Whispers and Wishes (Untouchable Book 4)

  Whispers and Wishes

  Untouchable Book Four

  Heather Long

  Contents

  Series so Far

  Whispers and Wishes

  Foreword & Dedication

  Unopened Letter to the World

  1. Chapter One

  2. Chapter Two

  3. Chapter Three

  4. Chapter Four

  5. Chapter Five

  6. Chapter Six

  7. Chapter Seven

  8. Chapter Eight

  Bad News

  9. Chapter Nine

  10. Chapter Ten

  11. Chapter Eleven

  12. Chapter Twelve

  13. Chapter Thirteen

  14. Chapter Fourteen

  15. Chapter Fifteen

  16. Chapter Sixteen

  17. Chapter Seventeen

  18. Chapter Eighteen

  Schadenfreude

  19. Chapter Nineteen

  20. Chapter Twenty

  21. Chapter Twenty-One

  22. Chapter Twenty-Two

  23. Chapter Twenty-Three

  24. Chapter Twenty-Four

  25. Chapter Twenty-Five

  About Heather Long

  Also by Heather Long

  Copyright © 2020 by Heather Long

  Editing: Bookish Dreams Editing

  Cover: Crimson Phoenix Designs

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Series so Far

  Rules and Roses

  Changes and Chocolate

  Keys and Kisses

  Whispers and Wishes

  Whispers and Wishes

  Untouchable Book 4

  Everything changes. Even the things we didn’t ask for. Jake, Archie, Coop, and Ian were my best friends and three of them still are, and they’re also now my lovers, my boyfriends, and pretty much the anchors keeping me from getting washed away.

  I’ve had great moments, and I’ve had horrible ones. One thing is for sure, I’ll never forget my senior year.

  It’s the year everything changed.

  It’s the year I found them. I lost one, and now he wants me back, but I have no idea how to trust him again.

  I wish… I wish for a lot of things, but with Halloween right around the corner and the holidays coming, I gotta stay focused on the future, even if part of me is still trapped in a night I can’t remember.

  Foreword & Dedication

  Dear Reader,

  Thank you for picking up Whispers and Wishes. If you haven’t read the first three in the Untouchable series, I caution you to go and grab those right now and read them first.

  Book four. Wow. You know, when I started this, I pictured a trilogy with the first book set in the senior year, the second in college and the third after they’d graduated college. That so did not happen. The world they live in and the stuff going on? There’s just so much more to it.

  Frankie and her boys have been friends forever, but the changing dynamics, the complicated relationships, and the conflicts that arise from the changes in their life just make it so much deeper for me. This truly is a love affair for me to write.

  This series wouldn’t be complete without the enormous support of Blake Blessing, Rebecca Royce and Sara Vermillion. They’ve been tremendous as cheerleaders (and in Sara’s case, cracking the whip), as sounding boards, and sometimes even telling me to take a break because I was pushing too hard. I flove them to pieces.

  Thank you to every single reader who has given this series a shot and to those who left reviews. Thank you to the readers who recommend the series to their friends and to every single person who has reached out to me about it. I see and hear all of you.

  Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

  And as always, the housekeeping notes:

  For those of you who have never read a reverse harem before, first let me thank you for picking this up and giving it a shot. Second, a reverse harem means the heroine will not make a choice in this book or any other between the guys in her life. It may take her a while to reach that conclusion, but it’s the journey that drives it. There are many ways to frame this kind of relationship, currently reverse harem fits it very well.

  Also, this is the fourth book in a series. If you haven’t read the first three, I encourage you to pause here and go grab them. While there may be no specific happy endings at the end of each of these books, there will be one to the whole series, that I promise you. Some of these books will have cliffhangers, largely due to the size of the story, but the happy ending has to be earned as part of the journey.

  Thank you again for reading Frankie’s story and I truly hope you enjoy it!

  xoxo

  Heather

  Unopened Letter to the World

  We’re taught to leave this world better than we found it. Maybe some are taught this by their parents, their pastor, their teachers, or a mentor. I can say with certainty I learned this lesson from my mother and my friends, but not because they tried to teach me. Because through their actions, they showed me that not everyone cares what they leave behind, and sometimes to rise, you have to fall.

  I believe that people will always have the ability to rise above their circumstances if they are willing to fight for it. Life, after all, is what we make of it. But we don’t always know what our lives are supposed to be or why we are as we are in this world. We can rail against our circumstances and say that they aren’t fair, or we can look at them for what they are—experiences.

  This is where I am, right now. Maybe I couldn’t control how I got here, but I can make the decisions about where to go from here. Buddha said, “Life is suffering.” Not the most cheerful of thoughts, but suffering doesn’t always mean horrible things. It can mean challenges. It can mean we have to work in order to achieve what we want. It can also mean that what we want is not always what we need.

