Excerpt Reveal: The Hard Way by Katie Ashley
Fuuuuuuuuuck! This seriously was not
happening. Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse,
apparently the universe didn’t just hate me. It fucking despised
me. Not only was I stuck working forty hours a week at this shithole,
but now I had the worst blast from my past standing before me. Avery
Fucking Prescott.
In every “manwhore with seemingly no
soul’s” world, there is one girl he regrets. One girl he thinks
about from time to time. One girl he measures all the other ones
against. One girl he even cries about when he’s shitfaced.
Mine was Avery Fucking Prescott.
I couldn’t help
noticing that the Avery standing in front of me didn’t seem the
same. Sure, she still had the same long, dark hair that she swept
back in one of those ponytail things. Gone were the glasses, which
made it a lot easier to see her green eyes that had flecks of gold in
them. Of course, today there was pure and unadulterated hate burning
in them directed at me where back in the day, there had been love.
But I had managed to kill that love by being a prick. Yeah, I’m
sure you’re thinking that isn’t all too shocking based on the
pure stupidity you’ve seen me exhibit so far. The thing is that
Avery brought out the good that was buried deep down inside me. The
good that you needed a fucking bulldozer to unearth.
While
there were slight differences in her appearance, her entire
personality seemed different, and no, I don’t mean just about how
she hated me with a fiery passion. She wasn’t the wide-eyed,
innocent farm girl who seemed so out of place at Harlington Prep. It
was like she’d had a personality transplant. It reminded of me of
what happened to my older sister, Catherine, the summer she turned
fifteen, and my mother sent her off to some glamour school shit to
detox the awkward out of her. When she came back a month later, it
was like she had become a Stepford Kid. Catherine no longer took the
time to play with me. She had “more important” things to do like
contouring her brows or preparing for cotillions. Things were never
the same between us after that.
My ego couldn’t help
wondering if what had happened between us had caused the seismic
shift in Avery. Like I’d broken the Old Avery with my actions, and
this was what had been rebuilt in its place. But another voice
rationalized that unlike me, Avery had probably gotten her shit
together in the last three years. College had matured her.
After
a few moments of a silent standoff, Avery said, “Hello again,
Cade.” Her words might have been polite, but her voice was
strained. I could tell it was taking everything within her not to go
off on me.
“Oh, you two know each other?” Tammy or
Theresa, or whatever the hell her name was, questioned.
Do we
know each other? Oh yeah, we know each other. Like in the biblical
sense. I can even tell you about the heart-shaped birthmark on the
inside of her right thigh.
But I knew I would mortify the
hell out of Avery if I said anything like that in front of her boss.
So instead, I cocked my brows at Avery for her to take the lead on
how she wanted us to respond to that question.
“A little.
We went to high school together,” she replied diplomatically. The
wounded look that momentarily flashed in her eyes told an entirely
different story—the story where I played the villain.
But
Tammy didn’t seem to pick up on it. “Well, isn’t it a small
world?” she mused.
“Yeah,” Avery and I said in unison.
Tammy smiled at me. “I was just about to sing all of
Avery’s praises to you, but since you know her, I don’t need to
waste my breath, right?”
“Right,” I muttered.
“Well, then. I’ll leave you two alone to catch up, and for
Avery to show you the ropes.”
“Thank you, Tamar,” Avery
said politely.
Oh it was Tamar. Shit, I needed to remember
that. “Yeah, thanks, Tamar.”
Tamar started out of the
door and then stopped. She threw a grin over her shoulder. “Now,
Avery, just because you know Cade, you can’t go easy on him. He has
a debt to pay to Georgia Tech’s athletic department.”
Avery
glared at me before flashing a fake smile at Tamar. “Oh, I promise
to make him earn his keep.”
Apparently Tamar wasn’t
picking up on the heavy tension between us. “Unfuckingbeliveable,”
I muttered under my breath.
“Excuse me?” Avery demanded.
I held up my hands. “Nothing.”
Avery crossed her arms
over her chest. “I never thought I’d have to see you again.”
She shook her head at me, which caused her ponytail to swish back and
forth like a whip. “Yet here you are standing before me. I guess, I
must’ve done something epic to piss the universe off this much to
put you back in my path.”
Whoa, that was sure as hell not
what I was expecting. “I could say the same.”
Her green
eyes narrowed to fury-filled slits. “Excuse me? You have some nerve
to stand here in front of me and say that considering what you did.”
She was right. Only an epic tool would not immediately apologize
for what I did to her. It should have been the first words out of my
mouth. And not just to make things run smoothly here at The Ark, but
because it was the right thing to do. After all, she had truly been
an innocent in the whole fucked up situation of me being an
emotionally crippled bastard. I’d let her be tortured by a
psychotic chick who thought she belonged to me. I’d humiliated her
with my deceptive words and cruel actions. But the greatest of my
crimes was I had broken her heart.
But in this instance, I
was being King Epic Tool because I couldn’t get those words to come
out of my mouth. It wasn’t something I struggled with today. I’d
had three years to stay those two words. Hell, I’d started off a
hundred texts, but I’d never sent them. I’d even done a few
stalkerish drives by her house to say how sorry I was in person, but
being an emotional pansy ass, I had never gotten out of the car.
So instead of taking the emotional high road, I went slumming.
“It’s been three years, Prescott. You really need to get over
that.”
Sports + Bad Boy + Second Chance
The Hard Way by Katie Ashley Releases
on August 31st!
Add to your TBR at:
Cade Hall has always been the golden
boy of the gridiron. Because of his talent at football, coupled with
his father’s wealth, he’s always gotten his way. But when a night
of drunken debauchery lands him in hot water with the college
athletic board, neither his influential father nor his charming grin
can save him. He finds it a total buzz kill when he is sentenced to
community service with troubled youth at an inner-city shelter. But
his nightmare is only beginning when his greatest high school regret
is the very one in charge of the program, and she has him by the
balls in more ways than one.
For Avery Prescott, senior year was a
nightmare of epic proportions, and Cade Hall played the lead villain.
After she fled her small town for college in the bright lights of
Atlanta, she thought she had escaped the painful memories of her
past. She never could have imagined Cade would waltz through the door
of the outreach program she presided over. But Avery has news for
Cade--she isn’t the same shy, doormat of a girl she was in high
school. Since she holds Cade's football future in her hands, she’s
more than ready to make payback a real bitch.
Will the two stay in the defensive zone
or discover that sometimes life's greatest lessons are learned the
hard way?
Katie Ashley is a New York Times, USA
Today, and Amazon Best-Selling author. She lives outside of Atlanta,
Georgia with her daughter, Olivia, and her two very spoiled dogs. She
has a slight obsession with Pinterest, The Golden Girls, Harry
Potter, Shakespeare, Supernatural, Designing Women, and Scooby-Doo.
With a BA in English, a BS in Secondary
English Education, and a Masters in Adolescent English Education, she
spent 11 1/2 years educating the Youth of America aka teaching MS and
HS English until she left to write full time in December 2012.
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