 by Saffron A. Kent.jpg)
Total pages in book: 199
Estimated words: 200280 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1001(@200wpm)___ 801(@250wpm)___ 668(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 200280 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1001(@200wpm)___ 801(@250wpm)___ 668(@300wpm)
No, her biological clock isn’t ticking, but she’s desperate for unconditional love. Rejected by all except her brother and soon to be married off by her father for financial gain, she aches for someone to hold close and call hers.
Enter Ledger Thorne. Soccer god, devastatingly handsome and her brother’s rival.
Once upon a time they had a thing. A beautiful thing. But while Tempest thought she was madly in love, Ledger was only using her for petty revenge.
So Tempest has a plan: seduce the sexy jerk who broke her heart, use him to get pregnant and then leave him in the dust like he left her, to marry a stranger.
Only the problem with making babies is that it doesn’t feel like revenge. It feels a lot like that thing they used to have: Hot and stormy, and intense and intimate.
But Tempest isn’t a fool. She’ll stick to the plan.
Because wasn’t it Ledger who turned their beautiful thing into something ugly?
Now it’s her turn…
NOTE: This is a STANDALONE set in the world of Bardstown, a St. Mary’s Rebels spin-off.
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
Part 1
Chapter One
Three years ago
If they ask me how I met the love of my life, I’ll tell them it was at a soccer game.
I’ll tell them it was fate.
Because I wasn’t supposed to be there, see.
I was supposed to be back in New York, at school, attending my last class for the day. But in a moment of wildness, I ditched it and snuck out of school to go see my brother play in Bardstown. I thought I’d surprise him. Mainly because it’s very rare for me to go see him play. Not only do I live at a boarding school in New York and can’t attend most games, but also because he’s always insisted that he didn’t want me around his asshole teammates; he’s super protective like that.
But on that day I thought, why not?
I’d just received an early sixteenth birthday present from my parents: a sleek black car. And while I shouldn’t technically be driving yet, that still wasn’t enough of a reason for me not to go.
So I went.
And there he was.
My brother’s teammate.
It happened in a flash.
Like in the romance novels that I eat up for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
I saw him flying across the field, his powerful legs taking him at a speed that seemed humanly impossible. His long-ish hair whipping in the wind, his uniform sticking to his tall and muscular body. And the way he kept scoring goal after goal, dribbling the ball, heading it, dodging the players of the opposing team, flipping himself in the air like gravity didn’t hold him down like it does to the rest of us.
And I just… fell.
For him.
I know people say love at first sight isn’t really a thing.
But meh, what do people know?
They don’t know how electric I felt in that moment. How thrilled and euphoric and just so fucking enamored by him. They don’t know that I wanted to jump and scream on the bleachers that day. Cheer and clap for him when the game was over and they won.
Oh, and they absolutely do not know, and hence can never understand, that amidst all the cheers and excitement at the victory, he looked at me.
He saw me across the space.
His eyes landed right on me and that was it.
That was the moment our love story began.
But all epic love stories have a problem, don’t they?
Something that keeps lovers apart.
Some hurdle that threatens to destroy their happiness and leave them brokenhearted forever.
Our does too.
And one of the problems in our love story — quite possibly the biggest, or let’s say the second biggest — is that it’s imaginary.
It’s fake. It’s made up.
It’s all in my head. And my heart.
In my sick, obsessed, love-drunk heart.
Although to be fair, it’s not all imaginary.
I mean, the soccer game is real. My loving, protective brother is real and I did go see him play. And his teammate is real too. Not to mention, all the things that my brother’s teammate made me feel, those are real as well.
But the moment at the end, where he saw me and instantly fell in love?
Yeah, that never happened.
It’s just something I read in one of my romance novels once. And I liked it so much — that he saw her and only her in a room full of people — that I decided to use it for my own story.
In reality, he doesn’t know that I exist.
He doesn’t know that at this very moment, I’m crouched behind the thick shrubbery that lines this strange and unknown backyard and that I’m watching him as a party rages on around us. That I’ve been watching him since the game last week. I skip my classes here and there, drive down to Bardstown without a license and follow him around town. I follow him into parties and observe.
From a distance.
It all sounds very stalker-ish.
But it’s okay.
I’m harmless. I have no bad intentions.
It’s not like I’m going to approach him and say hi. Or flirt with him — which I’m very good at, if I do say so myself — and ask him to hang out with me. I’m not going to make any advances toward him, or any sort of contact, even.
I can’t.
Even if I wanted to.
It’s just how it is.
And so this is all I have and will ever have.
Me watching him from afar while he goes on about his life.
As he drinks from a beer bottle, shoots the shit with his friends, chuckles with them. Although I have to say that I haven’t really seen him laugh yet.
And the longer he makes me wait for it, the more I feel like I’m going to love it when he does laugh.
What I don’t particularly love though is the plethora of girls around him.
The plethora of girls that are always around him. And since I’ve been following — or semi-stalking — him for the last few days, I’ve come to recognize a few. There’s a redhead who finds everything hilarious; a brunette who looks up at him like she’s gazing at the moon; a mocha-skinned black-haired beauty, whose ass is to die for and she never lets him or anyone else forget it; and a couple of other girls that I call transient brunettes because they come and go.