Free B00NRQWAJI by Nichole Christoff

Not just physically but emotionally, too. And it turned out, Barrett might be profoundly unworthy of my trust—and even if he wasn’t, he sure as hell didn’t trust me in return.
    But right then, sitting with me behind his grandma’s house, Barrett looked me in the eye.
    His voice was diamond hard as he said, “I wasn’t going to fuck you the other night, and I’m not going to fuck you now.”
    Anything I might’ve said in reply got stuck in the back of my throat. There was no comeback to Barrett’s statement. Because I’d tipped my hand in a game I didn’t even know we were playing.
    My face hot with embarrassment, I thundered down the remaining steps. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. Go into the house, for a start.
    But I didn’t get very far. Because Barrett followed me. He seized my wrist.
    It was the wrist I’d broken earlier in the autumn when my father, the senator, had maneuvered me into working for him. I’d almost met my death thanks to him. But Barrett had refused to let me face that danger alone.

    He said, “Pamela came to me in the barn one April night. She was a virgin, Jamie, and she didn’t want to be. She told me that in no uncertain terms.”
    Past his shoulder, I could see the barn, all red and rough-hewn. I didn’t want to think of him there. Not with anyone—and especially not with a fourteen-year-old girl.
    Barrett let go of my hand. “She told me she was in love with me. Not a crush. Not lust. Love, she said. She’d snuck out of her parents’ house and cut across the fields because she knew I’d be alone, doing my chores. She was barefoot. In her nightgown. It was some dark red, silky thing. It clung to her because of the dew. She slipped her fingers under the straps of it, dropped it to the ground. She wasn’t wearing a stitch under it.”
    Anxiety formed a black hole in the pit of my stomach and drew every ounce of my strength into it.
    “Did you, ah, take her up on her offer?”
    “No. She was a girl, Jamie, younger than my kid sister. She should’ve been playing with Barbies. I was a couple weeks away from my eighteenth birthday. I had plans to go to college and become an army officer. I was a man and I knew it.”
    “So what did you do?”
    “I scooped up her nightgown and threw it at her. I told her to put it on. Then I got the hell out of there.”
    “You left her. In the barn.”
    “Yes.”

    But Barrett hesitated.
    “And no,” he said.
    Fear, like a hot spike, pierced me. “No?”
    “I was halfway out the door when she told me she understood. She said if we’d met at a different time in our lives, we might’ve had a chance. Right then, she seemed more grown-up than anyone I’d ever known. I thought, wow, the guy who falls for her someday will be one lucky fellow. I hoped she knew that. I wanted her to know it. So I…I kissed her. Just once. On the mouth. I shouldn’t have done it.”
    “Oh, Adam. I’m sorry.”
    And I was. I was sorry he felt so bad for a girl who’d tried desperately to be a woman. I felt sorry for her, too.
    At thirty-eight, I was a long way from fourteen. Still, I could remember the sensation of youth. The feeling of power, that my body was strong and svelte and maybe even sexy. The disgust in realizing some men looked at me as an object. And the frustration that some regarded me as a childlike nonentity no matter how I saw myself.
    Pamela would’ve felt all these things and more.
    “She…she took the kiss as encouragement,” Barrett admitted. “I set her straight and she got upset. I offered to drive her home, but she ran out of the barn crying.”
    Barrett scrubbed a shaking hand along his scruffy jaw. “I should’ve gone after her, Jamie, but to tell you the truth, I was glad she left. I told myself it was a ten-minute walk through the old orchard and across her dad’s lower pasture to her place. She’d be fine. I mean, she wasn’t lost in a dark alley somewhere. I figured, what could happen in a meadow in ten