She Always Wins Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Discover More Books By Third Cousins

  A Synopsis & Table Of Contents...

  Inspiring Words

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Copyright

  Love's Not Popular

  She Always Wins

  Book 3

  Contemporary Romance

  By: Tina Lee & Third Cousins

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  A SYNOPSIS & TABLE OF CONTENTS...

  Messing around with her ex has gotten Cassie into trouble. So why is she still doing it? When Cassie starts to realize what’s really important she knows that she’s already left it for too long. But is that going to stop her from trying?

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Discover More Books By Third Cousins

  Inspiring Words

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  DISCOVER MORE BOOKS BY THIRD COUSINS

  Copyright

  INSPIRING WORDS

  “Wise are those who learn that the bottom line doesn't always have to be their top priority.”

  - William Arthur Ward

  CHAPTER 1

  Eric thought that my price was a bit steep, but I made sure that he realized quickly that there was no room for negotiations. Besides, I hardly thought that half of everything he was going to inherit seemed like that much, considering he wanted me to act as though I was his better half. That was another stipulation that I’d stressed on. I was happy to act like his girlfriend around his father or anyone he needed to impress, but that was it. I wasn’t actually going to be his girlfriend. I was free to date anybody that I chose, providing that it didn’t affect the agreement we had.

  He was even less happy about that. He knew that his chances of being able to date anybody in secret were slim, considering half of the campus knew his father. He tried to convince me that we should get back together for real. He tried to convince me that his father wouldn’t believe anything less, but that was his problem, not mine. I wasn’t getting back together with him. I didn’t want to be with him. Everything that he had done to me had revealed the truth about who he was and I just wasn’t attracted to him any more.

  When my phone rang the day after we sealed our agreement, I hesitated to answer it. Eric and I had agreed that we would only speak when we had to. This was something which had brought me a great deal of comfort, but that comfort was slipping when I realized that I’d had less than twenty-four hours to wash off the last meeting with him, before he was forcing himself into my world again.

  I answered the call. I’d taken so long to answer that Eric actually sounded surprised to hear me talk down the line.

  “What do you want?” I snapped. “I thought we agreed you’d only call when you had to.”

  “I hope you’re going to act nicer in person,” he snapped back. “I just got off of the phone with my dad. He’s flipping over the fact that we’re back together and he wants to come over to the campus and take us out for dinner.”

  “When does he want to come over?”

  “He’s coming over tonight.”

  “That’s a bit short notice,” I shook my head even though he couldn’t see me. “I’m not sure that I can swing it tonight.”

  “Jesus, Cassie, you said that you were cool with this.” He was losing his shit already. Eric didn’t work well under pressure. It brought out a nasty side in him.

  “I am cool with it. I just didn’t realize that I was going to be called on with less that a day’s notice.”

  “So, you’re coming?”

  “Sure, where is he taking us?”

  “I don’t know. Just wear something nice.”

  “Sure, I’m glad you told me that, I was planning on wearing bin liners otherwise.”

  “Cassie, don’t start with me. We both know since you’ve come to college you’ve started dressing like a grandma.”

  His insult caught me. I hadn’t been expecting it and I wasn’t prepared with any kind of retort. He sensed that. “Be ready for seven, and we’ll come and get you.”

  He hung up and I was left standing with my mouth open, still searching for a retort to his insult. I looked down at the clothes I was wearing. Was he right? My jeans were a classic Calvin Klein cut. My top half was covered in an old shirt and a huge cardigan that felt like it was hugging me. Was I starting to dress like a grandma? Was I already slipping into the obtuse age where comfort outweighed style? Had I simply stopped caring about the way that I looked? Even my hair was pulled back into a boring ponytail that sat half way up my head with the all the allure of a goldfish.

  My wardrobe was a war zone. All the careful organization I’d put into it at the start of the year was gone. I pulled through the mass of dirty and clean clothes. I’d brought a mix of everything with me. I’d prepared for almost any situation imaginable. The only way that I was getting caught out was if the world came to end because of a tidal wave or a nuke or, I don’t know, something worse.

  I stopped when I found a silky green dress that was stuck between two pairs of tights that had snaked themselves around it. I fought against them. They were tricky components to defeat. They stretched with every pull that I put against them. I could hear them starting to ladder as I lost my patience with them.

  I took a pair of scissors to them in the end. I cut straight through them with the all mighty feeling of being god. They could stretch as much as they liked. I was their master.

  The dress looked good, given that it had been sitting at the bottom of my wardrobe. The green was the same shade that you found on well-watered grass in summer. It was deep, but bright and lively. The small hanging light in my room was catching on it and breaking creating a shimmer that reminded me of stars against water. It was a beautiful dress. It was a dress that I’d worn only once before and never in front of Eric. I was going to make him eat his words and I could already feel my glorious wardrobe victory gathering in the air around me

  I spent the rest of the afternoon getting ready. It had been months since I’d spent time on my hair. I pulled it back into a basket bun. I left out some hair to the front to frame my face and then I worked on fixing my makeup.

