The Crush by Ward Penelope (best book recommendations txt) 📕

Jace was clueless. Totally clueless. Little did he know he was the only guy whose attention I wanted lately. Anytime I dressed provocatively, it was an attempt to rile him up.

Ever since he’d moved in two months ago, getting Jace’s attention was one of my pastimes. But unlike the pistachios he was chomping on, he was a hard nut to crack. Sure, I’d caught him looking at me from time to time, but I never knew what he was actually thinking. And truly, I didn’t know what I was thinking trying to get him to notice me. Jace wouldn’t touch me with a ten-foot pole—not just because he was living with us now, but because I was his best friend’s sister. Thus, he looked at me like a sister, too—which I hated. As much as he’d been like family over the years, I’d never looked at him like a brother. My attraction was too strong. I’d had a crush on him from the moment I’d met him, when I was probably around six.

“Last I checked,” I said, “the girls you hang out with don’t dress any more conservatively than this.”

He licked some of the salt off his lips. “Well, that’s…different.”

I cocked a brow. “How so?”

Jace’s jaw tightened. He didn’t have an answer.

Exactly.

I took the liberty of answering for him. “I know why you think it’s different. You seem to forget that I’m twenty-one now. Some of the girls you date are practically my age, but you don’t see me as mature, because when you left for college, I was twelve. That’s the person you remember.” I sighed. “I’m not twelve anymore. Reverse the numbers.”

My brother, Nathan, walked in at that moment. “I don’t care how old you are. You’re dressed like a whore.”

I rolled my eyes.

Jace glared at him. “Don’t say shit like that to her.”

“It’s my job to tell her the truth.”

“But you don’t have to use those words, jackass.”

I chuckled. “Yeah. Jace basically told me the same thing, except he was a lot nicer about it.” I gulped the last of my water and placed the glass on the counter. “Anyway, it’s hot as balls at The Iguana. Their air conditioning is sucky. Everyone dresses like this,” I lied.

They looked at me in unison, both with skeptical expressions.

Jace and Nathan had been best friends since childhood. He and my brother were six years older than me. I’d spent the majority of my preteen years lusting after Jace in secret. In those days, he’d come over to the house all sweaty after football practice, and my hormones would mimic Mexican jumping beans. Whenever he’d so much as talk to me, I’d get weak in the knees. If you looked at my diary entries from back then, there was something about Jace on every other page. Wanting someone and knowing I couldn’t have him had been pure torture. Especially during those last couple of years before Jace went away to college, I was hopelessly lovesick.

And then? He was gone. My twelve-year-old heart had been devastated when Jace moved away to attend school in North Carolina. And he only came home in the summer for the first few years.

He’d stayed away for nine years in total and had only recently moved back home to Florida. I certainly never imagined he’d end up living with us. At twenty-seven, Jace was the boy I remembered lusting after, but even bigger and better. He was a full-fledged man now. And I wasn’t a child anymore. So you can imagine where my head had been lately.

Nathan snapped me out of my thoughts. “You’d better bring the pepper spray with you if your stubborn ass won’t change into something decent.”

“You know I always carry it.”

Sometimes my brother didn’t hold back, but I couldn’t blame him for being protective. I was an adult now, but old habits died hard. Nathan had become my caretaker after our parents were killed during a robbery seven years ago. I was fourteen, and Nathan was twenty when we lost them. Jace had been home from college that summer, working for my dad’s landscaping company. Sadly, he was with my parents when they died. That was still so hard to fathom. To this day, Jace couldn’t talk about it. I knew he suffered from survivor’s guilt. He’d been shot at as well, but he’d gotten lucky. Still, the trauma of having witnessed my parents’ murder had inflicted a different kind of damage—not physical, but it had scarred his soul for life. None of us really talked about what had happened. Our painful past was a ghost that followed us around, one we never acknowledged.

I knew from the police report that my father and Jace had been driving back from a landscaping job. They’d stopped to pick up my mother at the convenience store where she worked. My father had felt like someone was following them from the moment he and Jace left the job site. The man eventually tried to run them off the road before pulling out a gun. My dad had a ton of cash on him, since his landscaping clients typically paid him that way. The investigators believe the man had somehow known about that money, which was why he’d been following their truck. Perhaps he’d been tipped off by someone working for my dad.

According to the report, the victims, Ronald and Elizabeth Spade, had cooperated, handing over the cash, but the man, who was high on drugs, fatally shot my parents anyway. A bullet grazed Jace, but he was unharmed. Based on the description of his vehicle, police later found the man holed up in his apartment. He was shot and killed following a standoff. And that was the end of it. Our lives changed forever, and the innocent, idyllic childhood I’d enjoyed became a memory.

After that summer, Jace never came home again. That was understandable.

Though it had now been seven years since my parents died,