Opposites (Never) Attract (Calloways vs. McGraws Book 2), page 1
OPPOSITES (NEVER) ATTRACT
HAILEY SHORE
CONTENTS
Family Trees
Prologue
Chapter 1
Kaitlyn
Chapter 2
Tag
Chapter 3
Kaityln
Chapter 4
Kaityln
Chapter 5
Kaitlyn
Chapter 6
Tag
Chapter 7
Kaitlyn
Chapter 8
Tag
Chapter 9
Kaitlyn/Sunshine
Chapter 10
Kaitlyn/Sunshine
Chapter 11
Tag
Chapter 12
Sunshine/Kaitlyn
Chapter 13
Sunshine/Kaitlyn
Chapter 14
Sunshine/Kaitlyn
Chapter 15
Tag
Chapter 16
Sunshine/Kaitlyn
Chapter 17
Tag
Chapter 18
Sunshine/Kaitlyn
Chapter 19
Tag
Chapter 20
Sunshine
Chapter 21
Sunshine
Chapter 22
Sunshine
Chapter 23
Sunshine
Chapter 24
Tag
Chapter 25
Sunshine
Chapter 26
Sunshine
Chapter 27
Sunshine
Epilogue
Also by Hailey Shore
FAMILY TREES
PROLOGUE
SUNSHINE
Last Hope Gulch School
Fifteen Years Ago
“Does anyone think they can solve the proof on the board?” Mrs. Diaz, our geometry teacher, asked the class. Mrs. Diaz was the Last Hope Gulch math teacher. She taught everything from seventh grade remedial algebra to private advanced calculus. (I’d been her only student for that class, she liked to say we taught each other.)
Did I mention that Last Hope Gulch was a tiny town in nowhere Wyoming? We’re barely on a map.
To answer Mrs. Diaz, I raised my hand faster than anyone else in the classroom. The theorem was crystal clear in my mind. Everything else in my life could be blurry, but math was always razor sharp.
“Oh look, Smarty Sunshine knows the answer.” The comment came from Cheryl, who was three years older and openly sneering at me from her seat beside mine. “Don’t you get bored always sucking up to teachers?” she hissed.
Mike Palmer, Cheryl’s neanderthal boyfriend, made kissy noises in my direction, which was hilarious to Cheryl and two other seniors in the class. So immature for someone his age. Seriously, these guys were graduating this year, they could show a little dignity.
I don’t know why I did this to myself every time a teacher asked a question. Raised my hand, shouted out the answer, volunteered to go to the board. I should just sit still and keep my mouth shut. Mrs. Diaz knew I knew the answer, but that drive to prove what I could do was impossible to control. Which inevitably led to other people, who didn’t know the answers, feeling the need to put me in my place.
I wanted to say something snarky to Cheryl and Mike.
Grow up.
You only wish you could do half of what I can do.
But I never had that kind of courage when it came to dealing with the seniors in my class. Which was most of my classes, actually. Because, while I was only fifteen, and technically considered a sophomore, all my classwork was advanced level stuff.
As advanced as the Gulch and Mrs. Diaz could provide, anyway.
That was how I’d won the argument with my mom to let me apply for college early. I’d gone through every available class the high school had to offer. The only thing that made sense next was college.
Away from here.
Finally.
I lowered my hand and kept my eyes on the board, ignoring Cheryl and Mike the way I’d been ignoring them my whole life. But I knew from past experience, if they did not let up soon, the whole class would start staring at me.
“I think she needs a new nickname,” Mike said.
“Brace face?” Cheryl supplied. “Scarecrow?”
Mike laughed. “Yeah, Scarecrow. Want to earn some extra money and stand in my dad’s sugar beet field and scare away the birds?”
It doesn’t hurt. I don’t care what anyone from this town thinks of me. Well, maybe I care about one person’s opinion.
Tag Dunham (who I always sat behind in any class we had together so he would never catch me staring at him) turned around with a stormy expression on his face.
Oh, no. Not you too, Tag.
I tried to brace myself for him to join in, but I knew if he started teasing me it would hurt so much worse.
Tag was always nice to me. Despite the fact he was best friends with my family’s mortal enemies…the McGraws.
Fun fact about Last Hope Gulch, we had feuding families. The Calloways and McGraws had been enemies for over a hundred years. It all started when the Widow Calloway refused to sell her land to Duncan McGraw, who was establishing the largest cattle ranch in the territory. After years of fighting over it, he pushed her off Widow’s Peak (back then it was just a normal edge of a butte) so he could just steal her land. However, in an incredible twist of fate, she survived the plummet, climbed back up the butte, and pushed him off instead.
Unfortunately, she was found guilty of that crime and was hanged in the center of town.
To this day, we had a gallows statue in front of our town for all to commemorate it.
Over the years, there had been cattle rustling, kidnappings and bootlegging. Broken hearts, and just a little bit of murder between our two families.
