Sand Jewels (The Wishes Series) Read Free Page A

that morning, just as I had almost every morning for the past year. I wasn’t expecting a full play-by-play of the night before, but I wasn’t expecting to be given the cold shoulder either.
    Alex did a double-take as I walked in, and then asked Nicole to make my coffee. “I just need to check something out the back,” he muttered unconvincingly.
    He was gone before I had a chance to speak. I ignored the overwhelming urge to hysterically cry and run out the door. I tried hard to make polite conversation with Nicole instead. I didn’t know the girl well. French wasn’t one of her classes.
    “Where’s Charli today?” It was the best I could come up with. One was rarely seen without the other.
    “With Mitchell Tate.” She rolled her eyes. “He’s leaving town soon and she’s making the most of having him around.”
    “Are they romantically involved?” I asked.
    I was used to the sly grins I received when speaking to teenagers. Alex wasn’t the first to point out that my choice of words were less than conventional.
    “No,” she scoffed. “She just likes surfing with him because he can get her out past the break. She can’t go alone.”
    “I see.”
    I didn’t really. I had no clue what she meant.
    “How will she get out there after he leaves?” I asked naively.
    Nicole carelessly slid a cup of coffee across the counter. I put my hand on the edge of the counter, managing to save it from hitting the floor.
    “She won’t,” she said bleakly. “But she’ll probably give it a crack anyway.”
    ***
    I spent the rest of the day painting. It’s all I could think of doing to take my mind off the huge miss-step I’d taken the night before. Pushing it to the back of my mind became impossible when Alex Blake’s loutish red Ute pulled onto my driveway.
    I kept jabbing away at the canvas in front of me, paying him no attention as he stepped up onto the veranda.
    “Hello, Gabs,” he greeted.
    In my twenty-five years on earth, no one had ever referred to me as Gabs. It was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard.
    I grunted out my reply. “Hello. What do you want?”
    I could see him from the corner of my eye, leaning against a veranda post with his arms folded, smiling like he’d won something. For a quick moment, I considered turning around and painting a big L on his forehead.
    “Are you mad at me?”
    I spun around to face him and hit him with a slew of French insults that would’ve made my mother blush. It didn’t exactly have the desired effect. He stalked toward me smiling brightly. His arm snaked around my waist and I quickly struggled free.
    “First you sneak out of my bed at dawn and then you ignore me. Of course I’m mad.”
    “Firstly, I didn’t sneak out at dawn,” he explained. “I snuck out before midnight. You were sleeping. I guess I wore you out.”
    I turned around and dropped my brush into a jar of turpentine. The urge to brand him was growing stronger by the second.
    “Before midnight?” I sounded appalled. “You really are a pig!”
    “But I’m a responsible pig, Gabs,” he defended. “I’m not in the habit of leaving a sixteen-year-old kid to her own devices all night. I had to go home.”
    It was a perfectly legitimate excuse but it did nothing to dissolve the chagrin I was feeling.
    “You could’ve told me that last night,” I grumbled, looking to the floor.
    Alex reached out, lightly pinching my chin between his thumb and forefinger. He tilted my head giving me no option but to look at him. “I’m sorry. I should’ve told you.”
    “And why did you ignore me when I came to the café?”
    Releasing his hold on me, he pulled a face as if I’d reminded him of something horrible. “I’m not quite sure how this is going to play out, Gabrielle,” he said quietly. “I don’t want to curse things. I think we have a better chance of making things work if we just keep it to ourselves for a while. This is new territory for me.”
    A strange groan escaped me. “I