The Trouble With Good Girls

In St. Aurelia's North Shore, sixteen year old Aly Miller lives the perfect, good girl life: a promising artist, a varsity cheerleader, and a straight-A student. Her brother is Whitfield Academy's star football player. Her father is a highly respected police lieutenant and her mother's family name graces civic centers, hospital wings, and the glass walls of downtown skyscrapers.

Sheltered and innocent, she doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, and certainly doesn't think about boys like Julián "J" Valentín.

At least not until she meets him on a Saturday while volunteering at Ashford Commons.

Twenty three, tattooed, with prison in his past and Southpoint set loyalty running through his veins, J knows better than to take the number the cute, blushing blonde offers him. And he certainly knows better than to actually text her.

Aly hears the rumors about him, learns about his past, and discovers he spent years locked inside a Florida state prison. She knows he's everything her parents would never approve of and everything her brother would try to protect her from.

In the gaps in her parents' attention and the freedom of her brother's absence, she finds herself wrapped around him at illegal race nights in the lots of Riverbend's abandoned warehouses and in his lap at parties in Alder Park and Southpoint where she has no business going, especially after dark. It's there that she learns the burn of liquor on her tongue, the sticky-sweet haze of weed smoke in her lungs, and what it means when boys stare too long and J tells her she's his.

Every free moment is spent tangled in his bedsheets or perched on his toolbox in the middle of his bay at El Riel Auto, where everyone knows what the hickeys on her neck mean.

And when it falls apart, when the rumors start, when her brother sees the marks on her thighs and her parents discover exactly how she spent her summer, it's too late.

Summer already left a heartbeat.