Going for Four: Counting on Love, Book 4 (11 page)

“You live ten miles from here.”

“I’ll…”

She quirked an eyebrow.

Dammit.

It wasn’t like he was all that serious about leaving anyway. It probably was time for her to know this story. It wasn’t going to make him look good at all. One big reason for never telling her before this. But that might be a good thing. If she realized what an ass he really was, maybe she’d want to stay away from him.

However, the
whole
story also made her brother look…naive. At least.

Which was the reason he and Conner had agreed, over beers nine years ago, that they were never going to talk about it.

Of course, they’d also agreed to never let another woman come between them and, well, here they were.

“Who’s Ashley?” Olivia asked.

Cody was jerked back to the moment by the mention of Ashley’s name. “How do you know her name?”

“So there is an Ashley? Emma said she overheard the name once when you and Conner were talking. Who is she?”

Could he really tell her this? He hated thinking about it and he hadn’t talked about it in years.

Olivia pulled her T-shirt up and over her head, tossing it on top of the apron.

Her bra was cotton. White with green polka dots.

Cody really liked it.

Dammit.

“Ashley was my high school girlfriend.”

Olivia looked suspicious. “You met Conner in college. Did he know Ashley?”

Cody nodded. “He met her.” That was an understatement.

“Start at the beginning,” Olivia said.

She looked determined. Everyone knew that Olivia was sweet and accommodating, but he knew she could be indomitable when she made her mind up about something. She was a Dixon after all.

“Ashley and I dated for two years in high school. She was the girl I thought I was going to marry. Everyone thought she was the girl I was going to marry.”

Olivia’s eyes narrowed and he couldn’t help but smile at the flash of jealousy he saw there. She propped a hand on her hip again. “What happened?”

“We went to different colleges after graduation. We were about two hours apart. She didn’t like it, but we both got scholarships—me for football and her for volleyball—so we didn’t have a lot of choice if we wanted to play.”

“
She
didn’t like it? What about you?” Olivia asked.

“I wasn’t too worried about it,” he said honestly. “I knew I’d be busy and wrapped up in football stuff and I knew I was going to love college. I didn’t really think I’d be sitting around missing her, you know?”

“That’s not very nice.”

“No, it’s not.” He shrugged. “This isn’t a story that makes me look good, Liv.”

“So, you went off to college and never called and she eventually broke up with you?”

He coughed. That would have been easier. “Uh, no. Not exactly.”

“You went off to college, had a great time, and you broke up with her.”

“No.” That, too, would have been a lot easier.

“Cody, what happened?”

This was where he was going to look like a jackass. And he suddenly couldn’t do it. “Actually, that was pretty much how it went. We were both crazy busy with practices and games on the weekends. We went for two solid months without seeing each other, and I finally said that it wasn’t working out.”

Olivia sighed and slipped her pants off. Cody’s mouth went dry as she kicked the yoga pants to the side. Her panties were green with white polka dots, the opposite of her bra. They were also small, dipping low under her belly button and arching high on her hips.

“Liv,” he said, his voice sounding strained.

“I’m also going to take an article of clothing off every time you lie or fudge the truth,” she said. “I know you, Cody. I know when you’re not telling me everything.”

Damn.

There were now two tiny pieces of cotton and elastic keeping Olivia from being completely bare. But there was nothing between his eyes and an awful lot of sweet, smooth, bare skin.

He felt his breathing speed up and could not, for the life of him, tear his eyes away from her thighs. They were toned from running, the skin lightly gold from the sun. Olivia was built like her sisters, but she was shorter than Amanda and Emma and curvier than Isabelle. She had hips and a butt that looked amazing in blue jeans. And out of blue jeans. She ran almost five miles a day, and the thought of tracing the lines and ridges of each muscle in her legs with his tongue made a certain muscle of his nice and tight as well.

“I can keep going,” she said, interrupting his thoughts. “Or
you
can keep going.”

His body and mind warred. He wanted her. She knew it and would welcome his touch, his kiss,
his
body. He knew that and it was almost too much to think about. He also didn’t want her to know this story.

But if they got involved, she would hear the story eventually. From Conner. And he appreciated that she’d come to him instead of going to her brother first.

The bottom line was, and always had been, Olivia was his friend. A woman he respected, liked and trusted. If she was going to learn ugly truths about him, at least it should be from him.

“Fine. I’ll keep going,” he said.

Olivia almost looked disappointed.

He fought a grin. Well, once the story was out, if she still wanted to take a few tiny scraps of cotton off, he wouldn’t object. At least not too much.

“I was having a great time. Football was going well, I was working my way toward a starting position, I liked my classes and my roommate was cool.”

“Conner.”

“Right.”

Cody knew there had been arguments between Conner and their mother about Conner going to college. Conner felt that he needed to stay home to help her out while she felt he deserved the chance to get away and to play football at the college level. He’d been awarded a scholarship—which helped the family out immensely as well—for football at a small school about an hour away. It had been a great compromise. He was close enough to help out with family stuff, but also had a chance to be a college kid and blow off some steam after being a responsible father figure to four younger sisters for two years.

“And you didn’t miss your girlfriend?” Olivia asked Cody.

“I, um…” He shifted uncomfortably on the chair. “I had a lot of female attention.”

She rolled her eyes. “I’m shocked.”

He shrugged. “It was a small school. I was a football player. I showed up at most parties. I was…popular.”

“And Conner was right beside you?” Olivia guessed.

“A lot of the time,” Cody agreed. “He went home as much as possible, but yeah, in those first few months, there wasn’t much chance for him to get away with our game schedule, so he went to plenty of parties and stuff too.”

