Scandal: The Lies We Tell (Volume 1) Read Online Free PDF Page A

anything.
       “I don’t really like hotels,” Nick explained. “Besides, why be locked up in a stuffy hotel all weekend when we can have our very own slice of paradise.”
       “Paradise? In Nowhereville, Virginia?” The town was so small I hadn’t even been able to find it on my phone’s navigation system.
       “Scoff now but you’ll be eating those words in the light of day.” Nick hefted the bags and led the way to the front door. “And it’s Collinsburg, Virginia.”
      In a matter of seconds, he had unlocked the door, dropped our bags in the hallway and turned on the lights. Nick moved around the house confidently, giving me a quick tour before carrying our bags toward the bedrooms.
       “You sure seem to know your way around,” I commented.
       “I know the owner,” he replied. “You can take the master bedroom. It has a nice bathroom and a balcony facing the beach. Make yourself at home and let me know if you need anything.”
       I hesitated at the threshold of my assigned room. “Thank you, Nick.”
       He sensed my reluctance to step inside. “What’s wrong?”
       “Nothing is wrong.” Things were actually right for a change. “I’m not really tired yet. Any chance there’s something to drink in this place?”
       Nick grinned. “It’s like you read my mind. Let’s see what we can find.”
       What we found was scotch, and plenty of it. We took a bottle and two glasses outside and made ourselves comfortable on the deck chairs. Water lapped gently on the shoreline somewhere in the distance and the moon was full as it began its journey through the sky.
       “My family used to go to the beach every summer.” Nick twirled the scotch in his glass as he spoke. “My dad was a lawyer in a big firm and he worked way too many hours. But without fail, every August we headed to the beach, all six of us piled into the blue station wagon.”
       “Six?”
       “My parents and four kids- two boys and two girls.”
       “You’re the oldest?”
       “Is it that obvious?” Nick laughed softly. “That’s how I learned to be so bossy and arrogant.”
       “That explains it.” The scotch burned as it coated my throat but I didn’t mind.
       “What about you?” he asked hesitantly. “Any siblings?”
       “One.”
       “Brother? Sister? Older? Younger?” Nick probed.
       “Brother. Younger.”
       Nick sensed my reluctance to discuss it further but that didn’t stop him. “These are pretty basic questions, Charley. It shouldn’t be this much of a struggle to get answers out of you.”
       “I know.” He wasn’t the first person to find my secretiveness unsettling. Usually I didn’t care, but with Nick it was different. I wanted to tell him about my past, but I was having a hard time finding where to start. I finished my drin k and held out my glass. “I’m going to need more if we’re going to continue down this path.”
       Nick joined me in another drink, remaining quiet while I stayed lost in my head. He didn’t seem to mind the silence. He wasn’t one of those people that squirmed and fussed to fill the time; he just sipped his scotch and stared up at the sky.
       “Tim was exactly one year younger than me, down to the day. Some kids would’ve hated sharing a birthday with their sibling, but I loved it. I always felt like no matter what, we would have this one day that was just ours and no one else’s. Maybe that’s why we were so close growing up, I don’t know. But our close age also meant that we were in high school at the same time, and we ran in the same social circles. Tim was the life of every party, always clowning around. Everyone loved him.”
      A dog barked loudly down the street and I was glad to have the distraction. It helped pull me from my revere. The problem with talking about Tim wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk about him- it was the opposite. I could talk about him for hours.
       “Anyway,