Amanda snuggled into her pillow as another snore escaped her lips. The sullen expression was gone, the rebellious bent to her shoulders nonexistent. She was just a kid. A lonely, screwed-up kid whose parents showed up two weeks after her grandfather’s funeral, saying it was a wake-up call, and that they wanted to build a relationship with their youngest daughter. They had actually stayed at the orchard for just over a year, but when Gran needed the hip replacement, things got too real for Samson and Maddie and they’d left in the middle of the night, just before Christmas.
From the second they arrived, Collin wanted to make them leave, but the hope he’d seen in Amanda’s eyes, the desperation he’d seen in Gran’s, had kept him from kicking them right back to wherever they’d been living. Prior to that visit, the last time they’d been at the orchard had been when Collin and Mara graduated from high school, and that had been a quick trip between what Samson Tyler called “business meetings.” Collin had heard him begging for money from Granddad, though, so he’d known it was a lie.
Collin had caused Amanda’s rebellion. If he’d only kicked them out, like Mara had suggested, none of this would be happening. There would have been no time for Amanda to get so attached to them that she forgot they couldn’t be relied upon.
He’d been pissed after their mother had called to say they were taking more time in Florida. Even more pissed when the two weeks she’d said they needed turned into two months. He hadn’t heard from them since mid-January. Not a phone call or an email. At first, all he’d thought about was what an inconvenience it was to have to look after Amanda while they sunned themselves in Florida. How much time he was taking away from the orchard and his plans.
He’d never thought about the toll this must be taking on her.
Collin closed her bedroom door quietly.
For as long as he could remember, Samson had talked about how things would be different in Florida. How they would find a good life in Florida. Apparently, they had found that better life.
Now he had to figure out how to make a better life for his sister here in Slippery Rock. Before he lost her.
* * *
SAVANNAH WOKE THE next morning feeling restless. She showered and dressed and then shoved the sequined number she’d worn the night before to the back of her closet. The last thing she wanted was to be reminded of Collin Tyler’s walkout.
Or her own idiocy.
Mama Hazel was in the kitchen when she walked in, squeezing orange juice into a tall carafe. Hazel Walters was sixty-two years and one hundred pounds of feisty. Her hair was steel-gray and she had lines around her eyes, but the backs of her hands were still smooth and rich.
“It’s about time you got out of bed. You’re back on the ranch now, not in your fancy Nashville apartment.”
“So I’m supposed to wake up with the rooster and ride the range?” Savannah teased as she snagged a glass from the cabinet and poured juice from the filled carafe. Hazel began filling a paper plate with biscuits and bacon.
“Wouldn’t hurt. Levi and your father have been up since dawn, you know.”
“Levi is a paragon of virtue,” Savannah said drily. Levi had left the bar early, and alone. Levi hadn’t made a play for a woman and been walked out on.
Levi was a football star. Levi made the pros. Levi would have been inducted into the Hall of Fame if not for a squidgy hit. But even though he’d blown out his knee, he’d kept his opponent from scoring.
Levi. Levi.
Freaking. Levi.
“Pssh. Levi has his bad qualities.”
“And I have my good ones. After all, if it weren’t for me, the Walters clan wouldn’t have a black sheep. And every family needs a black sheep.”
“Sweetheart, you’re no black sheep. You are my beautiful angel.” Hazel reached up and tucked a wayward strand of hair behind Savannah’s ear. “When I saw these braids for the first time on television, I wasn’t sure I liked them. Your natural hair was always the prettiest of corkscrew curls. I was wrong, though, it’s just as beautiful like this.” She put the plate of food in Savannah’s hands, tucked a thermos between her elbow and rib cage and motioned her to the door. “Take this out to your brother. He didn’t bother to come in for breakfast. He’ll be in the barn by now.”
Savannah walked across the front yard toward the massive barn. It was painted red, as it had been for as long as she could remember, but the black tin roof was new. The last time she’d been home the roof was still shake-shingled. Not that it mattered what the roof of the barn was made from. It just looked funny to her.
The same swing, fashioned from the metal seat of an old tractor, hung from a limb of the ancient oak in the side yard. The same ranch trucks sat before the barn, and the same horses ran in the paddock behind it. At least, they looked like the same horses. Somehow, despite growing up on the ranch, she hadn’t learned much about farm animals.
She found Levi in the barn office, clicking through a file on his computer. “Mama said you skipped breakfast,” she said, setting the plate on the desk.
“And you’re her errand girl sent to make me eat?”
Savannah sat in the hard wooden chair across the desk from her brother. “Something like that. I didn’t want to get roped into whatever confection she was starting to make, anyway.”
“Fish fry on Sunday. She’s probably prepping her apple-caramel pie.” Levi eyed the plate as if trying to convince himself not to eat.
“You on a diet or something?”
“No.” He stuck a couple of bacon slices into the center of a biscuit. He took a bite. “Have fun at the Slope last night?”