These days, the beef felt more like a habit than anything else. A show we put on for Last Hope Gulch’s Feud Day Festival. Which, I’m sorry to say, was a real thing. Part county fair, part renaissance fair, there were re-enactments of both family’s worst moments. Enough to draw crowds from all around the neighboring towns, and even some out of state tourists. Why people loved it, I had no idea, but they came in droves to celebrate the history of our families trying to kill each other for the past hundred years.
Tag and his dad worked for the McGraws on their cattle ranch, and he was best friends with all the McGraw brothers. But he’d always kept his nose out of the feud.
I didn’t really care about the McGraws in general. I had bigger problems.
Like the fact that it felt like every person in this town basically hated me just for being smart.
That was my problem.
“Hey,” Tag snapped.
I pointed to my chest and squeaked out, “Me?”
He frowned at me like I’d said something stupid. “Mike and Cheryl, what’d I tell you about that shit? Girl wants to raise her hand, you let her. It’s not like either of you two dumb shits know the answer.”
Tag looked at me and I wanted to sink as far under the desk as I could. Having him watching me was too…intense.
Did he know I lingered at my locker waiting for senior lunch break, just so I could see him during the day? Did he see how flushed I’d gotten last week when I saw that his girlfriend, Jenny, had given him a new hickey on the side of his neck, right by his collar bone?
You could still see the faded bruise of it when his t-shirt collar pulled anytime he turned around.
A muscle in his jaw ticked and I wanted to reach out and touch it.
“She thinks she’s better than us,” Cheryl hissed at Tag from over my shoulder.
“She is better than you,” he snapped at Cheryl. “Get over it.”
The bell rang and I knew I had to say something. Do something. Tag had totally stuck up for me.
And no one ever stood up for me.
He’d even…I think…complimented me? I didn’t get a lot of those, so it was hard to know.
Math class poured into the hallway with every other class in this wing of the high school. My window was limited, I had about two minutes before Tag met Jenny at his locker, where they would take off together for the rest of the day.
Probably to have sex.
Definitely to have sex.
He stood literally a foot taller than every other person in school, and it was easy to track his wide shoulders to his locker. I zig zagged my way through a bunch of students to meet him there.
“Hey,” I said.
“What?” he asked. Mr. Nice Guy from the classroom was nowhere in sight. He didn’t even look at me.
“Uh…” I hitched my backpack up over my shoulder. I carried all my text books with me for every class, because I never knew if I was going to have down time and could be working on something else, so I was perpetually lopsided to the right.
“You’re going to thank me for sticking up for you,” he predicted. “Don’t bother. I don’t like the upper class men messing with the freshman and sophomores like that. It isn’t cool. So it’s not about you, yeah?”
I nodded. Of course it wasn’t about me. It’s just who Tag was. “Still. You’re the only person in the whole school who doesn’t call me Smarty Sunshine.”
He huffed out a laugh. “Kid, there are worse things to be called. I wasn’t lying back there. You’ve got a big brain that’s meant for big things. Don’t let anyone make you feel ashamed of anythi
ng.”
The sentiment was nice but the kid stung.
He slammed his locker closed, and looked right over my head and smiled at someone behind me.
Jenny. The hickey-giving girlfriend. She had amazing skin and silky hair that was never frizzy. And boobs. She had boobs.
I had nipples, and that was about it.
She came up to him, oblivious of my presence next to his locker, and wrapped her arms around his neck so she could plant a kiss on his lips.
She could do that. She could just kiss him. And suck on his neck and put her fingers in his thick, dark hair.
“Ready to go?” she asked, against his lips.
“Always,” he said, with a smirk. Then he turned back to me. Yes, I was still standing next to his locker gawking at him. “We good?”
I nodded. “Yep. All good.”
He and Jenny turned away, his hand tucked into her back pocket so he could cup her ass, and I’d never wanted anything as badly as I wanted a man’s hand in my back pocket.
“What were you talking to Smarty Sunshine about?” Jenny asked, probably keeping her voice loud enough so I could hear. “That girl is so weird.”
“She’s just smart, is all.”
“Sure, babe. Sure.”
Even I could tell she was being sarcastic, and he leaned down and kissed her neck instead of arguing with her. I could admit it was nice to be defended for a minute, but no one was going to defend me forever. For good.
No. I needed to get out of this town. This whole damn state.
It was time to leave all of this behind.
Even him.
ONE
KAITLYN
Present Day
“Alright everyone,” I said, standing in front of a long boardroom table surrounded by New York’s most ambitious, most cutthroat analysts and investors. “It’s gut check time. We’re coming up on Q3 and our KPIs just aren’t where I want them. We need a plan in place if we’re going to meet our goals by the end of the year.”
“We’re trending in the right direction, though,” said Jeffrey, a twenty-eight-year-old finance wunderkind who liked to get drunk at happy hours and hit on me.
