CHAPTER TEN

 

 

Seth hadn’t heard from Sarah in two days. He knew he should be relieved. The sooner she gave up on pursuing him, the sooner he didn’t have to worry about her welfare as much. But the thing was, she’d told him she was gunning for him and he’d kind of expected her to follow through.

Maybe she changed her mind, he thought as he pulled his aching, but clean, body out of the shower. Maybe his warnings had sat heavy in her mind and she’d decided he was just enough of a whacko to be better left alone.

He certainly felt like a whacko at the moment.

Every day Bauer had been putting Seth and his brothers through their paces. His methods for teaching them how to control the shift were a mixture of meditation, hodgepodge kung fu, calisthenics, sparring, and worst of all, acting like their shifter animal while they were in human form.

If he never crawled on all fours, sniffing pine needles in the forest again, it would be too soon.

Seth was a fit guy, but every muscle in his body hurt, and what was even worse, his brain felt like fifty pounds of packing peanuts that had been compressed down inside his skull. Bauer was throwing all manner of philosophical mumbo jumbo at the brothers. And maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if Seth didn’t feel a wild urgency to download it all immediately. As far as he was concerned, the sooner he got this under control, the better. But in the meantime, he was utterly shredded.

Seth dragged a towel over his hair and pulled on the clothes he’d ironed and laid out on the bed before his shower.

He was hungry. Which probably meant that Sarah was hungry, too. It was dinner time. And he knew that if she didn’t have a better option, she was just as likely to dip goldfish crackers in peanut butter until her stomach stopped growling. Somehow, in that lovely, weird, interesting mind of hers, she called this a good meal.

He’d given her space the last two days, because he hadn’t wanted to encourage her. But encouragement or not, two days was just too long to go without seeing her. He would make some dinner nice and quickly, and then he’d drop it off, maybe exchange hellos and then he’d come home and catch up on some of the work he owed a few clients. Couldn’t be easier.

He made a quick red sauce and tossed it with penne, making some salad and garlic bread on the side. Not the most gourmet meal he’d ever made, but still, it was food.

He was just toeing into his shoes when he saw a familiar black jeep pull into Sarah’s driveway. What the hell was Jackson doing at her house?

Maybe it wasn’t Jackson. Maybe she knew someone else with the same car.

Nope. Two seconds later, Sarah was swinging out of the passenger seat and Jackson was swinging out of the driver’s seat. They walked up the pathway side by side.

Seth’s grip on the Tupperware in his hands tightened as he watched them through squinted eyes from his front porch.

It wouldn’t have been so bad, or weird, he supposed, except that Jackson walked her up her front steps and then laughed at something Sarah said. He laughed.

Jackson. Laughed.

Seth’s grip was now in danger of hairline cracking the glass Tupperware. A million scenarios played out in his head, each one seedier than the last. They ran into each other in the grocery store, were overtaken by a heretofore overlooked sexual chemistry, spent the next nine hours screwing each other’s brains out. Or maybe it was the library. Or the gym.

Or arguably worse, maybe his brother had gotten Sarah’s number that one night at the bar—the only time that Seth knew for sure they’d ever met one another—and they’d been texting ever since. Getting to know one another. While her infatuation with Seth had burned hot and quick and died, her infatuation with Jackson had been on slow burn.

Jackson and Sarah high-fived and Jackson bounded off the porch toward his car. Seth’s head cocked to one side as he watched. A high five? Not exactly the way one ended a hot date.

Jackson jumped into his jeep and pulled out of the driveway, driving as fast as usual. It had always been his brother’s single concession to danger. Jackson caught sight of Seth on his porch and honked his horn as he drove away. During a different time in their lives, Jackson might have stopped to chat with his brother, but with all this shifter training they were going through, they were already spending way too much time together.

Seth bounced on his toes for a second as he watched his brother drive away and then decided that he’d already made the damn food so he might as well drop it off.

He jogged across their quiet street and into Sarah’s house.

“Sarah!”

“Kitchen!” she shouted back.

