Royal Games(24)

My mouth might have been slightly agape. I had a strong temptation to confront him and ask him how exactly he knew how to build things. But Nicole intercepted me as I walked across the stage. “You don’t want to be with him, so let him work. Leave him alone.”

“For your information, he’s the one not leaving me alone.” I ignored the fact that I had been on my way to talk to him.

She ignored it too. “You want him to leave you alone? Then send him a message. Go out with someone else.”

I had grown up with the boys in this town. They were either already involved with someone else or I’d known them for so long it would be like going out with a brother.

Then she managed to land on the one exception. “Isn’t that Tommy Davis back there?”

Tommy Davis. He was that guy from high school who was always called by his first and last name together, mainly because I never knew him very well and we were basically strangers. He was sitting in the back row of the auditorium, texting on his phone. I remembered that he had a younger brother who was still in high school. He must have driven him and was waiting around for the rehearsals to finish.

My sixteen-year-old self had harbored a massive crush on Tommy Davis, but since he was Brooke’s boyfriend, and then her husband, he had always been off-limits. While Whitney was the poster child for a successful young marriage, Brooke and Tommy were the opposite. They’d only been married for six months before they filed for divorce. It was quite the scandal in town, and it had made things awkward for everyone because they’d both stayed in Frog Hollow.

It had never even occurred to me to talk to Tommy because I didn’t think he’d be worth the drama. But considering that I was heavily embroiled in my own personal drama, how could a little more hurt?

He would most likely not be interested, but I wouldn’t know unless I tried, right? Lifting my chin, I left the stage and marched up the aisle. I wished I had a hairbrush. Or Lemon here to do my makeup. Before I could say anything, he glanced up and smiled widely at me. “Hey, Genesis.”

I came to a stop, surprised. I had been carefully constructing a potential line-by-line conversation in my head and he’d disrupted it. “Hi, Tommy. I was just thinking about you yesterday.”

At that, he put his phone down. He looked nothing like Rafe, which right now was in the pros column. He had light brown hair, bright blue eyes, and was just a little taller than me. “Oh? What were you thinking?”

His question had a slightly seductive tone to it, which made my stomach lurch sideways. If Rafe had said it, I probably would have melted into a pile of redheaded goo, but Tommy Davis saying it felt a little squicky.

I was probably just reacting to the residual Brooke on him. “About how nice you were to me when I started high school.”

He blinked a couple of times, as if trying to remember. I could see the moment when he did. “Oh! Right! I showed you around.”

And then his ex-wife had tried to ruin my life, but I left that part out.

I couldn’t help but peer over my shoulder, back at the stage. Rafe had stopped what he was doing and was staring directly at us. He had his arms crossed across his chest, and his face had gone from fallen angel to avenging angel. I was a little scared. I knew he’d never hurt me, but right then he might have done some bodily harm to Tommy Davis. I stepped into his line of sight so that the two men couldn’t see each other.

Having never asked a guy out before, I didn’t know the right way to go about it. Aunt Sylvia enjoyed lecturing about letting a man chase me, but I never had the heart to tell her that men did not do much chasing as far as I was concerned.

Well, excepting whatever nonsense Rafe was up to right now.

I started to clear my throat, but then Tommy Davis spoke up. “Hey, are you doing anything tomorrow night?”





Chapter 7

Tommy Davis surprised me by asking me first. Like he’d been able to read my mind. Or he could understand my awkwardness and took one for the team to spare me further embarrassment.

“Doing?” I repeated.

“Yeah. We should hang out.”

Hang out? What did that mean? I didn’t speak guy. Was that the word in his native tongue for a date?

I guessed if I wanted this to be a date, I was going to have to lock it down. “Where and when?”

He stood then, and I saw his younger brother coming toward us. He was like an emo version of Tommy. He walked past us without slowing. “I’ll come by your house at seven. We’ll figure something out. See ya later!”

He went after his brother, and the teenage girl still living inside me was giddy. When I returned to Nicole’s side, that teen part of me practically shrieked, “Tommy Davis just asked me out!”