A Perfect Mistake Read online

  She stepped back, her eyes going all stricken and confused.

  “Oh, God,” she said softly.

  I stepped towards her, nauseated and also confused about how she could ever think I would do something like that. But then I realized she’d just assumed I would have been the one to do something so underhanded and despicable. Without wanting to analyze why that hurt, deeply, I just wanted her to understand that what I wanted from her in high school went beyond fucking sex. Even now, admitting that sounded so stupid and impossible. “Verity, in high school…I was….I wouldn’t have….Dammit.”

  The horn sounded again and I closed my eyes. “Fuck!”

  I watched the emotion flicker across her eyes, eyes that looked a hundred years old. I wanted to cage her, delve into why she was looking at me like I had been the one to drop this huge bomb on her. Like she was the one making connections and dealing with shock and confusion. And, what the fuck, but I wanted to wrap my arms around her, comfort her against whatever was streaking through her mind right now that had put that look in her warm eyes. I was reeling at the implications, dying to have a conversation with her, but I had Marcy in the truck.

  “I don’t believe you. I can’t be wrong. You are the liar,” she shouted at me, shouldering past me and slamming the door behind her.

  The beginnings of a headache, a dull pain in the back of my head, tightened my skull. I just stood there for a moment, trying to absorb the shock of learning what Verity really thought of me. I never even had a chance with her. She’d already made her decision about me without ever giving me an opening to defend myself.

  Resentment and anger boiled up. When I got back to the truck, Marcy said, “I thought she was a little bit nicer than that. She always seemed to be in high school.”

  “People change, Marcy,” I said as I watched the light come on in Verity’s room. I put the truck in gear, that turmoil I had experienced on her porch still roiling around. Was that true, or had I bought into the whole preacher’s daughter thing? Had I done to Verity what the town had done to the Outlaws? That didn’t sit right with me.

  As soon as we got to Marcy’s apartment and the door closed behind us, her hands were all over me. I wasn’t born yesterday. I’d known what she wanted from the moment she approached me in the bar. Her mouth fused with mine but I could only think about how hurt I was. How much I needed the comfort of someone who really wanted me.

  But as Marcy pressed her mouth to mine, that sick feeling moved over me again, so I kissed her harder to get it to go away.

  There was something decidedly lacking in heat with Marcy, but I pressed on. I wasn’t going to admit that I didn’t enjoy being with her. Except the damnedest thing happened, and I wondered as Marcy reached for the clasp on my jeans, crowding me until the backs of my knees hit the bed, how soft Verity’s lips would be, how hot against mine.

  Maybe that wasn’t fair to Marcy, but I think she just wanted to bed an Outlaw, and Booker was taken and Brax wasn’t interested. He was fucking someone else. Brax was always fucking someone else. Guess I wasn’t the only Outlaw who used stand-ins.

  What did it matter? We all looked the same.

  “Boone Outlaw,” she whispered. “It’s about time.”

  She had me out of my clothes and was having her way with me before I could even take two breaths. As I slipped inside her, Marcy said, “That’s feels so good, Booker.”

  I closed my eyes. Seriously? She had a thing for my brother? Ah, that made me understand why she’d come on to me. Aubree and Booker were quite an item. I smelled marriage in the future there. I’d never seen my brother so far gone. Marcy had to know that Booker was far out of her reach. My cell rang again, and I was glad I was fucking Marcy and couldn’t answer it.

  I pumped into her. I could only think about how it would feel to be inside Verity, and as I wrapped my hand into Marcy’s blonde hair, all I could see was midnight black. I guess we were using each other.

  Afterwards, she wrapped around me and I lay on my back in her bed, my eyes open and staring at the ceiling. I had thought this would make me feel better, but it didn’t, and Verity’s stinging words just made this whole evening even more pathetic.

  Damn, Verity, she even made sex unfulfilling. I wondered if she was still a virgin. If she’d let someone have her. All that uptight, cute, raging, face-slapping peach pit.

