brought to get the calf in.
Swinging around, she looked into the fog swirling past the road, swathing the bank. Her pulse thumped painfully. Dammit, dammit, dammit. She couldn’t afford to lose anything, including that calf. Limberlost Farm was on a perpetual brink of disaster.
“Calf’s gone. You’ll find it tomorrow.”
She swung back at him, irritated mostly because he was right. And arrogant about it.
“Would you leave me alone? Get in your car! Go away! Or get me your insurance information.” How disoriented was she? She’d almost forgotten that vital point. “You hit my gatepost.”
Not that it was some fabulous gatepost. It was old and crumbly. Whatever. He’d run into it.
“I hit you, too.”
“I know that! I’m not going to the hospital. I don’t need to. Nothing’s broken. Just tell me who your insurance people are and your name and back your car on out of here.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said.
Her pulse thumped again. She stepped toward him. He stood just at the edge of the beams. God, he sounded familiar. And looked familiar in that edge of light…. Sheer instinct made her want to shrink back, but she didn’t shrink from anyone, not anymore.
Dangerous, that’s how he looked. Tall, powerfully built, dressed in jeans and a dark T-shirt under a leather jacket. Athletic shoes, not boots. He didn’t look like he was from around here, or sound like it either, and yet his voice rang a bell. His face was all sharp planes and angles cut in shadows. She couldn’t make out the details of his face, but she was almost positive he was good-looking. He was arrogant, wasn’t he?
He definitely looked big and bad, which made her attempt to play at big and bad herself rather emptily.
“What do you mean?”
“My brakes. They’re dead. That’s why I couldn’t stop the car. I tried not to hit the calf and…”
He’d hit her when she’d run into the road after it. Stupid move on her part. She was lucky to be alive, lucky he hadn’t more than struck her with the corner of his bumper, which was just enough to knock her down. He’d swerved into her gatepost to keep from hitting her dead-on. Or she might be…dead.
Then her brain kicked in and she realized what he’d just said. His brakes had failed. He couldn’t get out of here in his car. It was dark and rainy and late.
And stranded. Just what she needed to top off her evening. A stranded stranger.
“Where were you going?” As if she felt like ferrying him anywhere. But she couldn’t leave him here at the side of the road under these conditions. Even if he had just hit her and damaged her property and seriously annoyed the hell out of her.
He jerked his head at the drive. “Here.”
“Uh, what?”
“Limberlost Farm.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s mine.”
Double blink. Had her hearing been affected?
“You’re mistaken.”
“I don’t think so.”
Now she forgot to breathe for a full beat. What was going on here?
“This is my farm,” she said. Rain, soaking her now. She didn’t care. Who was he? She was just about to ask that question but he beat her to it.
“Who are you?” he asked, and stepped toward her into the light from his beams.
Fully into the light.
Before she could open her mouth, he answered for her, his voice oh-so-familiar, and she knew exactly why. Oh yeah, she knew why he was so familiar and why she was so scared. Her head reeled.
“Willa?”
Chapter 2
Total panic, that’s what Penn read in Willa’s eyes. Willa…North these days. She’d married Jared North. Five weeks and three days after Penn had left Haven, not that he’d counted or cared or paid much attention at the time. Liar.
But he’d certainly made a heroic effort to forget about her after that. At least until tonight. There was no driving down Laurel Run Road without thinking about Willa, but running into her—Literally. That he hadn’t expected.
He was stunned, knocked off balance by a barrage of feelings—regret, anger, pain—as he stared for one pounding, frozen moment into her pale, shocked face, while the storm seemed to recede around them, leaving them on a planet all by themselves. She stood there in the light, and he was speechless.
It was her, it was really her. She was a mature woman now, not a teenage girl, but all he could see in those lost, scared, hazel eyes was the girl he’d once held in his arms.
He’d thought she was perfect fourteen years ago. Delicious, sweet, innocent Willa, with her apple cheeks, sparkling river-green eyes, ribbons of wavy, gold sunshine tumbling around her shoulders. Totally oblivious to her power over every boy in town—especially the boy who lived up the road and watched her picking corn, riding her horse, swimming in the river…. Walking down the road to the river right past his granddad’s farm in her itsy-bitsy bikini, carrying a damn parasol, for Christ’s sake, like she’d just stepped out of a wet dream and into real life.
It’d been all in fun at first, then it had turned so wild, so hot, that they’d burned each other to the ground in the end. And what a bitter end it had been. He wasn’t proud of his own behavior, but there was nothing good he could have said about hers.
He didn’t have any excuses to give for the past, but neither did Willa. She had betrayed him, not the other way around.
She was still gorgeous. Drop-dead gorgeous. And she still had it—that regal air, that natural elegance, even as she stood there soaked to the bones in jeans and a work shirt that did nothing to hide the fact that her body had lost little in the translation from teenage girl to mature woman.
He felt a buzz, like some kind of electrical charge zapping through him. He hadn’t felt that kind of buzz since….
No, don’t even go there. He wasn’t that stupid. His body might be that stupid, but not his brain. And he was no teenage idiot anymore.
“You’d better start walking.” Willa whipped around—oh yeah, she was still regal—and headed for the piece of crap pickup truck in the beaten-down rock drive.
“Not so fast.” He was on her in a heartbeat. Penn took her arm, stopped her in her tracks. In the past, he knew what her game had been then, or had by the end of things. She was a player, a user, a cheater. What her game was now—that’s what he was going to find out.
A shocked breath escaped her at his grip.
“Get off me,” she yelled at him, trying to shake off his grip.
She
