Whatever It Takes (Second Chances #2) Read Online Free PDF Page A

out. Working at the club made me pretty good at reading people, but I didn’t get that one.
    “I have a buddy with a tow truck who owes me a favor. Let me give him a call, and then I can take you guys home. That way I’ll know where to come by to fix it. If that’s okay?”
    I nodded and opened the door. He reached in to help me out of the car.
    His hand was warm and calloused, and I ignored the way my arm tingled from just a touch. It had been so long since I’d felt anything other than exhaustion that it took me a second to pull my hand away.
    God, how long had it been since . . . I shook my head. Too long. That had to be why my body was running hot. I took a shaky breath in and hoped he didn’t notice. As I got Noah and his seat from my car, Ryan grabbed the groceries from the trunk.
    “Leave the keys under the visor,” he said. “And if there’s anything valuable, you might want to grab it just in case. Not the best neighborhood.”
    I almost laughed again. Unless my Taylor Swift CD counted, I had nothing worth anything.
    “I’m good.” I tucked the keys where he said and then took Noah’s sticky hand. I followed Ryan across the parking lot to a black jacked-up truck that had to have cost a fortune. Obviously he’d done well for himself. It made me strangely happy that he had.
    Especially because it meant my father had been so wrong.
    Soon after I’d moved in with my dad, my father asked what Ryan’s plans for the future were. I didn’t have an answer, because Ryan still wasn’t sure. I knew he could do anything he set his mind to, but my father questioned how he would even afford college.
    The next time I saw Ryan I asked him. He didn’t know and I told him it was important to make a decision. High school wouldn’t last forever. I’d already taken on extra coursework to pad my transcripts, at my father’s urging. He said if I applied myself 100 percent, I could aim for the Ivy Leagues.
    That was something I never even dared to dream about.
    He encouraged me to join after-school clubs that would look good on an application. Community service. Student council. Before I knew it, my schedule was full. Something had to give and somehow, my father managed to convince me it was Ryan.
    The worse part about all of it was that he never expressly forbade me from seeing Ryan. The choice to move on with my life had been all mine when I got too busy with everything else in my new life. My father had convinced me that Ryan was not part of my future without ever saying those words.
    Seeing Ryan now, the confident, successful man standing in front of me, made me strangely proud of him. My father was so wrong.
    But then, he’d been wrong about a lot of things. And I was the one paying the price.

CHAPTER FOUR

    ryan
    I tried to get the car seat buckled in the middle of the bench seat in my truck, but holy shit—some engineer must be laughing his head off somewhere at all the idiots trying to work these things. Straps and buckles and nothing made any sense.
    Finally with a little sigh of frustration, Tess pushed my hands aside and pulled the seat belt around it and clicked the belt shut. Oh. That didn’t make me feel dumb at all.
    I tried to ignore the way she smelled like strawberries when she leaned in close. Or how every nerve pulled tight when her fingers brushed over mine.
    It was like all those years just disappeared. Being this close to her screwed up my head. I wanted to ask her so many damned questions that I practically choked on them, but I didn’t. That show of defiance when I told her that I could fix her car made me want to smile. That was my Tess. She’d been missing when I first approached her and it worried me, but it didn’t take long for the spark I remembered to come through.
    The girl who used to call me on my bullshit and, in the same breath, tell me that she loved me. God, how the hell was I supposed to reconcile that girl with the one sitting next to me now?
    She glanced over at me and