  When I’d finished I got dressed and checked myself out in the mirror. I looked Hollywood. I looked like a movie star. I looked like the girl that I had been, before Eric had destroyed my world. I looked like me again.

  CHAPTER 2

  I opened my door with a smile pulling on the corners of my mouth. “Eric,” I said, leaning forward so that I could kiss him on the cheek. “Mr Norwood,” I turned to his father with my arms open. “It feels like forever since I saw you last. You look like you’ve lost some weight?”

  He pulled me into a warm embrace with a happy smile on his face. “I’ve been hitting the gym pretty hard recently.”

  He held me at arm’s length and inspected my dress. He had a keen eye. It was something that Eric’s mother had trained into him and something he hadn’t lost after she passed away. “I’m glad that somebody noticed,” he said in a pointed way, so that Eric knew that he’d messed up again.

  “You look great,” Eric said quickly in an attempt to turn the conversation away from his wrong-doings. “That dress is amazing.” He looked surprised. He looked as though he’d been worrying all day about me showing up in something
that I’d hand-knitted.

  “She really does,” Mr Norwood said approvingly. “Why you would ever break up with her is beyond me.”

  “Father,” Eric said quickly. “You said that you wouldn’t bring that up. You know that it’s still a sore subject for us both.”

  Mr Norwood chuckled and the double chin he could never seem to get rid of jiggled as he did. “If it’s such a sore subject, then you wouldn’t both be back together. Whatever happened was enough to break the two of you apart, but denying it will only build walls between you. You have to face up to whatever happened and accept the fact that you need to move on from it.”

  Eric said nothing and neither did I. Mr Norwood didn’t know what had happened. He didn’t know that his son had cheated on me. He took our silence as a mark of our agreement and hurried us along to his car so that we could make our dinner reservations.

  The place that we went to was nice. It was an Italian-themed restaurant which had managed to net a Michelin-star chef to work for them. The food was the talk of the town. It was nearly impossible to get a reservation without a lot of advance notice; but, then again, it would take most people a lot of time to save up the funds needed to eat there.

  The food was good though. The food was worth waiting a long time for. It was probably worth handing over a year’s salary for, too, although I couldn’t say with certainty because I’d never really worked for the money that I had.

  “So,” Mr Norwood said, when our plates had been taken away and coffees had been served in their place. “Are you two back together for good this time?”

  “I hope so,” Eric said smoothly as he looked over at me with an admiring gaze. “I know that our time apart has only shown me how much she added to and continues to add to my life.”

  Eric’s father nodded and then turned to me.

  “I’d love to say that we’ll be together forever,” I smiled. “But I wouldn’t want to tempt the fates. After all, we’re not even engaged. I think it’s important that we take things one day at a time.”

  Mr Norwood frowned at me. “What would be the point of being in a relationship that you didn’t think would last?” He asked a good question. It was a question that I’d asked Sam. It was a question that I couldn’t truly answer, because I didn’t truly believe the words that I’d said.

  “I’m not saying that I’m expecting it to end. I’m just saying that until we’re married, there are always things that could stand in our way. Your son, for instance.” I reached over and picked up my wine glass and tilted it over to Eric. “He could cheat on me. If he did that, then surely you would not expect me to stay with him?”

  “My son wouldn’t cheat on you.” He chuckled as though the situation I had posed to him was absurd. “He may be many things, of which an idiot is one, but he isn’t a cheat. I’ve brought him up to be better than that.”

  The fact that Mr Norwood was defending Eric was what I blame for the next words that came out of my mouth. “Oh, it’s just he did cheat on me. That’s why we broke up.”

  Silence fell around the table, as my words hung the air between us. Mr Norwood looked shocked. Eric looked angry. I didn’t even need to look at him to feel his stare burning into the side of my face.

  “Is this true?” Mr Norwood asked after some time had passed. “Did you cheat on her?”

  “It wasn’t that simple,” Eric started, but his father cut him off.

  “So, you did?” His head started to shake. “You know you really do find new ways to disappointment me all the time. Just when I think you’ve run out of ways to do it, you find a whole new bunch of reasons.”

  He turned to me. “I’m sorry, Cassie. I thought that he was better than that. I thought that he could see what a good girl that you are. I’m very happy that you’ve managed to work past your problems and get back together because, I can tell you now, my son will never do better than you.”

  “Thank you, Mr Norwood,” I smiled to try and hide the guilt that I was feeling. What I was doing was wrong.

  The lie that I was telling was wrong. It didn’t matter how much money I might be getting at the end of it. It wasn’t ever going to be enough, because there wasn’t enough money in the world to fix the blackening to my soul. Mr Norwood was a good man and what I was doing to him was wrong.