He strode into her kitchen to see her standing behind the open fridge door, her head tipped back, guzzling orange juice straight from the carton. She was a deeper tan than two days ago and her hair was matted and dark against her head with sweat. All except for those honey gold flyaways that framed her face. He loved that. It made her look like she was electric with energy. And so lovely. Like a golden crown for a princess.

“Hi!” she said, a sweet, chipper note in her voice that told of her very good mood. “I was gonna come see you after my shower.”

Seth filed away that information, unsure if it ruffled or soothed his feathers. He decided to just out and ask what he’d come here to ask. “Why was Jackson dropping you offffff…fug?”

Seth’s words dribbled and splatted out of his mouth as Sarah closed the fridge door and he realized that she wasn’t in a tank top, she was in a sports bra and some high-waisted sporty underwear.

What she wore was much less revealing than a bathing suit, but still, it was a million times more skin than he’d ever seen on her before and seriously, his tongue suddenly weighed, like, fifty pounds. She was still drinking the orange juice and gave him a frowny, confused look over the top of the carton.

“You all right over there?”
He honestly didn’t know. She’d been in clothes when she’d come into the house, right? Yeah. She had to have been. He would have noticed otherwise. Still befuddled, his heart banging in his ribs, Seth turned 180 degrees and looked back down the hallway. Sure enough, there was a discarded tank top, a set of toppled running shoes, and a pair of running pants that he’d walked right past.

He tried to clear the sand out of his throat. “You stripped in the hallway.”

“I was hot.” She shrugged and sniffed the air hopefully. “Is that marinara I smell?”             

He looked down at his own hands in confusion and then realized that he was still carrying the Tupperware. “Oh. Yeah. I brought you dinner.”

“Thanks! I’m gonna shower first, though. You wanna stay and eat with me?”

“Sure,” he answered absently, kind of floating on after her. He paused at the bottom of the stairs as she bounded up. He couldn’t help but notice how pink the bottoms of her feet were. Why was that so flipping cute?

“Sarah!” he yelled up the stairs.

“Yeah?” Her voice was faint from her bedroom on the third floor.

“Why was Jackson here?”

The stairs creaked as she came back down with a bath towel in one hand, standing above him on the second-floor landing. “Because,” she said, and then turned and walked into the bathroom on the second floor, the rest of her statement getting blurred by the distance.

“What?” he yelled.

“Because,” she said again. “He wanded me to halfa person incasesmurgramercy.”

“What?”

The bathroom door flung back open. “Oh, jeez, Seth, just come talk to me up here, okay?”

He padded up the stairs and stood outside the bathroom door that she’d cracked a few inches. She’d turned the water on already and curls of steam were wafting out into the hallway. He felt his cheeks heat and his heart still was banging, but this time, in a sort of hollow way. A nervous way, he realized. He was nervous to stand out in this hallway while she stripped down five feet from him.

“I said that we went running together up on Mesa Trail. He learned that I’ve been doing it by myself and he wanted me to have a partner in case of emergency.”

“Oh.” Well, yeah. That sounded like Jackson. Always concerned with the welfare of others. But wait a second… “Hold up, Jackson ran Mesa Trail this afternoon?”

“Yeah. There and back. Took us a few hours.”

Well, shit. Here, it had been all Seth could do to drag himself home from Bauer’s practice and do a little gardening in his front yard. Jackson, who was almost eight years Seth’s senior, had gone home and run fourteen miles.

“Wow.” He paused and blushed even harder as he heard some water splash from her hair onto the shower tile. He jammed his hands further into the pockets of his jeans. “You guys are friends now?”

“I guess,” she called back. A fruity scent made its way out of the shower on a curl of steam. Before that moment, Seth couldn’t have said he knew what Sarah’s hair smelled like, but smelling that warm, floral perfume, he sure as hell recognized it. “We ran into each other at breakfast on Sunday. With Nat and Kaya. And he told me to call him if I wanted to run the trail. I wanted to run the trail, so I called him.”

