I didn’t actually attend any of the festivities, but I loved the buzzing atmosphere and the change in weather.
Fall was supposed to be the death of things, but it felt more like rebirth for me. I knew my seasons were messed up, but it was the change of leaves that breathed life into my soul and the crisp air and early darkness. I loved the sweaters and scarves and boots after a sweltering summer where I just wanted to strip naked and lie underneath my ceiling fan on full blast.
Tonight, felt like steps toward something I loved and it softened me toward this town with its twinkling lights glittering on every building and all around the courthouse park. I dropped Coco and Emi’s drinks off, happy to see Emilia’s friends hadn’t stuck around. I wasn’t in the mood for high school politics tonight.
“You two want the special then?” I asked them. “All the fixings?”
“Duh,” Coco said matter of fact. “All the fixin’s.”
“Anything else?”
“Can you take your break with us?” Em asked with the pout I had a hard time saying no to. “You need to eat too, right?”
I didn’t need to, but I wanted to before the kitchen ran out of chicken. “I’ll see.” Looking around at the remaining tables, I couldn’t help but ask. “Where did your friends go?”
“House of Pies,” she explained. “A few of them ate earlier at Mickey D’s.”
That wasn’t a reference to the most famous, hamburger joint in the world. There was an actual restaurant in our town called Mickey D’s. Their club sandwich competed with ours and the town had been arguing about which one was best since the beginning of time, but they couldn’t even pretend to hang in the same league with our chicken.
“Huh,” I managed.
She grinned at me. “Are you sad you didn’t get to say hello?”
I blinked at her. “So sad.” Then to Coco I added. “You’d think all her one with nature crap would make her more in-tune to the snobby bitches of this world, but she seems completely immune.”
Coco nodded her head in solidarity. “I think this is one of those ‘takes one to know one’ situations.”
Emilia waggled her finger at us. “Don’t be judgy.”
“Who me?” I asked innocently. Then I walked away to put in their order.
I had intended to go right back to their table, but I got busy helping other customers and then Brett came back and asked me a question about our schedules this coming week. Soon fifteen minutes had passed, and I hadn’t even made a complete circuit of our outdoor dining area yet.
“Table for three please,” a rough male voice asked from behind me.
I was at the edge of the seating area, picking up the tip left behind and pocketing the signed receipt in my apron, so there was no one nearby to confuse me with. I knew he was talking to me.
Even though the host stand was all the way across the makeshift dining area.
“You’ll have to check in with the hostess,” I said to Levi without looking up. “I’m not sure if we have anything available tonight.”
That was a lie. The seating area was almost empty after nine o’clock. Everyone had eaten their fill and moved to dancing on the courthouse green.
“I don’t trust the hostess to give us a good table.”
I finally stopped staring at the same spot on the stained white tablecloth in front of me and found Levi’s bright green gaze watching me. He was particularly alarming beneath the milky glow of the moon and the sparkle coming from the twinkle lights.
On closer inspection than earlier tonight, he was wearing a flannel shirt, pushed up at his forearms and a simple pair of dark wash jeans, I could hardly stand to look at him. My fingers itched to rub his closely shaved head and feel the prickly short strands against my palms. I noticed worn brown cowboy boots and nearly asked him where he’d forgotten his hat. He was like a Marlborough Man ad only without the cigarettes.
The lyrics, cowboy, take me away, suddenly danced through my thoughts like I had somehow wandered into a live-action Dawson’s Creek episode or something.
“She’s a nice girl,” I told him, shaking my head to chase away my crazy, stupid, lustful thoughts. “Just smile at her. She’ll let you sit wherever you want. Maybe even her lap if you ask real nice.”
His low rumble of a laugh chased after me in our darkened section of the temporary seating area. “I don’t think that’s true.”
I held his gaze. “Let’s make a bet.”
“I’d rather you sat me, Ruby. I’ll smile at you if that helps.”
“It won’t,” I rushed to tell him, but he’d already loosed his weapon of mass destruction. His lips stretched over straight white teeth and that dangerous dimple appeared just to the left of his mouth. I felt my knees tremble and willed my body to keep from accidentally swooning. “I’m immune to your charm.”
“You always have been.”
That wasn’t exactly true, now was it? Not that I’d admit that to him. Or anyone. I barely admitted it to myself.
My hand landed on my hip in frustration. “Then why are you bugging me to take you to a table?”
“Why are you acting like I’m the bug you tried to squish that just won’t die?”
Leaning forward, I finally lost my cool and snapped, “Why won’t you just die? Maybe that’s a better question!” But I instantly thought of Logan and regretted my words. I wanted to snatch them from the air between us and shove them back in my mouth. I shouldn’t have said that. I shouldn’t have taunted him like that.