  I want out-of-control, can’t-live-without-you, consuming, joyous, think-about-you-all-the-time love!

  I had overheard what she’d said to Billy Joe, what she wanted and how he fell short of her expectations. I bet that took him down a notch.

  My heart constricted a little at the memory of her heartfelt and ferocious words. Who would settle for less than that? I wouldn’t.

  I wanted to get close to Verity, and I felt that hollow feeling again. The one I had felt the night of the graduation party.

  But I wasn’t that guy anymore.

  I wanted to know her. People who made those kinds of statements were very determined and passionate people. Here I thought she would be pious, quoting the Bible, and mercy this and mercy that.

  But it looked like I was wrong. Had she always had this fire inside her?

  There was only one way to get Verity to see me for who I really was. It wasn’t going to be easy, but I was determined. She was like a microcosm of this town I lived in. Jumping to conclusions, using me as a scapegoat, ignoring the fact that I had never acted like that in my life.

  I drifted, but woke up each time Marcy moved. Finally I fell asleep and started dreaming. It was a dream I’d had often and it was always about Verity.

  Her mouth consumed me and I was lost. In a daze, I can’t find my way kind of lost. No bearings. No anchor. Nothing except the smooth slide of her skin beneath my hands. That enticing skin that peeks out of a neckline, or the cuff of a shirt, or the creamy expanse of a bared shoulder and teases and taunts.

  Skin on the forbidden body of a forbidden girl.

  Skin I touched and caressed and held as she moved above me like something elusive and intangible. Like a wind through my soul. My dick deep inside her.

  I shifted and groaned and tried to hold on to the sensations, but when something is forbidden, it always becomes like a dream that slips through your hands like smoke.

  A loud noise intruded just as she dipped her head, put her sweet mouth to my ear. She had a secret she wanted to tell me. It was coiled in her muscles that moved and contracted beneath my hands, it was in her brown eyes, in the line of her delicate jaw.

  I wanted to hear it.

  Yet, I didn’t.

  Irresponsible.

  That used to be me. So maybe I hadn’t quite given up on the small part of me buried inside that still rebelled.

  The noise pushed against the sound of her voice and I couldn’t hear what she had to say. I jerked awake and an ambulance squealed past the apartment complex. I rolled out of Marcy’s bed, my what-the-fuck reaction telling me that the dream had felt almost real.

  Same damn dream.

  Same damn girl.

  Same damn raging hard-on.

  Holy Mary Verity Fairchild.

  I looked for my clothes, stumbling against a chair in the unfamiliar room, jerking my head towards the bed. I didn’t want to wake Marcy up and deal with her. I thought it best I just slip out. I pulled my t-shirt over my head, slipped into my underwear and jeans. It was still dark outside, and when I looked at the illuminated time on the dash, I realized I had only been asleep for about an hour. Dead tired, I headed home, the persistent headache beating in time with my heart.

  Letting myself inside, I locked the door behind me and took a quick shower, washing off the remnants of my encounter with Marcy. I padded to my bed and slipped under the covers, the cool sheets feeling good against my naked skin. I hated sleeping in clothes. Again, I lay on my back staring at the ceiling. I realized that I didn’t like being a stand-in for my brother and I shouldn’t use a stand-in for Verity.

  I didn’t really w
ant to see Marcy again, now that I had a dedicated mission to get Verity to see who I really was.

  Damn, that dream had seemed so real. I shifted uncomfortably, cursing my stupid-ass high school self, especially about the night of the graduation party. I hadn’t done anything to her. I couldn’t have. I was passed out in the bed of my truck. I sure as hell never dropped X on her.

  When my alarm went off in the morning, I woke up with that same headache, but it was pounding. The pressure of all the shit that had gone down last night was obviously lingering. That dream was pretty intense and I’d had it several times over the course of a year. I’m not exactly Mr. Philosophy, but damn. What was the meaning?

  You want to do her, fool.