“Trending,” I said, with an appropriate level of disgust. This was why he failed at every attempt to get me in bed. I didn’t do half-assed. “Trending feels a lot like hope, Jeffery. Or wishing. That’s not what made Berkley and Brothers the top brokerage firm in this city…no, in this country. Did it?”
“No,” he said, looking like he did at the end of happy hour, after I shot him down.
“No,” I repeated slowly.
One of the keys to leadership as a woman in finance was that you had to be balls out badass. Never letting anyone imagine they could surpass you. But as a woman, you also couldn’t be a bitch.
“Now, I like wishing for things, too,” I continued with a smile. “Peace. Harmony. Calorie free cheesecake…”
There it was. A smattering of laughter. An easing of the tension.
See, I’m just like your wives. Your sisters. Nothing scary here.
I tugged my charcoal Chanel suit jacket over my black pencil skirt and straightened my back. Success in this position was all about moving from bad cop to good cop at will. Always keeping everyone’s attention, but never pissing off one person individually.
Slowly, I walked the space between the table and the floor-to-ceiling glass windows of the conference room. The late afternoon sun hit the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan and turned everything to gold.
“But that’s not going to get us where we need to be. Where we want to be…”
There was a thump in the hallway outside of the room. What sounded like a scuffle. Everyone turned to look through the glass walls of the conference room in the direction of reception. Voices got louder, and I heard my assistant, Matthew, say, “You can’t go in there, she’s in a very important meeting.”
We all watched the person, the man, who clearly wasn’t taking Matthews’s advice, walk through the reception area like he owned the building.
Oh. My. God.
There was no hope for it. I wasn’t getting the crowd’s attention back because this was not the type of man who walked through the hallways on the 86th floor of a building in downtown Manhattan.
He was six-foot four. Broad shoulders and lean hips, with an impossibly wide chest. He wore a black denim jacket with a dark beard that covered his face.
I could feel the reverberations under my feet from his beat-up cowboy boots hitting the hardwood floor. But the boots weren’t even the piece de resistance. Or the black Stetson he wore on top of his thick brown hair.
No, it was the mirrored aviator sunglasses he wore over his eyes. So cool. So…hot.
This man was a force of nature. A tornado sucking up all the oxygen in the room. Every ruthless money shark around that table, who - as a rule, were not impressed by anything - were utterly captivated by him.
He was the least New York thing that had ever dared to enter this building.
“Who is that?” Ellen, a twenty-year veteran with the firm, whispered to Bethany.
“My fantasy come true,” Bethany, a recent Wharton School of Business grad with a genius brain and killer instinct, replied in the same whisper.
“Should we be worried?” Jeffery looked up at me. “Should I call security?”
There was no point.
Security was no match against Taggert Durham.
The glass door to the conference room swung open to a collective gasp from those in the room with me.
There was no way he would recognize me. Last time he saw me, I was a tall, skinny fifteen-year-old. With hair in desperate need of a conditioning treatment and a blowout. Terrible skin. Braces. Glasses.
Your typical social outcast uniform.
Now, at thirty, that girl was nowhere to be seen.
My blond highlights and blunt bob haircut cost several hundred dollars every other month at a prestigious uptown salon. I’d filled out with curves in all the right places (mostly my boobs). My teeth were finally straight, and after years of acne treatment, my skin was so clear even my dermatologist couldn’t believe it.
So there was no way he would be able to pick me out in this crowd.
“Hey, Sunshine,” he said, taking off his sunglasses and looking directly at me. I was so shocked I had to place one hand against the table for balance. “Sorry for interrupting your work and all, but I’m here to bring you home.”
“I’m calling security,” Jeffery said, getting to his feet. “You’re not authorized to be here.”
Tag broke eye contact with me to stare at Jeffery, and I took a minute to catch my breath. Good lord. Tag Durham. Here? I hadn’t thought about him in years.
Except at…certain moments. Certain private moments.
Tag had been my earliest crush. My first sexual fantasy. That kind of thing tended to stick with a girl. Apparently, I had a weakness for the strong and silent type. A man with rough hands and broad shoulders. Thick thighs and a chest that had never been waxed. Who spoke in a growl more than words.
Who stood up for the ugly duckling in a classroom.
Tag was the original cowboy fantasy.
I shook my head, trying to gather myself from the hot internal place this man could send me.
Why was he here? It didn’t make any sense.
“I’ll be happy to leave. But Sunshine needs to come with me,” he said.
“Why does he keep calling you Sunshine?” Bethany asked me.
“Because it’s her name, ma’am,” Tag said, with a tilt of his hat in Bethany’s direction.
Bethany, who dated and dumped men and women for sport, was in danger of passing out she was blushing so hard.
It wasn’t her fault. Tag was laying on the cowboy charm thick. There was a time when he could make me blush just by looking at me.
I was happy to say those days were over.
Wait, were they? I wasn’t blushing, was I?
“Kaitlyn, do you know this man?” Kirk asked. He sat on the other side of Jeffery. His slicked back hair and gold pinky ring gave him a finance-bro vibe.