“Oh.” He was at a loss for words. Especially because his brain was very much busy picturing Sarah in the shower right now. Glossy, curvaceous, toned, wet hair down her back, the soles of her pink feet pressed flat against the tile.

She turned the water off and Seth jumped like he’d been caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

“You take a quick shower.”

“Always have,” she called through the door. He heard some small noises and knew she was scuffing her hair with the towel. Now she was wrapping the towel around herself.

A second later the door opened all the way. He jumped back but she didn’t come out into the hallway.

“Just letting the steam out.”

As casually as he could, he went and stood in the doorway, knowing that if she didn’t want him there, she’d have no problem booting him out. She was in the towel, just as he’d known she’d be, and was leaning over the sink, combing the knots out of her hair. He was fascinated. He’d never seen hair that long be brushed before. Except in movies where girls sat in front of gilded, heart-shaped mirrors and romantically, gently, brushed their hair 100 strokes before bed.              

Seth chuckled as he watched her aggressively wrestle with a knot and win.

“What?” Her eyes caught his in the mirror.

“I just never realized before that you have princess hair.”

She scoffed.

“You have princess hair,” he continued. “Yet you treat it like you’re yanking crabgrass out of your herb garden.” He winced as she ripped through another knot and tossed a hank of her hair over her shoulder.

She shrugged and kept grooming herself. “He’s a funny guy.”

“Who?”

“Your brother.”

Oh. They were still talking about Jackson, apparently. “I guess.”

She smoothed lotion onto her face and rubbed the excess onto her hands vigorously. “He seems all mean and reserved, but I have my suspicions.”

“Suspicions?” It was all Seth could do to even remotely keep up his half of this conversation. She was brushing her teeth now and for some reason, the little peeks of her pink tongue that she was giving to Seth were rooting him to the floor, making him dizzy.

She spat out her toothpaste and rinsed her mouth before she caught his eye again in the mirror. “Yeah. I think that Jackson is actually a complete softy on the inside.”             

“Maybe so. Pretty much everything he does is for the people he loves. He can be gruff, but he’s the most thoughtful person I know.”

She raised her eyebrows at Seth before she started to braid her hair. “Present company excluded.”

“Me?”

“You. You have to know how generous you are, Seth. Everything you do is for others.”

He grunted in response as he watched her separate her hair into three sections and start braiding it into a long, honey tail down her back. He had no idea why this whole situation was so wildly erotic to him. To watch her tend to herself. Besides the obvious, of course, that she was half naked. Maybe it was the fact that standing in the bathroom door while a woman in a towel braided her wet hair wasn’t really something that friends did. It was something that lovers did.

Seth knew that if he really were as committed to them being just friends as much as he said he was, he’d turn around and go downstairs, wait for her to finish up on her own.              

Right. Friends waited downstairs.

His thoughts were jumbled and twisting as he watched her lean over the sink and stare at herself an inch from the mirror, her mouth pulling into a serious expression as she turned her head from one side to another. He couldn’t help but let his eyes trip down the slope of her back and straight to that ass of hers. The one that made him sweat standing still. Her ass was a thing of beauty. High and strong and looking pretty voluptuous draped in that towel. It usually was more compressed in a pair of athletic leggings, but right now? Right now it was completely unhindered and practically calling Seth’s name. Her braid trailed down her spine, stopping three quarters of the way down her back and that called Seth’s name, too. He imagined wrapping a hand around that braid, burying his face in the curve of her neck and burying his dick in the curve of her ass.

“Seth.”

He jumped again, like he’d been caught in the Playboy section of a gas station. She was looking at him over her shoulder, a funny expression on her face, and he knew just how lustful he must look. He was sure that if he turned and looked in that mirror, his eyes would be fuzzy and dark, his color high, his lips parted with his breath.

“Yeah?”

“I was asking you if Raphael is the same way? If the selflessness thing is a trait that runs in your family but you all show it in different ways.”

“Sarah,” he said in a gruff voice, his hand clamping down on the doorframe of the bathroom to keep himself from going in.

“Yeah?”

“I don’t want to talk about my brothers anymore.”