They’d had a great time. He and Conner had clicked right away. Conner had shared a lot about his experiences losing his father, taking care of his sisters, looking out for his mom. Cody had respected the hell out of him right away.

He couldn’t say that the respect had necessarily been mutual though.

“And what happened with Ashley?” Olivia asked. “She found out about the other girls?”

Cody’s gut clenched. “I treated her badly, Olivia. Okay? That’s the bottom line here.”

“Badly how?”

He sighed. “After not seeing each other for a couple of months, she started talking about breaking up and saying maybe that would be best. But I didn’t like that. She was beautiful and smart and fun. I was sure there were all kinds of guys wanting her.”

“Like there were all kinds of girls wanting you,” Olivia said.

He nodded. “But I knew that she was completely in love with me and was an honest, sweet person. I knew that all I had to do was tell her I wanted to stay together and ask her to be faithful.”

Olivia raised an eyebrow. “And she said?”

“Of course.”

“So you asked her to stay faithful to you and not date anyone else, while you were partying and going crazy with a bunch of girls two hours away?”

“Pretty much.”

“You were only flirting though? You didn’t actually cheat on her, did you?”

He blew out a breath. “You know the answer to that, Liv. Of course I did. I cheated on her repeatedly. And I barely called her. I never visited her campus. She missed a big school dance because I couldn’t go as her date, but asked her not to go with anyone else.”

“Why didn’t she break up with you?” Olivia asked, her eyes wide.

“Because I was good,” he said, feeling like an even bigger ass than he’d expected to. “I knew how to keep her dangling. I sent her flowers, wrote the occasional sweet card or e-mail…just enough to keep her from really seeing what was going on.”

“You kept telling her you loved her?” Olivia’s expression said she didn’t really want the answer.

He nodded anyway. “I knew her really well. I was the only boyfriend she’d ever had. I was her first love, the first—and only—guy she’d slept with. I knew I had her wrapped around my little finger, and it didn’t really take much to keep her there.”

Olivia looked disappointed. “You didn’t want her but you didn’t want anyone else to have her?”

“I did want her. On one hand. I knew that all the football craziness and college fame and fun would eventually end, and I knew that when it was over, I wanted a sweet, honest, completely-in-love-with-me girl waiting.”

Olivia gave him a wow-you’re-a-dick look. Good. He’d been waiting for her to realize that.

Though the cramp in his gut got worse.

“How did Conner get involved?” she finally asked.

The wow-you’re-a-dick sentiment was about to get worse. “I didn’t answer her calls. I’d let it go to voice mail, then I’d e-mail her, but I couldn’t talk to her without feeling guilty.”

“Wow,” Olivia muttered.

Her look of disapproval almost made him forget she was standing in front of him in only her underwear. Almost.

“One night she was calling me over and over, so I went out for a run.”

“Uh-huh.” Olivia crossed her arms. It was clear that she’d gone from jealous of Ashley to defensive on her behalf.

“Conner was studying in the room and finally got sick of it and answered. It turned out that her grandmother had passed away and she needed someone to talk to. They talked for almost two hours.” He’d finished his run and then stopped by a house full of guys who always had a keg tapped and a video game hooked up, avoiding going back to Ashley’s voice mails as long as possible.

Olivia’s expression softened a bit. “Conner’s a great listener.”

Cody nodded. “Ashley thought so too. Conner told her to call anytime she needed to talk. And she did. They started talking every day. I didn’t know at first, but after about a week, Conner was starting to act like a jerk toward me. I couldn’t figure out what was going on. One night he said, ‘Have you noticed Ashley hasn’t called you in almost a week?’” Cody took a deep breath and avoided Olivia’s eyes. “I had noticed. At first I didn’t think much of it, but then started to wonder if she was pulling away, so I sent her flowers. She’d gotten them that day.”

Olivia didn’t say anything. Her arms were still crossed, and when he glanced at her face, he saw that she was watching him with a combination of fascination and offense. “You still didn’t know about her grandmother?”

“Right.”

“So those flowers probably seemed really insensitive.”

“Probably.”

“Go on.”

“When Conner asked me if I’d noticed the no-call thing, I said something like ‘yeah, it’s been nice and quiet’ and Conner was on me like that.” Cody snapped his fingers. “He grabbed me by the front of the shirt and pushed me up against the door and got right in my face. He told me I was a scumbag and how could I treat her like that and on and on.” Cody took another deep breath. “He hadn’t even known about her for a few weeks. When he’d found out I had a girlfriend from home, he’d asked about her but I told him it was really casual and no big deal. Well, obviously Ashley filled him in on the truth. Conner was pissed.”

Olivia nodded. “I can see that. He’s always very quick to come to any woman’s defense.”

It was one of the things Cody liked best about him. Conner had a huge respect for women and treated them all very well. He seemed to have a knack for knowing how to best get on a woman’s good side. Some went for the perfect gentleman, some for the flirtatious playboy. Whatever they responded to was what they got from Conner.

“Anyway, I told him to mind his own damned business. He said it was now his business and that I had one hour to call her and tell her everything or he would.”

The fascination on Olivia’s face seemed to overshadow any other emotion at the moment. “What did you do?”

Cody shrugged. “I got the hell away from him.”

“Did you call her?”

He shook his head. He wasn’t proud of any of this. But he’d been a nineteen-year-old kid. He’d been full of himself and, frankly, had been a jerk. A big one. He liked things easy. Confronting Ashley, being honest, telling her what a dick he really was and breaking her heart would
not
have been easy.