Dating the Defensive Back (The Nash Brothers Book 1)

A Lie of Omission is Still a Lie

Shit.

She just kissed me, and the twerpy ex who is certainly no match for me helped himself to photos, and it’s going to be all over social media by lunchtime.

Which means Beckett will catch wind of it all. He’ll know that I fucked the little sister he told me to take care of, and he’ll smell the betrayal of it all even from where he sits thousands of miles away.

I don’t know what came over me, but when I pulled up to the bakery to confront her and saw him yelling at her in a fucking parking lot, I lost my shit.

This primal instinct to protect her kicked in, and…well, maybe Beckett won’t kick my ass after all—not that he physically could, anyway—if I can make him see that I did what I had to do to protect her from the ex who won’t leave her the hell alone.

The ex is still standing across from us, and I still don’t know what the fuck his name is, nor do I care. “You can run along now,” I say a little more snidely than I probably should. I realize this guy is likely heartbroken, and maybe I should be a little nicer. She broke up with him when she was drunk out of the blue—not out of the blue to her, but it probably was to him.

It’s only been a week, so this is just him trying to win her back. It’s not like this has been going on for months or anything, and to be perfectly honest, he should be fighting for her. She’s worth fighting for. I may not know her very well, but I know her well enough to know that.

He’s never going to win against me, so I’m really just helping to push him out of the picture.

“So when you say next level,” the ex begins. “Do you mean sex?”

“That’s none of your business,” Ava snaps at him.

“Does he know you’re a virgin?” he asks.

All the air deflates out of my chest.

She’s…

She’s a virgin?

“Of course he knows,” she snaps.

Hold the fucking phone here, pal.

She’s a what now?

I put on the performance of my life as I force myself not to give away the fact that I had no idea I took her virginity.

I wondered. I suspected.

But to hear it confirmed—and by this idiot ex, no less—is a gut punch.

“Well, to be fair…she’s not anymore,” I say, my voice low and hoarse.

Ava gasps, the ex looks like he’s about to vomit, and I feel like I just got run over by a truck.

“Okay, then,” the ex says to me. “I guess you win.” He gives Ava a long look, and then he walks away. He gets into a Honda and drives away. Once he’s turned the corner, she peers up at me.

“I, uh…I need to get back to work. But thanks.”

“Thanks?” I echo. Is she really not going to address the giant elephant in the parking lot with us?

“For scaring him off. Hopefully that’s the last I’ll hear from him.” She clears her throat. “Oh, did you come by for something?”

Yes, I fucking came by for something. But I’m blanking on what it was since all I can think about is the fact that she was a virgin before she met me and now she isn’t and I’m the person who took that from her.

Me.

Why me?

Why did she lie?

I blow out a breath. “I did.”

“What was it?”

“Are we really not going to talk about the virgin comment?” I hiss.

She draws in a deep breath. “I need to get back to work. We can talk about it later.”

“Fine.” I clear my throat. “We’ve got another problem. He took a photo of us.”

“So?”

“So…what will he do with it?”

She shrugs. “Who knows. Sell it to the highest bidder? Use it for insurance and leverage? But who cares?”

“I care,” I say through a clenched jaw. “I don’t want your brother seeing them and getting the wrong idea.”

“Is it the wrong idea, though?” she challenges. “We did have sex.”

I glance around, completely at a loss as to what the fuck I’m supposed to do or say right now. “Because you lied to me. Apparently about more than one thing.”

“I didn’t lie about a damn thing,” she says sharply. “You never asked whether I’d had sex before, and some people really do call me Cookie.”

“A lie of omission is still a lie!” I roar.

“Not when it never came up!” she yells, defending herself.

“I’m not talking about the virginity thing!” I yell back, and then I draw in a breath to force myself to calm down. I lower my voice. “You. Your name. Your identity. You kept it from me, and I fucked you, and that made me betray my best friend. Don’t you get that?”

“So we don’t tell him, then.” Her voice is so flippant. “It’s not like I send him a weekly list of my conquests. Do you?”

“You don’t even have conquests!” I yell with a heavy dose of exasperation as the realization that I fucked my best friend’s virgin sister still hasn’t quite hit me. “Do you just, like, lie by omission to everybody? Because I can’t honestly be with someone who does that.”

She looks taken aback by my words. “No, I don’t. But don’t stand here and tell me you always tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

“Are you accusing me of lying?”

She purses her lips. “Did you ever tell my brother that you kissed Mindy at his college graduation party?”

I take a step back as if she just issued a physical blow. “How do you know about that?”

“Because I have eyeballs.” She rolls them for effect then holds out her hands. “Well?”

“No,” I mutter.

I swear to God, only Ava Maxwell could catch me being a hypocrite and get away with calling me out on it—especially in a tense situation like this.

And the only reason she could get away with it is because something flipped in me that night we shared.

It was instant, and it was intense.

But just because I’ve left words out of the story in the past, too, doesn’t make this sit any better with me. “That’s different.” I realize how weakly constructed my argument sounds the moment the words fall from my lips.

“How?” she demands.

“Because it didn’t matter. I didn’t tell him because he was over her, and telling him I kissed her when I was drunk at his graduation party would only hurt him.”

“So you did it to protect him,” she says.

I nod. “Exactly.”

Her voice is eerily quiet when she finally replies. “I didn’t tell you who I was because I needed to protect myself. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to work.”

She spins on her heel and heads back inside, leaving me standing alone in a bakery parking lot with my truck blocking the parking lot entrance.