“Sure, it is.” He pressed a kiss to my shoulder. “Just give me some of that sweet thing you’re so good at.”
He eased me down onto the mattress. I shrank inside my skin, needing a shower, wanting... His hands slid under my shirt, distracting me. I twined my arms around his neck as he pulled on my zipper, as he lowered himself over me.
At least in this way, we could be together. I could be who he wanted.
CHAPTER 3
Amy
The first time Trey rescued me, I was twelve. He and Jo had taken the boat out on the river, and I had tried to follow, tipping our father’s canoe and almost drowning. Jo said it was her fault because she wouldn’t turn back for me. But I knew better. Besides, she’d tried to save me after I fell in.
The second time, when I was fourteen? Also my fault.
We had a good childhood, my sisters and me. We weren’t rich like the Gardiners or the Moffats, the families who lived in gated communities along the river with boat slips and hired help to look after their yards and their children. But we had a place and a position in town—we were the Reverend March’s girls, from the parsonage by the white-spired Methodist church.
All that changed when we moved to the farm.
My mother’s people were Curtises, small-time farmers and homesteaders. After Daddy deployed and Momma took over running the farm, it was like we became Curtises, too.
Meg could at least drive. She had all her friends from when we lived in town and was leaving soon for college. And Jo didn’t care. She was still the smart one who ran cross-country, wrote the school play and for the school paper, and was obviously going places. Beth... Well. Beth never wanted to go anywhere. She actually liked living on the farm.
But I hated it.
It wasn’t so bad while Meg and Jo were still at home. They’d take me into town sometimes, if I asked nicely or Mom insisted. And sometimes Miss Hannah’s kids, James and Daphne, crossed the fields with their mother to help in the cheese room or play in the barn.
But high school pretty much sucked. I hated getting on the bus with the farm kids and the others, the ones from the trailers with dirty screens and sagging porches, moldering away between the tobacco barns on the outskirts of town.
My friends all lived in solid homes with sidewalks, flags, and flower beds or in neat subdivisions with pools and two-car garages.
So when Jenny Snow invited me to a sleepover at her house the Friday before homecoming, of course I said yes. We did manicures and face masks, swapped lip gloss and eye shadow, ate pizza and waited for Mr. and Mrs. Snow to go upstairs.
“Let’s play a game,” Kitty Bryant said after they had gone to bed.
Mary Kingsley smiled cruelly. “Chubby Bunny?”
Kitty flushed. She wasn’t fat. But there was a softness to her face, a tiny roll at her waist when she bent over, that was different from the other girls’.
“We could dress up,” I suggested.
Mary rolled her eyes. “Oh, please.”
“LikeAmerica’s Next Top Model,” I said. “We could do a photo shoot.”
“A lingerie shoot!” Jenny said.
We posed in pajamas and underwear like we were competing forAmerica’s Next Top Model.Head back, tits out, booty tooch. Mary snapped pictures on her new iPhone.
Jenny took off her bra. “Porn shot!” We all shrieked with laughter. “You next,” she commanded Kitty, who reluctantly complied. One by one, the girls all flashed for the camera.
Jenny turned her smile on me. “Your turn.”
“Oh, I don’t...” My mother would kill me. My father was an army chaplain serving in Iraq. I glanced at the bedroom door. Closed, thank God. “What about your brother?”
“Don’t worry. He’s out with his stupid friends.”
“You have such a cute figure,” Kitty said.
“It’s not like you have that much to show anyway,” Mary pointed out.