  CHAPTER 3

  “We need to talk,” I told Eric under my breath as we walked over to his father’s car. “When we get back to campus, you need to come over to my room and we need to talk.”

  He could tell that I was being serious, because he didn’t push for a reason or try to argue with me. He just nodded and held open the door, so that I could get into the car. “Thank you,” I said with a higher volume, so that Mr Norwood didn’t think that I was trying to keep my conversation with Eric from him.

  Eric got into the car after me and we pulled away from the front of the restaurant. “Thank you for taking us out to dinner,” I said to Mr Norwood. “The food was delicious.”

  “Don’t mention it,” he said with a smile. “It was a pleasure seeing you again. When Eric first told me that the two of you had broken up, I got quite upset.”

  “He told me as much. It’s always really nice to hear that somebody cares for you to such a degree.”

  “You’ll never have to be in doubt about that with me,” he said cheerily. “I’ve liked you from the first time that Eric introduced you. Do you remember that? Do you remember the first time you came over to our house?”

  “I do,” I told him. It had been three days after Eric had started at the school. I’d managed to convince him that I needed help with my English coursework. We’d sat in the kitchen and his mom had brought us cookies and milk, even though we already teenagers. I’d been impressed with their seemingly never-ending house and yard, which led off into a forest.

  “You came over for help with your homework, but you ended up helping Eric pass that class instead,” Mr Norwood chuckled at the irony.

  It was true. Eric hadn’t ever really been book smart. He was good on a field with a ball. He was really good at that, but learning and studying was something that didn’t really hold his attention for very long. The reason that I’d been such a good tutor to him was that I’d been sleeping with him. Mr Norwood didn’t know that, of course. I was pretty sure that he was under the impression that I was saving myself for marriage, but that didn’t make what Eric and I had really done any less true.

  The car pulled up at the campus drop-off area, and I got out. “Thank you for the ride,” I smiled at Mr Norwood through his window, which he had lowered. “I hope to see you again soon.”

  “I hope so, too,” he said, and held out his hand through the window. I placed my hand in his and he kissed it gently, before allowing me to leave.

  “I’ll see you soon Eric,” I turned to him with firm eyes, so he knew that I still meant what I’d said before. He nodded and I knew that it meant he understood the message loud and clear.

  I walked across the campus quickly and into my building. I knew that Eric might still be a while. His father was one for talking and Eric wasn’t going to rush him when he knew that he had to come over and see me after. I got changed out of my dress and into my sweats that I’d started sleeping in, and sat cross-legged on my bed to think over what I wanted to say.

  It took Eric almost two hours to knock on my door, but I was still awake when he did. “You better come in,” I said as I pulled the door open. “We’ve got a lot to talk about.”

  “What the hell were you playing at tonight?” he demanded. He didn’t wait for me to step aside and let him in. He just barged in roughly with his shoulder first, so that all I could do was jump out of the way or risk being pushed to the ground. “Why would you tell my dad that I cheated on you? What did you get out of that? You’re messing with my family here. That’s not right.”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help myself.

  “What are you laughing at?” he scowled at me. “Do you think this is funny? Do you think r
uining my relationship with my dad is funny?”

  “I think you talking about what’s wrong and what’s right is funny,” I corrected him. “You want me to lie to your dad. You want to pretend that we’re together so that you can get your hands on his money. You’re deceiving him. You’re taking him for a fool and now you’re trying to tell me that I’m doing wrong because I told him the truth? The truth about what you did to me. You’re messed up. Someone should come and lock you away, before you have a chance to fuck anything else up.”

  He looked angry. He looked as though he was about to hulk out and I wondered whether it was going to be me or one of the walls that he punched. It was neither. He reached out and his hand found the lamp, which was sitting on the bedside table. In a split second he raised it and sent it crashing into the wall next to my bed. Pieces of broken pot scattered around my bedspread like heavy snowflakes.

  I turned to look at Eric. “Feel better now?”

  He shook his head. “You just don’t get it, do you?” he snapped at me. “You think that this is a game, but it isn’t. This is my life that you’re screwing with.”

  “You want to talk about screwing with people’s lives?” I walked over to him, so that he knew that I wasn’t afraid. He could throw what he liked. He could hulk out to his heart content, but I wasn’t going to get pushed around by him any more. “You want to talk about people’s lives being ruined? What about me? What about what you’ve done to me?”

  “You’re not still going on about Natasha, are you?” he said with a voice drenched in scorn.

  “You didn’t just cheat on me with her. You turned the school against me. You stripped me of everything that made me, me. I moved on. I dealt with that. I dealt with the fact that you got with my best friend. I dealt with the fact that I was no longer the popular girl. I dealt with it because I had Sam. He was my friend. He was, he could have been, he was meant to be more than that and you fucking ruined that, too. And, it was all because your daddy was taking away your trust fund.”