My Life as a Holiday Album (My Life as an Album #5) - L.J. Evans Page 0,65

hell was I letting my playboy of a cousin anywhere near Grace. Not if I could help it.

♫ ♫ ♫

Two hours later, and all I’d been able to do was watch my fucking cousin play with Grace. Literally. Figuratively. She was drunk. Drunker than I’d seen her since she turned twenty-one. I watched as Dalton’s hands caressed her shoulder as he went by her to the other side of the pool table, and I suddenly wanted to take the stick and shove it so far up his ass that he wouldn’t ever be able to sit on his horse again.

“Wow, that’s some glare,” Edie said, drawing my eyes briefly from Grace and the way her skirt barely covered her underwear as she bent to assess the balls on the table. I was going to absolutely lose my shit.

“What happened?” Edie asked.

“What do you mean?”

She laughed. “Between you and Grace. It’s obvious you’re in the thick of some lover’s quarrel, so tell me, what happened?”

I sighed, took a huge swig of the whiskey in my glass, and then, without even looking at my cousin, told her the truth. “Friends With Benefits happened.”

She scoffed. “You’re too old to believe that ever could work.”

“You’re right. But that’s what she said she wanted, and I was the asshole who let myself believe it.”

“But it’s clear you don’t want that either, so what’s the problem?”

“The night Uncle Derek called to ask if I could replace Mitch, I literally walked out on her. Like…left her in my bed…and didn’t call for a week.”

Edie punched me in the shoulder.

“You shit,” she said.

I nodded. I was. “It’s worse.”

“How can it possibly be worse?”

“That was the first time we’d ever even kissed. It was the first we’d let ourselves give in to the attraction…and I just walked away.”

“You’re worse than Ty,” Edie said.

I hated myself because it was true. Ty was actually just an asshole on the outside. I was an asshole on the inside. It was a much worse situation.

“So you’re just going to let Dalton make the moves and not try to fix it?” she said quietly, as if she could see my insides and the self-battery I was doing. Maybe she could. Edie was almost as good at reading us as our parents.

“What am I supposed to do? Lock her in a room, tie her down, and force her to listen to some one-liners about needing her more than air and not realizing it until she was gone?” I asked.

Edie smiled. “That’s a pretty good line. I’d definitely use it.”

I looked back at Dalton and Grace in time to see him whispering in her ear, wrapping an arm around her bare middle, and before I could blink, he had his lips on hers. It wasn’t the color red that filled my eyes. Or green. It was black—like, death kind of black—because I was going to kill him and my mama and Uncle Matt were going to hate me.

There was no way he was going to touch her and make it out alive.

Grace

NEVER KISSED ANYONE WITH BLUE EYES BEFORE YOU

”You're getting these brown eyes seeing color, it's so true

I never kissed anyone with blue eyes before you.”

Performed by Gwen Stefani

Written by Stefani / Tranter / Busbee

I was drunk. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d actually been this drunk. Maybe not since Mayson—I mean, Asshole—Cole, and I had downed three bottles of champagne on New Year’s Eve after I’d turned twenty-one.

The dark wood panels of the bar blurred a little as I turned back to the pool table where I was still—even drunk—beating the pants off Dalton. Dalton, the flirty cowboy who, if I squinted my eyes, looked enough like Mayson—Asshole—to ease my shredded heart.

I could pretend it was his hands that kept grazing my arm, my hip, and the exposed skin below my crop top. I was drunk enough that I wanted him to touch me. Not the cowboy, but the Asshole.

I risked a glance in his direction. He was sitting at the bar, but he hadn’t taken his eyes off of me since Dalton had suggested we play. He wasn’t smiling. Mayson hardly talked at all until Edie sat down next to him.

Damn.

I knew as soon as I said his real name―even in my head―instead of the Asshole I’d been calling him for months, I’d weaken. I’d cave. I’d let him apologize. I’d forgive him. But forgiving him would mean letting him back in. Opening my heart again. And I wasn’t sure I could take