Valentine's Child by Nancy Bush Read Free Book Online

wondered why no one else saw it. Okay, she was still a little gawky, slower to develop than some. But he could almost watch her daily and predict what was going to happen. Beauty and unconscious sensuality were heading her way like a freight train.
    The coming transformation was enough to leave him weak at the knees.
    Yet she was still Sherry Sterling whose family was a source of head shaking and lip pursing to the adults. She had to be loose, he’d heard more than one old biddy pronounce. Father a drunk. Mother a weak and weary woman. No money. No family honor.
    It was a wonder Sherry had gotten as far as she had. For the remainder of his freshman year she circled his fantasies. Once, he seized an opportunity to talk to her. She was with her two friends, Jennifer and Julie, but Sherry seemed dissociated from them. There was a faraway look in her eyes, a haunted yearning from something that touched an answering chord inside Jake. He approached her as she was leaving school, her two friends chattering in her wake. They shut up as if someone had slammed a door in front of them as soon as Jake approached Sherry.
    “Hard to believe school’s almost out, huh?” he said, mouth dry. He heard his voice as if he were an outsider and cringed. As a pickup line it left much to be desired.
    She slid him a glance. Her eyes were deep purple blue and they shimmered with hostility. Jake was taken aback.
    “Hard to believe,” she agreed coolly.
    “I just meant it’s gone kind of fast. Freshman year.”
    “Yeah.”
    He’d been frozen out by girls before. Margot Agner had treated him like he had the plague when he dumped her after they’d made out in eighth grade at Caroline’s fourteenth birthday party. But Margot’s kind of freeze was different; she turned up her nose when she saw him, then cried gallons of tears to her friends and made sure he knew it. She’d been kind of fun to hang out with but he’d sensed a desperation beneath her cool-girl exterior and warning bells had sounded.
    But Sherry Sterling’s freeze-out was glacial — a whole new level.
    School let out for the summer and Jake spent his time surfing or bored to tears in his father’s real-estate office, learning the ropes. Thoughts of Sherry faded as those summer nights turned warmer. Tourists arrived, an influx of nubile girls with bodies just starting to curve. He lost his virginity the night before school started with a girl who possessed huge blue eyes and even huger breasts.
    Tina Phillips. A transferee from California who’d practically thrown him down in the sand and made love to him. Jake had gone through the motions, slightly detached, and then had suffered acute embarrassment and annoyance at himself. He tried to explain to her that he wasn’t interested in some kind of serious relationship, but Tina wouldn’t listen. She followed him around school, waited outside the gates of his house, broke into his BMW, called him incessantly.
    It was psychological hell, and Jake didn’t know what to do.
    Enter: Patrice. The ultimate Mother Bear.
    “Who is that girl?” she demanded, while Tina strolled along North Beach Road. “Did you give her a ride? You’ve barely got your license. You shouldn’t pick up strange girls.”
    “She’s not a strange girl.” Jake refused to talk about it with Patrice.
    No problem. His mother called up the school and talked to the teachers, counselors and principal. Then she phoned the Phillips and they packed up and moved back to California.
    Jake thought that would be the end of it, but his first conquest still called him from California three nights out of seven and started saying things like she would commit suicide if he didn’t love her. Patrice grabbed the phone and warned Tina that she would institute legal action if she didn’t stop harassing her son.
    Embarrassment. Humiliation. That one night of lovemaking became the talk of the school because Patrice made no secret of the fact that her son was desperately