….then showed up to my supposed assignation with Dante looking like a desperate idiot.

Dante was waiting for me under the bleachers, all right. Along with Shelby Summers, her cheerleader friends, and the team’s star running back, Sawyer Grant.

They all fell out laughing as soon as I showed up. But no one laughed harder than Shelby, who’d apparently orchestrated the whole thing, down to writing the note herself.

“I told you she’d fall for it,” she’d crowed in the Virginian accent she’d already affected, even though she’d only moved here recently, just like me. “And look at what she’s wearing! Did you really think he liked you?”

“Tell the truth. You borrowed that outfit from Mouth, didn’t you?” Sawyer guessed.

Sawyer was my cousin-sisters’ worst enemy. He was the most handsome boy at Greenlee High, but so ugly inside, it didn’t matter. Mouth was what he called Thel. He called my other half-sister, Stork, even though her name was Willa. Sawyer had been bullying Willa and Thel ever since our birth mother sued his father for ownership rights of the house she and her ancestors had lived in since the 1800s.

And judging by how hard he was laughing, he got just as much joy from making my life miserable too.

“Sawyer! What the hell are you doing?”

Sawyer abruptly cut off cackling after an ice-cold voice asked that question behind me. As if God himself had commanded him to stop.

No, not God…but close.

I turned around to find, not a boy, but a man with broad shoulders and heavy muscles towering over me. He was blonder than Sawyer, but he had the same eyes. Almost green, almost brown, but not quite either—the color of river running over moss. However, his gaze didn’t glitter with meanness like Sawyer’s.

“What are you doing, picking on this girl?” he asked his brother.

“C’mon, Josh. It was just a joke….” Sawyer began to say.

“A joke at an innocent girl’s expense. That’s not how a Grant should act. That’s not how anyone should act.”

Everyone just stared up at him. Including me. We were young, dumb high schoolers, and he was a huge, heroic Navy SEAL. Maybe I’m projecting, but I think we were all too in awe to speak.

Josh looked down at me without ogling my breasts.

“I apologize for my brother,” he told me, his voice tight and serious.

Forget Dante.

The Love….

The Love hit me in a flurry, soft and overwhelming. It was like getting caught in a flower storm. I didn’t know whether to run for cover or gather it in my arms.

Somewhere in the distance, Sawyer muttered, “Sorry, I shouldn’t have laughed.”

“None of you should have,” Josh decreed, his river-moss eyes swung away from me and he re-pinned all my persecutors under his cold gaze.