Not that they were going to do this. He was not, repeat not, taking Savannah Walters back to the orchard. That wasn’t the kind of example his baby sister needed.
His feet moved him across the wide dance floor that was so seldom used Merle didn’t bother keeping it waxed anymore. Savannah seemed to melt into his arms. She lay her head against his shoulder and linked her arms around his neck as he swayed them to the music.
Collin fastened his arms around her waist, feeling her heat through the thin material of her dress. Savannah sighed. The rhinestones beneath his hands were warm beneath his touch, adding to the burn he’d felt earlier when Savannah had brushed her hand over his. This was crazy.
He wasn’t some impulsive kid any longer. He wasn’t the same teenager that followed along with his friends’ reckless plans. He had a job, a family to support.
God, but she smelled good, though. Some kind of flowery scent seemed to envelop them on the dance floor. It started at Savannah’s hair, but it seemed to be everywhere. Like it was a part of the atmosphere. Her soft hands began playing with the longish hairs at the nape of his neck.
“Should I start another song or should we...” She let the words trail off.
Start another song, he wanted to say, but didn’t.
He had the orchard to continue building.
He had Gran and Amanda to support and, despite her reluctance to return to Slippery Rock, their other sister, Mara.
He wasn’t about to mess up the future plans he had for a night with Savannah Walters, no matter how tempted his hands were to continue caressing her curves.
Reluctantly, Collin loosened Savannah’s hands from his neck and stepped back.
“Thanks for the dance. I’ll see you around,” he said and quickly left the bar, calling himself all kinds of a coward for doing so.
It shouldn’t matter who she was. It should only matter that she was a willing woman, he was a willing man and it had been nearly a full year since he’d...
But it did matter.
Savannah Walters was not the kind of woman he needed to be messing around with.
* * *
SAVANNAH BLINKED. LOOKED around the empty bar.
He’d left.
She ran her hands up and down her arms, suddenly feeling as if all the warmth in the bar had gone out the door as Collin closed it behind him.
He’d really left.
She’d offered herself up to him and... Damn it, what was it about the men in this town?
Okay, that wasn’t fair. Not all the men in Slippery Rock were cold, clinical, orchard owners.
From what she remembered, Collin wasn’t cold or clinical. Maybe he just didn’t like her. Somehow, that didn’t make her feel better.
Savannah Walters was a grown woman who knew what she wanted, and what she wanted was to not think about what a mess her life was. Just for a little while. It wasn’t as if she was an ugly stepsister or something. She had assets, and she knew how to use them. And that left her right back at He Isn’t Interested. She blew out a breath. Okay, then, she wouldn’t be interested.
Merle stood behind the bar, still counting the money from the register.
“What do I owe you?” she asked, feeling foolish. She’d just come on—hard—to Collin Tyler and been turned down flat. The old bartender might pretend he didn’t see anything in the bar, but she knew he caught it all. God, this was so embarrassing.
“Your friends cleared the tab.” He put most of the money into a bank bag, locked it, and then put a few tens, fives and ones back into the register before closing it up.
“Oh.” She looked around, not sure what to do. Leave, she supposed. Go back to the ranch.
“When am I going to get one of your songs for the juke?” Merle asked.
“Oh. Um... I just finished cutting my first record.” Not that it would be released anytime soon. Genevieve was the star of their shared label. Savannah was the newcomer who’d literally screwed herself out of a tour slot. Not being in front of the fans coupled with Genevieve’s pull at the label probably meant a fast and definite death for her career. The career that Savannah wanted for her parents more than she’d wanted it for herself.
The whole time she’d felt like a fraud. Petrified the world would find out she wasn’t who she’d told them she was—the normal girl from the normal family from a normal small town—when the truth about the way she came to Slippery Rock or her family was so not normal. Not knowing her actual birth date wasn’t normal. Not knowing her biological medical history wasn’t normal. Not knowing her racial makeup wasn’t normal.
She’d been told as a kid that she couldn’t be white because of her hair type. But, she’d also been told she couldn’t be black because her skin tone was light, like Jennifer Beals or Zoe Kravitz. None of the kids in Slippery Rock seemed to realize that both of those actresses were biracial. She’d been raised by an African-American family who hadn’t cared that her skin tone was several shades lighter than theirs. For the most part, Savannah didn’t, either. She just wished she could feel worthy of them. That was the feeling that drove her to Los Angeles and then to Nashville.
Bennett and Mama Hazel loved country music, and had passed that love on to her. Once she arrived in LA, no one seemed to care about anything but her singing, so she’d pretended to be just another small-town girl, trying to make it. Then she stepped on the stage and realized she wanted to be anywhere but in the middle of that spotlight. The crowd was too loud, and the lights were too hot, and she’d just wanted it all to stop.
She couldn’t stop the LA circus, though, no matter how much she wanted out. Singing country music had been Mama Hazel’s dream as a young woman, but she’d fallen in love with Bennett and given it up. Savannah doing well on the show, doing well in Nashville, would have given a little bit of Mama’s dream back to her.
