Chapter Ten
THE REST OF THE SUMMERpasses like a patterned dream.
I’m either with his family or Arkane himself, if he’s not busy with grad school. And even though not a single photo of us shows up on the papers, it doesn’t really matter. The whole of San Antonio knows.
I’m Arkane Young’s girlfriend.
By day.
But by night, though—
I didn’t make the same mistake again. I don’t even bother locking my door. And I think...even though no one says a word, everyone knows.
Not just the fact that we sleep in the same room, but that I’m still...you know. I could be wrong, but I think it’s an agreement he’s made with his parents. Maybe.
Either way—they know. And they’re okay with it.
But me, though?
The more time I spend in his arms, the more my confusion grows. When he touches me, I don’t just shatter. When he touches me, I see it in his eyes. I feel it in the way his kisses can be both gentle and demanding, rough and tender—
He wants me as much as I want him.
Needs me the way I need him.
And even though I’m too much of a wimp to say the words out loud—
I want to believe that his heart feels the same thing my heart does.
I want to believe he loves me the way I love him.
I want to believe that.
But what I don’t get is why.
Why won’t he just say the words back when he already knows I’m in love with him?
And I know he knows. We know his whole family knows, and everyone working for him, too. It’s just him who doesn’t...say it.
The closest he’s come was one afternoon, maybe a month into the summer, when he brought me with him to the ranch and I said I wanted him to teach me how to ride. And I meant the kind of riding where a horse is involved and you sit on top of it and you go places, but Arkane apparently had other ideas about how one earns a riding pass, because six hours later I was knee-deep in manure, and he had informed me—with the tiniest curve of his mouth that wasn’t quite a smile—that the right to ride was earned, and that I had fifty more hours of mucking stalls before he’d consider it.
Fifty more hours.
Of horse poop.
And the worst part is I actually loved it.
Then there was the grad school thing. He asked me if I wanted to sit in on some of his classes, and I—proud girl that I am—said yes, because I wasn’t going to let him see that the idea made me nervous. And then I spent the next two hours in the back of the lecture hall trying not to stare at him, which I was doing a bad job of, because at some point my phone buzzed.
Arkane:Why are you so obsessed with me?
