Southbound Surrender Read Online Free PDF Page A

her breasts. I stare a little too long before my eyes shoot up to her face.
    “Excuse me, let me scrape my friend’s mouth off of the floor,” Hudson jokes as he elbows me.
    “Yeah, how did you know it was me?” I finally manage to stutter. The hole in the fence was only an inch or two in diameter. There’s no way she could have seen me.
    Her lips turn up into a knowing smile before she points down at my shoes. All three of us look down to see my knock-off white Chucks with fluorescent laces.
    “I saw your shoes underneath the fence,” she says. “And then I saw another pair of shoes just like your friend’s over here.” She points to Hudson’s black Nikes. “Stalkers found and apprehended. Case solved.” She curtsies and then blows a kiss at me.
    Oh God, those lips .
    “Don’t look at me,” Hudson says as he raises his hands in surrender. “It was him. I just happened to be delivering some cabinets with my dad down the street when I saw his bike. I decided to come check it out. It’s not every day that Cash Rowland is on the north side of town without me.”
    “Cash Rowland, huh?” she says, eyeing me. I stand up taller and puff out my chest even though, at this point, nothing is going to help me when I’m standing next to the man-child.
    “Piper Sullivan,” I say as I reach my hand out to hers. Shaking hands feels like a formality lost on my generation, but I do it anyway because I would do anything just to feel her skin against mine. She reaches out and meets my hand.
    Her skin is so incredibly soft.
    “I see you’ve done your homework to find out who I am,” she says as she continues to shake my hand. Her hand is warm and smaller than I would have guessed, but the grip is firm. It’s full of meaning like she has something to prove to me. She’s not the type of girl to go down lightly.
    Somehow, a handshake is turning me on.
    “Yeah,” I say, not moving my eyes away from hers.
    “This is awkward,” Hudson mumbles as he moves a few feet away from us and pretends to look at notecards even though he has never taken a note in his life.
    “That’s Hudson, by the way,” I add, nodding toward him. He’s behind her now, but she doesn’t move her eyes from me, which is surprising and completely abnormal. Ten out of ten girls would choose Hudson over me. Hell, I don’t blame them. But this gorgeous girl, she’s looking at me. Hudson violently shakes his head, waves his arms, and silently screams no. Then he points at me.
    “Good to know. Why were you watching me earlier today? Did you like what you saw?”
    “Um,” I stutter and her hand finally stops moving up and down in our handshake. And I realize that I’m standing in the middle of Target, in front of the pens, holding a girl’s hand I’m confident will fill and break my heart at the same time. I don’t ever want to let go.
    “As far as first impressions go, you’ve scored a zero so far,” she saves me with a melodic laugh that snaps me out of the Piper haze.
    Her words scored a zero slice through my brain.
    “You scored a 2400 on your SAT,” I reply. “You’re the only one who scored higher than I did in our graduating class so I had to scope out my competition.”
    “Competition, huh?” she asks with a raise of her eyebrow. She finally drops my hand and the dreadful path back to my own cold bubble of a body leaves me deflated. “You go to Xavier?”
    “Yeah, Hudson and I both do.” I curse myself for bringing up Hudson again. As far as I’m concerned, she needs to stay far, far away from Hudson Hawley and his chiseled abs, thick neck and strong jawline. There is no sharing when it comes to Piper, not that we shared anyone before.
    “So, why aren’t you at the football game? Why isn’t your friend playing? He looks like a football player. Grades not good enough?” she quips as she leans in and lowers her voice. “Big meatheads like him usually aren’t the brightest in the bunch.”
    “He left the team or got