Free One Week (Stolen Kiss #0.5) by Shana Norris Page B

you don’t want me to go with you, I won’t go.” Jude put his hand on the door handle. He still had a small smudge of grease on his thumb.
    “No,” I said quickly. “You can go with me.”
    He opened the door just a crack, his eyes locked on me. “Do you want me to go with you?”
    “If you want to come, then come,” I told him.
    He shook his head and opened the door wider. “That’s not an answer.” He put one brown booted foot outside on the asphalt.
    “I want you to come!” I exclaimed. “Are you happy now?”
    Jude settled back into the seat and shut the door. “If you wanted me to go with you, all you had to do was say so.”
    I scowled at him as I shifted into drive. “Do you love being difficult?” I asked.
    “It’s my specialty,” he said with a grin.
    #
    “The house was completed in 1895 by George Vanderbilt,” the tour guide said. “It boasts two hundred and fifty rooms.”
    “Plenty of space to get lost in,” Jude whispered to me.
    We had slipped into the back of one of the guided tours, even though I’d only paid our admission for the self-guided one. I felt like a rebel, even if it was something as lame as a guided tour.
    The house itself was impressive: an American castle nestled in the green mountains. The rooms were decorated with priceless items. The tour group moved on to the next room, but Jude and I hung back so he could marvel at the ornate ceiling one more time.
    “I think my whole house would fit into this room,” he said, craning his neck to look up at the ceiling. “Can you imagine living here? You wouldn’t have to see anyone in your family if you didn’t want to. You could hide out on one side of the house and pretend to be all alone.”
    “Sounds lonely,” I said. The house reminded me of my own home. Not that my house was anywhere near as big as Biltmore Estate, much to my mother’s dismay. And we’d never own the antique furniture or portraits on display. But the house had a quiet, frozen feeling to it that I knew well. It was a house waiting to be lived in, a house where the people inside couldn’t quite fill the space enough to make it cozy. The air in the house was cold, even though it was over ninety degrees outside.
    “Let’s go outside,” I told Jude, our footsteps echoing through the vast rooms as we walked.
    We followed a hall back toward the doors and then found our way to the south terrace. A few people sat on the steps or wandered around looking at the statues situated around the terrace. There were a lot of statues, figures frozen in time, unaware of the demands of life around them. I eyed a statue of a man playing a flute, his sightless eyes staring at nothing as he played on forever. Must be nice to not have to see how empty and dead a giant house like this really is , I thought.
    I walked over to the stone wall that bordered the side of the house and leaned against it, looking out at the blue mountains that stretched as far as I could see until they blended into the sky. I sucked in a deep breath, holding it in as long as I could before letting it out.
    “You okay?” Jude asked. He sat down on the wall next to me, stretching his legs in front of him.
    “I’m fine,” I said through clenched teeth. I hadn’t expected to feel this way about a house I had never seen before. It was a tourist museum, not a real home, not anymore. I wondered about the people who had once lived in the mansion and whether they had found happiness hidden away in their impressive castle. Or had they realized that everything they’d built had been a mask for what really lay underneath? No matter how well you held things together on the outside, your life could be crumbling away bit by bit on the inside. Big walls and expensive things couldn’t keep everything together.
    “When I was a kid,” Jude said softly, “we used to have a yearly pass to Biltmore. My mom loved coming here and pretending we lived in this giant house. My brother, Liam, used to try to scare