Chapter 1
CHAPTER ONE
winnie
Apparently, I draw the line at kissing frogs.
Shock racks through Winnie Rusu’s system.
If you’d asked her thirty seconds ago, she would’ve puckered up in a heartbeat.
For a frog. For a beast with a killer library.
For an overly polished charmer with a foot fetish.
Heck, even a penniless grifter with a stolen identity didn’t sound too bad if it meant true love.
But that was before she felt the press of cool, slimy skin against her lips. Before she opened her eyes to find the limp, hollow carcass of a dissected bullfrog smashed against her face.
I should have seen this coming.
The moment Davy Moore told her Liam Reyes—the Liam Reyes, the most gorgeous, most popular, most amazing boy in their seventh-grade class—wanted to meet her behind the Texas live oak by the soccer field, she should have known something was up.
On some level, if she’s being honest, she did.
But it was Liam. Surely, any embarrassment was worth the risk if there was even the slightest chance he might actually be there waiting.
And he was! He was there, standing with his hands in the front pocket of his football hoodie, one foot propped against the wide trunk, just as Davy said.
When she walked up, palms sweating, fingers shaking, heart giving the drum section from their local award-winning marching band a run for its money, he gave her that twisted grin that had made her weak in the knees ever since the first time she saw it during third-grade recess.
So when he told her to close her eyes, what else was she supposed to do?
Say no? Ignore him? Leave? Or hope that just this once, everything was exactly as it seemed?
Optimism has always been her downfall.
And now, a dead frog is my first kiss.
If that isn’t a metaphor for something…
Winnie jumps back and spits the bitter taste from her lips, but it’s too late.
The damage is done. Liam’s laughter hits her first, prompting a bolt of burning humiliation so ripe it brings a buzzing to her ears.
Then she registers the approval-seeking look he tosses over his shoulder.
She knows what she’ll find when she slides her gaze sideways, but morbid curiosity leaves her doing it anyway.
Grace Carmichael and her cronies watch giddily from about a dozen yards away.
Of course.
It always comes back to Grace. Every taunt.
Every cruel act. Every cut. Winnie still has no idea what she’s ever done to deserve it.
So what if she would rather eat a lunchbox full of cabbage rolls than buy a sandwich from the cafeteria?
Her mom makes the best sarmales on this side of the Atlantic.
And who cares if she prefers to cover her wrists with the handmade beaded bracelets her cousins from Romania send her every year instead of the typical silver and gold of her classmates?
Is it really such a sin to prefer staying home with her favorite fictional sleuth on a Friday night to attending the local high school’s football game of the week?
Yes, she wears glasses. Yes, she has somewhat untamable black hair.
Yes, her real name is unfortunately Uldwyna.
And yes, she spends far too much time drawing colorful tattoos across her thighs when she’s supposed to be paying attention in class.
But being different isn’t a crime. Except of course at the Wentworth Christian Academy of Dallas, where apparently it is.
For girls, anyway. Her stupidly tall, athletic, and annoying older brother has never gotten bullied a day in his life.
Which I’m clearly not bitter about at all.
The moment Winnie meets Grace’s eyes, her archnemesis’s evil plot becomes clear.
Grace is skinny, blonde, a cheerleader, and the daughter of an oil tycoon, so naturally she’s the most popular girl in their grade.
Liam is clearly in love with her. She clearly knows it.
And the second Mr. Gutiérrez put that dissection tray on Grace’s desk, everything must’ve clicked.
Winnie’s just mad she didn’t put it together sooner, especially when she notices Liam is holding up his phone, making it clear her mortification has been immortalized for the whole school to witness.
Her feet start moving before her brain even registers it.
In a move she’s sure will haunt her for the rest of her life, she doesn’t say anything, doesn’t stand up for herself, doesn’t speak one of the approximately nine hundred and seventy-three million comebacks she’s sure she’ll come up with in the days and weeks and years ahead.
She runs.
Like a coward.
Like a doormat.
Like a fool, forgetting in her own mounting horror that predators only salivate at the sight of their prey’s backside.
I will not cry. I will not cry.
But she can’t even do that. Fat tears trickle down her cheeks as she races across the freshly mowed grass toward salvation behind the thick brick walls of the gym.
She drops her head back, as if gravity alone can stop the flood from coursing down her cheeks.
The sky is so blue it must be mocking her.
She closes her eyes and forces air into her lungs, one shuddering breath at a time.
“Hey, Little Rusu!”
Winnie stiffens at the sound of his voice. As if today hasn’t been humiliating enough, now Ty has to see me like this, too. Great. Just freaking great.
“Have you seen—” He stops talking the moment he gets close enough to notice the wetness on her cheeks.
She attempts a smile, but it’s no use. With his blond hair, blue eyes, and sun-kissed cheeks, Tyler Briggs could be the poster child for All-American Teen Boy, if not for the fact that he generally hates everyone and everything around him, and wears the scowl to prove it.
Ice hockey is the one exception, and, well, the Rusu family, ever since the day Winnie’s dad, a former professional hockey player turned coach of the most competitive junior team in the entire southern US, caught him playing in their rink after hours.
All this to say, the boy can brood better than any fourteen-year-old has a right to brood and it’s exactly what he’s doing as he barrels toward her, brows furrowed, gear bag slung across his back, fingers wrapped tightly around the stick balanced on his shoulder. “What’s wrong?”
She swipes at her cheeks, as if that will help when her glasses are still fogged over from crying. “Nothing.”
The slow arch of his brow speaks louder than words ever could.
