Steadfast (True North, #2)

by Sarina Bowen

When I was seventeen, I thought Jude was sent to me from heaven. When I was eighteen, I let him take me there. When I was nineteen, he broke both my heart and my family.

He was the boy who’d always slunk into class late if he felt like it. The teachers didn’t even give him a hard time, because there would be no point. He gave off an aura of “I don’t care what you think.” I’d found him ridiculously attractive. It wasn’t just his too-long eyelashes, either. I’d had it bad for his attitude. I was a cautious good girl, always too fearful of authority to say the things inside my head. Watching him became my hobby. But the idea that Jude Nickel would ever look my way had been pretty ridiculous.

But even a glimpse of him had given me palpitations. As if my subconscious had recognized a piece of my soul before my brain got a chance to speak up.

The feel of his fingertips sliding into my panties made us gasp together. “So slick and sweet,” he growled. “You feel like mine.” I couldn’t answer him because I was too busy yanking him in for another kiss. An addiction is when you can’t keep away from something that’s bad for you. Maybe Jude was a drug addict, but I was a Jude addict.

“Maybe you weren’t always good for her. But it’s not a fatal condition. St. Augustine said it best—‘It was pride that changed angels into devils; it is humility that makes men as angels.’”

“Everybody is sometimes uncomfortable,” he said, accelerating onto the highway entrance ramp. “It’s what you do about it that defines you.”