Undeniable (Always Book 3) Read online

  The text –

  No, let me start that again.

  The professor.

  Professor Douchebag was my Art History professor when I was still a college student. Insanely sexy and hugely popular, he had this amazing ability to make students feel like they were the most important thing in his world with just a look.

  When I joined his class, he’d commented about my hair (purple at the time) and suggested my father – who he knew quite well – was probably not a fan. Straight away I’d felt like he understood me.

  After just one month I lived for his lectures. Hurried to them, eager to see his face. To have him see me.

  Those classes . . . oh wow. He’d hang on every word I said. He’d call on me to answer questions, ask my opinion on the topic at hand. That may not seem like a big deal, but when you’ve gone through the education system with teachers who handled your hearing impairment by either pretending you didn’t exist in their class, or shouting the most basic of questions at you just so you can feel like you’re included, to be treated like a normal student is huge. And I so desperately wanted to be treated like a normal student back then.

  When I look back, that desperation really messed me up. But I was only eighteen. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it. Eighteen and angry with my father for making it obvious he was disappointed with me.

  On some weird, subconscious level, I suspect the fact Professor Douchebag taught at the same collage as Dad was an added bonus.

  Whatever the reasons, I fell hard. Took out my heart – that moronic organ I’d spent eighteen years guarding like it was the One Ring – and gave it to him.

  He took it. And for ever so long I was happy. Why wouldn’t I be? He worshipped me. Adored me. Spent long hours exploring my body with his hands and lips and tongue. Made me feel normal. Like a real girl, not the defective one I’d grown up believing I was.

  I should have wised up to the fact he didn’t consider my heart as precious as I did when it became clear we were never to be seen in public together in any capacity other than that of student/teacher.

  But I was in awe of this intellectual, sexy, popular god with more than one New York Times Bestselling art book to his name. I was in love with him.

  Love is stupid.

  And it makes you blind, which is not ideal when you’re already damn near completely deaf. Functioning on three senses is tricky at best.

  Ending it hurt more than it should have, for a variety of reasons. But the thing with Professor Douchebag? He figured out very quickly he’d got under my skin. And for every No, I’m over you text I sent in reply to his I need to see you now texts, there were shamefully just as many Okay, I’m coming ones.

  Under my skin. Didn’t matter what I did to try and exorcise him, he was under there. And when we were alone together at his place, or in his car, or his office . . . when he was touching me, looking at me, listening to me . . . I forgot how the us that existed behind closed doors wasn’t the us I wanted beyond them.

  So when I got the professor’s text asking me to come to his place, as I was sitting on my bed with the knowledge Caden O’Dae was once again gone from my life, I went.

  Was it self-punishment for refusing to acknowledge that Caden O’Dae was the first guy to ever make me feel like my life was actually fine the way I was living it? I don’t know.

  I still don’t.

  Thankfully, I stopped myself from doing something completely stupid and drove away from Professor Douchebag’s place before I could get out of the car.

  I went to a friend’s house and we got drunk on tequila, and watched Daredevil on Netflix, and while Charlie Cox beat up bad guys with brooding, angst-ridden intensity I was wondering if maybe this time, this time, Professor Douchebag was going to take me out for dinner in public, hold my hand in public, say he was wrong for breaking my heart. Apologize for hurting me . . .

  And then it wasn’t the professor I was thinking about but Caden. Caden and sock puppets, and his laugh, his grin, his eyes. Caden and his ability to make me forget I was defective. His ability to make me realize when I did remember, that it was okay . . .

  His ability to make me smile . . .

  I passed out before the last episode of Season One began. My friend let me crash on the couch, which was a good thing. I couldn’t have faced whatever disappointment I’d find in Dad’s eyes if I went home, and if I’d gone to Amanda and Brendon’s I would have told my sister about everything and I wasn’t ready to deal with that either.

  Being messed up about who you are and what you want is really messed up.

