Settling the Score (The Summer Games #1)(56)

“Kinsley, you have to tell her I didn’t invite Caroline here. I didn’t know she’d be in that limo with Georgie. This is all a jumbled mess, but I’ll figure it out. I’ll…”

Kinsley was shaking her head and staring up at me with a mixture of pity and—worse—hatred. I sounded crazy, and she didn’t believe me. Bloody hell.

I wasn’t going to let them speak for me. I wasn’t going to let them muddle the facts and confuse Andie. I already looked crazy, so I shoved past them. I didn’t know which bedroom was Andie’s, but two of the doors off the living room were open and empty, so the one closest to me, the one with the closed door had to be hers. I knew she was in there, but I wasn’t going to barge in. I’d give her that much. I stood outside the door as Kinsley and Becca shouted at me that they were going to call whatever the Brazilian 911 was. God, I was causing a scene. I knew I was being a prick, but I couldn’t let this get any further out of hand. I was falling for Andie. I was falling for her so bloody hard and so bloody fast that the idea of losing her over a misunderstanding seemed unfathomable.

“Andie, please come talk to me,” I begged.

Kinsley gripped my arm with surprising strength, trying to tug me back. I hardly recognized this version of myself, this lovesick dog.

“Andie, please,” I begged again, pressing my hand up to the door as if she could see it through the cheap particle board. “Last night was the best night of my life. I need you to know that…”

There were no sounds coming from her room, nothing to indicate my pleas were even reaching her. I was pouring my heart out to a white door.

“Freddie, you need to go…” Kinsley said, holding up her phone. “My husband Liam is on his way.”

I squeezed my eyes closed and fisted my hand against her door. I had to leave. I had practice and I wasn’t about to get escorted out like a psychopath. I turned away from her door and brushed past Kinsley and Becca without another word. I walked up to my flat and gathered my swimming gear. I was late for practice and Coach was going to chew me out…but I couldn’t seem to care.

A heavy fog lingered around me, even in the pool. The water was usually my escape, but that day, my heart wasn’t in it. I swam slow, ignored my coach, and left right after practice, not even bothering to wait for Thom.

I tried to reach out to her one last time before bed.



Freddie: Please give me a few days to get this sorted. I never lied to you. I’m ending my betrothal.



She responded right away.



Andie: Of course you are. Is that before or after your “winter wedding”?

Freddie: Where are you? Can we meet somewhere? We need to talk.

Andie: Save it for your fiancée.





CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT


Andie




THE ANGER I felt toward Freddie paled in comparison to the self-loathing that had settled in the pit of my stomach since the day before. I had known Freddie was betrothed. He’d been perfectly honest about that from the start. I’d been the one to fall into a fairytale. I’d let my fantasies get the better of me, until reality sank in like a hot sharp knife.

The harshest reality?

That I was stupid enough to fall for a man who’d been unavailable from the start. I was surrounded by a f*cking all-you-can-eat buffet of sexy single athletes, yet I’d chosen one of the few that were off limits.

That’s stupidity at its finest.

I hadn’t left my room the night before. After leaving the bathroom in the lobby, I’d locked my door and barricaded myself inside. When Freddie had pounded his fist on the other side and begged me to come talk to him, I’d stared at my wall and prayed he’d go away. I needed him to go back to Caroline and leave me alone. It would make it so much easier for me to squash my delusions. I needed him to cut me off cold turkey.

But he was messaging me constantly. Every time I looked down at my phone, I had a new text from him that I had to delete. Since he wasn’t going to leave me alone, I did the next best thing: I googled Caroline Montague incessantly. For hours, I sat on my bed—alternating between icing and heating my wrist—and scrolled through articles about the English socialite. There was no shortage of information about her. I read up on everything from her fifth birthday party (her family had thrown a lavish affair at her family’s country castle) to her sweet sixteen (in lieu of a party, she’d asked friends to donate gifts to the children’s hospital in London). Honestly, it would have felt very good to find some salacious gossip or a mug shot after a drunken night out on the town, but instead of skeletons in her closet, TMZ only reported that she was pleasant to everyone she encountered.

At first, I didn’t believe it. Every celebrity poses for feel-good photo-ops every now and then, but with Caroline, they didn’t seem staged. She didn’t even have her own social media accounts. The stories were spread from the people she met—the surprised children, elated to have gifts from Caroline on Christmas Eve, or an elderly woman who intimated that Caroline had helped her shop for groceries each Saturday morning for the past five years.

I forced myself to read every article there was about her, including one about her betrothal to Freddie. It’d been posted recently, only three weeks before Freddie’s arrival in Rio. The reporter highlighted the fact that the setup was a bit old-fashioned (even by British standards), but that “it was an earthly formality only meant to celebrate the match that had so clearly been made in heaven”.