  Life defaults to the difficult setting because without understanding sadness, we cannot comprehend joy. Without grasping loneliness, we can’t fathom togetherness. Sometimes, happiness is like a bird. Laughing and calling one moment, then flitting away to somewhere else. It is up to us to pursue that happiness and to rigorously apply ourselves to fulfilling our own needs.

  In 2005, Steve Jobs addressed Stanford University in a commencement speech. He said, “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.”

  I have spent a long time living my life according to someone else’s thinking—my mother. But the more disinterested in me she becomes, the more I learn about who I am and who I don’t want to be.

  I made the mistake of assuming where my friends were concerned. In fairness, we all made that mistake. We all thought we knew who the other was and what they wanted. Learning the truth hurt, but it’s also freed me. I want to make mistakes and learn from them. I want to follow the rhythm I make, even if no one else can hear it. I want to live without regrets for the things I didn’t do.

  My mother lives her life on the run, fleeing her responsibilities and her family. She is always looking to someone else to make her happy, to fix what is irrevocably broken in her life, whether it’s me or a boyfriend or a married man. She’s always looking elsewhere. I have to look to me. I have to live my life. Every day, I want to live my life to the best I can.

  I want to be excited about the possibilities, and I want to push the boundaries. If my mother sho
wed me what life looks like to run away, then my friends have shown me what it is to face things head on. Maybe I’m idealistic and foolish, but I’d rather risk and lose, then never risk at all.

  Every day, I learn more about my friends, about me, and about the potential of who we can be. I know there’s a chance that some will fall away. Maybe our relationships won’t survive the changes, but we, as individuals, will. We’ll grow. We’ll change. We’ll become the people we can be. That is a life lived in flux and in suffering. We have to live our lives for us. That means celebrating those moments, even if we’re growing apart.

  Life’s hourglass never stops trickling. I want to leave the world around me better than I found it. I want to leave my friends that same way. They have helped me to be better than I thought I could be, sometimes by doing nothing more than being my friends. By doing nothing more than being themselves. To live my best life, I have to be me.

  Chapter One

  I Want to Believe

  Ian

  “It’s been a long couple of days for you,” Dr. Diane Miller, the student advocate and counselor stated, or rather, understated. Long didn’t begin to describe it. In fact, it felt like we’d been in one continuous day since I got to her place to get ready for the dance. The dance that was supposed to have been our night, our date, before I blew it. Then that crap with Mitch…

  “Bubba,” Diane said, pulling my attention back to her. Neither Jake nor I had really commented on her statement. The only reason we were even in her office was because we had to do the anger management and work on our communication, per the principal and the coach. That meant two sessions a week, and we’d only gotten started the week before.

  Fuck, the only reason we were even at school was to get Frankie’s homework and to do this. We were all going to rotate staying with Frankie, or at least the guys were. Hopefully they’d let me pull a shift on Thursday.

  “I don’t really want to talk about it,” I told Diane when she kept staring at me. I shifted in the seat and tried to ignore the throb in my hand.

  “Pretty much,” Jake agreed with me. Granted, our fight was what landed us up in here, but we were united on this topic. It was no one’s business. The kids were all talking about it. I’d heard the gossip everywhere, seen some of the social media posts, and already saved some dumbass sophomore’s life when he straight up asked Jake about it.

  Moron.

  “Okay,” Diane said, shifting aside a notepad and staring at both of us. “I’m aware of what happened at the dance. All of the teachers were informed.”

  Great.

  “I also know what happened to your hand Bubba.”

  “My hand is fine.” I’d jammed my finger and dislocated two knuckles. It was worth it. Walking in that room… Red hazed my vision all over again. She’d been so out of it. Her dress had been torn. The knuckles on her hand had been bleeding. She’d punched him.

  She’d also scratched the shit out of him.

  Frankie was no slouch, but the asshole drugged her.

  My fists clenched, but Jake sat forward. “Great, then you don’t need to ask us about it.”

  “Actually,” Diane said. “I do. Not about the specifics, because clearly neither of you want to discuss that.”

  She was right about that. No we didn’t want to discuss it. “We’re not here to discuss that. We’re here to work on our anger or some shit, right?”

  Jake and she both gave me a look, and I sighed. Yeah, my temper was showing. I didn’t want to be at school at all. In fact, I wanted to trade places with Archie and be at her place, looking after her. But it had been really fucking hard to be there the last few days. And I kept messing shit up where she was concerned. The last thing she needed was me being an ass.

  So, Archie was there and I was here.

  “Sorry,” I said, and blew out a breath. “I’m just mad.”

  “You have a right to be angry,” Diane told me.

