“You hurt me, Grant.” Underneath her seemingly calm voice is a seething sea of emotion too confusing for me to fathom. “You took what I offered and cheapened it. What’s worse is that by being ‘generous,’ you made sure almost everyone would turn against me. You were right—the things I auctioned off brought me almost two hundred thousand dollars. And people looked at me like I was insane to complain about it. But it can never make up for what I lost.”
What’s with this resentment? “What could you have possibly lost?”
“Stop playing dumb. Sadie and Heath told me everything.”
“Told you what?” Sadie dropped by the office, but she didn’t get a chance to spew any poison. And Heath probably hasn’t seen Aspen once she left college. “What did they say?”
She says, “You turned me into the biggest joke on campus.”
“What are you talking about? I defended you—”
“You were going to humiliate me, then transfer to Harvard!”
“What?That’s ridiculous.” I need to get on top of this fast. “I never told you about my transfer applications because I never planned to actually go anywhere. I wanted to stay at Napa Aquinas College.With you. Regardless, you can’t possibly be upset about the transfer,” I say. “I didn’t even go to Harvard.”
Her face twists. Her lower lip and chin tremble for a second before she clenches her jaw tightly. A sheen of moisture glistens in her eyes. Even the tip of her nose is flushed. She sniffles, then hides her eyes with a hand, but that can’t hide the tears falling down her cheeks.
My frustration and exasperation dissolve, even as I tell myself I’m being stupid to be affected by something as clichéd as tears. But then, I’ve never been smart when it comes to Aspen.
I go over to the desk and pluck a couple of Kleenexes. When I turn around and start toward her to offer them, her hands hang loose at her sides, but she looks at me like I’ve just broken her heart.
“I know about the bet.”
I freeze.The bet…?She can’t possibly be reacting like this over the bet I had with Emmett…
My head empties of thought as though someone swung a mallet and hit me between the eyebrows. The most unbearable pain spreads in my heart. It feels like somebody stuck a knife in, pried my chest open and carved it out, so there’s nothing left but a bloody crater. My pulse thunders in my ears, and I blink, struggling to focus in spite of my dimming vision.
“You only wanted to be my first to win.” Her words are muffled by the deafening roaring of my blood.
Shock clenches around my lungs, and my skin feels hot and tight. Every cell in my body pulses with shock.
Sheknew…? But why didn’t she say something back then? Why didn’t she kick my ass or—?I think numbly, still frozen to the spot. Of all the reasons for her to hate me, this never entered my mind. I didn’t think she’d ever found out.
“For God’s sake.” She wipes her face roughly, her eyelashes trembling like wounded butterflies. Her gaze is unsteady as more tears fall. “You can tend the bar yourself tonight.”
Then she turns and runs out.
Chapter Fifty-One
Grant
The sound of a car door slamming jolts me. I flinch, and the gears in my head start to turn overtime to make up for being idiotically frozen just moments ago.
First things first, I have to talk to Aspen. I run out after her. But the roar of an engine from the parking lot says I’m too late.
A sedan swerves precariously along the road, heading away from me. Fear pours into my veins—she’s going to crash that car. She shouldn’t be driving if she’s that upset!
But the car straightens out, and I rake shaking fingers through my hair. My mind is clear now, all cylinders finally firing.
With the clarity comes only one question:What have I done?
The damnbet… I specifically asked Will and Heath to keep that quiet when they insisted on streaking! She wasn’t ever supposed to find out—and I thought she hadn’t. Not when George, one of the most social and popular guys on campus, had no clue.
I pull out my phone and log into GrantEm’s intranet, using my admin privilege to access Aspen’s HR data and get her home address. Then I hop into my Maybach and plug it into the GPS.
The apartment complex she lives in is…a dump. Jesus. How can a building this awful still stand? It should be illegal to charge rent here.
There’s nothing overtly dilapidated about it—you have to keep up appearances. But it’s the small things—like cracks that haven’t been repaired in the sidewalks and the lobby. A few of the steps on the stairs are missing anti-skid strips, and from the amount of dirt that’s accumulated, they’ve been missing for a while. The security camera is bigger than my arm, and I don’t know if it still works—or if it can actually get decent images if there’s a crime. It’s worse than that Howell Hall Aspen used to live in.
