Free Love Story by Jennifer Echols Page A

latte, and I watched him suck the heart into his mouth.
    “You’re going into business with my grandmother,” I said. “I know you want to leave the stable boy behind. I’m trying to leave that whole life behind and get out of your way. The internship will help me do that.”
    His tongue peeked out of his mouth. He licked a bit of the foam heart off his upper lip.
    “I know you’re angry with me, Hunter, and I understand why. But I honestly never meant to offend you. My only real crime is to step aside and give you a stab at millions of dollars and a hundred and forty-two horses.”
    “A hundred and forty-seven,” he corrected me. Of course they’d bought and sold and bred them over the summer. Because he was buzzed, he couldn’t resist reminding me that the farm went on without me.
    He set his mug down. “I won’t tell Gabe.”
    I ignored his patronizing tone. I was growing more desperate by the minute. “Don’t tell anyone else, either. It might get back to Gabe.”
    The corner of his mouth quirked into a smile. “I won’t.”
    “And ask Manohar and Brian not to spread it around.”
    “I’ll ask. I can’t promise anything. You may owe them a favor.”
    I stared dumbly at him. He was blatantly toying with me now. Hunter was very persuasive. He could have convinced Manohar and Brian of anything if he’d wanted to. He did not want to.
    And what kind of favor could I possibly do for them? Unlike last spring when I could have gotten them admitted to the Churchill Downs clubhouse, I had no clout, no money, nothing left to offer.
    Maybe that was Hunter’s point.
    I’d done all I could do to save my internship, though. My boss was standing at the counter, reminding me that my break time was almost over. I raked back my chair. “Thank you, Hunter. And again, I’m really sorry about this. I know we both wish we could go back to enjoying New York and pretending each other didn’t exist.” I reached for my mug to take it back to the counter with me.
    Before my fingers touched the ceramic, Hunter grabbed my hand and gazed up at me.
    I hated how my body responded as if he were my boyfriend, not my classmate or even my sworn enemy. Maybe heat would have shot across my chest regardless because he was handsome, confident, a force of nature. But I was afraid I had done most of this damage to myself. In real life we hadn’t engaged in a friendly conversation since the summer before the seventh grade, save one sparkling night last May. But in my mind I’d already written Almost a Lady, the entire novel. In my mind, we’d slept together.
    His hand still squeezed my hand. His thumb swept across my palm, and as I watched, the pupils dilated in his bright blue eyes. I wondered whether in his mind we’d slept together, too.
    He released my hand and nodded toward my chair. “Sit down another sec. Your grandmother wanted me to bring you something you left at home.” He reached around for his backpack.
    Obediently I collapsed into my chair because my legs felt weak, and because I really did need him on my side. But I said quickly, “I don’t want it.”
    He broke into a playboy grin, as if we were flirting instead of dancing around a sensitive topic. “How do you know you don’t want it? You haven’t even seen what it is.”
    “Whatever it is, I left it on purpose.”
    He pulled it from his backpack and placed it on the table between us. My music player and earbuds.
    The last time he’d handed me my music player, at my grandmother’s Derby party last May, he’d saved me from a convo with Whitfield Farrell, a twenty-one-year-old college dropout who would inherit the famous farm next door. Whitfield was widely known for his drunken exploits at the horse parties, and widely rumored to want in my pants. My grandmother had ordered me to be nice to him because she did business with his dad.
    So Whitfield put his hand on my ass. I was not far from slapping him and then taking whatever punishment my grandmother dished