting precisely six matches into each tiny vessel, then passing them to me. I glue on the sign and cork the bottles, then put them neatly in a row on the other side of the table.
“Congrats on finishing your doctorate. That’s so damn amazing.”
Her cheeks pinken as she looks up at me. “Thank you.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“I haven’t quite decided. I actually sold the patent for the prototype I created for my dissertation. It’s given me enough savings to live off of for a while. So I can take some time deciding what’s next. I’d really like to just work on my own, developing projects that I care about.”
“You sold your patent? What’s it for?”
She licks her lips and my cock stirs.
“It’s for a safer helmet for quarterbacks, since they’re tackled most often and are more prone to concussions. The type of padding I used and its placement has shown that it can help reduce the risk of concussions by a significant amount. I mean nothing can fix it completely. Except flag football. Which is lame.”
I am literally biting my tongue so I don’t fall to my knees and beg this woman to marry me. How did I not know that’s what she’d been working on? Was it ridiculously arrogant of me to presume she’d done that for me? To keep me safe?
“I’ve had three,” I say.
“I know. Thankfully none of them have been severe,” she says, her eyes back on the glass bottles.
I reach across the table and put my hand on hers. “What you’ve done is amazing. I hope they paid you well. But thank you.”
She opens her mouth to say something, then just nods.
Then we’re back to working in silence until she finally says, “They paid me very well.”
“I’m glad.” I stare at the top of her head for a moment, but I know I have to ask. Waiting any longer is just going to drive me crazy. “Kathryn,” I say.
She looks up at me. “Donovan.”
“Will you please tell me what I did so wrong back in high school? I’ve never been able to figure it out.”
She rolls her eyes. “I doubt that.”
“I’m serious. I know that one day you were my best friend. I went away for the summer, and when I came back you ghosted me.”
“First of all, those were not the only things that happened. Shortly after you came back, you started dating Mona.”
“Okay,” I say. “So, you were jealous?”
She shakes her head. “No.” Then she stares at my face, searching. “There’s no way you didn’t know how cruel Mona was to me. She was relentless. And you just let it happen.”
“When? When was she cruel? What did she do?”
“Teased me and called me names for one. If it had only been that, I could’ve handled it. It was just dumb clichéd things. She tripped me in the library when my arms were full of books. ‘Accidentally’ dropped an entire tray of food on my head in the cafeteria.”
The more words she says, the angrier I get. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You were there. It’s not like you went to a different school.”
“No, but I only ever saw her be nice to you.”
Kathryn releases a humorless laugh. “She cornered me and told me that my time with you was over. We’d run our course, and it was time for you to take your rightful place in school. The quarterback and the head cheerleader, as it was meant to be. Not you hanging out with the fat, nerdy girl.”
I shake my head. “Don’t call yourself names.”
“I didn’t. Those were your girlfriend’s words.”
“She told me she overheard you saying that I’d come home from football camp a dumb jock and you were done with me.”
She stares at me, then gives me a look. “When have I ever thought you were dumb? I’m an engineer, and you’re probably still better at math than me.”
“Son of a bitch.” I rake my fingers through my hair.
“So you’re telling me that you truly had no idea any of that was happening?”
I shake my head. “No. KitKat, I would’ve stopped it. Stopped her. I would’ve dumped her far sooner than I actually did. I would never have picked her over you. I need you to believe that.”