Rebel Heir (Rush Series Duet #1)(47)

Gia kicked off her sandals and put her bare feet up on my dash. “So is the house your mom lives in the same place that you grew up?”

“One and the same. She’s been there for thirty-five years.”

“That means I’ll get to see where you slept as a teenager?”

“Yep.”

“I bet you were a handful as a teen. Bringing girls back to your room and what not.” She scrunched up her nose. “On second thought…I might not want to go in that room.”

“Come on. We can pretend we’re fourteen again, and I’ll feel you up while sucking your face and pressing a lead pipe into your hip bone.”

She laughed. “Fourteen? Is that when you started feeling up girls?”

From her reaction, I figured it best to not tell her it was more like twelve. “Somewhere around there.”

“That’s young.”

“How old were you the first time you got felt up?”

“Eighteen.”

My eyes flashed from the road to her to see if she was kidding. She wasn’t.

“Eighteen is a little old to go to first base, isn’t it?”

She shrugged. “I guess.”

“Boys must have been hounding you growing up. I’m guessing the late start had nothing to do with lack of opportunity.”

“No. I was asked out a lot. I just…”

I side glanced over at her. “You just what?”

“I don’t know. In hindsight, I think I might not have wanted to let my dad down. My mother had acted irresponsibly by having me and taking off. He put so much into raising me. I just didn’t want to disappoint him.”

All of the girls, and most of the women I spent time with as an adult, had the opposite goal in life. They wanted to piss of their fathers. I’d always kept away from the daddy’s girls, telling myself they were prudes. But suddenly I wondered if I had kept away from those girls because I didn’t think I could live up to the standards they had. Gia definitely had high expectations and that scared the crap out of me.

“I saw the way your father looks at you, the way you two interact, I don’t think it’s possible for you to disappoint him.”

She smiled. “Anyway, to get back to our conversation. I never had a boy feel me up in his bedroom. But I did let Robbie Kravit put his hand under my sweater in the back row of the movies when we were seniors in high school.”

“Is it fucked up that I have the urge to punch Robbie right now?”

She giggled. “Well, now you know how I felt over the last month…women stopping into the restaurant to proposition you while wearing little leather skirts.”

I hadn’t thought about that. “I didn’t invite any of them.”

She looked out the window, quiet for a minute and then said, “Can I ask you something?”

“When a woman asks if they can ask you something, it’s usually not something I want to answer.”

She laughed. “Were you with any women since we met?”

“No.” I’d almost gone there the night she’d jumped into that fight. But honestly, I had forced myself to reach out to another woman just so I could stop thinking about Gia, and I’m doubtful if I would’ve even gone through with it if I’d shown up. “I wanted to be with someone because I thought it might stop me from obsessing over you, but I never actually did it.”

She nodded and said nothing. Which made me fucking paranoid. Does she have something to confess?

“Were you with anyone?”

“No. I’ve only been with one other person in the last year. And like I told you, that was a total mistake. I got lonely and fell for the nice guy routine because I missed feeling a connection with a man. But I realized after he left me with the wrong number that sex doesn’t satisfy the connection I missed.”

I shook my head. “Now I want to beat the crap out of the asshole who played you, too. For a variety of reasons. The first being that he got to be inside you and I haven’t.”

Gia rested her hand high on my thigh, and I almost swerved out of my lane. “We can fix that you know?” she said. “I’m not the one making us take it slow. We just passed a Holiday Inn at the last exit.”

I groaned. “You’re going to be the death of me, woman.”





“Hi!” My mother opened the front door and engulfed Gia in a big hug before even acknowledging me. “I’m so glad you could make it.”

The two of them started complimenting each other on shit immediately.

“I love your necklace.”

“Blue is your color!”

“Did you change your hair?”

I rolled my eyes. “What the hell am I? Chopped liver?”

My mother stuck out her bottom lip. “Awww. Does my little boy feel neglected? Come here. Give your mamma a hug.”

Well, now it just feels forced. But I didn’t give a crap because my mother’s the shit. I squeezed her tight, and it felt freaking awesome.

When she pulled back, she looked between Gia and me with the most excited face I’ve ever seen on her. She clapped her hands a few times, barely able to contain her enthusiasm. “Come in. Come in.”

The house I grew up in was small, a typical Cape Cod-style starter home that packed many of the middle-class neighborhoods on Long Island. But my mother kept it filled with bright colors and paintings, so it always felt bigger than most of my friends’ homes for some reason. The best thing that came out of my grandfather leaving me the inheritance was that I was able to pay it off for her a few years ago.