Savannah folded her arms across her chest. “What if I did?”
“Just tell me you didn’t go home with Merle, okay?”
“Not that it’s any of your business, but I didn’t go home with anybody. I came back here.”
“I didn’t hear you come in.”
“Are you my keeper now?”
“No. Dad mentioned—”
“Would you both back off? I’m twenty-seven years old, and I’ve been living on my own in a major metropolitan area for the past couple of years. I think I can handle Slippery Rock without accidentally falling on some guy’s penis and impregnating myself.”
Levi blinked. “It isn’t that we don’t think you can take care of yourself—”
“Sure it is.” Savannah stood and began to pace. “You want me to be helpless, but I’m not. I’m like Mama.” At least I want to be.
Mama Hazel was always calm, always knew what to say and how to fix a hurt. She baked pies and loved her family.
“Mama has a purpose.”
“And I don’t?” She didn’t know why she was picking a fight with her brother. It was stupid and childish, especially when she wasn’t sure she wanted the things she kept telling her family she wanted. She liked singing, and she was good at it, but there was a difference between the fun of karaoke night with a few friends and singing in front of an audience in an arena. In having all those people scrutinize her every move. There were good points, too, like meeting little girls who wanted to be singers. A few of them had looked up to her. At least, it seemed as if they had.
Levi just watched her for a long moment. “Mama worked in the Peace Corps, Van. She didn’t vagabond all over the world with a hobo sack over her shoulder.”
“I’m not a vagabond, and my luggage is Louis Vuitton. I lived in Nashville and I’ve been on tour with the top artist at the label.”
Levi nodded as he finished his biscuit.
“Fine, I have no illusions about world peace and I’m not curing cancer. That doesn’t mean my dreams are inconsequential.”
She just needed to figure out what her dreams were. Did she want to go back to Nashville and face the music? The one part of the city she liked was the weekend music program the l
abel put together for underprivileged kids. Helping those kids find their music had been the highlight of her months there. Now she wasn’t welcome in Nashville and definitely not in the music program.
“They could be so much more, Van. You had a scholarship to the university. You were talking about med school.”
“And then I realized I didn’t want ten more years of school. I wanted...something else.”
Levi waited, watching her expectantly. “What is the something else?”
“I don’t know.” She crossed her arms over her chest.
“Is that why you’re here ‘on a break’ now? Because you don’t know what you want?”
“Is that so wrong?” She didn’t wait for his answer.
Savannah stalked out of the barn and started down one of the trails leading to Slippery Rock Lake, which separated Walters Ranch from the Tyler’s orchard. Through the trees she could see sunlight dancing over it.
What was wrong with her? Getting turned down by a guy was no reason to take her frustrations out on her family. And keeping this lie that things in Nashville were perfect was ridiculous. Things were so not right in Nashville it wasn’t even funny.
She’d gone to Nashville to try to get people to notice her the way that nobody had in Slippery Rock. To validate her in some way. When she was onstage she was more than Levi’s sister. Offstage, though, she was still the kid someone had left on the steps of a police station with her name pinned to her jacket.
The truth was that she didn’t know what she wanted. She liked singing, but had found out that she detested being on a big stage in front of thousands of people. She enjoyed working with the kids in the music program, but she didn’t play an instrument so mostly she’d just encouraged their interest. Now she was back in Slippery Rock, pretending she had her life together, when in truth it was falling apart and she had no idea how to make things right or if she even wanted to.
She’d been wrong to come back here.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Savannah should have kept driving and completely reinvented herself in some town where no one knew who she was.
She could use some distraction.
As she neared the lake, she saw Collin sitting on the hood of his old pickup truck, staring out over the calm water. She hadn’t realized she’d walked so far.
“Hi,” she said as she neared him. Brilliant May sunlight gave his blond hair streaks of white, which was just unfair. Women in Nashville paid hundreds of dollars to beauticians for streaks like that.
“Savannah.”
“You say that like you’re unhappy to see me,” she said, leaning against the fender of his truck and shooting a flirtatious look his way.
Collin glanced at her. “I’m not.”
“Not unhappy to see me? I figured,” she said, pretending she couldn’t read the disdain in his expression. He might have turned her down last night, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself from flirting with him again. “What brings you to my side of the lake?”
“Technically, you’re on my side.”
Savannah grinned wickedly. “Do you want to know what brought me to you, then?”
Collin sat straighter. “No.”
It was the panic in his eyes that did her in. It was fun flirting with a man who was reluctant to flirt back. It wasn’t fun to flirt with a man who was not only not interested but potentially afraid of her. Although why Collin would be fearful of her, Savannah couldn’t quite figure out.
“You don’t have to look at me like that. I’m not going to jump your bones out here.” Savannah stood straight, smoothing her hands over the thin tank top she wore. It was royal blue and she knew it contrasted nicely with her skin.
