* *
“CAMDEN?”
Levi blinked once, twice, then a third time. This brain tumor–epilepsy thing was getting out of hand. He’d gone from imagining a beautiful woman in a wedding dress to imagining Camden Harris—a girl he hadn’t seen since he was fourteen. Not girl. Woman. From the tilt of her pretty head to the smooth shoulders, full bust—
Levi slammed his hand against the bar, and Camden jumped. So did Merle. And he was pretty sure he’d gotten the attention of everyone else in the bar, too, from annoying Collin and Aiden to Juanita, who stuck her head around the corner of the door leading to the kitchen.
“Sorry.” He swallowed. “I’m not crazy, right? You’re Camden Harris.”
“Hello, Levi.”
Her voice was the same. A little twang, which was odd, because she lived in a fancy part of Kansas City and competed in beauty pageants. At least, she’d been on the posters of several pageants around the university campus where he played football.
Slight southern drawls weren’t welcomed in those circles. For beauty pageants it was full-on, south-of-the-Mason-Dixon drawl or what he considered broadcaster cool, with no hint of an accent. From anywhere. Or maybe he was reading too much into a short conversation.
He needed to get a grip on himself or he was really going to lose it. Levi didn’t like to prove people right on the crazy side of things. He was steady. Not impulsive. He considered options, developed a plan of action. He didn’t rush into decisions.
He didn’t even usually rush into flirting with women, especially women he didn’t know. So, naturally, now that he had, it had to be someone he used to know.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, and the question threw him. What was he doing here? What was she doing here? And in a wedding dress?
“I live here.” Levi sat on the stool beside her. “What are you doing here?”
A half smile crossed her wide mouth but didn’t reach her eyes. Camden shook her head. “Paying my bill.” She stood, and her high-heeled shoes clacked against the hardwood. She pulled a ten from the little bag strapped around her wrist and left it on the bar. “I’ll see you around, I guess.”
“I live here,” Levi said and felt like an idiot for repeating himself. And in such a lame way. Of course they’d see one another—Slippery Rock was a small town. His ranch and her grandparents’ farm were next to each other. It would be a miracle if he didn’t bump into her now and again.
He reached out, and a sharp little burst of attraction hit him hard when his hand brushed her arm. Which was just weird. Sure, he’d felt a little heat when he took her hand to look at the glimmering rock on her finger, but that was when he’d been in the mood to seduce the sexy stranger at the bar.
Camden Harris wasn’t a sexy stranger. She was the girl next door. The girl with the big brown eyes who tagged along after him during her summer visits with her grandparents.
The girl who hadn’t been back to Slippery Rock in at least a decade and, as far as he knew, whom her grandparents hadn’t seen in at least as long.
Calvin and Bonita had pictures of Camden, though, and he’d seen them on several occasions when he stopped in to check on them. One more reason he should have recognized her as soon as she walked into the bar. But he hadn’t. The girl—no, woman—in those pictures was confident. Happy.
The Camden standing next to him at the bar...wasn’t. Something had changed. Whatever that something was, it wasn’t his business. He should just back off. Camden Harris was a childhood acquaintance, not a personal friend.
“Yes?” she asked, and Levi realized his hand still gripped her arm, holding her in place. He let go quickly, and her arm fell to her side.
“Nothing, nothing,” he said, and she turned to go. “Wait! You didn’t say what you were doing back in town.”
She turned to face him, and those big brown eyes went soft, her mouth turned down and Levi wondered what might have happened in Camden’s privileged life that would make her look so sad.
So lost.
So...familiar.
And that wasn’t right. Of course she was familiar. Her hair was the same walnut brown he remembered, and her eyes were still big and round and had those honey-colored flecks that mesmerized him. She was taller, but that was normal. What twelve-year-old didn’t grow a few more inches in their teens and early twenties? He’d put on about fifty pounds of muscle and added nearly three inches to his height since graduating high school.
Only it wasn’t the color of her hair or her eyes that drew him in—it was something else. Something to which Levi didn’t want to get too close. Something that might be a little bit dangerous for a man who liked to consider and think his way through life, because his impulse was to pull Camden Harris into his arms to make that look go away.
Levi Walters had too much going on in his life to let a woman with a sad look on her face distract him, though. He had very specific plans, and those plans had specific goals, and getting distracted with Camden Harris was definitely not part of the plan.
“I’m just here for a few days. Visiting my grandparents,” she said, but he didn’t think she was telling him the whole truth.
“In a wedding dress.”
She shrugged, and the half smile that crossed her face made a little of the lost disappear. “I already told you the dress isn’t my style.”
“And the ring wasn’t your choice.”
“Something like that.”
The evasive answers were interesting. More interesting than the conversation he’d been avoiding with Collin and Aiden. More interesting than the fact that he had a video conference with his investment counselor in the morning about making an offer on a portion of the Harris land he’d been renting for the past two years.
“Is coming here your choice?”
She looked around, and he wondered what she saw in the weathered floor, the neon signs and the dim lighting. He saw familiarity. Safety. Home. The sign behind the bar had been partially unlit for as long as he could remember. The juke in the corner had played the same songs since he was in high school, with the exception of Merle adding Savannah’s single a few months before. The vinyl on the booth seats was cracked, and the chairs were scuffed.
It was perfect to him. Not a shiny disco ball in sight.
“Yeah. Coming to Slippery Rock was my choice,” she said, and when she looked at him again, he thought he saw more confidence in her expression. In the set of her shoulders. That zing of attraction buzzed a bit brighter. “I’ll see you around, Levi.”
“See ya around, Camden,” he said as she crossed the room. Her footsteps seemed to echo in the bar long after the door closed behind her.
Camden Harris was back in town. This might be the most interesting thing to happen to Slippery Rock in...okay, that wasn’t fair. A lot had happened over the past year. Savannah had scandalized the town, as had the revelation that Sheriff James Calhoun had been having an ongoing affair with the favorite local rebel, Mara Tyler.