  With a huff of exasperation, I swung my legs to the floor and stretched. Heading for my dresser drawer, I got out a jock strap and a pair of shorts.

  The sun was just inching up on the horizon, my favorite time of day on the bayou. I went outside and spent twenty minutes watering and tending to my plants. It was a ritual that got me into the day and filled up my well.

  Back inside I headed to the kitchen to grab a bottle of water out of the fridge and a hand towel from the laundry.

  Even after all that busyness, the dream still lingered as I walked into my weight room.

  I grabbed a stack of weights and loaded up the bar. Slipping underneath, I pressed up and shifted the bar off its supports, grunting with the weight. I wanted to push her out of my mind, and for the next forty-five minutes of intense lifting, I managed. Toward the end of the session, I heard my front door open and Wild West’s voice.

  “Boss, you got your sorry ass out of bed?”

  “Weight room,” I hollered. “Grab me another bottle of water.”

  I heard him in the kitchen and he soon filled up the doorway. Deacon West. Deke for short, or, as everyone had called him in high school, Wild West. He was a Southern boy through and through. His baseball cap was pulled low over his blond hair and forehead, and he was dressed in jeans and a red t-shirt that had Outlaw Landscaping across his broad chest. His blue eyes twinkled as he watched me grunting and puffing.

  “Told you not to call me that. Gives me the hives.”

  “What? Boss?”

  “Yeah, that,” I said sitting up, catching the bottle he chucked at me, unscrewing the cap and guzzling it down. Geezus, I was parched.

  “Ain’t you the master?”

  “You’re going to be unemployed.”

  “Would serve him right,” Savannah Hawkins said, standing next to him in the doorway. She was eighteen and my other employee. Like Deke, she was blonde, her hair a cute, short cut. She had a no-nonsense attitude and a tomboy spirit. “But, then I couldn’t drop all the shit jobs on him.”

  I laughed.

  “Ha!” Deke said, “That’s right. You couldn’t get along without me. Picked up your design boards. We’ve already been out to Mrs. Johnson’s. That little old lady not only loves her cats, but she knows how to fill a Southern boy’s belly. Her coffee cake? Shoot. She asked after you.”

  “Did she really?”

  “Yeah, wants to know when you’ll be stopping by again. She wants to talk to you about doing a koi pond.”

  “Koi pond? What the hell? Those cats are going to be licking their chops.”

  Deke laughed, his white teeth flashing. “That’s exactly what I thought.”

  Savannah shook her head. “I swear I almost lost it, but the customer is always right.”

  “What’s next on your list?”

  “Aubree’s momma’s place. We’re going to be there for a while. A lot of work to do.”

  “Okay, sounds good.” I rubbed at my temple. This headache sucked. I was going to have to break down and take something for it.

  Deke asked, “You okay?”

  “Yeah, just a damn headache.”

  He nodded. “We got some calls about more maintenance and a few for landscaping. I left the messages on the hall table as you come in the front door. Boards are in your office. Do you need any help at the church today?”

  “No, I’m just going to show the reverend my sketches and work out the particulars. I’ll need you and Savannah later on, though, when I do the installations. ”

  “Will do.”

  “Wait a second, Deke. Did you finish that project I gave you?”

  He paused. “Almost. I just have a little bit of painting to do.”

  “How much longer?”

  He was quiet as he calculated the time. “A day, maybe. Those plans you drew were amazing. The revver is going to be blown away.”

  “I didn’t have you build it for the reverend. Okay sounds good, tomorrow then. Let me know. Then you can deliver all of it to the church and we can assemble it.”

  “You got it. Anything else?”

  “Nope.”

  “See you later…boss.”

  He chuckled as they left. I joked with him about firing him, but Deke had gotten a full ride to Columbia University and I was going miss him in the fall. Smart kid, and he’d be a good engineer, unless he decided that software development was more interesting.

