Falling for Seven Read Online Free PDF Page B

whole body was too close. He was practically on me .
    “There’s not a chance I’m letting you get out of this. I’m dying to know everything there is to know about you.” His eyes slid down my body in a lazy exploration. “Every. Single. Thing.”
    Heat rushed into my cheeks. I was showing major weakness, letting him get to me like this. And judging by the look on his face, my reaction was everything he was hoping for.
    “You’re blushing. Tell me what you’re thinking.”
    “I’m not blushing. You are embarrassing me.” Julian had spared me a meager fraction of space, and I used it to check we hadn’t attracted anyone’s attention.
    “Yo, Seven!” One of the guys who Julian was joking with earlier was squeezing through the crowds, a whole head taller than most other students. These boys knew how to stand out, that was for sure.
    Julian didn’t even so much as look up. “Gimme your cell,” he said to me.
    “No.”
    “Okay. No biggie.” He squeezed his hand into the pocket of my jeans and pulled it out for himself. The intrusion caught me so off guard, my fingers were too slow to stop him.
    “Hey,” I protested, reaching to snatch it back, but he was already tapping the screen with two hands, holding my cell high above my head, out of reach.
    “Here. Call me.”
    “Like hell.” I speedily retrieved the new contact and deleted the number. I shoved the phone back into my pocket and glared at Julian and his cocky smile. “Get yourself another partner,” I said. “Because there is no way I am working with you.” I barged past him, head lowered as I side-tracked his friend.
    “We’ll see!” he shouted.
     
    <>
     
    Glenvale nursing home was big, expensive, and it was where my dad’s mom, Nellie, now permanently lived. When I’d first ever visited Glenvale I thought of it as more of a war camp than a nursing home, but now I knew the nurses and I saw how happy Nellie was, I knew how lucky she was to call this place home.
    I signed in at the entrance and spotted her in one of the small and cozy dayrooms, surrounded by floor to ceiling windows bowing out over the lush grounds. There’d been no expense spared on pops part with the choice of living facilities, even though my paternal grandparents had divorced twenty years before Nellie was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
    She was sitting up in an arm chair, a quilted throw draped over her legs and a picture book in her hand.
    “Nell.” I wrapped my arms around her neck and kissed her on the cheek, sitting on the armrest.
    She looked at me with milky-blue eyes and a vacancy deeper than any ocean. But her smile was real. Ninety-nine percent of the time she didn’t know who she was or where she was, but her smile never wilted. Wherever and whoever she was, she was happy.
    “What you got there?” I pointed to the heavy picture book, page to page of young Elvis Presley and his biography.
    She looked down at the black and white photography and smiled. “Handsome young man, this one.”
    “Who is he?”
    “He’s my boyfriend. Mother hates him, though. She’s always keeping us apart.”
    I grinned. “Why would she do that?”
    “Because she’s hideous, that’s why. He took me to the playground the other day, and don’t tell anybody,” she yanked on my sleeve, pulling me farther down, and her lips came to my ear. “We kissed on the merry-go-round, and when no one was looking, he put his hand up my skirt and—”
    “Oh, god, really? That’s so romantic.” Ugh, the outcome of that story scared me.
    Jennifer, Nell’s favorite nurse came over and I asked her, “How’s she been?”
    Jennifer sighed, her smile watered-down. “As good as she can be. She’s still as sharp as a knife, aren’t you, Nellie?”
    “Have you seen my boyfriend?” Nellie crooked an arthritic finger for Jennifer to come look at her rock ‘n’ roll lover who died thirty-eight years ago.
    “My, Nellie, he’s a looker. How do you keep the competition