  Caden and I hadn’t spoken or been in contact since the Thor sock-puppet incident. I’d seen what he was up to on Facebook, of course. And Instagram, where he posts pics of him and the animals he cares for at the RSPCA on the weekends (the RSPCA – the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals – is the Australian equivalent of the ASPCA). Facebook is mainly dedicated to his social life.

  Most of his Facebook posts involve him and his university friends being twentysomething-year-old students doing the kind of things twentysomething-year-old students do. There are lots of images of him and his friends in crazy costumes no doubt for crazy college parties. Lately, there have been a few posts involving the celebrity veterinarian he’s interning for in Australia.

  I’m not jealous. Honest. It means nothing to me that she’s tall, blonde and stunning, with teeth so white my brain hurts. It really doesn’t. But seriously, people were going to talk soon if he wasn’t careful. I mean she’s older than him for starters. And she tags him all the time. And you should see the way she leans into him in all the photos she has posted on—

  “. . . incoming flight . . . delayed.”

  I blinked, frowning at the crowded airport around me. What was that announcement?

  The noise of the place – an incomprehensible, muffled cacophony that grated on my senses and made my head buzz – seemed to swell around me. Because I was grumpy, I hadn’t bothered to charge the battery of my hearing aid, which meant it was just another thing I was carrying around that I didn’t need. I rarely wore it, because it irritated the hell out of me. Noises were either too loud when I wore it or too confusing, and the second people saw it they treated me differently.

  So no hearing aid, just a lot of noise in my head.

  And now an announcement I’m almost certain was about an incoming flight from Melbourne, but because I couldn’t hear it clearly I could have been completely wrong.

  That happens. More than I like, unfortunately. There are ways around it, of course. Services provided for the “hearing impaired” (I don’t know why, but that term grates on me just as much as the noise of a crowd). All I needed to do was seek out one of those services and problem fixed. Or do something as simple as go check the arrivals board again.

  I didn’t do either. Common sense and I weren’t on speaking terms at that point in time.

  Instead, I held my ground, glared at the flow of tired-looking people ambling into the arrivals section, and waited until Caden came into my line of sight.

  He didn’t.

  Instead, someone else did. Someone I did not want to see.

  “Shit,” I muttered, turning away.

  But not before Professor Douchebag saw me. Not before he smiled at me.

  Shit.

  And as much as I hated the fact, my throat grew tight and my belly fluttered.

  Shit. Again. Times three. God, where was Caden O’Dae when I needed him?

  Caden

  What was a good Aussie boy like me doing falling in love with a prickly, feisty, snarky American girl, you ask?

  Good question.

  The answer? Hmmm . . . not sure if there is a good answer. Just a brutally honest one. And in love – and war – brutal honesty is paramount.

  The second I saw Chase Sinclair I fell in love with her.

  I’m not embarrassed to admit it. Okay, I didn’t admit it to anyone but myself, and begrudgingly to start with. I
wasn’t in the market for the love of my life, and if I had been, I’m one hundred percent certain I wouldn’t have been looking for an American girl who seemed convinced I was trying to kill her sick nephew with the sock puppet I’d made for him. But the heart wants what the heart wants, as the saying goes, and the moment I laid eyes on Chase my heart wanted her. It was only later the logical problems of that love sank in. Things like her being in the Northern Hemisphere, and me being in the Southern Hemisphere. Things like me being twelve months away from finishing my doctorate at the top of my class in Veterinary Medicine at Melbourne University. Things like the fact I was an intern for Australia’s most distinguished and respected vet, with the offer of joining her practice when I finished my studies.

  None of those logistic complications mattered when I first saw Chase. I fell in love with her instantly.

  She, however, didn’t want a bar of me.

  I was jet lagged when I first saw her. Jet lagged, sleep deprived and over-caffeinated. At the best of times I’m . . . how should I put this? Exuberant. I’ve been called a prat, a dickhead, accused of never taking anything serious, dumped more than once for that very reason, labeled a joker and – in that weird way Australians appropriate American slang – a jackass. Jackarse just doesn’t have the right sound to it, I guess.

