Read Online The Lonesome Young by Lucy Connors - Free Book Online Page B

game. All I had was an overwhelming want —an all-consuming need .I needed to taste her lips more than I needed to think or breathe or exist on the planet.
    So I kissed her.
    And she kissed me back.
    For one long, glorious moment, Victoria’s arms wrapped around my neck and she kissed me with a heat and passion I’d never experienced. Never believed was possible.
    When the kiss finally ended, I stumbled back a step or two and stared at her in disbelief while everything I thought I knew about girls and myself and, hell, life itself went up in flames.
    Her eyes were a little unfocused, so at least it hadn’t just been me whirling around in that tornado of feeling.
    “Holy shit,” I said reverently.
    She inhaled sharply. “Really? ‘Holy shit?’ Evidently kissing a frog doesn’t always turn him into a prince. Bad boys are called that for a reason, right? I’m the dumb one here.”
    “Victoria—”
    “Nice, Mickey . Really lovely. You might work on your charming ways before you kiss the next girl you’ve lined up, though.”
    The warmth in my chest congealed and turned icy, becoming a rock in my gut.
    “There’s no next girl lined up, and you’d better not even be thinking about the next guy,” I said flatly. “We need to figure this out. We need—”
    “We need nothing. All I need from you is that gasoline,” she snapped.
    Over the next five minutes, while I poured the gas in her tank and then watched her drive away, she never said a single word.
    Way to crash and burn, Rhodale.
    • • •
    I wasn’t exactly sure how Victoria managed to sound sexy answering a question about carpetbaggers, but somehow she did. Maybe it was the little blue dress she was wearing.
    Or maybe I was just losing it.
    Two solid weeks of watching Victoria ignore me would be enough to drive the most reasonable person to distraction, and I was a Rhodale, which meant I wasn’t on even a handshake acquaintance with reasonable. She didn’t speak to me, didn’t look at me, and didn’t answer me when I tried to talk to her. To make things worse, while her campaign of studied indifference kept running longer, her skirts kept getting shorter.
    Or maybe that part was just in my imagination, which had been working overtime trying to give me a mental picture of those long legs all the way up.
    Everything else in my life felt like it was caught in the same stasis bubble, too. Ethan, for once, had been lying low. My mom was busy with her own students; she said this year’s crop of fourth graders was the most challenging she’d ever had. Pa was around less and less in the evenings, which usually meant he was heading back down inside a bottle of bourbon.
    Football practice was same old, same old, and even my job at the gas station had been slow.
    “Do you plan to answer me sometime this class period, Mr. Rhodale, or shall I fax you a written request?” Mr. Gerard’s dry voice cut through my mental meanderings, and I looked up from the drawing of a mule I’d been doodling to see that everyone was staring at me.
    “Nobody faxes anymore,” I said, not really trying to be a smart-ass but rather buying myself time to think back and see if I could figure out what he’d asked me.
    Victoria glanced over at me, and I could almost see a hint of compassion in her eyes.
    “Kentucky declared neutrality at the beginning of the Civil War, but it didn’t last,” she said.
    He actually smiled. I thought I heard Derek gasp. Nobody had seen Gerard’s teeth in years. There’d been bets as to whether he actually had real ones or if, like fireflies over the Kentucky hills, they only came out at night.
    “Very nice, Miss Whitfield. Most people forget that. Perhaps you can manage to stay awake in my class from now on,” he said, directing that last bit at me.
    When he walked away, choosing his next victim, I leaned across the aisle. “Thanks. I owe you one.”
    She shrugged, but I noticed her cheeks turned pink. The beautiful and brilliant