“What do you want to talk about, then?” She was still talking to him over her shoulder, her back to him.

He sighed, tore his eyes from hers and rested his forehead against the doorjamb. “Things I can’t have.”

“That’s your desired topic of conversation?” She laughed a little and then she turned back to the sink, pulling out a drawer and fishing in it for some other product. She pulled out a little vial and pumped a clear liquid underneath her eyes. She patted it on with her pinky finger.

He watched this with the rigid fascination of a man observing witchcraft for the first time.

“Seth,” she said, recapping the vial and catching his eye in the mirror again. “Come in here.”

His body had him taking an immediate step forward before his brain caught him and he froze. “Why?”

She laughed, dropped her head back and rolled her eyes at the ceiling. “Come in here.”

He took one step and then two and then there he was, standing at her back, not touching, just standing behind her, eyeing their reflections in the mirror. He stood a head taller than she did, and was significantly broader.

He could feel her shower-heated skin even though he wasn’t touching her. She was warming the air between them.

“Lean down,” she commanded him, a frown on her face and her hands on her hips.

“What?”

“You’re too tall. You’re looming. Lean down.”

Careful still not to touch her, Seth leaned forward, placing a hand on the counter on either side of her hips. He fit his face above her shoulder, so they stood at the same height, but still, he didn’t touch her.

She opened her mouth to say something, their eye contact zinging with an almost unbearable energy, but then she seemed to change her mind and clapped her mouth back shut. She dropped her eyes and Seth felt released from some cosmic, tensile force. Like she’d been leashing him, just with those wide eyes of hers.

He bent forward, his hands closing into fists on the countertop, and dropped his head down so that his forehead rested against her warm, scented shoulder blade. He smelled soap. He took deep, long drags of breaths, trying to both calm himself down and imprint this moment into his body, into his DNA.

How had this happened? He’d only brought over pasta.

Not good for her. Bad for her. Dangerous. She’ll hate you in the end.

“Friends don’t do this,” he said suddenly, lifting his head back up and trying to make himself step away from her. But he didn’t succeed. His hands gripped the countertop, keeping her in the circle of his arms. “Friends wait downstairs and chat benignly about things that barely matter. Friends don’t make things this messy or complicated.”

He was unsure if he was talking to her or to himself, but suddenly she was turning in his arms, bumping against him, soft into his hipbone, smooth skin against his jaw.

Bent over as he was, when she stopped turning, they were eye to eye. Her hair, even pulled back, was just beginning to wave a little bit at her temples as it started to dry, her face was scrubbed clean, her features strong, her eyes dark. He was dying for her.

“Seth, how about instead of talking about all the things you can’t have,” she said, her voice dropping low, “we talk about all the things you can have.”

He watched her lips form those words and couldn’t help but feel pulled forward.

Dangerous. Not good for her. She’ll hate you in the end.

“You don’t know what you’re offering me, Sarah.” His voice was gruff and low. She was looking at his eyes but he still couldn’t tear his eyes away from her lush mouth.

“It’s not rocket science, Seth.”

“This isn’t a joke. You could get hurt.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“I want to take care of you.”

She stiffened a touch, her eyes bouncing back and forth between his. “What?”

He knew he ran the risk of seeming like a total freak, but whatever cork he usually used as a filter had been thoroughly popped the second he’d stepped foot in that bathroom. “I can’t help it. It’s the way I was born. I love taking care of people. Making their lives better. But with you, it’s even worse. I have to force myself not to cook for you every single night. Not to pick up things for you at the grocery store. The other night I was researching snow tires for your car, for God’s sake. I—”

She clapped a hand over his mouth. Her posture had gone from stiff and surprised to loose and fluid again, and there was a sparkle in her eye.

“Seth, you might just be the most sexually frustrated person I’ve ever met.”

He tried to speak but her hand clamped down harder and muffled his words.

Bad for her. Dangerous. She’ll hate you in the end.

“This doesn’t have to be so hard,” she whispered, leaning into him.

