About That Night

By Alison Kent

Avery was the cheerleader everybody loved. David was the geek nobody noticed... until he stepped between her and their high school's biggest bully and earned a rep as a badass and a suspension for his trouble.

Fifteen years later, David has returned and is living on the third floor of the converted Victorian belonging to Avery's widowed mother. Avery lives beneath him on the second. The staircase between makes for a tight fit when they pass, and the shared address for a lot of circling, avoiding, retreating, and hiding, at least on Avery's part.

But the tension between them is impossible to ignore and David's determined to get to the bottom of what happened the night she ran off after he saved her life. The very same night—in her words—she ruined his.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bryant Street Publishing
• Release date: Aug 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9781094419923

Alison Kent

Alison Kent was a born reader, but it wasn't until she reached 30 that she knew she wanted to be a writer when she grew up. Five years later, she made her first sale. Two years after that, she accepted an offer issued by the senior editor of Harlequin Temptation live on the 'Isn't It Romantic?' episode of CBS's 48 Hours. The resulting book, Call Me, was a Romantic Times finalist for Best First Series Book.

Book preview

ABOUT THAT NIGHT

Alison Kent

BRYANT STREET PUBLISHING

COPYRIGHT

Copyright © 2004 by Alison Kent

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to locales, events, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. With the exception of quotes used in reviews, this book may not be reproduced or used in whole or in part by any means existing without written permission from the author.

Praise for ABOUT THAT NIGHT

It’s UPSTAIRS, DOWNSTAIRS intrigue in Alison Kent’s addition! The beautiful Avery’s widowed mom is acting a little peculiar lately, and Avery wants to know why. She thinks her mom’s sexy tenant, David, might have the answers. Her search for the truth sends her straight into David’s arms—just as mom planned! — RT Book Reviews

ONE

AVERY RICE TURNED ONTO THE street where she lived just in time to see her mother’s white Toyota Camry back out of their shared driveway and head away from the three-story Victorian.

So much for their weekly ritual of coffee and croissants. And for the second weekend in a row, no less. Her mother was taking this business of moving on with her life too far. Especially as her plans obviously included leaving her only daughter behind.

They’d shared Saturday-morning coffee and croissants—the croissants fresh from Avery’s bakery—since the death of Avery’s father five years before. For the past month, however, Suzannah Rice had been busy doing her own thing to the exclusion of the shared things that had been a big part of both of their lives for so long.

Avery wasn’t complaining, though a little voice whispering in her ear argued otherwise before going on to tell her to get over it already. She readily admitted her quasi-isolation and homebody tendencies were no one’s fault but her own. But she’d found a great comfort in safety—especially after the near disaster she’d barely escaped when she had taken a risk years ago.

Another three houses and she bumped her pickup into the driveway. The driver’s side door was hit twice with a blast from the sprinkler dousing the front lawn—and spraying the front of the house. She’d have to use the back door into her mother’s kitchen rather than the main entrance that accessed the staircase to her second-story apartment in the converted triplex.

Of course, doing that meant making her way down the long narrow driveway and around the overgrown SUV that belonged to her mother’s third-floor tenant and the longtime bane of Avery’s existence, David Marks. David, the know-it-all who was constantly riding her about still living at home with her mother when she didn’t live at home with her mother at all. She only lived in the same house. Yes, it was the house she’d grown up in but it was now very clearly a multitenant dwelling, which he should know since he lived here, too.

Wicker bread basket hooked over her elbow, Avery shut off the engine, climbed down from the truck and pocketed her keys. Slamming the door apparently drew David’s attention—though what he was doing in her mother’s kitchen, she didn’t have a clue—because he was standing in the open doorway before she’d even climbed the first of the six back steps.

Hey, he said, wiping his hands on a workman’s knobby red rag and getting on her nerves by just standing there, his jeans slung way too low and his chambray shirt hanging open as if he’d just slipped it on. What’s up?

Just me and the breakfast trying to stay dry. She walked up one step, two, three.

You just missed your mother.

So I saw. Four steps. Five. She stopped there, leaving the sixth step between them because he hadn’t moved except to tuck the red rag into his front pocket. He’d been so much easier to take when she’d led cheers and he’d run around the Tatem, Texas football field sidelines wearing their high school mascot’s tornado costume.

A tornado that she’d always thought looked more like an upside-down soft-serve cone than a threatening storm—even if later, she admitted, the threat had been real. For all she knew, it still was. He made her nervous—another admission she couldn’t afford not to make, just as she couldn’t afford not to keep her wits about her. Their history left her less than certain where she stood with him today.

He’d been just as maddening fifteen years ago as he was now but from age eight to eighteen he’d been nothing but a muddle of arms and legs and freckles who’d bugged the crap out of her and the rest of her friends with his stupid jokes and lame attempts to get her attention.

Now he was all broad chest and six-pack abs, with a disheveled head of thick, sandy-brown hair, fans of crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes, a short sexy goatee, and a really fine backside that...

What are you doing? she asked, pulling the basket of croissants away from his greedy, groping fingers.

Looking for breakfast. I’m wasting away to nothing in here. He wiggled both brows in a suggestive way that drove her nuts. And you know how I feel about your buns.

Oh, good grief. You have way too much meat on your bones to be starving, she said, blushing as his eyes grew all sleepy looking when she knew he wasn’t the least bit tired. She pushed past him into the kitchen that would’ve been classified as sixties retro if it hadn’t been the original decor. With all the changes her mother was making these days, Avery wouldn’t be surprised to find a kitchen makeover next on the list.

Why in the world Suzannah had ever rented the top-floor apartment to David was a bone of contention Avery hadn’t quit gnawing. Her mother claimed that David, now Suzannah’s colleague on the faculty at Tatem High, deserved to feel at home, returning as he had to West Texas, to the town he’d left on the heels of scandal, to teach the high school’s one and only computer science class.

Avery agreed in theory. She couldn’t imagine a better mentor for the high school’s whiz kids than Tatem’s team mascot-cum-resident geek. But in practice... no. David did not deserve to feel at home when she was at the root of that old scandal and when the home in question was hers. Or at least above hers.

And when getting to his home meant sharing the same staircase and having to pass each other between the first and second floors. A staircase that really was much too narrow for a man as broad as David Marks.

He shut the kitchen door behind her and a shiver of intuitive apprehension told her that walking through her mother’s living room of roses and mahogany and chintz and up the stairs to her own apartment before either of them said another word would be the smartest thing she could do. He made her uneasy in ways she hadn’t taken time to define since he’d moved in ten months ago and she feared that lapse would prove to be her undoing.

Then he flipped the dead bolt, locking the back door. She lifted one brow in question and tried to breezily add, That’s really not necessary, you know.

Reviews for About That Night

[judy griffin · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Wish scribd would drop this author

[Deb Pden · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Good storyline, a twist of second chance romance, 15 yrs in the making. A good short read with a HEA.