His One and Only Read online

While she did so, she looked around the room, realizing if Beau could see, this probably would have been the first time he set eyes on his old bedroom since college. Before Wayne had moved Loretta into her own apartment in Birmingham, she had told Josie that Beau never came home after he went pro, preferring to occasionally fly his parents out to visit him in L.A. rather than come back to Alabama.

  “Guess he too good for this place now,” her mother had said.

  But Josie hadn’t been able to judge him. She’d started staying away from Alabama herself by then, too, mostly at Wayne’s behest. He’d claimed he couldn’t do without her but also that he couldn’t get away from work to go home with her.

  At first she’d been flattered by his desire to keep her by his side, but eventually, she’d come to see Wayne’s supposed devotion for what it really was: his way of keeping her separated from the people she loved, the people who might have helped her.

  Maybe it was a good thing Beau couldn’t see this place now, she thought to herself now. She’d suspected Mrs. Prescott wouldn’t be the kind of woman who would leave a room as a shrine to her son, even one who had been as good at football as Beau had been from the start, and she’d been right. His former bedroom now looked like it belonged in an upscale bed and breakfast with its large four-poster bed, an expensive looking Persian rug on the floor, wallpaper covered in a delicate fleur de lys pattern, a crystal chandelier, and lace curtains adorning the huge bay window that looked out onto the back lawn and the woods that lie beyond it.

  It was definitely fussier and decidedly more feminine than what Beau was probably used to. She’d once run across a feature on him in one of Wayne’s sports magazines. It had a photo of Beau in an ultra-modern and very masculine penthouse surrounded by lots of windows, sleek black and red furniture, and ample white space. A far cry from his current surroundings, that was for sure.

  She finally heard the front door close behind Miguel and said, “Just so you know, your room no longer looks like it used to. If you don’t mind taking my arm, I can give you a quick tour.”

  She stood to the side of him and held out her arm, but he didn’t make any move to step closer. Instead, he said, “Is the intercom still to the right of the door?”

  She looked over her shoulder to the little white box that would allow him to call her, no matter where she was in the house. “It sure is.”

  “I’ll use it if I need it. Now leave.”

  “But—”

  “Get out,” he said.

  She hesitated. Yes, he was being an ass, an even bigger one than he’d been in high school (and that was saying something). But after all the reading she’d done, she felt bad abandoning him in the middle of an unfamiliar room without even a cane to help him find his way around.

  “Are you sure there’s nothing else I can get you?” she persisted.

  “What part of ‘get out’ don’t you understand?” he asked before turning his head away from her voice, as if to dismiss her with both words and body.

  After a few uncomfortable ticks, she decided to do as he’d commanded. He was newly blind, she reminded herself, and needed her sympathy and understanding.

  “Oh, and Josie?” he said behind her.

  She turned back around. “Yes? Is there something I can bring you?”

  “I was just wondering if you were alive.”

  “You’re wondering if I’m alive?” she asked, frowning. Could he be having even more side effects from the concussion? “Of course I’m alive.”

  He smirked and a bit of the old Alabama drawl laced his words as he asked, “You’re not a ghost? Or maybe one of them zombies?”

  “No,” she answered, truly alarmed now and wondering if a visit to the hospital might be in order. “Can I ask why you’re asking me these questions?”

  “Because you’re working for me now,” he answered. Then he smiled in her direction, his voice flat and hard. “And it sounds to me like you’re still breathing.”

  And with that, Josie knew the amicable working relationship she’d been hoping for was nothing more than a pipe dream.

  Beau hadn’t forgotten what happened when she crossed him all those years ago. In fact, he seemed to remember every single bit of it down to the fine details. He had no intention of letting bygones be bygones. And he finally had her where she had vowed to never be.

  Right under his thumb.

  CHAPTER 3

  I SHOULDN’T HAVE COME BACK HERE, Beau thought to himself while sitting in the bay window of his old bedroom.