She finally dropped her hand and he took the first opportunity he could to say the words that were bubbling up inside of him. “Sarah. Don’t ask me to do this. I want to be good for you. I want to be good for you so badly.”

She was a centimeter away now, nothing between him and her body but a thin, terry cloth towel. “So, make it good,” she whispered.

And then her lips were on his and all reason was lost to Seth. There was no tender beginning to this kiss, no sampling, no preamble. Immediately, these were deep, swimming kisses that attempted to get to the bottom of this mystery between them. Without even opening his eyes, Seth knew that Sarah was as lost to this as he was. He could feel her axis tipping just as he could feel his own. His hands left the countertop and anchored at her hips. He lifted, she jumped, and her legs went high around his waist. He pushed forward and they were sandwiched together in a way that felt permanent, irrevocable, almost harsh. His hands raced up her back, searching for the line where cloth became skin. He found it startlingly quickly. He knew that her towel was crumpled, falling away, but the kiss was so potent he couldn’t force his eyes open. He was lost in her, spinning.

One of his hands stroked over her hip and down her bare thigh, all the way to the toned calf she had pinned halfway around his back. They were slammed together, but still, Seth needed more.

He leaned forward against her and she let him. Her back landed on the counter, toppling things to the floor that neither of them noticed. And then, finally, there it was, he let the weight of his upper body rest on top of her and he finally felt a measure of his franticness fade away. This was how they were supposed to be. This level of pound for pound pressure against one another. This was how close they were meant to be.

He made himself crack his eyes open, look at her. He tore his mouth from hers to kiss along her jaw. There was very little finesse, only hunger. “Too much?” he asked her gruffly.

“Quiet,” she immediately responded. “More. More.”

She arched her neck for his exploration and all the voices in Seth’s head officially quieted. It was a peaceful moment, filled with clarity. He was completely in the present and there was no room for worries here. Here was simply Seth and Sarah, trying to get as close to one another as possible.

It was an insane feeling, pressing her into the counter, sucking at her pulse point. His circumstances hadn’t changed, not one bit. But he’d never felt more free in his life. Somehow, being with her like this made him feel as if handcuffs he’d been wearing his entire life had suddenly sprung loose.

She was both liquid and unyielding in his arms. Soft and strong at the same time. The combination was intoxicating and so very, very Sarah.

He felt it the instant she stiffened up. He froze, only then realizing that one hand was grabbing a handful of towel-covered ass and the other had a hold of her braid. Oh shit. Had he pushed this too far, too fast?

“Seth,” she whispered, wiggling underneath him. “I… I have to get that.”

That’s when he finally heard it. Her cell phone, sitting on the far end of the counter, was ringing. And a strange ring it was. It wasn’t a song or a normal, chirping tone. It was just a rhythmic, constant bang of a gong. Something about it seemed ominous.

“Oh,” he shook his head and picked his weight up off of her.

“I have to get that,” she whispered again. “Or else he’s just going to keep calling. I don’t know why he’s calling. Why now?”

Seth was barely cogent, but he knew enough to know that she was talking to herself more than she was talking to him. She scrambled up, straightening the towel and covering herself. The flush of desire was still high in her cheeks, her lips were smudged and a deep, kissed pink, but her eyes were cinched in a strained, trepidatious expression.

She almost looked… scared.

Maybe it was all the sex hormones zipping through his blood stream, or maybe he really was just that concerned with her welfare, but Seth had to resist the urge to slap the phone out of Sarah’s hand as she picked it up.

Who the hell was calling her and making her look like this? He’d never seen Sarah shrink from anything since he’d known her, but here she was, shoulders tucked inwards like she was attempting to shield her heart from the world. Her head was bent over the phone, and as he watched, she undid the tie at the end of her braid and combed out her hair with her fingers, creating a damp curtain of waves that hid her face from him.

“Dad,” she answered the phone in a quiet, numb sort of voice.

Seth stiffened. Her father was the one who was making her shrink into herself? She tapped on Seth’s chest and he realized that he was still standing too close to her for her to slide off the counter.

