voice was soft. Sad. The words more than mere formula. “Thanks.” He spoke around the tightness in his throat that always grabbed him when he thought of his parents. They’d died in a small plane crash in the Rockies when he was in his sophomore year of law school. He hadn’t been back to town since the funeral. Even before then, he’d pretty much left Cedar Creek behind, visiting only on holidays and for a few weeks in the summer. Now he’d moved back, partly because this was where he felt closest to his parents’ memory.
“You really are coming home, aren’t you?”
Her words startled him, as if she’d been reading his thoughts. She sipped her wine. “I guess that doesn’t surprise me. You always seemed so much a part of this place. Whenever I thought of you, I always pictured you here, settled down with a wife and two or three kids.”
So she’d thought of him? The knowledge warmed him. “It took me a few years, but I finally made it back. Without the wife and kids, though.”
“Alyson mentioned you were still single.” She picked a sprig of parsley from her plate and twirled it between her thumb and forefinger.
“I’ll confess I haven’t even come close to tying the knot yet,” he said. “I didn’t see any reason to hurry.”
He tipped the neck of the beer bottle toward her. “What about you?”
She shook her head. “No, I haven’t come close, either.” She glanced at him. “My friends tell me I’m too picky. I tell them I’m holding out for the right man.”
Her words sent a quiver through his stomach. Was she trying to tell him something or was he reading too much into her words? “I never would have thought you’d have ended up staying here,” he said.
She set aside the parsley, avoiding his gaze. “Why is that?”
“I don’t know. You were always so…sophisticated. Cosmopolitan.”
She laughed. “I may have thought I was sophisticated, but I’m sure I wasn’t.”
“Hey, it doesn’t take much to impress a bunch of hicks from the sticks.”
She regarded him through the lacy veil of her lashes. “And were you impressed?”
“Oh, yeah.” He pushed aside his half-filled plate. “I still am.” Seeing her again tonight had made him certain he’d made a big mistake when he’d never kissed her all those years ago. Did he dare try to make up for that now? He leaned toward her. “About what happened back in high school—”
She put her hand over his. “Wait.” She glanced around them. “Could we go somewhere else and talk? Someplace with a little more privacy?”
“Sure.” Suddenly he wanted nothing more than to be alone with her.
They moved apart and he followed her toward the door. They passed Alyson Michaels, who stopped in midsentence to stare. Her voice followed them out of the room. “They certainly aren’t wasting any time….”
They stopped outside, on the walkway between the gym and the main building. A few smokers huddled against the side of the gym, swatting at the June bugs that dove at them from the overhead lights. “Where do you want to go?” Dylan asked.
She glanced around them, then nodded toward the main building. “There’s some picnic tables behind the cafeteria. Let’s go there.”
He walked beside her, putting his hand at her back to steady her as she picked her way around the side of the building and across the gravel lot toward a trio of wooden picnic tables in the shadow of a live oak. They sat side by side on a table, feet on the bench, looking back toward the gym. The faint throb of the music drifted to them.
He turned his head to study her. She still had a certain stillness about her, a calm reserve he’d admired from the first day they’d met. “You haven’t told me yet—why did you come back to Cedar Creek?”
“I think…” She stared out into space, silent for so long he thought she’d forgotten the question, then she turned to look at him. “I think I had some unfinished business here.”
He let out the breath he hadn’t even realized he’d been holding. So they were finally going to talk about that. “You mean, what happened in high school. All those wild stories.”
She nodded. “I ran away from them, but I never really left them behind.”
He gripped the edge of the table with both hands. “I owe you an apology for my part in that. If I’d said something sooner—”
She covered his hand with her own. “I don’t think anything you said would have made a difference. Most people made up their mind about me the first day I walked down those halls. I was the fast girl from California.”
“Maybe so. But I still should have said something. Done something.”
She leaned toward him, the intensity of her gaze making his temperature edge up a few degrees. “Do you really want to make it up to me?”
He swallowed. “Of course.”
She angled closer, her knees brushing his. “I’ve decided I’ve let those rumors haunt me for too long. I’m ready to get them out of my system for good.”
“How are you going to do that?”
She took his other hand and rested them both in her lap. “That’s where you come in.” She traced the lines of his palm with one red-painted fingernail, sending a lightning bolt of sensation straight to his groin.
“I want to revisit the past, so to speak, and turn those rumors into the truth.”
He blinked, trying to pull his thoughts away from sex to the discussion at hand. “I don’t understand. You can’t go back in time.”
“Not physically.” She continued to stroke his palm, so that he ached to reach out and pull her to him. “I want to take all those wild stories and re-create them today.”
She lifted her head and met his gaze and his breath caught. Was it only wishful thinking that made him see desire in her eyes, or was she really saying what he thought she’d said? “You mean, you want us to really do all the things they accused us of back then?”
She nodded and wet her lips, the pink tip of her tongue darting out between her teeth in a surprisingly erotic gesture. “Before you say yes or no, there’s something else I have to tell you.”
Something else? What else could she say that would tilt his world any further on edge? He waited, not breathing.
She looked down at his hands, her touch light as a butterfly’s wing as she traced the lines of his palm. “I’m going away in a few months to begin a year-long fellowship at Oxford, studying Shakespeare. If I’m lucky, it could turn into a long-term teaching assignment.”
The words landed like a rock in the pit of his stomach. “You’re leaving?” Just when he’d found her again?
She nodded. “So you see, this would only be for a few weeks or months, then we’d both be free to move on with our
