Once and Again Read Online Free PDF Page A

people. But he needed cash, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to get it from his asshole of a father, who gambled away everything he ever earned. So he’d put on his one pair of church pants, borrowed a collared shirt from a friend, and braved the drive across town.
    The first time he passed through Briarwood’s gates, he thought he’d reached paradise.
    In his mind, golf was boring. The tournaments he saw on TV dragged on and on. But up close, the game was exciting, elegant, and above all, intimate—the polar opposite of the way he’d grown up with a steady diet of beer, football, and fighting. If the perfectly manicured greens hadn’t done it for him, the beautiful women at the club would have. But he knew his place. Boys like him couldn’t screw up, because there weren’t going to be any second chances. So he could look, but he didn’t touch. For five years, he never touched.
    Until the summer he turned twenty-one, when
she
appeared.
    Long, straight, sun-lightened hair, pearls at her ears and throat, and a turned-up collar on her polo shirt would have told Jake everything about Carolyn Rivington if he hadn’t already known—she was rich, gorgeous, and so far out of his league they weren’t even playing the same sport. She’d watched him back then. And every time he caught her staring, she’d looked away fast, as if she knew she was doing something naughty.
    Of course, he’d watched her, too. Lounging by the pool in her barely there bikini. Driving in her father’s sleek convertible, golden hair flowing in the breeze. Waltzing in the ballroom as the midsummer dance unfolded, her in a gorgeous silken dress, looking every inch the debutante she was. She’d practically lived at Briarwood that summer, and he’d lived there with her, worshipping her from afar. Until the one night she’d finally smiled at him.
    He’d had the balls to ask her out behind the pool house, knowing what he was doing could get him into a whole lot of trouble. But he did it anyway.
    After that, they hadn’t wasted a second. They’d started out slow. Slow touches. Slow kissing.
Hell
, even holding her hand gave him a thrill. But soon, they’d both wanted more.
    They had it all planned out for the night of her eighteenth birthday—a blanket on the beach, the moon above their heads, and the most expensive bottle of wine he could afford. He’d loved her, and told her so. She’d said the same—that she wanted to be with him, always.
    And then it had all gone very, very wrong.
    It came back to him in flashes, sometimes. The police cars, the cold metal of the handcuffs around his wrists, and the deep humiliation when his big brother, Joe, had to come bail him out of the one-celled Eastbridge jail because his own dad was off at some illegal poker game, blowing what was left of Jake’s college fund. Above all was the way they’d been separated. As Carolyn’s dad led her away, she wouldn’t even look at him. Not once.
    The next day, he’d been summarily fired from his job at Briarwood—fraternization between staff and guests was swiftly punished—but it didn’t matter. Carolyn was gone, too, taken away by her parents to spend the rest of her summer out of his dirty hands. He’d texted her, called, emailed, everything—even hitched a ride to Manhattan in an ill-advised attempt to see her.
    No response.
    His court-appointed lawyer got the charges dropped—they couldn’t prove he served alcohol to Carolyn because she hadn’t actually drunk it—but the anger and shame remained. He’d gone back to college that fall, more determined than ever to prove—to his friends, to his teachers, to himself—that he was worth just as much as Carolyn. More, even.
    When Jake heard the rumor that Briarwood was up for sale—from a friend-of-a-friend who was a successful New York City real estate broker—he hadn’t seen the club in fifteen years. Once he’d confirmed the rumor was true, he didn’t even do any due diligence on the place,