Chapter One

Her Naughty Secret

No one would believe what happened that summer in the Forrest’s barn or that Andie Forrest could be the center of anyone’s life for those three long and languid months. When the trio of young libertines insinuated themselves into her private pastimes, they opened up a world of secret sexuality none of them understood, though none was willing to shun. On the surface, Andie seemed the most unlikely girl to engage in freakish erotic activity, but then, she was slightly odd. Everyone knew that, although no one dared say so.

Andie Forrest’s exterior demeanor was shy, prim, and blatantly unassuming. Throughout her four years of high school she went about, carrying a mountain of thick textbooks in her arms, while tucking her head down to avoid the eyes of her classmates. She stuttered over words when asked to speak, and shrunk back in the corners of classrooms, allowing her thick, unmanageable hair to fall over her face. Hidden away, no one noticed her; she hoped. Except Harper Montgomery, who sometime during freshman year took it upon herself to comb Andie’s shoulder-length tangle of ash-blonde hair into soft curls, just so she could peer into the wide dark eyes that Andie hid.

“There,” she said with some satisfaction, smiling. “You’d be a whole lot prettier if you just let people see you!” Because Harper said that, it had to be true. She spoke with authority and no one doubted her. The tall auburn-haired beauty was destined to be Snow Princess, Prom Queen, Girl’s Soccer MVP and academically at the top of her class from freshman Honor’s Circle to her valedictory address at graduation. She nabbed a scholarship to Yale without breaking a sweat. While the rest of her world looked on in awe, Harper took the world by storm, expecting success and getting it, knowing that she could have everything she dreamed of just by dreaming it.

As confident as she was, Harper was not stuck-up and haughtily remote as some overachievers are. In fact, she was Andie Forrest’s savior, willing to stoop beneath her station in a gracious act of goodwill that would forever alter Andie’s luckless life. The fact that the slightly backwards farm girl was treated with respect in school rather than scoffed at behind her back was due to Harper’s cloak of protection.

“Andie may be shy, but she’s the smartest person on this planet.”

Harper’s pronouncements oozed from her tongue, delivered like honey dripping off a silver spoon, while her green eyes snapped with conviction. No one doubted her; no one crossed her; no one had the guts to confront her.

In the face of Harper’s bold compliments, Andie would manage a half smile—looking just a little bit pleased, then bashfully draw her lips in and lick them nervously because she was so uncomfortable with the attention. She never understood why Harper picked her as a friend…that they were intellectual equals never crossed her mind. Of the one hundred twenty-five students in their class, Harper and Andie were the girls with the brains. It didn’t matter to Harper that the orphaned Andie wore the same dress three days in a row, or rode to school in her grandpa’s dusty truck and ate lunch out of a brown paper sack. She could think. She could banter about Roman history, chemical equations and microbiology at the same rate of speed as Harper’s razor-sharp mind, which made Andie Forrest Harper’s intellectual equal. That mattered to Harper, and what mattered to Harper was noticed by everyone else in their class… in particular, Zooey French.

A blowsy blonde with a mass of natural curls as untamed as Andie’s long ones, Zooey was the pair’s funky foil. While she was a good inch short