Crush on You by Christie Ridgway

Author:Christie Ridgway
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.
Published: 2010-04-30T04:00:00+00:00

11

Insistent raps pulled Alessandra out of the depths of sleep. “Allie,” her sister Stevie’s voice called from the other side of her bedroom door. “Are you decent?”

Hmm, she mused as drowsy memories of the night before flooded her mind. Was what she’d done last night with Penn “decent”? But before she could answer, her sisters came barreling through the now-open doorway.

“Hey,” she protested, yanking the covers to the neckline of her old cotton nightgown with one hand while the other swept the empty space beside hers, assuring herself he was gone.

“Hey, what?” Giuliana asked, crossing to the windows to pull up the shade.

Alessandra squinted as pale morning light brightened the room. That’s when she saw it, Penn’s T-shirt bunched on the floor on the far side of the bed. If her sisters realized what had happened last night, how would she explain it to them?

They’d want answers besides “I was horny and couldn’t help myself.”

Like always with him, it had felt beyond her control from his first touch. They kept colliding like magnets, opposites attracting, the small-town girl body-slamming with the big-city bad boy. Inevitable and hard to regret, though now that she was awake there was a vague disquiet hanging over her head.

“Coffee?” Stevie asked, then lifted Alessandra’s limp hand and wrapped her fingers around a cardboard cup.

“You brought me coffee,” she exclaimed, bringing it to her mouth. Her first sip brought more clarity to her brain and she looked at her sisters with suspicion. “You brought me coffee . . . why?”

Stevie shrugged. “I have some clients to pick up out this way. But since the tasting rooms don’t open until 10:30 at the earliest, I thought I’d kill some time with you.”

Alessandra switched her gaze to her oldest sister. Giuliana shrugged, too. “Um, I work here, remember?” Her job was at the winery offices, where she’d taken over the administrative tasks that had been their father’s, though she lived in town instead of at their family home.

“Your room is just down the hall,” Alessandra felt compelled to mention.

Stevie snorted. “Rapunzel’s afraid of what—who—might come crawling through her window.”

Alessandra blinked. “Huh?”

The middle Baci sister was looking in Giuliana’s direction, while Giuliana herself was playing with the comb and brush set on the dresser, as if she wasn’t the subject of the conversation. “Allie,” Stevie said, “haven’t you ever wondered what wore that path between our house and the Bennetts’?”

“I know what wore that path,” Alessandra retorted. “Liam and Jules . . . oh.” Oh.

At only fourteen when her oldest sister swore eternal enmity on Liam Bennett, Alessandra had never known what had seeded such passion. And now she realized that it was . . . passion. That meant Giuliana herself had only been eighteen, but you didn’t need to tell Alessandra about her sister’s ability to hold a grudge—or about the intensity of first love.

“Oh,” she said again.

“You can’t trust them,” Giuliana pronounced.

Bennetts? Men in general?

“We have to remember that, Allie,” she continued. “That’s why I came this morning.

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