Chapter 1

What if I have a child that’s allergic to dogs and I have to get rid of the child?

-Reed to his mother

Reed

14 years ago

The first time I saw her, I nearly fell out of my truck.

I remembered it like it was yesterday.

She was wearing a pale lavender top, short—and when I say short, I mean that if she bent over I'd see her underwear—khaki shorts. A pair of simple black flip flops from Old Navy—the ones that are a dollar on sale every other week—and she had her hair up in a ponytail with the length of the ponytail braided down to her bra strap.

Her long, strawberry blonde hair seemed to shimmer and shine under the street lamp, and I wanted to touch it. Wrap my fingers around the length and bring it up to my nose to smell.

We met because her best friend and my friend wanted to meet. Each of us had tagged along, neither of us realizing that we were about to have our lives changed forever.

“Come on,” Drake said. “It’s time to go.”

I rolled my eyes and walked with my friend out to my truck. And it was my truck, because if it was his, I knew that I wouldn’t get a say so in what time we left.

What if this girl was his soulmate? I didn’t want to have to stay out there until dawn. I wanted to be able to go home at a normal time, because I had a baseball game the next day.

Thinking about how much this was going to suck, I drove slowly, uncaring whether Drake was bitching in the seat next to me.

“Could you drive any slower?” Drake, aka Dilbert as I liked to call him, groaned.

“I can’t get another ticket,” I told him honestly. “I was barely able to pay for the last one. If I get another, I have to go to teen court to get it dismissed and that would fucking blow, because then they’d make me do community service. Then I wouldn’t be able to practice with the elite team on Saturday, and then…”

“I got it,” Drake muttered under his breath.

I grinned.

Drake hated hearing about my practices…mostly because he wasn’t as good as me and couldn’t keep up with me at all.

That wasn’t vanity talking, either.

I played on two club teams. One for baseball, and one for soccer. Lucky enough for me, they split the seasons. Fall and spring it was baseball. Winter and summer, soccer.

When I wasn’t playing games for one, I was practicing for another.

At one point, Drake had been on the baseball team with me, but he quit shortly after his father and mother caught him trying to juice himself—or shoot himself up with steroids—to keep up with me.

Which had upset me, too.

Now we were just friends, and I made it a point to chill and relax with him, since I think the whole reason he tried was because we’d been the best of friends during our younger years, but had grown apart as we got older.

“Okay, she’s going to have her friend there, so if we disappear for a little while, you have to take one for the team.”

I snorted, knowing where he was going with that.

He wanted me to keep the proverbial fat chick entertained while he went for his own entertainment.

“Sure, Drake.” I snorted. “I’ll do that for you.”

He pointed out a few more turns, and not five minutes later, I was pulling off on the side of the road next to a sweet ass yellow Chevy.

We both got out, but instead of going up to the front walk with Drake, I hung back and checked out the yellow Chevy C10 pickup truck.

It was a sixty-eight or nine short bed, and it was in mint condition.

“Her dad moved it out of the garage so he could get the Christmas tree down for her mother,” a soft voice came from beside me.

I would’ve jumped, but my brothers had been trying to scare me since I was young enough not to fall over. I’d trained my body not to react, even when my body was going crazy on the inside.

“It’s August,” I pointed out.

“August fourth,” she agreed.

“Then why is she getting out Christmas?”

“Laryn’s parents put it out at the beginning of August because her mother is a Christmas-aholic,” the girl said.

I finally gave the girl my full attention.

She was not a fat chick.

In fact, she was anything but fat.

She was small and skinny.

Very small.

Like a chihuahua compared to my mastiff.

I was six-foot-three inches and packed solidly with lean muscle.

One day, I’d probably resemble my father more closely than what I did today, but since I worked out often and watched what I ate, I stayed lean.

I looked like a monster next to her.

Also, I’d seen her before, of course. She was my brother’s best friend’s little sister.

She didn’t hang out at the house with her brother, Jay, at all, and it was only on rare occasions that I saw her out and about with her parents.

They hated me, by the way.

Honestly, they were stuck up assholes, and the Hails were too middle class for them.

It probably didn’t help that I played my ‘redneck’ status up when they were around, though.

Seeing her there was still a surprise.

When I saw her around town, she was always presentable. Most assuredly, she wasn’t dressed like that.

She wasn’t in anything overly provocative. All of the girls I knew wore short shorts.

No, she was dressed like a normal teenage girl, I guess.

But when she was with her parents it was all khaki pants and cardigan sweaters.

I didn’t think I’d ever seen as much of her skin revealed as I did right then.

It was her eyes, though, that held me captive. The way the streetlight cast shadows that seemed to play over her features.

“You,” she said then, finally placing how she knew me as well.

“Me,” I agreed.

“What are you doing here?”

Just then Drake and her friend came walking down the driveway. The girl with two bottles of Coke in one hand, and Drake with a Coke in one hand, and a water in the other.

The water was obviously for me.

I didn’t bother drinking my calories. I’d rather eat them.

And he knew that.

“Here you go,” the girl said to her friend.

“Thank you, Larry,” Krisney said to her friend. “Larry, this is…”

“My friend, Reed Hail,” Drake finished for Krisney.

Drake probably hadn’t recognized her yet, but he would.

It was only a matter of time.

It was the eyes, you see.

They were a shade of silvery light blue. Like a wolf’s eyes.

On her, they looked almost eerie.

They were distinctive, that was for sure.

“Nice to meet you,” Laryn aka “Larry” said to me. “I’d offer you a place to sit, but it looks like Christmas exploded inside my house, and every available surface has a box or a Santa on it.”

My lips twitched.

“I’m fine outside.”

And I was.

I was so used to the heat that ninety degrees with zero sunlight was heavenly to me. And when the breeze blew, signaling a pending storm on the way in, it was downright chilly to me.

But I didn’t care.

Not with how Krisney sat next to me on the tailgate of my truck, laughing with her friend about something that’d happened to her cousin.

“He said he was so happy to get underwear from his mom that he waved them around the room with excitement. Apparently, they hadn’t had clean underwear in quite a long time.” She paused. “She also sent him wet wipes, which he said he used about half of to wash a month's worth of grime off of him thirty seconds after opening them.”

I snorted.

“My brother said that the remote places are like that sometimes when they’re deployed,” I added my two cents.

“Your brother is in the military?”

I nodded. “Marines.”

Her eyes widened. “I want to go in the Army, too.”

I must’ve looked at her incredulously, because she narrowed her eyes at me.

The halo that the street light was casting on us was bright enough that I saw her left cheek twitch.

“I’m more than capable of being in the Army.”

I bit my lip to keep from saying something like, ‘You’d be eaten alive.’

Instead, I kept my trap shut and continued to pepper her with questions.

“What do you want to do in the Army?”

She shrugged. “Well, I’ve always wanted to be a dental hygienist.”

“Who the hell always wants to be a dental hygienist?” I broke in. “That’s weird.”

“Well, what do you want to be?”

I shrugged. “I’ve always wanted to be a doctor.”

“An OB/GYN?” she teased.

I burst out laughing at that.

“Why would you say that?”

“You look like a guy who would like to play with vaginas for a living,” she countered.

I snickered.

“I guess that wouldn’t be half bad,” I admitted. “I could think of worse careers.”

Our banter only continued after that.

And, six months later, our relationship was still going strong.

Her father hated me.

Her mother hated me more.

And her brother, my brother’s best friend, looked at me like I was no better than dog meat.

But I loved the girl, and I had a feeling that nothing would ever change that.

Oh, how wrong I would be.