“Grayson looked at me again. This time his gaze traveled form my hair down, and he let me see that he was looking. What he meant by this was that he thought I was beautiful, it was not just my miraculous hair, and we shouldn’t be distracted from our true love by the pesky detail that he was blackmailing me into dating his brother.Right.”

“Nick ran smack into me."Ooof!" he hollered, grabbing me around the waist to keep me from falling down the rest of the staircase.That's when I realized Mom thought Nick and I were going on a date together.Quickly Nick let me go.He looked huge, frowning down at me from the step above. "Why are you stopping in the middle of the stairs?""Why are you tailgating me?"He put his hand behind me, at butt level, without touching me. "What is that?" he demanded.I bent a little and slapped my butt, "Something the heir to a meat fortune should know all about. USDA grade-A prime,baby." I straightened. "Just kidding. Really, it's my butt."He put his hands on his hips, and from below I noticed his strong superhero chin again.He grumbled, "Why do you have 'boy toy' written across your butt?""Oh!" I put my hand over the words, realizing that I probably should have been embarrassed about this sooner. "These are my brother's jeans. He wrote it to annoy me. Or to get me a date.”

“We can't leave the snow all bloody," I told the underside of his chin,shadowed with stubble. "It will scare the tourists.""The new snow will cover it up." He looked down at me."Shhh."Something in his Shhh tugged at my heart. He kept watchiing me,not examining m ear for medical emergencies but looking into my eyes,for a few more steps. I couldn't read his look.He was kind of blurry,for one thing,and I was kind of dizzy. I thought he looked..concerned. Sympathetic. Determined to rescue me from danger. I wished that was what he felt. But it couldn't have been.I was misreading him.”

“He pursed his lips and gazed at me reproachfully for throwing our seventh-grade history in his face,times two. back then he'd brought our tween-love Armageddon on himself by letting our whole class in on a secret while he kept me in the dark.Not that i was bitter.”

“Let's go," I said."Go where?""On Lori's date with Parker."Now he looked at me over the nerdy spectacles he wore for reading."I wasn't aware it was a double date. And you're not my type.”

“And" – his voice was soft now – "you’re a beautiful girl. If you show the slightest interest in Alec, he’ll want to go out with you. I know I would."My skin prickled with goose bumps, a chill in the hot April evening. My brain knew Grayson didn’t have the crush on me that I’d imagined when he got mad at me at the airport that afternoon. He wouldn’t have asked me to date his brother if he’d been interested in me. But my body didn’t know this, or didn’t care.”

“I gave my dad a thumbs-up.He stared at me. My mom turned to him in the car, asking him, What? What is it? He kept staring at me. My brown hair was an even bigger shock for him than I'd expected.I smiled and waved at him and mouthed, "Welcome home."He put his hand to his eyes. He knew I was finally cured.”