His brows furrowed, and I smoothed his frown with my thumb. “I don’t remember everything, but I remember Jewel asking me to give you a message.”
Dane seemed taken aback by that, but didn’t laugh at me, or tell me it wasn’t possible that I’d seen or spoken to Jewel in a dream.
“She wanted me to tell you she was glad you found your cliché.”
He waited a beat, allowing my words to sink in, and then his mouth turned up into a magnificent smile. He hugged me tighter, like I was about to disappear from his grasp at any moment.
“What did she mean?” I asked gently, afraid that I’d be intruding on whatever memory her message had brought to the forefront of his mind.
He pulled back, and looked at me as he explained, “I used to tease her about the romance books she read, and always told her none of that stuff was real. She’d said that the stories were always clichéd, because it was about a guy who fell for the one girl who drove him crazy. Then one day she said she looked forward to the day I became the cliché.”
That sounded like Jewel.
“And did you? Become the cliché?”
“I did,” he replied. “I fell in love with the girl who drove me crazy most of my life without realizing it. And I’m one lucky sonovabitch because she loves me back, even after I hated her for so long.”
“She hated you too,” I mused, touching his lips wit my fingertips. “But she tripped over that fine line between love and hate, and landed in the arms of the boy who’d been there all along.”
ABOUT THE A UTHOR
TAMSYN IS A 23 year old blogger turned author who has an insatiable hunger for New Adult Contemporary Romance novels, coffee and chocolate. When she’s not getting caught up in yet another steamy romance with a new book boyfriend, she can be found spending endless hours working away on her laptop.
Tamsyn is a Brat when it comes to books and believes that every story, no matter how challenging, should have a Happy Ever After
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CONTENTS
Prologue
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Epilogue
About the Author
Keep reading for a snippet of Blurred Line, a novella for Jade and Reid.
Blurred Lines
~ a Novella ~
by
Tamsyn Bester
Please Note: Blurred Lines is a novella written for the two supporting characters from The Line Between – Jade and Reid. It spans over the period of a few months, as you will notice in the Chapter headings. This novella has been included for the enjoyment of the reader and not necessarily for review purposes.
Prologue
Reid
November
Jade stared at me with her chocolate brown eyes, red and slightly puffy, and I fought the natural inclination to wrap her in my arms. We’d been friends all our lives, and she was always the one constant in my life when everything else seemed uncertain. But for the past few months, the dynamic of our relationship had changed, and it terrified the hell out of me. It went from being playful to sexual, sedate to intense, calm to electrical, and we were both fumbling around in the proverbial dark trying to figure out what it meant for our friendship.
“I want you to kiss me, Reid, like you did the first time weeks ago when you couldn’t fight this,” – she gestured between the two of us – “any more than I could.”
We were standing in her family’s Villa in Barcelona, and she was a mess after her grandmother’s funeral. I’d come with her because I knew how hard it was going to be, and I couldn’t not be here if my girl needed me.
My girl.
I’d been thinking of her that way for a while now, if only in my head.
“Jade, I - ” I hesitated, rubbing my hands down my face. She wasn’t thinking clearly, and I was aware of that, which was why giving into her was a terrible idea. Once I kissed her, I would be tempted to do more, and the last thing I wanted was for her to think I was taking advantage of her vulnerable state. Because that’s exactly what she was.
Vulnerable.
Split wide open.
Showing me everything.
“Please,” she begged softly, the hitch in her voice causing my chest to ache. She was hurting, and I wanted to do what I could to help her through it.
I ran my eyes down her body, and my body reacted the way it always had when I saw her. Something deep inside me stirred, and it was so much more than just lust. It was a fierce need to have her, to claim her…to love her.
And God did I love her.
So much.
But what would happen if I acted on it?
My fear of losing her far outweighed my physical need to be with her, and as far as my emotional need went to tell her how much I cared about her, I wasn’t sure if our friendship would stay the same if I did.
I stepped closer to her, resting my hand on the back of her neck, and pressed our foreheads together.
It was dark outside, but I could see the plea on her face, in her eyes. I wanted to give her the world, but I was waging a war on the inside because what she was asking of me right now, in this rare, unguarded moment was so much more than that.
“If I kiss you,” I breathed, “There’s no going back. We will never be the same, and that scares me.”
“It scares me too,” she replied. “But what scares me more is going to bed in the next room without knowing what this would have felt like. With you.”
The ‘this’ she was referring to was more than a kiss, because we wouldn’t be able to stop there. Neither of us wanted to, but we had to be mindful of how it would impact the twenty years we’d been friends.
It was inconceivable to think that she’d been in my life that long, but our mothers were pregnant together, gave birth to us days apart, and our fathers had been best friends since high school. Her life was inextricably woven with mine, and her presence had always grounded me.
I had a feeling it would all change after tonight.
I wasn’t ready.
We weren’t ready.
But it was bound to happen, the same as the sun was meant to rise, and set every day.
“Are you sure?” I asked. Part of me was hoping she’d realize it was a bad idea, that our friendship wouldn’t last if things changed so drastically, but the other part wanted to know that she wanted this as much as I did.
“I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life,” she replied.
That confirmation alone made my body hum with anticipation.
I pressed my lips to hers, gentle at first, and then our tongues met, and the rest came as naturally to me as breathing.