Then the discomfort of the stage turned into fear that some zealous reporter would start to dig into her past. Would make the connection between Levi and her. There would have been questions she couldn’t answer, and maybe even accusations that she’d been trying to “pass.” In truth, she hadn’t considered her ethnicity at all; she had been too focused on finally doing something that would make her parents proud.
Merle’s voice brought her thoughts back to the bar. “Well, when you’ve got that song, you make sure we get a copy. It’ll be the most played song in the Slope, I guarantee.” Merle winked.
“I will.” Savannah backed out of the bar. The thick oak door closed behind her and Savannah leaned against it for a second. She heard the tumblers click over as Merle locked up for the night.
She had no illusions about the perfection of Slippery Rock. There were racial and economic divisions even in the middle of nowhere. Bennett and Mama Hazel were respected landowners, her brother, a beloved football star, but there were other families who weren’t thought of in the same way. Families who lived below the poverty line. Some of them also families of color. Ever since the adoption worker had brought her here, Savannah had been caught in the vicious cycle of wanting to be worthy of the family that had chosen her, but of being too afraid to accept their love.
Afraid that they would come to the same realization that her first family had—that Savannah was too much trouble—and would send her back to those cold police station steps.
Getting out of town, finding herself living a very sheltered and artistic California life in which no one questioned her race, had been freeing for the first few days. Then the old fears had come back. What if people turned on her because she might not be the typical, Caucasian country music star? What if people turned on her because she could have been the one to break the musical stereotype but instead had chosen to pass, even if she hadn’t consciously thought not mentioning her past was an attempt at passing?
It had been a relief when she hadn’t won. It was
as if she’d dodged a bullet. But then the Nashville record company had offered her a deal, and then, when one of the biggest country stars opened a tour slot for her, it had all spun out of control.
From the second those offers came in, she’d started to think she really could earn the love of the family that chose her, but she’d still been so uncomfortable under all of that attention. And when Philip Anderson, Genevieve’s tour manager and estranged husband, had come on to her, she’d found herself following him to Genevieve’s bus.
Why had she gone onto that bus with Philip? She didn’t even like the man.
She doubted, deep-in-her-heart doubted, that she deserved her family’s love now.
Savannah pushed away from the door, got into Mama Hazel’s sedan and pulled onto the highway.
This was one more blinking neon light indicating that she should focus on her own mental health and not start chasing a man who obviously didn’t want her. She needed to get her life in order.
She parked the car in the carport and slowly climbed the steps to the house. The door creaked as she opened it. Savannah flicked off the porch light and climbed the stairs to her old room.
Pretty yellow curtains fluttered in the light breeze and the familiar blue of the walls soothed her. She didn’t bother with pajamas, just unzipped the party dress and climbed between the cool sheets in her undies. She pulled a pillow to her chest and closed her eyes.
She fell asleep dreaming she was still swaying in Collin’s arms.
CHAPTER FIVE
A HEAVY KNOCK sounded at the front door. Collin pulled a couch pillow over his head. Big mistake. His hands still had Savannah’s flowery scent on them and he could smell it through the feathers.
“Go away, Savannah,” he muttered. He’d turned her down once already tonight, he wasn’t sure he had two turn-downs in him.
The knock sounded again.
It couldn’t be Savannah. First, he’d walked out on her and she had never been the type to go running after rejection. Second, he was sleeping on the couch in the main house tonight, not in the barn that he’d turned into his office-slash-apartment a couple of years before. If Savannah wanted him, she would be at the barn, not the main house. Of course, Savannah wouldn’t know about the apartment in the barn, so it made sense she was knocking on the front door.
Collin scratched his scalp as he started for the door, tripping slightly over the light blanket he’d pulled over his hips when he’d sank onto the couch a couple of hours before.
Another knock.
If she didn’t stop trying to demolish the front door with her knocks she would wake up the rest of the house. Wait, what rest of the house? Gran took out her hearing aids at night and Amanda slept like the teenage dead. She hadn’t moved a muscle when he’d checked in on her after arriving home to work on the books.
Collin reached for the door, prepared to send Savannah on her way. At least he hadn’t been dreaming about her. He unlocked the dead bolt, opened the door and his jaw dropped.
It wasn’t Savannah.
It was James.
And his baby sister in handcuffs.
Collin glanced at the grandfather clock in the hall. Just after two thirty.
“Sorry, man, found her using these—” James held up two rolls of pink-camo duct tape “—to cut off the streets leading to the town square.”
“I wasn’t cutting off traffic, I was funneling it in a way that actually makes sense.” Amanda blew out a breath, making the wispy blond fringe around her face float up and then back down. Her eyes were green, rather than the blue of his or Mara’s, but the stubborn set of her jaw was all Tyler. For Collin, that stubbornness led to a football scholarship and a degree in Agri-Business. For Mara, it led to a top technical university and a job as a cyber-security expert.
In Amanda, that stubbornness was likely to lead straight to jail. He couldn’t let that happen.
“We have one-way streets that funnel traffic just fine,” James said. He elbowed Amanda gently. “And we don’t have the money for a middle-of-the-night traffic cop.”
“There’s no traffic to direct.” Amanda, likely realizing she’d just ruined her own excuse for taping over the streets of downtown, began talking quickly. “Except during the day, and then all Slippery Rock has are one-way streets that make it impossible to get from Maple to Franklin without making a detour down Main.”