Winnie ignores him and points to the bricks behind her. “Alex is still inside getting his stuff.”
“Then I’ve got plenty of time to wait out here with you.” He takes the spot beside her and leans back against the wall, clearly there to stay.
“Let me guess…” Winnie rolls her head to the side, a bit of mischievous joy breaking through the pain. “Doughnut Dan caught you trespassing again?”
He and the school security guard have a long sordid history, seeing as Tyler, who is not a student at this school, refuses to stop sneaking onto the private grounds to which he has strictly been forbidden.
But he and her brother, Alex—short for Alexandru, same as their father—are practically tied at the hip, so a little thing like following the rules isn’t enough to keep him away.
Plus, her mom is his ride to practice and hockey trumps all.
Tyler doesn’t take the bait. “Come on. Tell me what happened.”
“Nothing.”
“What did these rich jerks do now?”
She sighs, just to be difficult. “Not everyone at this school is a rich jerk, you know.”
“Sure they are.”
“Need I remind you, your best friend goes here?”
“Exactly.”
She laughs, for real this time, and the corner of Tyler’s lip twitches with a smile. Winnie turns fully to him and crosses her arms in challenge. “I go to this school.”
Those bright blue eyes find hers. It’s never been just the two of them like this, alone, sequestered, close enough to watch his pupils dilate as he speaks. For the first time in his presence, her breath hitches. “You’re the exception to the rule.”
A sudden heat spirals down her chest, so similar to that burning embarrassment from minutes before, yet so very different—the opposite side of the same coin.
It’s not humiliation. It’s something far, far worse, a sudden bashfulness she never in a million years expected to feel around a boy who once helped her brother hold her down so he could fart in her face.
Winnie looks quickly away, but the heat remains.
This is bad.
This is very, very bad.
She cannot start crushing on her brother’s best friend. On one of her best friends! She sees him every day. He practically lives at their house. He’s like a brother—or he was, until this very moment, when her traitorous heart decides to skip a beat.
“Seriously, Win,” he says, voice soft. Yet somehow, the sound of her nickname on his lips, banal not even twenty-four hours before, hits her like a tidal wave. “What happened?”
“It’s stupid.” She’s too flustered to lie, too flustered to think straight.
The truth comes spilling out before she can stop it.
“Someone told me this guy who I think is cute wanted to meet me behind the live oak, so I went over there, and I thought maybe he—” Winnie cuts off with a shake of her head.
“But obviously he didn’t. And when I opened my eyes, there was this frog from Mr. Gutiérrez’s class, and Grace was watching, and there’s a video, so now it’s just this whole big mess that will probably haunt me for the rest of my life. And, yeah. That’s what, uh, happened…”
She trails off pathetically.
Rambling, one. Logic, zero.
Tyler’s frown deepens as he surveys her face, making a valiant effort to try to understand what in the world she’s saying.
But apparently, it doesn’t matter. He flicks his gaze over her shoulder and those baby blues harden into that lethal look she recognizes from being forced to attend far too many of her brother’s hockey games—the one that says someone is about to pay.
“Tyler,” she warns.
“You know what my mom always says?” he interjects suddenly as he kicks off the wall and readjusts the strap on his shoulder.
The detached tone of his voice carves a pit in her stomach, but before she can say anything else, he returns his attention entirely to her and the force of it strikes her dumb.
Bad. Bad, she thinks. Very bad. Stupid.
But it does little to quell the swarm of butterflies raging like a tornado inside her chest as he places the back of his pointer finger under her jaw and arches her face toward his.
Her mouth parts against her will as a mortifying little gasp escapes her lips, but the gods of mercy are finally shining down on her because he doesn’t seem to notice.
“Chin up, Winnie,” Tyler orders with the sort of sympathy and conviction that can only come from having heard the words himself many times before. Then he drops his arm and starts past her with a soft, “I’ll be right back.”
It takes a second for the implications of that muttered goodbye to hit. By the time Winnie spins, he’s already rounding the building.
“Tyler!” she whisper-shouts.
If he hears her, he ignores it. Winnie chases after him just enough to poke her head around the bricks.
“Ty!”
She wants to yell, but it comes out as barely more than a squeak—partially because he’s already in trouble with the school, partially because she doesn’t want to draw attention to herself, and yes, partially because deep down there’s a not-insignificant part of her that wants to see exactly what he’ll do.
Tyler is across the field before Liam, Davy, and Grace even see him coming.
They jump back in surprise the second he joins their circle.
Winnie is too far away to hear what anyone is saying, but it doesn’t matter.
The conversation lasts just long enough for Tyler to smack the phone out of Liam’s hand.
The younger boy lunges for it, but before he can get his fingers around the device, Tyler snags it with his hockey stick.
The second he starts twisting, Winnie knows what’s coming.
She’s heard her father rave about it over dinner enough times to recognize the beginnings of the slapshot Alexandru Rusu senior is confident will one day end up on a plaque in the Hall of Fame.
She doesn’t care much about hockey, but she finally understands what her father is always going on about as she watches Tyler lift his stick to shoulder-height, then slam it down to the grass with enough force to send the phone flying.
The way he moves is like poetry in motion—grace and fury and commanding power, all held together with unyielding control, and he’s barely even hit puberty.
Winnie clutches her chest as if her heart is the thing he’s struck. With the way it blazes, he might as well have. Because all she can think as she watches that phone slam directly into a soccer goalpost fifteen feet away and shatter into a million little pieces, is screw Prince Charming.
She’s got a knight in shining armor right here.