Read The Game of Love: (BWWM Romance) for Free Online Page B

before about being used up and then tossed aside like trash.
    She’d been talking about herself.
    The thought of any man doing that to her filled him with anger.
    “ Sommer, I want to spend as much time as possible with you while I’m back home. All of your free time. So, go out with me tomorrow.”
    She closed her eyes against the feeling of his finger stroking her cheek. “I can’t. I’m going to church with Mom.”
    “After that.”
    “What do you want to do?”
    “It doesn’t matter.”
    She opened her eyes. “I take it that we’re not making love tonight?”
    “Not tonight,” he reassured her, secretly vowing to get to the bottom of what had caused that fear and if possible, who.
    “Another night then?”
    He leaned in and pressed another kiss against her lips. “Another night.”
    She smiled, and he returned the gesture.
    They stood together for a few more moments before returning for their shoes and food, and making their way back to the car. As he drove her home, Austin kept his fingers entwined with Sommer’s and kissed her fingers intermittently, still in disbelief that all this time, he and Sommer had shared the same feelings.
    He took a quick glance over at her and wondered what life would have been like if he’d known that before. Maybe Sommer would have come with him to Tallahassee and then move with him to Texas after he was drafted. If Sommer had been in his life back then, there certainly would have never been a Jessica Costa.
    All along, he’d been searching for a replacement for Sommer, but now that he had her, he was going to make sure that nothing would ever put distance between them again.

     
     
    Chapter Three
     
     
    What she’d initially thought was going to be a long and difficult summer had blossomed into a time of her life that Sommer would never forget. Austin hadn’t been kidding when he said that he wanted to spend all of his free time with her, sometimes randomly showing up at the end of one of her longer shifts at the bakery. Whenever she was visibly exhausted they would sit, have coffee and a pastry, and simply talk.
    To everyone around town, her change in demeanor had been the result of a friend coming back into her life. No one knew about their intimate moments; the passionate kisses behind the heavily tinted windows of his car, the lingering gazes they shared whenever they were in the same room, or the nights they escaped to Flatwoods Park where he kissed her on the swings so hungrily that he’d managed to slip her shirt over her head before thinking better of having their first encounter on the grass. But the time was coming. With each encounter, their desire for one another only mounted higher, and Sommer no longer had the resolve with which she’d started.
    The sound of her Uncle Reese reciting his vows jolted her back to the present, and she steadied the bouquet of assorted lilies she held between her hands. She couldn’t believe that her uncle had made the decision to marry again at the age of fifty. Marcie was thirteen years his junior and had spent the last eleven years working alongside Sommer, her mother, and her uncle at the bakery.
    No one knew at what point either Reese or Marcie had made a move, but all of a sudden, they were flirtatiously whispering to each other in the backroom. Then, Reese was teaching Marcie how to make a rose using a piping bag with an extra, delicate touch. It wasn’t until Marcie had walked into work one day with an extra bump to her already round stomach that they realized that the secret was out, and finally publicly revealed that they’d been seeing each other. Their son, Josiah, was born five months later. He was Marcie’s first and Reese’s third child.
    The couple was now beaming at one another, Reese swiping at the corners of his eyes while tears rolled down Marcie’s cherub-like cheeks. As their vows continued, Sommer searched the room until she’d locked eyes with Austin, and he became the only image at the end