Until Fountain Bridge - Young Samantha. Страница 15

way so I’m going to put these away.”

He clamped a large hand down on mine as I moved to lift the diaries. I glanced up at him

and he shook his head with a small smile. “It’s painful to read how my stupidity hurt you at

the time, but I like being inside your head. I like knowing that while I was struggling with the fact that I had fallen in love with my best friend’s little sister, she loved me back more than I could ever hope to deserve.”

I grinned at him. “One: you deserve it. And two,” I gestured to the diaries, to the story of

us, “It is totally romantic, right?”

Adam laughed, shaking his head at my single-minded determination to turn us into a

romance novel. “Maybe. But don’t tell anyone I said so. It’ll ruin my reputation.”

I pushed through the diaries looking for the familiar purple leather of the last one. “Baby,

you ruined that reputation when you told Braden Carmichael you were in love with me.”

“Cocky bastard knew all along,” Adam muttered unhappily. “Could have saved us a

couple of months of worry.”

“You mean,” I found the diary and paged through it, “A couple of months of you being a

mercurial pain in my arse.”

“Such a nice way to put it. But let’s not forget I wasn’t the only pain in the arse.”

“All I did was start dating again, and it took me ten months to do it after our little couch

scene. You got off easy.” I thrust the diary at him and he took it with a scowl.

“I was staking my claim.”

“No, you were peeing all around your territory without actually staking a claim.”

He chuckled and bent his head over the latest page without responding… because he knew

I was bloody right.

Sunday, August 13th

I haven’t had time to write anything down for a few days, partly because of studies and

partly because my seething anger has been taking up quite a lot of my time. You see, it all started on Friday afternoon when a casual conversation with Nicholas ended in me wanting

to strangle Adam…

As Joss and I walked toward The Meadows where we were meeting Braden, Adam, Jenna

and Ed for a picnic, I considered telling her what I’d discovered about Adam yesterday while

I was having coffee with my fellow student and friend, Nicholas. I didn’t get the chance to

tell her yesterday because she’d been working at Club 39. I knew Joss would be pissed off for

me and I needed that fire, I needed motivation to put Adam at an arm’s length and see how he

liked it.

It had taken me and Adam a few months to get past the awkwardness of almost having

sex, and even then things weren’t the same. If I thought about it, things hadn’t been the same

for a while. I think maybe since the lip brush incident when I was nineteen.

Anyway, I knew obviously that Adam had slept with other girls since he’d had me on his

couch and it hurt worse than I could ever explain. The whole incident made it difficult for me

to move on and I hadn’t. I hadn’t been on a single date in ten months.

That was all about to change, however. After making a crack to Nicholas about my dry

spell he’d told me maybe I’d have better luck getting a date if my friend Adam would stop

going around intimidating men out of asking. Surprised and to say the least, confused, by this

comment I’d asked him to elaborate only to discover that Nicholas had wanted to ask me out

months ago. Knowing how close I was to Braden and Adam, but feeling Adam the safer

choice, he’d called Adam and asked him for advice on where to take me out. Adam’s

response had been, “Stay away from Ellie or I’ll break your face.”

What the hell was that?

Seriously?

I couldn’t even begin to process how not cool that was. He was warning perfectly nice

guys away from me? So he was allowed to manwhore his way through Edinburgh but I

wasn’t allowed to go on a single date? I didn’t think so.

I wanted to tell Joss all that. Despite being incredibly secretive about her past, Joss had

proven herself straightforward. I needed her to tell me if it was okay or not to play a little

dirty with Adam. Honestly, I was just so tired of being the nice girl that he could just walk all over, knowing I’d still love him in the end. His actions had proven that he could be

possessive of me, which meant he thought of me as “his” in some small way. Well, I wanted

to show him that I wasn’t his. I wouldn’t ever be his unless he decided he wanted more than a

one night stand.

All this I wanted to confide in Joss that sunny Saturday as we strolled to The Meadows but

Joss was distracted by something so I decided it wasn’t a good time. I was curious whether

Joss’s distraction had something to do with Braden. She’d been acting strangely around him,

strangely enough for even me to notice during the aftermath of one of my headaches. We’d

been book shopping with Hannah when it happened. The headache hit me out of the blue like

it had been doing for the last couple of months. It was horrible and usually accompanied by

tingling and numbness in my arm. When it passed I was exhausted. In fact, lately my energy

levels hadn’t been great. I kept meaning to go to the doctor but every time I got this ominous

churning in my gut, and I put it off, promising myself I’d make an appointment the next day.

Anyway, the headache hit and Joss was concerned—she didn’t fool me with her ‘I don’t

care about people’ rubbish—and taking me to get some food in me. We bumped into Braden

and Vicky. While I was pissed off that Braden had slept with her again and brought her back

into our lives (and Adam’s orbit), I still noticed the tension between Joss and Braden.

Admittedly when they’d first met I’d had hopes of playing matchmaker but recent revelations

had spoiled my hopes. However, Braden still asked an awful lot of questions about Joss and

he stared at her (a lot), and I was beginning to suspect that, despite denials from both of them, something was going on. I didn’t know how to feel about that now that I knew Joss wasn’t

keen on being in a relationship. It was difficult to pin down her true feelings about anything

and I didn’t want either Braden or her to get hurt.

Deciding to bite my tongue about a lot of things I kept our conversation cheerful as we

approached our friends. Braden, Adam, Jenna and Ed were already there, sitting on a large

chenille blanket with two picnic hampers beside them. My eyes immediately went to Adam

and then quickly moved to Braden when I discovered Adam was watching me.

I laughed as Joss teased Braden upon our arrival, something not many people outside of

our family dared to do and I loved that Joss did. I think secretly my big brother did too.

Without thinking about it I flopped down onto the blanket beside Adam. His strong arm came

around me instantly and he squeezed me affectionately against his side. “Nice to see you,

Els.”

The whole point of the picnic was to catch up with Adam and Braden since they’d been

working so hard on the new development we’d barely seen them these last few weeks. I

missed them both, I did. I missed Adam, and inhaling the familiar smell of him and feeling

his strength pressed against my right side, I almost forgot for a moment my earlier resolve.

Almost.

“Yeah, you too.” I gave him a half-hearted smile and pulled casually out of his embrace. I

turned to Jenna and Ed to greet them properly, ignoring the sudden tension radiating from

Adam. He knew me too well, and he immediately understood something was wrong.

Good.

Hearing Joss tell Braden she needed to take a rain check on the picnic, worry brought my

head around to her. I gazed up at her in concern, suddenly wondering if there had been more