Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 75592 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 378(@200wpm)___ 302(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75592 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 378(@200wpm)___ 302(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
Sylvie shakes her head. “You shouldn’t be sorry.”
“I’m sorry it’s making you feel bad about yourself and I think it’s a brilliant idea for you to change your last name to Blackburn. Your mother wanted you to be with Ethan, and I have to believe that means she’d want you to share his last name too.”
Sylvie’s eyes round with pure desire to believe those words. “Really?”
“Really,” he assures her. “You get your father working on that as fast as possible, okay?”
My conflicted feelings make my stomach roll. How easy it is for Gabe to grant respect to Sylvie, Ethan and the Blackburn name. Gone is the ire for our family and the shame in having a connection to it. He gives it so willingly to Sylvie and yet denied it all to me.
I’m not selfish enough to try to refute that this is an apples-and-oranges situation. He and I were barely nineteen, trying to navigate this ages-old feud between our families. Now Gabe is older, more mature.
Sylvie is also his blood, the closest tie he has to his beloved sister. He’d gladly give his niece the world. I wasn’t even quite his girlfriend. More of an infatuation if I had to put a label on what we had.
At least, that’s how I felt in the end. The same old arguments took up the precious moments we had to steal to be together.
“Gabe, we can’t keep hiding. Let’s tell our families.” That was my mantra. My most fervent wish.
His was radically different. “Kat, you know we can’t. It’ll be a disaster. Do you think our families will just accept this? It’ll reignite everything.”
Over and over again, the same old words. The same wishes and denials. And yet, I couldn’t walk away from him. My heart was involved and I was sure, deep down, his was right along with me. That when it truly mattered, Gabe would be brave enough to step under the microscope of our families’ scrutiny and we’d both force them to accept that the feud was ending with us.
It didn’t work out that way and even after eight years apart and plenty of moving on, I’m still as bitter and resentful as I was back then.
I was making my way across the quad, the crisp autumn air of my sophomore year filled with the chatter and laughter of students back from fall break. While Gabe and I managed to see each other a few times, now that we were back on campus, we could be freer to be the couple we clearly had become. We still stayed in the shadows but the acreage was greater here in Lexington than it was back home in Shelbyville.
I was on my way to meet Gabe at his off-campus house. His roommate was away for the weekend and we had unfettered time to ourselves. I was running a little early but Gabe had given me a key to his place, surely a sign that he was ready to commit even deeper to me. I smiled as I crossed an intersection, only a few blocks from his house. Maybe I’d strip down naked and just wait in bed for him.
The one thing Gabe excelled at was getting me to release my inner sex goddess. I never knew physical intimacy could be so profound and yet liberating at the same time. He made me feel beautiful, no more so than when he was worshipping me in bed.
My head was in the stars when I reached his house so I didn’t really see Derek Mardraggon until I almost ran into him. He was coming down the porch steps, his cell phone pressed to his ear as he was talking to someone.
Derek was Gabe’s first cousin, second son to Terrance Mardraggon. He and Gabe weren’t overly close, but Derek was a freshman and Gabe had been helping him navigate first-year life at the University of Kentucky. I was so shocked to see him, and him me, that we came to a stop and just stared at each other.
My heart pounded as I realized this did not look good, me waltzing up to Gabe’s place as if I belonged there. While I wanted nothing more than for me and Gabe to tell the family, I knew that this was not the way to do it. Mind buzzing with potential excuses as to why I was here, it hit me that I was merely walking down the block. I wasn’t necessarily headed to Gabe’s place as far as Derek knew.
With that in mind, I continued walking down the sidewalk, intending to make a wide berth around where Derek stood at the bottom of Gabe’s steps. My eyes were on the ground, my shoulders hunched as I held tight to the pack on my back, hoping it would look like nothing more than a Blackburn wanting to avoid confrontation with a Mardraggon.