James, one strong hand at Amanda’s elbow, directed her through the front door, gentle despite his height and weight advantage over the teen. Collin felt like a largemouth bass left on the bottom of a boat, gasping for air and getting none.
“You taped off downtown?”
Amanda shrugged. Her blond hair hung in a ponytail down her back, and she wore his old hunting jacket, dark yoga pants and shirt. She’d obviously considered the best way to go undetected during her trek. She’d been planning this for a while. And just who had he said good night to a couple of hours before? She slouched on the leather sofa in the family room, putting her booted feet up on the coffee table. Collin knocked her feet off the table and stood over her.
“What the hell, Amanda! What are you thinking?”
His sister straightened on the sofa and shrugged. “It isn’t like I took a jackhammer to the pavement,” she said sullenly.
“It isn’t like we have the budget to take a street crew off their job to take down your five rolls of duct tape, either.” James tossed two remaining rolls to Collin and put three emptied rolls on the entry table. “Look, I’m not filing a report. This time,” he said sternly. “But this isn’t like the fire you helped to put out. This is a straight-up nuisance, and it’s the third time I’ve caught her out with her tape. The last time, she taped a giant maze through the courthouse square, and the time before that she taped the high school principal into his house.”
Collin caught a hint of mirth in James’s eyes. But this was so not the time to go easy on Amanda. Even though Old Man Tolbert had been running Slippery Rock High with an iron fist since before Collin’s high school days.
“I deconstructed the maze and you can’t prove I was the one to tape Troll-bert into his house,” she said and then mumbled, “On the third snow day he screwed us out of last year.”
“Col, I know you’ve got your hands full with the orchard and all, but I can’t keep covering for your kid sister. It could mean my badge.”
“No, I’ll take care of it. This won’t happen again,” Collin promised his friend, wondering how long he would be able to keep it. He hadn’t even realized Amanda was gone tonight.
Or any of the other times she’d snuck out of the house since he’d grounded her.
He wasn’t good at this stand-in-father thing.
“If you think it’ll help, I’ll take her to the station house. She can spend the night in a holding cell.”
Amanda’s eyes widened. “You can’t send me to jail.”
“Au contraire,” James said. “I can. And if your brother wasn’t one of my best friends, you’d already be there.”
“I’ve got this one,” Collin said. He walked James to the front door. “I’ll make sure this doesn’t happen again, man.”
“I’m not always going to be the one getting the call about her antics, Col. I know you guys are going through some stuff right now, but if one of the other deputies catches her, she’ll do more than spend a night in our county lockup, you know?”
Collin nodded. “Yeah, I know.”
“This isn’t us painting the mascot on the water tower or Mara resetting the stoplight so it taps out an SOS in Morse code.”
“I know.” God, did he know.
Collin had once thought the rebellious Tyler gene had skipped his baby sister, but Amanda seemed to be making up for lost time. And he didn’t know how to help her.
How the hell was he sup
posed to come down hard on her when he’d done worse than she had on so many other occasions? The difference was he didn’t get caught. She not only had the Tyler Rebel gene, but their mother’s Bad Timing gene.
“Thanks for bringing her home, J. I’ll take care of it. This won’t happen again.”
James stepped out onto the front porch. “See you for the fish fry Sunday?”
Collin nodded. “Sure. I’m bringing the apples, remember?”
James got into the squad car and backed down the drive. Collin closed the front door and rested his forehead against it for a second.
“What the hell were you thinking, Amanda? What are you trying to do?”
She didn’t answer.
“Are you trying to get sent to some halfway house for rejects? Because if Sheriff Calhoun or one of the other deputies catches you out one night, that’s where you’ll go. It won’t matter that I’m your older brother, but it will matter that I don’t have custodial rights. That you don’t have parental supervision.”
Still no answer.
“You could wind up in juvenile hall.”
Nothing.
Collin turned around.
Amanda lay on the sofa, a round pillow clutched to her chest, asleep. Her legs were curled up to her chest, the way she’d slept when she was a baby, and the ponytail was fanned out over the sofa cushions.
“What am I going to do with you?” he asked, but her only answer was a soft snore.
Collin gathered his sister in his arms as if she weighed nothing and carried her upstairs and down the long hall to her bedroom. When he pulled back the electric-pink covers, he saw Mara’s old doll on the pillow. It was one of those life-size dolls that seemed to walk alongside when a little girl held its hands. Mara had used it to fake out their grandparents every time she’d snuck out as a teen.
“I’m trying, Amanda, but I don’t know what you need,” he said as he laid her sleeping form on the bed. Collin pulled the covers over her and smoothed her hair off her face. “I wish I could say they’re coming back, but I can’t. I’m sorry. I wish I could change it. I wish I could make our family like every other family in Slippery Rock, but I can’t. I’m what you’ve got, kid. Me and Gran, and she’s not as strong as she used to be. The upside of that is that the two of you are all I’ve got, and I’m not going to let you down the way our parents let me and Mara down, okay? I’m going to get you through this.”
Famous in a Small Town Page 5
