Dedicated to my brother,
who shares a birthday with Be With Me release day.
Happy Birthday, Jesse James.
Table of Contents
Extract from Wait For You
Extract from Trust In Me
Chapter 1
Sweet tea was apparently going to be the death of me.
Not because the amount of sugar could send you into a diabetic coma after one slurp. Or because my brother had nearly caused a triple-car pileup by winging his truck around in a sharp U-turn after receiving a text message that contained two words only.
Sweet. Tea.
Nope. The request for sweet tea was bringing me face-to-face with Jase Winstead—the physical embodiment of every girlie girl fantasy and then some that I’d ever had. And this was the first time I was seeing him outside of campus.
And in front of my brother.
Oh sweet Mary mother of all the babies in the world, this was going to be awkward.
Why, oh why, did my brother have to text Jase and mention that we were on his end of town and ask if he needed anything? Cam was supposed to be taking me around so I could get familiar with the scenery. Although the scenery I was about to witness was sure to be better than what I’d seen so far of this county.
If I saw another strip club, I was going to hurt someone.
Cam glanced over at me as he sped down the back road. We’d left Route 9 years ago. His gaze dropped from my face to the tea I clutched in my hands. He raised a brow. ‘You know, Teresa, there’s a thing called a cup holder.’
I shook my head. ‘It’s okay. I’ll hold it.’
‘Okaaay.’ He drew the word out, focusing on the road.
I was acting like a spaz and I needed to play it cool. The last thing anyone in this world needed was Cam finding out why I had a reason to act like a dweeb on crack. ‘So, um, I thought Jase lived up by the university?’
That sounded casual, right? Oh God, I was pretty sure my voice cracked at some point during that not-so-innocent question.
‘He does, but he spends most of the time at his family’s farm.’ Cam slowed his truck down and hung a sharp right. Tea almost went out the window, but I tightened my death grip on it. Tea was going nowhere. ‘You remember Jack, right?’
Of course I did. Jase had a five-year-old brother named Jack, and the little boy meant the world to him. I obsessively remembered everything I’d ever learned about Jase in a way I imagined Justin Bieber fans did about him. Embarrassing as that sounded, it was true. Jase, unbeknownst to him and the entire world, had come to mean a lot of things to me in the last three years.
A friend.
My brother’s