Free Tease by Sophie Jordan Page A

said.
    He stepped forward, his biker boots crunching over the snow as he closed the distance between us. He stopped right in front of me, his hands buried in the pockets of his leather jacket. I shivered, achingly aware that I’d left my coat inside and was freezing my ass off out here.
    “You had this panicked look in your eyes.” He tapped the side of his head once. “It didn’t take a genius to put two and two together. You thought you’d seen the last of me. I get it. You didn’t want your friends to know you were slumming it with me last night.”
    I worked my lips a little before finding my voice. “That’s not it at all.” I shook my head.
    He shrugged like he didn’t care either way.
    “I was embarrassed,” I admitted. “But not because of you. I didn’t want my roommates to know I passed out and had to rely on some stranger to take care of me. God, they’d stage an intervention.”
    He considered me for a moment.
    “Not my finest hour, I know,” I added, scuffing the ground with the toe of my boot. And then we just stared at each other. Him looking at me. Me looking at him. Like we were trying to figure each other out. I doubted I could ever do that. This guy . . . a boy who’d been to war, who’d seen people die all around him, was not like anyone I had ever met. He’d lost his cousin, and when he returned home it wasn’t to family and friends waiting for him. Not from what I had just seen anyway. Beth looked almost ill at the sight of him. His mother was gone, remarried, and he’d told me yesterday that his grandfather died a year ago. Probably while he was stationed over there. Had he even come home for the funeral?
    “What’s your last name, Emerson?” he asked.
    “Wingate.”
    Dark eyes with gold shards flecked throughout drilled into me. “You’re trouble, Emerson Wingate.”
    Funny. That’s what I had been thinking about him since we first met. And yet here I was. Talking to him. Baiting him. Even though I felt like I was skating on thin ice around him—one sudden move and I’d go plunging under—I was here.
    “I know. I’m not your type, right?”
    The air felt suddenly thick and I wished I could grab those words back, stuff them down my throat. I actually sounded like I was fishing for him to say he liked me. That he cared.
    For a second I had forgotten he wasn’t my type—I was so focused on him. On the fact that he found me thoroughly resistible. I’d let that little fact get under my skin. Stupid, stupid, stupid .
    With him, I couldn’t be in charge, and I needed to never forget that.
    “I don’t have a type.” His deep voice rumbled across the few inches between us.
    I nodded dumbly, humiliated, but relieved that he wasn’t going to protest and play along with me by insisting I was his type. I opened my mouth, about to add, me either , when he said, “But if I did, it would be you.”
    I gawked at him, shocked. If he didn’t look so displeased at his admission, I’d think he was complimenting me. Or flirting.
    My phone rang and I pulled it out, grateful for the distraction. I cringed when I saw it was my mother. I pressed the mute button.
    “No one you want to talk to?”
    “Just my mother. I don’t need to talk to her.”
    “Not close with your mom?”
    I shrugged. “Are you close with yours?”
    “Yeah. She raised me all alone. My dad was never around, so it was just us and my grandfather growing up. I haven’t seen her much since I got back. She married and moved to Boston.” The corner of his mouth kicked up and my heart gave a stupid flutter. I just got an almost smile. And he was talking more to me than he ever had. “But I take her calls at least.”
    I bit the inside of my cheek, resisting the urge to defend myself and explain just how different my mother was from the kind of mom who baked cookies and made her kids lemonade. My mom was the type who stood by as her daughter was hurt and then insisted she forget it. She wouldn’t have worked