“Twenty-two. Been married six months.”
“Sounds like you’ve got a lot of soul searching to do in the next couple of days.”
He rubbed a hand across his chin. “If you were my wife, what would you do?”
“I’d never have married you to begin with, but since she did, I imagine I’d shoot you for cheating on me,” she answered.
“And if you were the woman I’ve loved since I was in the third grade?”
“I hope I would have had enough sense to back off until you were a free man.”
“Hope?” he asked.
“I can’t judge. I haven’t walked a mile in either of those women’s shoes. Maybe your wife loved someone else, too, but she doesn’t know how to get out of this horrible marriage and she’s puttin’ the job on you. You should talk to her—and listen to what she has to say. Just the two of you.”
Maybe you should practice what you are preachin’. There was Granny Annie’s voice in her head again. You should try paying attention to Zed and your sisters like you do to strangers.
“Thanks for listenin’ to me. You might have been my sign after all. I’ll probably check out early tomorrow mornin’ and go back across the river. See if I can get this straightened out,” he said.
“Sure thing.” As she covered the distance to her own little cabin, Tawny could hear all kinds of night insects and animals who’d come out to play under the light of the moon. When she was inside, she slid down the back of the door and wrapped her hands around her knees. “Granny, I’ve done some really stupid things that I don’t want to tell Dana and Harper about. They’ve never been on probation or made the bad choices that I have. I just can’t tell them. Don’t leave me. I need to hear your voice sometimes.”
She cocked her head to the side, but all she heard was wind rattling through the trees.
CHAPTER SEVEN
For the second night in a row, Harper was restless. When not even an evening of mindless drinking and dancing or picking up a sexy cowboy for a one-night motel fling sounded good, she considered taking her temperature to see if she was sick. She paced around the cabin a few times and finally pulled an old gray sweatshirt over her head and went outside. She didn’t even slow down at the porch but kept walking, following the trail by moonlight to a little cove in the bend of the lake where she couldn’t even see the cabins.
She went right to a big flat rock jutting out at the shore. It was one of Granny Annie’s favorite places to take the girls fishing in the summer. Sometimes they’d talk, but most of the time they just enjoyed the quiet. If they were lucky, they’d take home a whole string of fish to fry. The memories calmed her—right up until the tiny hairs on the back of her neck started to prickle and Wyatt walked out of the shadows. He sat down beside her and covered her hand with his. Peace surrounded her like a warm blanket on a cold Texas night.
“The guys are having a Die Hard marathon tonight in one of the cabins. I couldn’t sit still and watch the third one, so I told them I was going for a walk,” he explained. “I figured you’d be out dancin’ the leather off your boots.”
“I might have learned my lesson with that business last week,” she answered. Suddenly, the sweatshirt was too warm despite the chilly night breeze coming off the water. Not one of the men that she’d used to get Wyatt Simpson off her mind had ever caused the kind of heat waves he did simply by touching her hand. “What do you do when you’re not fishin’?”
“Get my stuff ready for another fishin’ trip. What about you? What did you do before you came here?” He gently squeezed her hand. “They say you never forget your first love. I think they might be right.”
“Is that a pickup line?”
“Nope.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “I have not been a saint, believe me. But no one ever quite measured up to the feelings that I had with you. I don’t know where you are in your life right now, but I just wanted you to know that.”
“Thank you,” she muttered.
She’d been flattered by the best of smooth-talking men, but none of their lines had ever made her heart skip a couple of beats. “I guess I could say, ‘Back atcha,’ but a lot of water has run under that bridge since we were kids. I’m not even sure there’s a bridge anymore.”
“Ever hear that old song called ‘One Wing in the Fire’?” He smiled again. “It comes to mind when I think of us. Maybe we are angels with no halos and one wing in the fire.”
“Honey, nobody ever called me an angel,” she laughed. “I think maybe ‘Strawberry Wine’ applies to us more. Heard it?”
“Oh, yeah.” He nodded. “And I agree with you. We did find love growing wild on the banks of the lake, didn’t we?”
Her heart twisted up like a pretzel the way it always did when she let herself go back to that place. She pulled her hand free. One bittersweet young love had brought such pain into her life—the kind that nothing, not alcohol, wanton sex, or even friendship could erase, and she’d tried all three.
“We did.” She finally nodded. “It was a sweet summer, Wyatt.”
“Would you go to dinner with me sometime?” he blurted out.
“You think it’s wise for us to go down that path?”
“Won’t know unless we give it a try.” He slipped an arm around her shoulders and brushed a sweet kiss across her cheek. “I’m still every bit as attracted to you as I was then. I’d like to see what happens if we give things a go as adults.”
She couldn’t go there. Not after giving away their child. Not after the guilt trips and certainly not at this time of year—around her daughter’s birthday.
“Friday night. Dinner and maybe a walk on the edge of the lake?” he pressed.
“I can’t, Wyatt. I just can’t.”
“Okay, then. How about just sitting on your porch and watching the lightning bugs? We don’t even have to talk if you don’t want to,” he asked.
“The lightning bugs are pretty.” She should run from him, not cave in, but she wanted to be near him and hear his voice. Her chest tightened like it had a decade ago when she’d thought she’d never see him again. Talk about life being complicated.
“Then it’s a date. I’ll be here with a bag of barbecue chips and a six-pack of root beer. Those are still your favorites, right?”
“Yes, they are,” she answered. He remembered—after all these years he remembered her favorite snacks.
“I should be going. Can I walk you back to your cabin?” he asked.
“I think I’ll just sit here a little longer,” she said.
“See you tomorrow at breakfast, then.” He hugged her to his side but didn’t kiss her again.
Tawny pulled a chair up to the table in the café where Harper and Zed were already seated on Sunday afternoon. “Either of y’all ever hear Granny Annie’s voice in your head?”
“All the time.” Zed nodded. “And I talk to her, too. Tell her everything that I can remember before I go to bed at night. Makes me feel good. Like she’s still here. Why are you askin’?”
“What’s happenin’ in here?” Brook asked as she popped inside the door. “Flora sent me for takeout cups of iced tea.”