Page 3 of The Love Dare
“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 forAll-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 isnota 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. “Igo 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.
