Page 47 of Don’t Go Stealing My Heart

Unease slowly cooled his desire. “Do you want to tell me the truth?”

“I was stabbed.”

A flash of a blade filled his mind, pressing against her sensitive skin, pushing in. Jack wasn’t the fighting sort. He’d never punched a man or brawled in a bar. He wanted to punish someone now. “Who hurt you?”

She held his hand in place but kept her mouth closed. She wasn’t ready to trust him. Could he fault her? She’d found her father dead and had been shuffled through the foster system. She blamed herself for her mother’s overdose. Then, somewhere along the line, she’d been stabbed. Those experiences didn’t nurture faith in others. When she looked at Jack, she probably only saw a past filled with chandeliers and libraries and bathrooms large enough to live in. Idyllic perfection.

His shitty teenage years had been far from perfect. Nothing comparable to what she’d endured, but he could offer her a part of himself he’d never offered anyone.

“I went through a rough time in high school,” he said. He wouldn’t describe his worst moment, what he’d done to land in jail, but sharing his vulnerability might help her share hers.

She released a stilted laugh and raised her eyebrows. “Did I miss the segue into this conversation?”

He smirked. “Kissing beautiful women messes with my head.”

She eyed his crotch. “Is that what it does to you?”

“I plead the fifth. But I would like to talk.”

Her shirt now covered the scar, but her eyes darted there. She nibbled her lip. “About the situation in your pants?”

Always evading. “About me, yes. But not the very large situation in my pants.”

Amusement sparked in her eyes. “How modest of you, Jack.”

“I do excel at modesty,” he said, matching her sarcasm. “But this topic’s embarrassing, not ego building. My model airplanes and favorite yo-yo might have you fooled, but I wasn’t the hippest kid in high school. Some experiences changed me.”

Her delight faded. “You don’t have to say.”

He settled himself against his headboard and beckoned her to follow. She crawled over and cuddled into his side, turned her face into his neck.

“I don’t have to tell you,” he said, “but I want to.”

It wasn’t like she hadn’t seen him at his most awkward, and she would see him confident and bold between the sheets, if he had anything to say about it. But he knew what he was like during sex: controlling, demanding. It suddenly seemed important she know what had shaped him.

“When I was fifteen,” he said, closing his eyes as those unpleasant memories resurfaced, “I was a mess when it came to girls.”

15

Jack had been more than a mess with girls. He’d been fifteen with braces, acne, and a stutter, and he’d been in love with Charlotte Aaron. Even in science, one of Jack’s favorite classes, he’d watched her instead of scribbling notes as Mrs. Eschenbaum expounded on seed germination rates. Normally a fascinating subject.

All Jack could hear was the beating of his heart as Charlotte passed a note to Stella, both girls suppressing laughter. Stella was pretty enough. Boys in the locker room, when not picking on him, often made rude remarks about her big breasts and full lips. She was magazine pretty.

Charlotte was fairy-tale pretty.

If Cinderella took human form, she’d be Charlotte Aaron. The sun refracted through the classroom windows, blinking off her blonde hair. Her rosy cheeks looked like ripe apples, her eyes so large and blue his often-misfiring tongue would shrivel and dry around her.

Mrs. Eschenbaum turned to write on the board. Stella took advantage of the lack of supervision and leaned toward Charlotte. She whispered in her ear. Both girls giggled. Then looked at him.

Crap.

He’d been caught staring. Again. Mortification swamped him. The state of his erection was even worse. His body had a mind of its own these days, a girl’s laugh or smile acting like his own personal magnetic field. When Charlotte looked at him? His penis strained like it was pumped full of iron, reaching for her magnetic force. He crossed his hands over his lap.

The girls giggled harder.

Marco poked him from behind. “The archery stand’s almost done. Come over Friday. We’ll put up pictures of the D Squad and shoot their faces.”

The D Squad, aka the Douche Squad, encompassed the three Ds: Derek, Darrin, and Dale—all assholes who tripped Jack and Marco in the cafeteria, knocked books out of their hands, and there was that time they held Jack down in the Phys-ed locker room while Derek farted on Jack’s face. Their female entourage was a different kind of mean. They used dramatic coughs to barely disguise insults like loser and gross when passing Jack’s locker, a subtler brand of nasty.