  He couldn’t see what lay beyond the glass, but he’d spent so much time at the window as a boy, he knew the scene by heart: an immaculate lawn, a gazebo, and a large shed that doubled as a hiding place if you wanted to get away from your life as the only child of Beau Prescott Sr., the last in a long line of Prescott steel magnates that stretched all the way back to the mid-nineteenth century.

  When Beau had lived here for real, looking at the never-changing scene had been enough to calm him down after yet another fight with his father about how he should have gotten an A+ as opposed to an A-, about how football was beneath a Prescott, about how he needed to start doing more to live up to the Prescott name.

  But he couldn’t take much comfort in the familiar scene now, since he couldn’t see it. He took off his sunglasses and rubbed a hand over his face. This damn blindness was turning his life into a nightmare.

  And it had made living in Los Angeles unbearable. Suddenly everything he’d enjoyed about his life was gone. The football, the partying—even the never-ending stream of girls had come to a standstill. After getting cleared for sex by his doctors, he’d tried to get it on with two groupies, only to find out a certain part of him hadn’t been down to party.

  Not for those two girls. Not for the one his agent had sent him in lieu of a get-well card, or the one he had hired from a discreet escort service in a fit of desperation.

  He’d asked his mother to arrange his return home partly out of frustration and partly because he couldn’t stand living in L.A. as a shadow of his former self. The last thing he’d expected upon his return home was to find Josie Witherspoon waiting for him on the goddamn front steps.

  He hadn’t even needed her to tell him who she was. Her smell, her voice, her undeniable presence—he recognized it all in an instant. And despite his worries about whether he could still get it up after the concussion, he immediately knew it was all bullshit, because his dick had gone hard as a rock as soon as she touched his arm.

  He mentally cursed his mother. It was one thing not to show up to see to him like any decent mother would have. He had long ago stopped expecting even a minimum of maternal behavior from her. But to hire Josie Witherspoon of all people…

  His cock throbbed with almost painful need just knowing she was here, in the same house. It was even worse than when they had been teenagers and Josie had decided to go and sprout some serious curves the summer before she started at Forest Brook Senior High. The summer she turned seventeen.

  He’d tried not to look, reminded himself Josie and he had practically been raised together, like brother and sister. But he definitely didn’t feel like her brother that hot afternoon when he watched her plump, heart-shaped butt swaying back and forth underneath her jean shorts as she walked out to the shed with a green apple and a stack of sci-fi books.

  The airy shed held special meaning for her, too. It had been her favorite place to read since she was eight, and often when he saw her walking out there, he’d join her with one of the “great men of industry” biographies his father was always haranguing him to read. But that afternoon, instead of grabbing a book and joining her, he’d stood frozen on the back porch, hypnotized by her beautiful backside, to the point that he didn’t hear his father come up behind him.

  “She isn’t for you, Son.”

  He turned, startled, to find his father staring at him. Hard. “I was just…” Then he trailed off, not wanting to lie, but not knowing how else to explain why he’d been ogling
Loretta’s daughter.

  “I know exactly what you were doing, Junior, and I’m telling you, she isn’t for you.”

  Beau Sr. was a few inches shorter than his son, but that didn’t make him any less intimidating when he stepped out onto the porch. “That Mindy LaSalle girl, she’s fine. A good girl from a good family. But you’re a Prescott and Prescott men don’t need to be associating with the help. Do you understand?”

  “She’s not the help,” Beau answered. “I mean, I wasn’t planning on getting with her or anything, but she’s not the help. She’s Loretta’s daughter.”

  His father leveled him with a censorious look. “You know what I mean. And if you don’t want to listen to me on this, think about Loretta, the woman you claim to love like a second mother.” He nodded toward the shed. “Loretta’s put just about near everything she’s earned in a college fund for that little gal. And she wouldn’t want you sniffing around her daughter.”

