Then He Kissed Me: A Cottonbloom Novel Read Free Page B

sieve, saving only the good stuff.
    The days before his mother got sick, catching lightning bugs in the summer, the walks along the river with Tally. He ignored the bad stuff—his mother dying, bigger boys pushing him down, calling him a freak and later Nerdy Nash, the constant ache of loneliness.
    If reconnecting with Tally had crossed his mind more than a few times while he had been debating the job offer and move … well, it wasn’t something he was willing to admit to her.
    “Is Cottonbloom not on Conde Nast ’s top destinations list?” He kept his voice light, hoping to coax out another of her smiles.
    “Not yet, but it will be if Regan and Sawyer have a say.”
    “Ah, yes. Regan is rather passionate about her tomato festival.”
    “Try obsessed. My brother has bought stock in antacids. Not that he’s any better. He wants to win the competition so bad, he might have sold his firstborn to the devil.” Her smile was a combination of tease and sarcasm.
    “You don’t think”—he cleared his throat and side-eyed her—“Sawyer had anything to do with the gazebo fire?”
    Her smile thinned and her eyes narrowed. “Absolutely not. Who said he did?”
    “No one. Well, no one besides Regan thinks he did it.” Nash had a hard time believing someone as smart and level-headed as Sawyer would torch the gazebo, but then again, the man had planned to drop a half-dozen rabbits into Regan’s mother’s prize tomato garden. Regan had caught Sawyer in the act.
    “Regan’s motivations are more personal than professional, if you ask me,” she said with more than a hint of antipathy.
    Nash would have said the same of Sawyer, but he kept his opinion to himself. Tally looked ready to defend her brother to the death. “Say what you will, but the woman can get things done. Businesses on the Mississippi side of River Street are booming. And she has a solid plan for the contest money from Heart of Dixie magazine if she wins.”
    “So does my—” A text buzzed her phone on the bar between them. She glanced at the screen, her forehead crinkling.
    “Is that your escape text?”
    She set the phone back on the bar, facedown. “What are you talking about?”
    “I thought all girls had some system in place if some weirdo dude was hassling them. You know, your friend calls or texts you and all of a sudden something very important requires your attention somewhere far, far away.”
    “Are you a weirdo?” The worry cleared from her face, her smile making her green eyes sparkle.
    “I do get ridiculously excited about Star Wars .”
    “Really? I pictured you as more of an Indiana Jones fan.”
    “Why’s that?”
    She raised her eyebrows and harrumphed. “Knights Templar, Holy Grail. I can only imagine what percentage of your classes are female.”
    “Professor Jones was an archaeologist.” He took another sip of his Scotch and shook his head. Now that she mentioned it, a good eighty percent of the classes he’d taught as an associate professor at Edinburgh had been female. He stilled. Was she insinuating women signed up for his classes because they might find him attractive? Did she find him attractive? Embarrassment followed by a wave of longing incinerated his insides and triggered another spate of coughing.
    Her eyes flared before she burst into laughter. This was the laugh he remembered, and he tumbled back twenty years.
    “Ohmigod, you don’t even realize, do you?”
    “Realize what?”
    “Better if you don’t know.” She grinned.
    Her cheeks were flushed, and dark hair that had escaped her braid wisped around her face. Unlike most of the women in the bar, she wasn’t wearing a skirt or heels. Her simple blue T-shirt emphasized lean curves, and her dark-wash jeans were tucked into a pair of black motorcycle boots. Smudged black eyeliner emphasized the only thing about her that was soft. In her laughter, her intense green eyes shed their wariness and turned warm and welcoming.
    He smiled back and propped his