Totally off the market for this damsel in distress.
Not that I’d ever be in the running in an alternate universe. Or that I’m even looking.
I’ve logged off the male gender for a good long while after Jean-Paul showed me just what lying, conniving, heartless backstabbers some guys can be.
“I’m fine!” I call out as loudly as I can in my mortified state. “Got it all under control here. Just waiting until they’re inside to shut the gate!”
“You sure about that, Peach?”
Sarcasm is the last thing I need right now. “Yes, really.”
Peach?
Again, this weird sense of familiarity hits.
I chance a glance at Owl, see he’s still chasing down a couple of goats, and then make a quick count of the beasts already inside the fence. Nine. Including the black one standing in the opening, watching me with a glint in his eye identical to Lucifer’s. “Just three more to go.”
“You know goats can sense rain coming, don’t you?”
“Rain?” I glance up.
Where the hell did that dark cloud come from? Me, probably, considering I always have a black cloud over my head. The chaos today proves it.
“Yep. They’ll go right for the closest shelter at the first hint of a storm coming. Which, right now, appears to be your trailer.”
Crap, he’s right. Two goats are sprinting toward the gate from inside the fenced-in field.
“Oh, no, no, no.” I rock the gate, trying to make it move, but now it’s like the stupid thing is stuck. “Son of a biscuit eater!”
“Tory Redson-Riddle-Coffey? Shitfire, it is you,” the stranger says.
It bops me like a boulder to the head.
That Oklahoma twang I haven’t heard in years.
I whip my head around so fast my neck pops.
I’m staring at a dangerously handsome, wickedly amused, very built man smiling dead at me.
He’s older, bigger, and broader than I remember, but he has the same boyish dimples behind a dark scratch of beard.
The same emerald-green eyes drinking me in with a gaze that used to stir me up like a blender.
The same forehead, aquiline nose, and neat ears perched in a face that still looks like it was crafted by Michelangelo.
The same good-natured slip of a smile on his chiseled face—a half smirk, but not a cruel one. More like the kinda smile that says he knows a scandalous secret, and you’ll spend every second you’re with him just itching to find out what he knows.
Holy Hannah.
My hold on the gate slips. Squealing, I catch myself from falling at the last second, yanking myself forward and finding my footing on the metal.
“Quinn? Quinn Faulkner?” It rushes out of me in total disbelief.
“Don’t wear my name out, Peach. I knew it was you. I’ve only ever heard two people say son of a biscuit eater in my entire life,” he says, scratching at his chin. “You and your granny.”
I shrug, because that’s true, and then ask the obvious.
“I...I thought you were Ridge? What’re you doing here at his house, anyway?”
“I was wondering the same about you,” he says smugly, lifting a brow. “I’d tell you now, but something tells me you’d be a lot happier getting off that thing. Here, let me—”
Owl interrupts with a loud series of barks.
“The goats! Wait, I have to make sure they don’t wander.”
Quinn nods once. He must know dog-speak, too, because he shoots down the ditch and up the other side like it’s nothing, shooing the goats back into the fence, including the devil goat.
I jerk harder on the gate. Definitely stuck. It won’t budge.
So I start working my way along the metallic piping, toward the fence, wondering why on earth this gate is so long, just as Owl chases the last three horned beasts through the opening.
My foot slips, scratching at the ground, and pain shoots up my leg.
Wincing, raw fire surges to my knee.
The injury warns me it’s had its fill of this, and I’m sensing it’s the only warning I’ll get.
God. I pause, breathing through the pain, but I’ve barely sucked in a gulp of fresh air when the gate starts swinging closed.
A strong pull is all it takes before I’m hovering over solid ground again with Quinn.
No, actually, he’s facing my back when the gate finally clicks shut.
I’m almost afraid to turn around.
If Ridge Barnet is a Captain McHottie, Quinn Faulkner is two and a half superhero hunks.
He was...
Kinda my first boyfriend.
Totally my first raging crush.
Absolutely, positively my best friend on the long, hot summers of small-town teenage hijinks here in Dallas that always made the Windy City a distant memory.
The first two things were completely unknown to him, of course—and I plan to keep it that way.
Years ago, when he’d spend summers with his grandpa and I’d spend mine with Granny, he delivered the first hint of butterflies I’d ever had for any boy.
This innocent, chaste crush we never dared turn into anything else because I think, deep down, we both appreciated an unlikely friendship too much to risk setting it on fire.
That pesky age gap between us also didn’t help.
Still, I’d been plenty crushed when I returned here for my last summer and found out Quinn wasn’t coming to Dallas. He’d grown up and joined the Army.
Yet here he is, grasping my waist, snapping me back to reality, which sends a gazillion volts through me. Then he lifts me off the fence like I’m lighter than a feather.
“I heard you were home, Tory. Figured we’d bump into each other sooner or later. Didn’t know you were helping Dean with his goat business,” he says, rendering me speechless with another panty-ripping Faulkner smile.
My feet are on the ground.
I think.
He’s released my waist, but I keep an awkward hold on the gate as I slowly turn, needing the stability. Both because that sting in my knee won’t let up and the shock of seeing him again makes it hard to stand.
He’s wearing a black t-shirt that leaves virtually nothing to the imagination when it comes to a rugged mess of biceps, pecs, and abs hot enough to grill on.
A pair of snug-fitting blue jeans and brown cowboy boots rounds out a picture my mind files away to haunt me for another ten years.
“Um, y-yeah, that’s my job...goat helper, extraordinaire.” Swallowing because grown-up Quinn is illegally, deliriously hotter than boy Quinn, I remember how to form words and nod. “I’m being a good niece. Pretending I like this and didn’t get roped in.”
Those lush green eyes of his flash again in the light. Even with the last of the sun disappearing behind the rain clouds, his gaze glows.
Seriously.
No one, man or woman, should have eyes as gorgeous as his. They sparkle like lights on the Vegas strip where it’s always St. Patrick’s Day, rimmed with dark lashes and thick brows which make them stand out even more.
“Damn good to see you again, Tory.” He shakes his head. “How long have you been in town?”
I nod because it’s damn good to see him, too. I’d thought it’d never happen, even if I secretly hoped it might.
Of course, I can’t admit that.
“Just a couple weeks,” I answer. “We all know summer’s the best time to visit these parts. North Dakota winters? Count me out.”