  Beau looked away and felt his face grow hot. He would never want to jeopardize her future, nor did he want to disappoint Loretta. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw his father give him a grave shake of his silver head, “She isn’t for you, Junior. Leave her alone.”

  And though Beau managed to stand up to his father about all sorts of things, including playing football, that short conversation had left him feeling guilty and uneasy. Not just because he got caught checking out Josie, but because of the how his father had made it sound like him having any kind of feelings for Josie would somehow ruin her. Plus, he already had a girlfriend, Mindy, the cute cheerleader who was a shoe-in for homecoming queen that year.

  As a result, shunning Josie had felt less like a dick move and more like something he had to do when she came bouncing up to him on the first day of the school year to ask if she could catch a ride home after football practice. He was standing with his teammates, and Josie, it seemed, still hadn’t figure out that her new curves made not only him, but also other guys look at her as more than the knobby and bespectacled kid who liked to tag along with him from time to time.

  His buddies all slid knowing looks at him, and one even asked, “How’s Mindy gonna feel about that?” just low enough that Beau could hear it, even if Josie could not.

  “Look,” he said to Josie, shifting his backpack to his other shoulder, “you can talk to me when I’m at home and I need a plate of cookies or whatever, but when we’re here, I don’t know you. You’re gonna have to take the bus.”

  His friends had snickered, and for a moment, Josie looked incredibly hurt, like a puppy who had been kicked. But to her credit, she quickly rearranged her face to a neutral setting and walked away with her chin up, like Beau wasn’t worth her hurt look or another moment of her time.

  But his cruel words got the job done. After that, he didn’t have to worry about Josie finding out just how much he liked her because she went out of her way to avoid him at school, home, or anywhere else. In fact, they didn’t exchange more than two words until her stick of a best friend decided to make moves on Mindy.

  When Beau had let Mike get him riled up on beer and big talk, he’d told himself that hunting Colin down was a matter of pride.

  But as soon as he saw Josie, his body had reacted. It had been all he could do to mask how much he wanted her under the cover of wanting to fight the boy she spent most of her time with outside of school.

  And when she’d stepped up to protect Colin from Beau, talking about how much more talented he was, he’d just snapped. Before that, he’d only been planning to scare the junior a bit, but now he wanted to punch the guy’s face in. And it had only pissed him off more when Josie jumped on his back, refusing to let go, so his only choice was to hurt her in order to get him off of her, or agree not to hurt Fairgood.

  He’d been furious as he watched them walk away, furious to the point that the plan, which took form in his head, didn’t only seem like a valid way to get around the promise he’d made not to beat up Fairgood, but also the best way to get the revenge he deserved.

  Two days after the almost-fight, he went looking for her in the shed, where she’d set up a slab of wood across two piles of extra bricks that she used as a desk. He knew this was where she preferred to study on nights when it wasn’t too hot or cold.

  However, when he found her hunched over her little makeshift desk, reading a textbook with an elegant, brass magnifying glass, he almost abandoned his plan. Yeah, she had crossed him and the one thing he’d inherited from his successful father was an in-born refusal to ever let anybody get away with that. But unlike him, Josie didn’t have a bedroom of her own, which must have made it hard to find quiet places to study even in a house as big as theirs.

  But then he remembered her calling him talentless in comparison to the guy who’d stolen his girlfriend, and he hardened his heart.

  “Well, look what we’ve got here,” he said with false camaraderie.

  She squinted up at him like a myopic squirrel then jumped out of her seat, hiding the magnifying glass behind her back. “Beau, what are you doing here?”

  “I see you got into my dad’s desk,” he said, nodding toward the magnifying glass. “It’s an antique, you know, passed down in our family for at least three centuries.”

  Josie had spunk to spare most days, but he knew Loretta had taught her from her first day at the Prescott home that she was never to touch anything she wasn’t cleaning, much less take it out to the shed for her own personal use.

