Free Angel Beach (Summer Romance Collection) by Tess Oliver Page B

would sing as they carried it out.”
    “Mom had that picture of Reeve on the television where he was sitting in front of the shop and the scoop had just fallen off his cone.” I licked icing off my lip. “Hey, how did these get here? Did you guys wait in line?”
    “Hell no,” Matt said. “Someone left them on the front door step. Maybe it was that hot chick who hates us.” He dropped the last piece of roll on the counter. “Maybe she poisoned them or something.”
    I took another bite. “If she did, we’d deserve it.”
    “Speak for yourself,” Reeve said. “I’m hitting the waves. If I see the bakery wench, I’ll be sure to thank her before I run my board over her skinny ass.” He walked outside, picked up his board, and headed out to the beach.
    “One time, Dad and I won a cool plastic dragon at the arcade.” Matt was still back at Charlie’s Ice Cream Palace.
    I finished my roll and pathetically checked the box in case Echo had written a note on it. There was nothing. Maybe they’d had extras and everyone on the road got a box. That sounded stupid even in my head. The line for their shop stretched down the entire block. They would never have that many extras. I was reading too much into it, and I had to stop before I drove myself crazy or actually convinced myself that she cared. When my mind was doing crazy shit, I knew there was only one place for me-- the water.
    Sometimes it amazed me how much time we spent sitting out in the water on our boards. My shoulders stung from sunlight and salt as Reeve and I sat, silently waiting for a decent wave. In the distance, I heard skateboards scraping the cement walkway.
    “There’s your friend,” Reeve said motioning with his head toward the sand. We hadn’t spoken two words to each other since we’d paddled out.
    I looked in the direction of the skateboarders. Echo was riding a board behind the two guys she’d been skimboarding with earlier in the week. Her long legs stretched out forever below the hem of her shorts, and her light brown hair swirled around her shoulders as she raced down the walkway. She looked in our direction for a moment as she passed by.
    “She’s not that hot,” Reeve grumbled.
    “Yeah, right, keep telling yourself that. Maybe you’ll actually believe it.” Then my mind drifted back to the night before when she’d knocked the wind out of me by telling to me to get lost, and I remembered the marks on her arms. “You tried to hit on her last night, didn’t you?”
    Reeve started pushing farther away from me. “Like I’d ever hit on that.”
    “You did and she told you to go to hell.”
    Reeve ignored me a minute then laughed. “The way you went after Courtney last night, she must have told you the same thing.”
    His words rang painfully true. She hated me as much as she hated my brother. “Yeah, she told me to go to hell too, but I’m warning you, Reeve, don’t you ever touch her again.”
    The harsh glare of the sun was no match for the harsh glare Reeve shot me across the water. “How about you stop telling me what I can and can’t do . . . little brother.”
    “You can do whatever the hell you want, jump off a cliff for all I care. Just don’t ever lay a hand on her again.”
    Reeve faced the beach for a minute then glanced behind him at the incoming swell. He looked my direction. “I don’t want anything to do with her, just like she doesn’t want anything to do with you. So it looks like you won’t be laying a hand on her either.” He dropped down onto his board and took off on the wave.
    Reeve and I surfed in the same patch of ocean for two more hours without speaking one word to each other. My final ride ended in a pretty ugly wipeout, and my face scraped the ocean floor before I managed to surface again. I felt a warm trickle of blood rolling down the side of my face, and I decided I’d had enough.
    Reeve had done his best to destroy my mood again mostly because what he’d said was true. Echo wanted