Hard Edge - Tess Oliver Page 0,28
house looking fucking adorable with a bandage on each knee. Almost from the second I’d arrived in Mayfair, the one person I wanted, needed, to see was Kenna. I was sure she’d help me hold onto Grady a little longer and she had. But there was more to it than that. Spending time with her had reminded me of all the reasons why Grady and I had been so crazy about her. She was someone who you always wanted to spend time with, and when she wasn’t around, nothing seemed quite right.
A long, golden strand of hair curled across her mouth. She brushed it away and tucked her hands in the back pockets of her shorts as she walked up the driveway. I’d used her scraped palms and knees as an excuse to touch her. It had been worth every damn minute.
I leaned past the opened hood of my truck and looked down at her knees. “Trinket, you really rock those bandages.”
“Oh, trust me, I know.” She smiled as she walked up next to me and glanced into the truck engine.
“You smell like sugar and vanilla, a mouth-watering combination, and coupled with those bandaged knees—Lethal, baby.”
“Yep, I know that too. What are you up to under the hood? Holy moly, wait, is that the pirate flag I sewed for the tree house?” She headed toward the backyard gate. “The tree house is still standing?” She reached over to open the gate. “I’ve got to climb up there. Is it still safe?”
I shrugged and followed her. “Guess there’s only one way to find out.”
Kenna strode into the yard and stopped beneath the giant oak. The tree house had been a summer project when we were kids. Kenna’s dad had helped. It was rustic and rough, but fairly impressive considering we’d built the thing out of old wood and our imaginations. Kenna had pounded in a lot of the nails herself. She’d also added to the coolness of our home built club house by hand sewing a black pirate flag, skull and all, to be flown off the top.
I stood back and watched her. She’d pulled on some hiking boots, and they looked hot with her long, sleek legs and jean shorts, scraped knees and all.
She smiled up at the flag. “That felt skull looked a whole lot more like a skull when I was ten. But I was impressed with myself at the time.”
She walked up to the first rung of the tree ladder, a series of wood pieces that had been hammered to the trunk of the tree. She smiled back at me over her shoulder, and a memory of her as a girl, climbing up with a bag of marshmallows and playing cards, came back to me.
“Are you coming up?” Her voice popped me back to the present.
“I’m right behind.”
With the athletic grace that always made her fun to watch, no matter what the activity, Kenna climbed the splintery ladder up to the tree house. She stopped near the top to look down at me. “Thought you were right behind.”
“Yep, but I was having too much fun with the view from below.”
“You cad. Some things never change,” she said as she climbed up into the tree house.
“So damn true,” I muttered to myself.
“What?” she called down.
“Nothing.” I climbed the ladder up to the house.
Kenna stood in the center of the box that was once a well-used playhouse, hideout and fort for keeping an eye on the enemies advancing toward the gates.
“It looks a lot smaller now.” Kenna said as she walked over to the wall where we used to carve pictures, treasure maps and even secret messages in the soft lumber planks. It was a heavy reminder of our childhood and our time with Grady. The bright mood she’d climbed up with seemed to have disappeared.
I watched her as she ran her fingers along the wood, stopping occasionally to read something. The smooth skin on her shoulders glowed like cream as she reached up to touch letters on the wall. Until this week, I hadn’t seen the all grown up version of Trinket, but none of it disappointed. She was every bit the heartbreaker as she was at sixteen, when she could skip into a room and stop my breath with one glance my direction. It was all still there, those conflicting feelings of wanting someone so badly, and all the while knowing she was not for me. She’d laughed off the mention of her childhood crush, and