  Just as he expected, she responded to his joking accusation like a Saturday sinner on Sunday morning. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But I’m going to put it back as soon as I can. Please don’t tell your daddy. It was the only one I could find in the whole house, and my mama won’t be able to get me new glasses until she gets paid at the end of the month, but I have to do my school work…”

  She trailed off when he held out a rectangular-shaped case wrapped in last year’s Christmas paper to her. “What is that?” she asked, squinting harder.

  “A gift,” he answered. “Take it.”

  She might have felt bad about stealing the magnifying glass, but that didn’t stop her from throwing him a suspicious look.

  “Why would you, Beau Prescott, be buying me, Josie Witherspoon, a gift?”

  “Because, despite what you think, I’m not the devil, and I want to make amends. Now open it, will you?”

  The look on her face said she didn’t quite believe his claim about not being the devil, but she took the present from him anyway. Then she opened the package, with the look of someone expecting a snake to pop out.

  However, her suspicion rapidly disappeared when she found the clamshell eyeglass case inside. Someone would think he’d given her a diamond necklace the way her face lit up.

  “You got me glasses?” She pulled out the cat-eye glasses and put them on, blinking her large brown eyes behind the thin lenses. “And they’re just right! How did you know my prescription?”

  “I went back, got your old glasses up off the ground, and brought them into LensCrafters. They said they could make you a new pair based on the prescription from the old pair. All I had to do was pick out some new frames. Hope you like them, they didn’t have that many cat-eye glasses in the store.”

  “I love them!” she said. Then she sheepishly admitted, “The truth is, the only reason I was wearing cat-eyes was because those were my grandma’s old frames from the sixties. You wouldn’t believe how heavy they were. I think they must have made them out of lead or something back then. But these are real light!” She took the glasses off and turned them over in her hands like they were a precious artifact. “Are these featherweight lenses?”

  “The lady at LensCrafters said those were the best kind for a prescription as strong as yours.”

  She put the glasses back on and smiled at him for the first time in almost a year. “Oh Beau, I don’t even know how to begin to thank you. I mean, you really didn’t have to. Mama and me would’ve managed, but this is just so… I don’t even ha
ve words. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

  He shrugged. “No big deal. Sorry about stepping on your glasses.”

  “Sorry about jumping on your back. I was just trying to—”

  “I know what you were trying to do,” he said, finding it hard to keep the bitterness out of his voice, even though that wasn’t part of the plan.

  She smoothed her hair, which she wore in long, synthetic braids, behind her ear. “I’m just real surprised, that’s all. I thought you hated me.”

  “I don’t hate you.”

  She snorted. “Could have fooled me.”

  Even though this had all been pre-planned, his heart started beating faster when he insisted, “I don’t hate you. If anything, I like you too much.” He cast his eyes away. “That’s why I’ve been trying to keep my distance from you since you started at Forest Brook.”

  Her eyes narrowed behind her new eyeglasses. “Now I know you got jokes, Beau Prescott. There is no way you’re giving me more than two thoughts when I’m not keeping you from beating up kids half your size.”

  He shook his head, and took a step closer to her. “Why are you finding it so hard to believe someone like me might like someone like you?”

  Now her face went from laughing to flustered. “Because I’m not blond or rich. Because I don’t look like any of the popular girls at Forest Brook.”

  “No, you don’t,” he agreed, taking yet another step closer to her. “But you’re smart and loyal to a fault. You stand your ground, and you don’t back down.”

  He took off her glasses, so he could fully see her nut-brown face without anything in the way. And his next words were completely true: “And I don’t care if you’re not blond, you’re so goddamn pretty, I always have a hard time not staring when you walk by.”

  She blinked. “Really?”

  He shook his head at her, “You got Fairgood and me mooning after you and you don’t even know it.”

  She shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. Colin and me are just friends.”

  “If Fairgood and you are just friends, that’s because you haven’t given him the green light,” he said with a lazy smirk. “Everybody at Forest Brook knows he’s got a thing for you.”