The Truest Thing (Hart's Boardwalk 4)

Jack threw the bar a regretful look and jogged down the boards to Main Street where he’d parked his car.

The truth about Dana would have to wait.

6

Emery

Five years ago

* * *

Not for the first time in my life, I felt like a naive fool.

Jack Devlin hadn’t shown up to take me on that date he’d promised. I’d sat on my porch swing overlooking the water, waiting. And waiting.

At fifteen minutes past seven, I wondered if he was late because of work.

At seven thirty, I wondered if we shouldn’t have exchanged phone numbers.

But by eight o’clock, I knew I’d been stood up.

Maybe I was wrong about Jack.

Maybe his kind eyes were a trap.

Maybe it had been like that time at Daltry Prep when Lucinda Weymouth told me she’d set me up on a date with her brother, Logan, who was a beautiful senior boy I’d crushed on forever. When I’d risked my grandmother’s wrath and snuck out of the estate to go meet him, Logan, Lucinda, and their friends did an egging drive-by on me. They literally threw eggs at me as they drove by in their expensive SUV. Apparently, they’d gotten the idea from some teen movie.

It was not only humiliating but I was covered in bruises from those goddamn eggs. Getting hit with an egg when the thrower was on the rowing team hurt like a mother. In more ways than one.

The prank had been the talk of the school for weeks.

Plus, I’d had to return home covered in egg yolk and my grandmother officially grounded me for a month. It seemed pointless to ground me. My entire life was one big grounding.

Was Jack playing a cruel joke on me by asking me out and then standing me up?

That didn’t seem like him.

There was a possibility he’d changed his mind. But it had been almost a week since he stood me up, and I hadn’t seen or heard from him. He usually came in for his coffee every morning.

Jack was definitely avoiding me.

I cursed the flush of heat that crawled across my skin at the thought and said goodbye to a customer who’d bought an entire pile of beach reads.

Sighing as the bell tinkled above the door announcing her departure, I rested my elbows on the counter and stared unseeingly at the stacks of books opposite my coffee counter.

For four years, I’d watched Jack Devlin from afar, and my stupid crush had only intensified. I’d often wondered what it was that I found so attractive about him. I mean, of course, Jack was handsome, but it was more than that. When I talked to him, he went from handsome to the sexiest man I’d ever met. He just had that thing. That je ne sais quoi. He brimmed over with charisma and a genuine charm.

Not that disingenuous, smooth kind of charm like I’d encountered before with Tripp Van Der Byl and only realized was disingenuous after the fact.

Perhaps what fascinated me about Jack had more to do with my own feelings than Jack himself. Until I moved here and met the black sheep of the Devlin family, I’d honestly thought something had broken inside me. That Tripp had broken something. He seemed to have hit the kill switch on my attraction for men. I felt nothing. Zip. Zero. Nada.

Until Jack.

Suddenly, everything was zinging in all the right places again.

No way did I think I’d ever have the courage to agree to a date with him.

But I couldn’t help myself. There was something about Jack that made me want to be brave.