1
Who appointed you my guardian angel?” Lucy Sheridan asked.
She was pissed—really, really pissed. But she was also thrilled. She was alone with Mason Fletcher, driving down a narrow, moonlit road. It should have been the most romantic night of her life—the stuff teen dreams were made of. But Mason had ruined everything by treating her like a kid who didn’t know enough to come in out of the rain.
She slouched deep into the passenger side of the truck, one sneaker-clad foot braced against the dashboard, arms folded tightly around her middle.
“I’m not anyone’s guardian angel,” Mason said. He did not take his attention off the road. “I’m doing you a favor tonight.”
“Whether I like it or not. I’m supposed to be grateful?”
“Brinker’s little party is not going to end well. There’s booze and drugs and a lot of underage kids. You don’t want to be there when the cops break it up.”
Mason’s calm, ice-cold certainty was infuriating. You’d never know that he was nineteen, just three years older than her, she thought. The realities of teenage life made that an unbridgeable gap, of course. To him, she was what Aunt Sara would call jailbait.
But it was worse than that. Mason was not just nineteen—he was nineteen going on thirty. Aunt Sara said that he had the eyes of an old soul.
True, Sara often described people in weird ways. She and her business partner, Mary, were heavily into the whole meditation, enlightenment, be-in-the-moment thing. But Lucy had to admit there was something to what Sara said about Mason. He was already a man in ways she doubted any of the boys at the party tonight would ever be. He made them all look like they were still in middle school.
She was starting to think that Mason was more of a grown-up than any of the actual adults she knew, including her parents. When they had split up three years earlier everyone congratulated them on a civilized divorce. But none of their acquaintances had been in her shoes, she thought. None of them had been a thirteen-year-old kid hiding out in her room while two so-called adults fought using verbal grenades filled with accusations and the kind of sarcasm that sliced to the bone. If the divorce that followed was supposed to be an example of civilized behavior, the word civilized needed a new definition.
Mason, on the other hand, always seemed like a real adult—to a fault, maybe. He and his uncle and younger brother had moved to Summer River two years ago. Mason was working full-time at the local hardware store and fixing up an old house on the side. This summer he was single-handedly raising his younger brother because his uncle was off fighting a war somewhere. One thing was blazingly clear: Mason took life Very Seriously. Lucy wondered what, if anything, he did for fun, assuming he actually got the concept.
He even drove like a grown-up, she thought morosely, or at least like a grown-up was supposed to drive. The way he handled his uncle’s aging pickup truck said it all. He shifted gears with a smooth, competent hand. There were no bursts of acceleration on the straightaways, no heading into the curves a little too fast and definitely no speeding. It should have been boring. But it wasn’t. It just made her feel like she was in good, steady hands.
“I didn’t need you to rescue me,” she said. “I can take care of myself.”
Great. Now she really sounded like a kid.
“You were out of your league tonight,” he said.
“Give me a break. I was okay. Even if the cops do show up out there at the old Harper Ranch, we both know that no one’s going to get arrested. Chief Hobbs isn’t about to throw kids like Tristan Brinker and Quinn Colfax in jail. I heard Aunt Sara say that the chief wouldn’t dare do anything that might get their fathers mad.”
“Yeah, my uncle says Brinker and Colfax have the chief and the whole damn city council in their pockets. But that doesn’t mean Hobbs won’t snag a few of the other kids tonight just to show that he’s doing his job.”
“So what? He’ll give them a warning, that’s all. The worst-case scenario is that Hobbs would have called my aunt to come get me and take me home.”
“You really think that’s the worst-case scenario?”
“Sure.” She wanted to grind her teeth.
“You’re going to have to trust me on this, Lucy,” he said. “You did not belong at Brinker’s party tonight.”
“You do realize that by tomorrow morning everyone who is at the ranch tonight will be laughing at me behind my back.”
Mason did not respond. She glanced at him. In the glow of the dashboard lights his jaw looked like it was carved in stone. For the first time a tingle of curiosity whispered through her.
“There’s something you’re not telling me, isn’t there?” she said.
“Let it go,” Mason said.
“Like I can do that now. How did you know that I was at Brinker’s party tonight?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes,” she said. “It matters.”
“I heard rumors that you might be there. I called your aunt. She wasn’t home.”
“She and Mary are in San Francisco. They’re on a buying trip at an antiques fair. I left a message in my aunt’s voice mail, not that it’s any of your business.”
Mason ignored that. “When I found out your aunt was gone I decided I’d swing by the park and see if you were there. Figured you would be in over your head.”
“Because I’m not one of the A-list kids?”
“You’re too young to be hanging around Brinker and Colfax.”
“Jillian Benson is only a year older than me. And please, whatever you do, don’t give me the lecture about jumping off a cliff just because all of my friends do it.”
“Jillian is not your friend.”
“It just so happens she’s the one who invited me.”
“Is that right?” Mason sounded thoughtful. “Well, now, isn’t that interesting.”
“She called earlier this evening and said she was going to Brinker’s party, and did I want to come along? It’s not like there’s a lot of other stuff to do in this town.”
“So you jumped at the chance.”
“Not exactly. At first I said no. I’m just here for the summer. I only know a few of the local kids. She said it would be a good way to meet people. I told her I didn’t have a car. She offered to pick me up at my aunt’s house.”
“Real nice of her, wasn’t it?” Mason said.