Chapter One
HANNAH
“Shit, just looking at him makes me want to drop my panties,” Rachel, my roommate, pushed her long red hair over her shoulder and squeezed her legs together; as if the sight in front of her might physically cause her undergarments to flow down her long tan legs without her permission.
I swallowed and followed her gaze.
“This was a really bad idea,” I chocked out, my eyes still locked on the other side of the room. My view was obstructed by at least a few dozen of my college coeds, all grinding on one another and throwing back shots as if they did the whole frat party thing every night. And they most likely did.
Me? Well, let’s just say I was a virgin in more than one sense of the word.
Yup, this had definitely been a bad idea.
My gaze drifted past a blonde with a huge chest and landed on the exclusive group toward the back of the football house that Rachel had just been losing it over. Or, rather, the guy, she had been losing it over. Nathan Cummings smirked at something one of his teammates said to him and then leaned forward, whispering softly into the dark-headed beauty that was currently perched on his lap, there was no doubt in my mind he would be balls deep in her by the end of the night. The thought alone made me blush.
Whatever he said caused her to giggle like a schoolgirl before she ran her hand back and forth over his perfectly ripped chest. Nathan caught her hand and then moved it down to his crotch.
A gesture she seemed to enjoy.
Ugh, disgusting.
My knees felt like they were going to give out from underneath me.
“This was a very bad idea,” I said again, louder this time. “I’m leaving.”
Rachel caught me before I could fully turn around and shook her head sternly. “You aren’t going anywhere, Hannah, you’re going to march your fine ass over to the other side of the room and do what you have to do.”
Easy for her to say. She didn’t have to walk up to the most popular guy on campus and announce that she was assigned a research paper on him. I could hardly believe it when my teacher had handed me the slip of paper with Nathan’s name on it. The assignment? Each member of the class was given a name of someone who we went to school with.
It was our job to hunt that person down, find out as much as we could about their life, and then write a ten-page paper about what made them tick, about what made them who they were. At the end of the term, our teacher was sending the papers over to her contact at the Westfield Times to see if any of them were good enough to be picked up for a special edition they were running on the hidden challenge of college writers. It was supposed to be a great opportunity for us, and it would have been if I had gotten anyone else’s name.
The research part wasn’t the problem. There was enough information on Nathan Cummings swarming around the Internet to write a book. He was our school’s starting quarterback at only 20 years young, the NFL was already looking at him to enter the draft within the next two years. His grandfather owned one of the top sports drink franchises in the world and Nathan was in talks to be the youngest owner ever of the half a billion dollar company when his grandfather called it quits within the next five years. It was a huge scandal in the press because Nathan’s father wanted the company and he wanted it bad but the whole family was a mess, caught up in way too much turmoil for an outsider to fully understand, no matter how many articles I had read on the matter.
So, just to recap, Nathan was worshipped by the whole school, came from enough money to buy the campus a few times over, and was so good looking that girls literally stripped at the sight of him.
“Hannah!” Rachel said my name loudly, shaking my shoulders back and forth and snapping me out of the gut-wrenching thoughts that were running through my mind. “Are you listening to me? You can do this! You aren’t the same timid and scared girl that kept her nose in a book for most of high school!” She waved her hands up and down my body. “You’re sexy and fierce!”
I clutched my bag tighter to my body and closed my eyes, trying to repeat the words to myself but no matter how many times I said them internally, it did little to calm the rocks circling around my stomach. Because I wasn’t sexy and fierce, I was the same old Hannah. The one who no one noticed when she walked into a room, the one who stuttered when she got nervous, the one who had never even been kissed. No amount of hair fluffing or makeup was going to change that.
My eyes snapped open and I shook my head. “I shouldn’t have let you dress me up like this!” I waved my hands up and down the black dress Rachel had shoved me into and then pulled my jacket tighter around my waist, trying to pull the long strap across the center together to tie it. “I look ridiculous! And it’s not going to work!” I glanced back at Nathan again.
More and more people were swimming to his side.
Did I really think a new look was enough to make him hear me out? Even at my best I still couldn’t compare to the kind of girls who were surrounding him now, the kind of girls he had begging and clawing at each other for his attention. They were completely gorgeous and I – well - I was average.
Nathan Cummings didn’t do average. Not in any form.
Rachel grabbed my purse and flipped it open. “I’ve had enough!” She thrust a piece of paper into my hands and pushed my bag over her shoulders. “You are going to go over there and get him to sign this damn release! And then we’re going to celebrate!”
I glanced down at the folded up piece of paper in my hands. The damn release.
This whole thing would go away if it wasn’t for the damn release. Since there was a chance of our work ending up in a national newspaper, they were insisting every subject sign a release, just in case anything ended up going to print. Everyone else’s subject had signed willingly but Nathan wasn’t anyone else, everyone in the world would be dying to read whatever it was I had to say just because it was about him.
The notion made me sick. I wanted to win because I was the best writer, not because my subject happened to be semi famous.
“Maybe I can switch with someone,” I tried one last attempt at getting out of the football house freely. Back to the safeness of my dorm room and the familiarity of Netflix playing as I fell asleep.
Rachel pushed me a few steps further into the party. “You already tried that. There’s no switching, there’s no extra credit, there’s no way to not submit the paper for consideration, there’s NOTHING else to do but march over there and get exactly what you need from Nathan Cummings.” She flipped my body over and shoved me halfway across the room, forcing my jacket open again before she finally gave me some space to finish the walk on my own.
Here goes nothing.