He reluctantly took a step back and she slid down, immediately padding out of the bathroom, one of her hands in a death-grip with the towel.

He watched her go and then adjusted himself in his pants. He caught his own eyes in the mirror and barely recognized himself. He looked insane. Feral. Wild. Wolfish.

“Fuck.” Seth dropped his hands back to the counter and let his head sag. What the hell was he doing? “You’re dangerous for her, you prick.”

He picked his head back up and strode back down the stairs, reheating the pasta, setting the salad in a bowl, and warming up the garlic bread.

A few minutes later, Sarah came back downstairs in a humongous sweatshirt, baggy sweatpants, and large, bunchy socks. Her hair was caught under the collar of her sweatshirt and as she wordlessly slid into her seat at the dinner table, she pulled her hood back up.

Seth knew instinctively that these oversized clothes were a sort of personal armor she was donning. He also knew that the armor wasn’t to protect herself from him, it was to protect herself from her father.

“I wasn’t sure you’d still be here,” she said, watching him spoon pasta onto her plate. He put an extra scoop of the meat sauce onto her dish. She needed the protein.

“You thought I’d bail?”

“I mean, that seems to be your m.o. after we swap spit.”

He smiled. “Technically, the second time we kissed, I didn’t leave, you closed the door in my face.”

“Ah,” she smiled faintly. “Right.”

“Sarah,” he said after a quiet minute. “Is everything all right? You seem really… deflated.”

If it was possible, she deflated even more, her shoulders falling even further. Seth frowned and put some salad on her plate before he reached over and landed a palm on her back, rubbing her in a small circle.

He was relieved when she pushed into his touch a little bit, like she was welcoming it. “Things with my dad are really complicated. He’s not a great, um, influence on me? I guess?”

“What do you mean?”

She sighed and finally lifted her head, shoving her hood back. She pushed the food on her plate around and around. “I mean that he’s really charismatic and he can talk anybody into anything. He has this way of making bad things sound good. And before you know it you’ve been living a shitty life for years.”

“He’s manipulative.”

“Bingo.”

Seth paused, unsure of how far he was allowed to push this. “Wasn’t he your Olympic coach?”

Sarah sighed again. “Yeah, and manager. He’s a damn good archer. Just a shitty person.”

“Who made you live a shitty life.”

“Yup,” she popped the p and frowned down at her food.

“What was so bad about it?” he asked tentatively.

She was quiet for a long time, pushing her food around. Then, to Seth’s immense relief, she took a huge Sarah-bite of her pasta and spoke with her mouth full. “Have you ever seen my Instagram page?”

He shook his head.

“Bring it up on your phone,” she told him.

While he fiddled around on his phone, he was happy to see that she polished off her plate of food and took seconds.

A minute later, he had her page brought up on his phone. “Um. Wow.”

It was not what he’d expected in the least. The most recent post was from a month or two ago—she hadn’t posted since she’d moved to Boulder. But it looked like previous to that, every few days she’d posted photos of herself. A few of them were her with her bow, or her working out. But most of them were these very un-Sarah, heavily makeup-ed, heavily filtered photos of her. In one, she leaned against a brick wall with a huge hat and sunglasses, flashing a hell of a lot of leg. In another, she lounged in a bikini on a boat, the sun bouncing off her bare skin. In another, she seductively sipped wine, her eyes pinned on the camera.

“Surprised?” she asked.

“Um. Yeah. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with these photos… they just don’t seem very you.”

“They’re not. At all. Keep scrolling. Go to the beginning.”

He did as she asked and could barely contain his grin when he saw the photos there. Sarah sweaty and red and grinning as she lifted weights. Sarah doing a very un-ladylike victory dance in front of a bullseye. Sarah teaching a group of kids how to shoot. Sarah shoving half a burrito into her mouth, crossing her eyes in exaggerated pleasure. “Now these, I love.”

“Right?” she agreed with a small smile. “I know.”

He set the phone down and went back to his meal. “So, why the big change?”