  Jake snorted, but when she looked at him, he shook his head.

  “Boys.” Diane exhaled the single syllable and leaned back in her chair. “You’re in an impossible situation, so let me make a few things clear to you. What you’re experiencing right now is tough and traumatic for adults, much less kids—granted you’re eighteen,” she said with a nod to me. “And you’re seventeen, almost eighteen. Someone you care about has been hurt. Badly. Right now, you’re both staring at me and thinking ‘no shit, and she’s the one who is hurt, not me.’ And to a point, I absolutely agree with you. However…”

  She paused there, studying us for a long moment, and I found myself trying to figure out how she was going to make this about us. It wasn’t about us…

  “You’re blaming yourselves because you didn’t prevent it from happening. You’re blaming yourselves for not seeing something you feel you should have seen. You think there’s something you could have or should have done…”

  “I shouldn’t have let her go to the bathroom,” Jake said. “Not by herself. One of us should have been waiting. So you’re right, there’s something we could have done. We didn’t, and now she’s got to deal with it. But we weren’t going to talk about this.”

  “I understand not talking about the incident. What I want to talk about is how it makes you both feel.”

  I laughed, and it came out a hollow, empty sound as I stared up at the ceiling. “What does it matter how we feel? It isn’t about us.” Or the fact that it was the date I asked her out on and ultimately fucked up. If we’d been there as a date date, maybe it would have been different. Maybe…

  Shit. If I hadn’t pushed her away. If I’d not listened to my dad…and now… If I’d seen what the hell Mitch was doing…

  How the hell had we missed that?

  Why would he target Frankie like that? I wanted to ask him, and I wanted to beat him all over again. Not that he could answer at the moment. The last I heard, his jaw was wired shut.

  Good.

  I was pretty sure he was under arrest, or at least, I hoped he was. No one was talking to us, and after all the interviews with the cops, Archie got his attorney to take over running interference. They said she’d have to talk to them again and…

  “Jake—are you angry?”

  “Is water wet?” Jake demanded. “What kind of effed up question is that? Of course, I’m angry. He hurt her. I want to…” He clenched his fists until his knuckles went white.

  If Jake’s harsh answer bothered her, she didn’t let it show. Instead, she focused on me. “What about you, Bubba? Are you angry?”

  I just stared at her. What could I say? I was angry. At Mitch. At myself. At the guys. At Cheryl for giving her the damn water in the first place.

  “What about this, are you angry with her?”

  “No.” Jake’s answer pounded so closely on the heels of my own, it might as well have been one voice. Then I added, “It wasn’t Frankie’s fault.”

  “But you’re angry that this happened to her.”

  “Yes.” Was that what she wanted to hear? “I’m pissed off that it happened to her. I’m furious it happened while we were right there, and if we hadn’t been looking for her…” I couldn’t finish that thought,

  When she didn’t come back from the bathroom, it had made all of us a little twitchy. Be great if we could have said it had been some kind of sixth sense warning us, but really? I wanted a chance to dance with her, and I kept looking for her to come back and so had they.

  “We noticed because we were being selfish,” I admitted. Was that what she wanted to hear? If Coach wanted to kick me off the team if I wouldn’t go through with this, I’d walk. But I couldn’t do that to Jake. I’d already caused enough trouble when he was on uneven ground in the first place. That scholarship of his seemed locked in, and I wasn’t going to jeopardize it anymore than I had.

  “Why do you say that?” Diane pinned me with a look.

  I didn’t want to explain it, but Jake said, “Because we wanted to dance with her. We’d been having a great time, an
d she took off to pee real quick and we kept looking to see if she was back.” He verbalized every thought. “One song made sense. But two? When the third song came on, we went looking.”

  “Sometimes, it can take a girl a while in the bathroom,” she suggested.

  “Not Frankie,” both of us said in one voice again, and Diane almost smiled.

  “No,” I continued. “Frankie’s low maintenance, she really isn’t that girl who stands in a bathroom and preens.”

  “Well, there’s always a line, too,” Diane pointed out. “It can take girls a while.”

  “There was no line at the bathroom,” Jake interjected. “It doesn’t matter why we went looking. Things have been weird for her, she’s taken a lot of crap from some of the assholes at this school.”

  “Ah, so maybe you weren’t selfish so much as protective.” It wasn’t Jake she was looking at, and I sighed.

  One glance at my watch, and I wanted to sigh again. We’d barely been in here ten minutes, and we had an hour of this to get through?

  “Yeah,” Jake said, and I glanced at him. He pinned me with a look that said pay attention. “We are protective. All of us are. Sometimes, we’re too protective and try to protect her from ourselves. But we weren’t too protective on Saturday.”