  I’m probably all of these things, truth be told, but the one I’ll gladly own is the not-taking-things-seriously label. I don’t. Not really.

  Unless it’s important, and when my cousin Brendon called and told me he had an eighteen-month-old son he’d only just found out about in America, and that son had leukemia and was likely to die if a suitable bone marrow match wasn’t found . . . yeah, that falls into things-that-need-to-be-taken-seriously.

  I hopped on the first flight to the US.

  Almost three hours after touching down in the country and walking into Tanner’s hospital room, I met Chase. For a second I kind of forgot why I was there. She took my breath away.

  When she jumped up and snatched the sock puppet out of my hands, spraying it liberally with disinfectant before giving me permission to “give it to her nephew” I was gone. Just like that.

  Hook. Line. Sinker.

  All over, red rover.

  It wasn’t the electric-blue dreadlocks, the eyebrow piercing, the Iron Man T-shirt that did nothing to hide the fact she had a bloody awesome body that would look even more awesome wrapped around mine. All those things – and more – sank into my consciousness later.

  It was the protective way she guarded her nephew. The fiery, fierce instinct to look out for someone she loved. The unabashed accusation I was fucking things up and she was going to stop me from doing so.

  And before you say, Really? That’s why fell in love with her? remember the reason I was in the States to begin with: my cousin had called and told me he had a sick kid. I could hear how fucked up he was about that – and Brendon Osmond didn’t do fucked up – and I knew I had to go be there for him, regardless of cost or uni lectures or assignments due. He was family; I loved him, and he needed me, whether he said so or not.

  That was me. And I saw that part of me in Chase.

  That’s why I fell in love with her.

  I had a lot of contact with her during the next few months. I was in the States a lot, due to a bone marrow transfer that changed everyone’s world. But even if I didn’t need to keep coming back to San Diego for Tanner and Brendon, I couldn’t have stayed away.

  A little bit about me before I continue, just so you get an idea of who I am. It’s probably good that you get some backstory, because I’m pretty certain you’re going to want to hit me at some point in this tale and tell me to wake up to myself.

  I’m a fourth-year student at Melbourne University studying a Doctorate of Veterinary Medicine, with the end goal of opening up my own clinic. As part of my degree, I’m currently working as an intern at Briny Phillips’ vet clinic. Briny Phillips is a celebrity vet with her own television show, and one of the best vets I’ve ever met. I’ve learned a lot from her, particularly how to deal with stressed pet owners. There’s an art to it, a fine line to walk. I haven’t always been able to walk that line, but I’m getting better at it, thanks to Briny.

  I’m an only child, but not a spoilt one. My parents are divorced, not because they grew to despise each other, but because they were grown-up enough to recognize they just weren’t compatible, and when I was twelve they did something about it.

  It was amicable. They didn’t rant and rave at each other. In fact, I never saw them get angry or slam doors and fight during the demise of their marriage. They were calm. Dad joked about it with a relaxed good nature I remember as a kid not understanding, but emulating.

  If my parents were shouting at each other, if they weren’t getting angry with each other, it meant I shouldn’t either.

  So as angry as I was – and I was angry – I joked. Laughed. Made fun at my own expense. Didn’t ruffle anyone’s feathers, including my own. When Dad left and never came back, I joked about the fact I needed to change my deodorant.

  Laughing at life proved to be an effective way to deal with whatever life threw at me, and I’ve lived that way every since. Getting ruffled, angry doesn’t achieve anything. I’ve had girlfriends in the past, hence being dumped for not taking things seriously, but none I’ve fallen in love with. Two had the audacity to tell me to get rid of my beard.

  I love my beard. Don’t ever, ever, ever tell me to shave off my beard.

  I play rugby union on weekends, despite the fact I’m built more like a tennis player.

