insecurities, she sucked in a deep breath and tightened her hands on the wheel. She had her reasons for returning to her hometown, and the faster she accomplished her goals, the sooner she’d be back in Phoenix, where she belonged. Where people only knew her as the strong, confident woman she was now and had no memory of the painfully shy, desperately lonely girl she’d once been.
As she glanced in the rearview mirror at one of her reasons for coming back, her heart filled with love—and yes, concern—at the sight of her son with his ever-present tablet in hand.
“Robbie? Robbie?”
“Huh?” He blinked as he looked up through his too-long blond bangs, his eyes slightly unfocused behind his Harry Potter–frame glasses.
It worried her a little, how fixated he was with his video games though she strictly limited them to ones she thought appropriate for a nine-year-old boy. She tried to monitor the time he spent playing them, too, but that was more of a challenge.
You were the same way at that age, she reminded herself even if it had been books and not games that had captured her imagination and led her away into the land of make-believe. But as much as she loved her son—his sweet shyness, his quirky humor, his sometimes scary intelligence—she didn’t want him to follow so closely in her footsteps. She wanted him to have fun that didn’t involve a high-definition screen and make friends who lived outside a computer-generated world.
“What do you want on your pizza?” she asked even though she already knew the answer.
“Pepperoni and peppers.”
Lindsay didn’t know where her son’s craving for spicy foods came from. She could barely handle more than a few shakes of black pepper. Had to be from being born and raised in Phoenix, where Mexican restaurants dominated the landscape along with palm trees and cacti.
A sudden image teased the edges of her memory—a brown-haired boy with laughing green eyes popping jalapeño slices into his mouth like candy—but she shoved the thought away. “Okay, pepperoni and peppers, but only on half, okay? You know Grandma Ellie and I don’t like hot stuff.”
Lindsay found a parking place on the street outside the pizza parlor and cut the engine. Lowering the visor, she took a moment to check her hair and makeup. Not that she expected a fashion disaster to have taken place during the fifteen-minute ride from her grandmother’s house, but it never hurt to check.
Her honey-brown hair was still caught back in a clip at the nape of her neck despite Robbie’s request to ride with the back window down and her daytime makeup—a soft brown eyeliner to highlight her blue-green eyes, mascara and a touch of lip gloss—was still in place. She took a moment to wipe a small smudge from the inside corner of one eye and tucked a stray curl behind her ear.
In her job working at a PR firm, she’d learned how much appearance mattered. And though she was on vacation, she saw no reason not to look her best. Especially when she never knew who she might run into...
Her stomach trembled at the thought, and she ran her suddenly damp palms down her beige slacks. As she climbed from the vehicle, the late-afternoon sunlight warmed her face and she took a moment to enjoy a cool breeze blowing in from the ocean.
The summer temperatures rarely rose above seventy, a refreshing change from the scorching heat they’d left behind. Back home, she’d already dug up all but the hardiest of flowers she’d planted during the mild winter and early spring, but here towering red and yellow snapdragons, purple petunias and snow-white alyssum flowed from brick planters. The green-and-white-striped awnings above the plate-glass windows waved in welcome, as did the open doors along the street—few of the buildings needing or even having the air-conditioning that was an absolute necessity living in the desert.
She wasn’t alone in taking a moment to appreciate the gorgeous late-May day. Tourists strolled along the sidewalks and posed for pictures on benches outside the small shops. Families walked hand in hand—some heading toward the pizza parlor, others for the ice cream shop across the street. A group of laughing, roughhousing teenagers jostled by—all talking over each other in an almost indistinguishable babble—but Lindsay overheard one remark loud and clear.
“I can’t believe we’ll be starting college in three months!”
She did a quick double take at the trio. They all looked so young, sometimes it was hard for Lindsay to believe she’d ever been that age. Hard to believe that by the time she graduated, she’d already been—
“Oh, awesome! They have video games!” Robbie’s voice cut into her thoughts.
As if he hadn’t been playing a game the entire ride into town, she thought wryly.
Caught up in his excitement, he charged toward the restaurant doors.
“Robbie, wait! Watch—” Lindsay saw the accident waiting to happen but was too far away for her words to do any good as her son barreled into a man exiting the pizza joint. “—where you’re going,” she finished weakly, relieved when the man reached out to steady her reeling son with one hand without dropping the large pizza boxes balanced in his other.
“Whoa there, bud! No need to hurry. There’s still plenty of pizza left inside.”
No need to hurry.
The words—the voice—slammed into Lindsay’s gut. She might have gasped, but the blow knocked the air from her lungs. Bright flashes of memory assaulted her, and she wanted to close her eyes, but she knew from too many sleepless nights that only made the images so much more intense.
“No need to hurry... We have all night.”
So she steeled herself to face Ryder Kincaid for the first time in a decade—the familiar green eyes, rich brown hair, the sexy half smile that had stopped almost every girl’s heart in high school—including her own. He’d always been undeniably gorgeous, even back then, and now... Lindsay swallowed. Now those good looks had been magnified by ten years’ worth of distance, ten years’ worth of maturity as he’d grown from a boy to a man.
That sexy smile was still there as he met her gaze. A dimple flashed, somewhat at odds with the five o’clock shadow defining the planes and angles of his sculpted cheekbones and rugged jawline. Her heart pounded as he stepped closer, the moment she’d at once dreaded and anticipated for all these years, finally at hand.
She’d pictured it a hundred times—his heartfelt apology for the way he’d treated her following that one warm spring night their senior year. Her cool dismissal as she proved once and for all how much better off she was without him.
How much better off they were without him.
But time, as it turned out, didn’t change everything.
Not Ryder’s smile or the casual nod he tipped in her direction before he walked by without a word.
And not Lindsay’s shock as memories grabbed hold, dragging her back to the stupid, naive and lonely girl Ryder had used and tossed aside.
For a split second, the rich, tangy scent of pizza and whistles from the video games inside changed. Transformed into the slightly musty smell of a high school hallway and the peal of the morning bell from over a decade ago...
After years of silently, hopelessly loving Ryder Kincaid from a distance, she had finally, finally