Sarah cast her eyes down again. “My dad decided that my image needed an overhaul. Archery isn’t the most lucrative sport, you know. So, he figured we’d need to find sponsors using ‘all of our assets’. Which unfortunately included my personal T and A.”

Seth’s stomach dropped. “You don’t mean that he—”

She laughed and shook her head. “He didn’t pimp me out or anything. But whether or not I looked hot became way more important to him than whether or not I was at the top of my game. For a long time he was just my coach and manager. But after I started getting an online following, he fired my trainer and my nutritionist. He said it was to cut costs, but now I know better.” She took another defiant bite of food. “He just wanted to control every aspect of my life without supervision from anyone else.”

Seth thought back to the videos of Sarah at the most recent Olympics looking dull and out of it, almost weak. She’d looked nothing like the vibrant, alive woman in front of him right now, sparking with anger and defiance.

“He cut my caloric intake in half, upped my cardio, reduced my weight training. After I qualified for the games, he would scream at me if I trained with my bow for a second longer than he wanted me to. He figured that it didn’t matter how I did at the Olympic games. All that mattered was that I looked good doing it. It’s the hot people who get the sponsorships. It’s the hot people who get the followers. And to him, that’s where the real glory was.”

Seth felt cold. He set his fork down as he tried to make sense of this horrifying story. “He cut your caloric intake in half?”

Depriving an Olympic athlete of food was akin to abuse. Her body would have revolted, turned against itself.

She nodded tersely. “And my water intake. Because you can’t get your skin to stick to your six pack and cheekbones unless you’re dehydrated as hell.”

“You have got to be kidding me.” Seth folded his hands in front of his face and tried to calm down a little bit, but his adrenaline was coursing through his veins. He couldn’t remember a time he’d been this outraged.

“I wish I was kidding. But nope. That’s dear old Dad for you.”

He took another calming breath and looked up at her. She looked sad and mad, but she didn’t look quite as deflated anymore. He took in the oversized clothing and it took on another layer of meaning. Just speaking with her father had her hiding her body from the world. The man had fucked up her body image so much that getting a phone call from him was enough to have her slipping in on herself.

“No wonder the Olympics were such a rough time for you.”

She laughed humorlessly. “Yeah. The chance of a lifetime and I was too fucking hungry to even appreciate it, let alone compete at any sort of level. Because I’d done so badly, they didn’t test me for drugs or anything like that when I was being investigated. But I wish they had. I wish the Olympic committee could have had proof of just how undernourished I was. How dehydrated. I wanted it to go on record what that asshole did to me. But they didn’t.”

“You left early,” Seth remembered from an article he’d read. “You left the Olympics before the closing ceremonies.”

“Bombing that hard was what it took to snap me out of my stupor. I realized then, all at once, that not only was he destroying my body, he was destroying my dreams as well. Everything I’d worked for. It hit me that he didn’t give a fuck about what was best for me. I realized just how selfish he really is. And I just couldn’t spend another minute with him. I hopped on a plane. It didn’t take much to pull out of my sponsorships, they were all pretty underwhelmed with my performance anyways. By the time my dad got home, I had packed up everything from our house in New York and had already driven to Aunt Lynn’s. She helped me buy this house and the rest is history.”

“He didn’t try to follow you?”

She shook her head. “No. But I’m not exactly sure why. I thought for sure he’d pull out all the stops trying to convince me to get back in the game. But maybe it’s because I went to Aunt Lynn. She was my mother’s sister and she’s always scared the shit out of my dad. I think he didn’t want the hassle of getting past my guard dog.”

“What did he want just now?”

Sarah’s shoulders wilted. “Who knows. He was pretending just to say hi to me, but he was really fishing for information about my life. My plans. I’m sure he’s cooking up something in that manipulative head of his.”

She rose up to clear their plates, but Seth caught her by the wrist. “Sarah, just so you know, no matter what happens between us, if your father tries to get to you again, Lynn isn’t going to be the only guard dog your father has to get through.”

Sarah smiled at him sadly.

She had no idea how literally he’d meant that.