  I plan to one day own a rescue mutt of indecipherable parentage and call him Puss-Cat, just to mess with people’s heads.

  Every uni break, I fly to San Diego. Originally, this had been to see my cousin, who is like a brother to me, and Tanner, to see how the champion kid was doing, to be a part of his life. Trust me, if you knew Tanner, you’d want to be a part of his life as well.

  That’s about it. At least, that’s all that really matters.

  Which brings us to Chase.

  Chase has never asked me to shave off my beard. What she has done is told me she doesn’t like it, told me to get the damn thing away from her, used it as a way of throwing me to the floor in a wrestling match that somehow got completely out of hand, spread honey through it while I was dozing after one particularly brutal red-eye flight from Melbourne, and once, during a midnight movie marathon while we were babysitting Tanner, combed her fingers through it, her breath warm on my lips as she studied my face, confusion warring with desire in her eyes.

  That was the night I realized Chase felt for me what I felt for her.

  It was also the night I fully accepted she was going to fight it harder than she’d fought anything in her life. And Chase Sinclair is, if nothing else, a stubborn pain in the butt when it comes to backing down.

  Chase holds the world at bay. At arm’s length. She’s had a lifetime of being treated differently because of her hearing, of being dismissed by people for being dumb or rude, of being cossetted by her father in a misguided attempt to protect her from whatever he thinks might bring her pain, and unfortunately, of being disconnected from normal life by something she has no control over. The first week after meeting her, I could see it bugged the hell out of her. I could also see she hid all her anger and dejection behind a wall of snark, unlike any I’d encountered.

  And there was something else. Something I couldn’t quite figure out. Like a secret in her eyes, that were filled with a pain darker than any I’d experienced.

  What I wanted to do more than anything else from that very first week, was to show her she didn’t need to be defensive with me. That I got her. That I would protect her from whatever crap the world threw at her.

  Not exactly an easy goal to achieve.

  The closest I’d ever come was during that midnight movie marathon in Brendon’s living room almost five months ago, as Simon Pegg dealt with his zombie stepfather Bill Nighy on screen.
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br />   I caught her laughing, really laughing. Before I could stop myself, I flicked her ear so she’d look at me, see my lips, and told her she had an awesome laugh.

  She studied me, silent, and then brushed her fingers through my beard, drawing closer to me, so close my heart tried to smash its way out of my chest via my throat, and . . .

  That’s when Tanner toddled out to us, in perfect three-year-old interception, and asked for a drink of water.

  I’ve never seen a person move so fast as I saw Chase move that night. Up off the sofa and across to the door where her nephew stood, rubbing his eyes, his Transformer PJs as crumpled as his crazy blond Mohawk was messy. She scooped him up, snuggled him against her chest and told him she would get him a drink.

  A quick glance over her shoulder told me she was unsettled. I didn’t realize how unsettled until she didn’t come back from Tanner’s room after putting him back to bed. I found her there thirty minutes later, asleep beside him, a frown on her face.

  She didn’t talk to me the next morning. She kissed her sister on the cheek, muttered something about not being hungry and left before anyone could say a word.

  Brendon had looked at me with a raised eyebrow. “What did you do?”

  True to form, I answered him honestly. “Made her acknowledge she has a thing for me.”

  That was my reason for this trip to San Diego. To make Chase acknowledge she liked me, and that we’d be good together.

  Actually, it was more than just making her acknowledge she had a thing for me, as undeniable as I had for her. I was here to help her see that she didn’t have to face the world alone. That I was more than happy to face it with her. That I was willing. And able. And ready.

  So when I entered the Arrivals hall of LAX, duffle bag slung over my shoulder, tired and dry-eyed from my thirteen hour flight but full of the upbeat optimism my family is known for, my heart thumping fast as it always did when I knew I was about to see her, and found a man cupping her face with his palm, a man standing so close to her I could barely make out any light or space between their hips, I kinda felt it in my gut.