  It wasn’t until I was in the shower that Verity slipped back into my pounding head. She had been and still was off limits. I wasn’t going to fall into the same trap that my brother Booker had with Aubree Walker. I wasn’t going to idealize Verity. No, not that, but the three of us had set her apart from the other girls in this town because she was a preacher’s daughter.

  Now I had discovered that she had flaws just like all the girls who weren’t preacher’s daughters.

  Fuck knows I had enough of my own flaws to understand that.

  I knew who I was—that had been hammered home enough throughout my life.

  I dried off, trying not to think about the way she’d turned me on in my dream. It couldn’t be real. Again, no idealizing.

  My dick hardened, and I tried even harder to ignore my purely male reaction to her, in spite of the fact that she’d accused me of doing something terrible.

  I was interested in her, even my dick knew that. No matter how much I told myself I wasn’t, or told Booker, or told Braxton. Hell, my subconscious laughed at me every time I fell asleep. She was there enticing me with not only her smokin’ body, but her.

  Weird thing is, the only interaction we’d ever had was at the graduation party last year. And with high school over and the future before me, I had felt defeated even before I could start.

  I freaked out sometimes when I thought about how wasted, how messed-up I was in high school. And if it hadn’t been for Booker seeing something more in me, something worth believing in, I don’t know where I’d be.

  The only interaction we had now? Every time we were in the same room, she scowled at me angrily, and she had slapped me with a look on her face that had made my gut clench up. I understood the anger.

  But what I couldn’t understand was why she always looked at me with that bruised accusation.

  Like I had hurt her.

  How?

  I didn’t even know her. Yesterday was the extent of my interaction with Holy Mary Verity. I hadn’t said more than hi to her the whole time she’d been on my radar.

  But the part of the dream where I was deep inside her always seemed so real. Like a fragment of a memory.

  I was absolutely sure I’ve never touched her. And just as sure she’d never even thought about touching me.

  I had to talk to her, clear the air, make her understand who I was then and that I was different now. It was vital to make her understand that I would never have done such a thing. Especially not to her. Everyone in the town thought poorly of me, I was used to that; but it bugged me too much to think that Verity did, too.

  I had to do something about it, even as the anger jabbed at me again at how easily she had jumped to the conclusion that I was the one who had spiked her drink.

  And, something else. I didn’t want to invade her privacy, but what the hell had happened to her after she’d consumed t
he X?

  And based on the dream I keep reliving, I began to wonder if I had played a role in it.

  #

  Verity

  He didn’t remember!

  Now I had something else to make me feel like shit, guilty and peeved to no end. All this time I thought he just didn’t care, but he’d blacked out and I didn’t know. Everything about Boone shifted inside my head and I had to reassess my whole perception of him. The fact that I had taken advantage of him, unjustly blamed him, weighed heavily on my mind. If only I’d had a chance to talk to him afterwards…maybe…I cut off my thoughts. What I had done was done and there was no going back.

  Boone just didn’t remember. I thought he had tried to duck me when I was looking for him, but that also wasn’t the case. I had to face the fact that I had screwed up. The miscommunication and misunderstanding from that night was starting to pile up.

  I stood by the window as I did every day and watched him. Why? I didn’t know. He pulled me here every day, like a ritual. Now, part of what I had kept hidden was out in the open. He knew why I was mad at him. But his denial rang all too true. If that was the case, who could have done it? If it was someone I knew and trusted…that would be awful.

  The emptiness expanded until I almost drowned in the pain of what was securely locked away inside. Deep inside. Something so devastating that if I gave it free rein I wouldn’t recover.

  I stared at him. Was I pulled here to watch because we were now linked by something that connected us? Something important and life-changing? Was it because I was trying to understand who he was? Who he had been? The boy who had been in most of my classes. Even though he’d never approached me, I had often felt the weight of his eyes on me. Eyes that were often glazed, I suspected, with drink or drugs. There were so many days when he’d looked miserable and beat down. Days when I’d wanted to talk to him and soothe whatever troubled those heartbreakingly blue eyes.