Jude nodded once. “Uncle Joe.”

“And those are your cousins?” Again, I surveyed the handful of boys ranging in age from probably kindergarten to high school, finding no definitive feature that would tie them to each other.

Another nod from Jude as he popped up.

“Do they all have different moms?” I asked, only teasing partly.

That made him laugh a laugh that I felt all the way down to my toes. “I think you might be on to something.”

Accepting the end was near, I decided to cut the tie early. “Well, it was . . .”—I searched for the right word, coming up empty —“something meeting you, Jude,” I said, as that smile of his angled at my word choice. “Have a nice life.”

“You too . . . ” he said, his brows coming together as he searched me for something.

“Lucy,” I offered, not sure why. I’d said my name a million different times and ways, but telling it to him seemed oddly intimate.

“Lucy,” he repeated, tasting the word in his mouth. Shooting me another tilted smile, he turned and headed towards the trail of boys leaving the beach.

“Oh god, Lucy,” I said to myself, flopping down on my beach towel. “What were you thinking? That was a serious heartbreak averted.”

Even as I said the words, with as much conviction as I could muster, my eyes weren’t able to peel themselves away from him as he ambled down the beach, spinning the football between his fingers.

Stopping suddenly, he turned around, that smile reforming when he found my stare on him. “So, Lucy,” he hollered, tucking the ball under his arm, “how much further are you going to let me get before you give me your phone number?”

Whatever premonitions I’d had about Jude and heartbreak going hand in hand flew out the window. I wanted to get up and break dance I was so stoked.

However, I still had some dignity in the name of all women and couldn’t make this easy on him. “How far do you think the edge of the world is?” I called back, rolling onto my side.

Jude shook his head, chuckling silently. “You playing hard to get, Lucy?”

“No, Jude,” I replied, arching a brow. “I’m impossible to get.”

Outright lie, but he didn’t need to know that.

“Jude!” Uncle Joe shouted again, this time sounding a special shade of pissed. “Right now!”

Jude tensed, the smile faltering. “Coming!” he shouted over his shoulder before loping towards me. Kneeling beside me, his eyes locked on mine. “Number?”

“No.” I was so close to breaking if he asked again, I knew I’d cave.

“Why?”

“Because you have to work harder than some lame attempt to get it,” I answered, hearing my conscience asking what the hell I was doing. This type of guy was every type of wrong on the surface, but there was something more there, something I’d seen in that flash of vulnerability that sucked me in.

Leaning in so close his nose was almost brushing mine, he asked, “How much harder?”

I sucked in a slow breath, hoping my answer wouldn’t make it seem like I was hyperventilating. “Use your brain, since you’ve made it clear you don’t use it for academics.”

He waited a few seconds, maybe waiting for me to retract my “hard to get” routine. I sealed my lips tighter.

“I’m going to come up with something good,” he said finally, sliding my glasses back into position. “Really good.”

“You come up with something that good,” I said, glad my eyes were covered so he couldn’t see the party in my pupils, “I’ll not only give you my number, I’ll let you take me out on a date.” I felt the uninhibited part of me I did my best to repress surfacing. The part of me I tried to convince myself was bad, evil, wrong, so on and so forth, but the part of me that felt most like I wasn’t fighting a current when I went against it.

“What makes you think I want to go on a date with you?” His face was more serious than a teenage boy should be able to make.

I cursed under my breath, wanting to spurt out another string of them when Jude’s expression stayed frozen. I was just about to reply nothing or grab my beach blanket and bag and scramble out of here with my tail between my legs when a smile split Jude’s face in half.

“You’re kind of beautiful when you’re tortured, you know that?” He laughed, giving the football another spin. “Hell yeah I want to take you out. Even though dates aren’t really my thing, I think I can make an exception for a girl who rescues varmints,”—right on cue, a snarl sounded beneath the picnic bench—“one who reads quantum physics at the beach,”—I could have corrected him that I was brushing up on Biology, not quantum physics since I was taking AP Biology in the fall, but I don’t think he would have cared, or known the difference—“and one who adheres to the European way, not to mention my favorite way, of suntanning by going topless.” Jude’s smile pulled higher, giving me a knowing raise of his chin.

“For someone who prefers the sans top thing, you must not adhere to that policy personally,” I replied, skimming my eyes down the long sleeve thermal clinging to his chest from sweat or water or some combination of both. Apparently full sun and ninety-five degree heat didn’t warrant shedding the layers in Jude’s book.

He shrugged. “There’s a work of art, a true masterpiece, hiding beneath this shirt.” His muscles rolled and stretched to bring the point home. Not that I needed to be convinced. “I can’t let all this be displayed for free to the public.”

If there weren’t already about three dozen red flags up as to why I should steer clear of the grinning, flexing, wrapped head to toe in caution tape boy in front of me, here was three dozen and one. So what did I do?

Exactly what I knew I shouldn’t.

“So what’s the price of admission to the Museum of Jude?”

His smile faded into nothing, his eyes doing the same. “For girls like you, with the world-is-yours futures,” he said, toeing at the sand, “it’s expensive. Too expensive.”

Another flash of vulnerability. I didn’t know if he had a bad case of mood swings or deep down was a sensitive guy banging against the walls to be set free. But I wanted to find out. “Was that you just inadvertently telling me to stay away from you?”

“No,” he answered, meeting my eyes. “That was me telling you directly to listen to your gut and what’s it’s screaming at you right now.”

“What makes you think you know what my gut is saying to me?”

“Screaming,” he corrected. “And experience.”

If Jude thought experience had given him the instruction manual to Lucy Larson, he’d never been so wrong. “So I’ll see you around then?”

Shaking his head, his smile broke through again. “I’ll see you around then.”

CHAPTER TWO

After begging the Darcys, who I used to babysit for across the lake, to take the pup for one night while I figured out what I was going to do with him, my gut’s message had finally taken root and spread all the way into the careless, free-spirited pieces of my conscience.

Jude Ryder wasn’t only trouble, he was trouble with a side of danger and a dessert of heartache. I didn’t talk the lingo of stereotypes, but I knew the path Jude was on and the one I was on would never intersect unless one of us forfeited our individual one to join the other.

I’d worked too hard for too long to allow mine to dead end.

Even as I veered off Sunrise Drive to bounce down the pitted dirt road to our once secondary home and present primary and sole home, the reasons I should delete Jude from my mind continued to pile up into a mountain I was incapable of climbing. I knew why I shouldn’t have anything to do with him and that all made sense, but something that didn’t make any sense just didn’t give a hoot about what I knew.