One Tiny Lie A Novel

to his head and face, but it still manages to wisp out at the ends in that sexy way. I see a droplet of water running down his cheek and I feel the urge to reach up and wipe it away but I’m not sure if that’s too intimate, so I don’t. But my heart still starts pounding harder than it ever was while I was running.
    “Stop staring, Irish.”
    “I wasn’t.” I turn to look down the street, my cheeks burning, embarrassed to be caught. Yet again.
    He jostles my shoulders slightly as he adjusts his grip.
    “Do you need to put me down?”
    He smirks. “Eight years of rowing makes carrying you pretty easy, Irish.”
    “I guess.” Eight years. That definitely explains his ridiculously fit upper body. “You must really enjoy it.”
    With a sigh, he murmurs, “Yeah, it’s relaxing, being out on the water, focused on an end goal. It’s easy to shut everything else out.”
    Ashton’s head jerks to the side. I see another raindrop running along his cheek and realize that he’s trying to shake if off since he can’t brush it away.
    “Here,” I murmur, reaching up to help him. Dark eyes flash to me with a scowl and my hand instantly recoils. I must have misread that. I shouldn’t have . . . But he’s not scowling at me, I soon recognize. He’s scowling at the nasty red scrape across my palm that I earned with my fall. Distracted by my ankle and by Ashton, I had forgotten about it.
    “You should really think about never running again, Irish,” he mutters.
    “And you should think about wearing more clothes while you run,” I snap back, my anger flaring without warning, followed quickly by heat crawling up to my hairline.
    “And why is that, Irish?”
    Running my tongue over my teeth to buy myself time, I decide to ignore his question. “I could have waited for Grant.”
    “And died from pneumonia,” he retorts in exasperation, adjusting his grip once again. The movement shakes my leg, which shakes my foot, which shoots a pain up my leg. But I fight the urge to wince because I don’t want to make him feel bad.
    Ashton settles into a quiet, fast-paced walk with his eyes straight ahead, and so I assume all conversation is over.
    “I’m sorry about your parents.” It’s so quiet I almost miss it.
    I peek at him from the corner of my eye to see him staring straight ahead, his face a mask.
    I’m sorry about your mom, too .
    It’s on the tip of my tongue but I bite it back. Reagan was eavesdropping, after all. She’s not supposed to know. I’m not supposed to know. Not unless he tells me.
    So I don’t say anything. I simply nod and wait in silence for him to make the next move. He doesn’t, though. There’s another extremely long, awkward pause, where neither of us talks. Where Ashton stares straight ahead as he walks, and my eyes shift back and forth between his face and the turning colors of the trees. Where I soak up his body heat, acutely aware that I’m covered in his sweat. Where I feel his heartbeat and try to synchronize my own heartbeat against it. And then acknowledge that that is utterly ridiculous.
    I can’t handle this silence.
    “I can’t believe Reagan’s dad knew them,” I say casually, adding, “and that he recognized my mother in me. I didn’t know that we looked that much alike.”
    Ashton’s brow furrows deeply. “You remember what she looks like, don’t you?”
    “Yeah. But my parents lost all of their childhood and college pictures in a flood one year, so I never got to see her at the age I am now.”
    I sense my fingertips rubbing across warm skin and realize that at some point in my reverie, my hand staged a mutiny against my common sense and slid under the collar of Ashton’s shirt. I watch my fingers still drawing little circles as if of their own free will. And, seeing as I’m feeling all kinds of brave today and seeing as it’s a fairly innocuous question that a person who didn’t know the answer would ask, I decide to ask it, keeping my voice casual and light. “What about your parents?”
    There’s a pause. “What about them?” He tries to sound bored but by the way his arms constrict around me, the way the muscles in his neck spasm, I know immediately that I’ve hit a nerve.
    “I don’t know . . .” Turning to look out on the road, I murmur casually, “Tell me about them.”
    “There’s not much to tell.” The bored tone has switched to annoyed. “Why? What has Reagan heard?”
    Keeping my focus ahead, I take a deep breath and