“I can take care of myself, whether or not you want to jump my bones,” he said, and she thought she caught a hint of laughter in his voice. It seemed like progress. She didn’t want him to hate her, after all. They could be friends. “Well, I didn’t come here to see you—”
“And I didn’t come here to see you,” she put in.
“So how did we both wind up here?”
“I needed a break from Levi the Lecturer.” She shook her head when Collin started to say something. “Or maybe he deserved a break from me. I was in a mood.”
“And now you’re not?” Collin seemed genuinely curious.
“I’m trying to not be in a mood. Being in a mood gets me into trouble. By the way, he has no idea about last night, and he’s not going to.” And maybe, if she really was going to make a change, it should start now. “I should apologize for all that. I...um...” She wasn’t quite sure how to explain last night without laying bare those old insecurities.
“‘Was in a mood’?” Collin asked, and this time she definitely caught a hint of laughter in his voice.
“Something like that.”
“What caused the mood?”
Nope. Not going there. Collin Tyler might not hate her, but that didn’t mean she needed to dump all her baggage on him. He was barely an acquaintance. She shook her head. “Doesn’t matter.”
Collin nodded. “I was in a weird mood, too,” he said.
“So you did want to dance with me?” Savannah leaned her shoulder against the truck and crossed one foot over the other in the dirt.
“No,” he said, a little too quickly, a little too harshly. She couldn’t ignore the quick hit of pain. Stupid pride.
“Don’t go getting all soft on me now,” Savannah said. “Tell me how you really feel.”
He didn’t look at her for a long moment. When he finally spoke, he seemed completely focused on a tree with branches hanging low over the smooth water.
“Savannah, I have... There’s a lot.” He drew his brows together. “You’re Levi’s sister. I just don’t think about you that way.”
Oh. Well, that was way more information than she wanted at—Savannah glanced at her watch—ten o’clock in the morning. The day after she’d made a serious come-on to the man.
“Maybe we could be friends,” he said.
The feelings she felt around Collin were definitely not the friendship breed of feelings. Good thing she was decent at covering up her true feelings. That was the one thing in life she’d always been good at.
“Sure, whatever. I just wanted to apologize because I had a little too much to drink last night. But I’m going back to Nashville in a couple of weeks, so we don’t have to pretend we’re friends or anything. We can just go back to being Levi’s sister and Levi’s best friend. It’s all good,” she said, hating the words even as she said them. Hating the intentionally careless tone she’d pushed into her voice.
Savannah was pretty sure she didn’t want to be Collin’s friend.
He might not think he wanted her as his girlfriend—not even in the short term—but she definitely didn’t want to just be his friend.
And if no one ever called her Levi’s sister for the rest of her life, it would be too soon.
She backed away from the truck, feeling Collin’s gaze on her the way she’d felt his hands the night before.
“See you around, friend,” she said and then turned and walked away from him as quickly as she could.
CHAPTER SIX
COLLIN WANTED—BADLY—to adjust the tie trying its best to strangle him. He liked farm work because most days the dress code called for jeans and a T-shirt, like he’d been wearing last Saturday when Savannah had found him at the lake. God, he’d like to be at the lake now instead of this conference room talking to the head of a regional grocery chain about the next step in his plan to expand Tyler Orchard. Even if being there meant lying some more about how Savannah being Levi’s younger sister was the reason he’d walked out of the Slope that night.
Walking out of the Slope had had zero to do with Levi and one hundred percent to do with the things
he’d been thinking while breathing in Savannah’s sweet perfume. He’d been thinking they could take a drive out to the lake, or maybe just a quick run to his truck, so he could strip her down to see if her skin was that glowy, coppery tone everywhere, or if it was just a trick of the lighting. Yeah, there was no way he was telling Savannah any of that. He didn’t need her kind of distraction right now.
Collin focused on the question Jake Westfall asked about growth averages for the past three years. Luckily, he only needed half of his brain to talk growth averages, as the other half was still firmly in the imaginary bed of his truck. He needed to get his mind fully into this office building in Joplin, an hour west of Slippery Rock. With effort, he pushed Savannah all the way out of his brain, imagining he and the other executives were walking one of the ruler-straight rows of apple trees instead of sitting in this conference room, with its wide windows looking over the downtown area, the potted ficus in the corner, and its granite-topped table.
Damn, but he’d like to loosen this damn tie. Suits and ties were for bankers and insurance salesmen, not orchard owners. The last time he’d worn a suit, this very suit, had been his grandfather’s funeral a year and a half before. The only other time he’d worn it had been to the party his grandparents had thrown after he’d graduated college with his degree in agri-business.
The other suits in the room didn’t appear to be suffering from the same issues as he was, though, so he kept his hands away from his neck as he wrapped up his presentation about how he’d taken the orchard from a small, family-run business to a larger business, still family run but with more ties to the community.
Famous in a Small Town Page 6