He didn’t seem to notice my faux pas though. He was entirely fixated on something else. Me. He took three steps and closed the distance between us, towering over me. I wondered if he could crush me with his brute strength and gigantic hands.
I wondered if he was about to try.
“The last time we were together I kissed you, Ruby. And don’t tell me you were drunk. I know you remember.”
Nibbling on my bottom lip, I ignored the pain that slashed across my chest. “How do you know I remember?”
“Because it was a damn near unforgettable kiss,” he growled, his mouth just inches from mine.
My throat dried out and I struggled to swallow. He could kiss me again. Right now. Just like the first time.
It had truly been an unforgettable kiss. It had been my first real kiss and nothing I’d ever experienced had ever been able to compete with it—no matter how hard I’d tried. It had been passion and promise, anger and truth. He’d kissed me on the balcony of Kristen’s house and I knew I would never be the same again.
And then he’d gone back inside to find Kristen and I’d slept with his older brother.
His older brother that was dead now.
His older brother that was the father of my six-year-old little boy.
7
Breaking (Old) News
I tried to form words, but I couldn’t even manage a sound. Things had shifted between Levi and me that night. We’d gone from high school rivals to… something else. And for his part, he’d tried to reach out to me the remainder of that summer.
He’d left for a family vacation the next day, but he’d called me. I hadn’t answered. I’d had immense guilt about sleeping with Logan, even though I had been in love with Logan for as long as I could remember.
It hadn’t made sense at the time. I hated Levi. He’d been a thorn in my side since we were kids. And Logan… Logan had been the man of my dreams.
Why was I so miserable afterward? I’d lost my virginity that night to a man I supposedly loved and yet it was the kiss with Levi that was burned in my memory… branded on my skin.
Since that night, even with his tragic death, I realized I didn’t love Logan. Not in the real sense of the word. It was a crush. The kind of crush that was intense and overwhelming and born from a lifetime of not knowing what real love was, but it was only a crush. And it had only been on my side.
Logan was a nice guy, but the night we’d spent together didn’t mean anything to him. It was obvious the second
my virginity had disappeared, and the evening was over.
Logan and I had been friends, but any kind of feelings were one-sided on my part. He was just a nice guy. A high school kid that had been able to see past my status and get to know me as a person. A boy that had been fun to laugh with and talk to. A friend I’d missed after he’d graduated. A decent first time. And he would have stayed all those things if Max hadn’t come into the picture.
Now things were more complicated.
Especially with Levi.
Levi had called. And then called again. And then called at least twenty more times over the next few months.
By the time I’d worked up the courage to face him, at least over the phone, I’d been late—too late to make an excuse for why I kept missing his phone calls.
And then I found out I was pregnant.
Six weeks after the positive plus sign on my home pregnancy test, before I could fully process what to do with the baby or my life or the future, Logan had been killed in the desert where he was stationed somewhere in the Middle East. IED. Three men in his unit were lost. But Logan’s death had hit Clark City like an explosion of its own.
Everyone mourned our heroic golden boy. No one knew how to recover or move on or go on with life. Nothing was certain anymore. Hope was gone.
Logan Cole was the epitome of perfect. At least to this town. He’d been smart, musical, athletic, skilled in all things farming, ranching, and cowboying. He was class president and valedictorian and student council vice president and captain of the football, basketball, and soccer teams. His list of accolades went on and on.
It was easy to see how I’d fallen so quickly for him. Not to mention, freshman year, when he’d been a junior, we had Spanish class together. He always sat by me and let me borrow his pencil. I told him I liked his hair. He told me he loved my style—grunge meets goth with a side of cowgirl.
It was love at first compliment. Not to mention he didn’t seem to care or even know that I was the poor loser from the trailer park.
Logan was not at all caught up in the small-town politics that ruled everyone else.
Which meant that if he had stayed alive, I would have for sure told his family about the baby. I would have told Logan immediately. At least after I’d been able to work up the courage.
But by the time I found out I was pregnant, he was halfway around the world without the ability to connect to civilian social media. And the one person I could have asked for his email or phone number or whatever was Levi. And I couldn’t do that to him. I couldn’t admit to Levi that I’d accidentally been knocked up by his brother after our life-altering, soul-shattering, world-rocking kiss.
But if Logan wouldn’t have died, I knew I would have told him. Eventually. I would have. It would have been his right to know… to be given the chance to be Max’s dad. Or not. It would have been his choice. But a choice I never would have taken away from him. I respected him too much.
But since he was taken away from us rather abruptly, Max’s dad had remained a secret.
What started out as a way to protect my frayed reputation from speculation that I was lying to profit from Logan Cole’s death, had turned into something more like protecting my son from the Cole family and this town in the past six years.
Obviously, I had been scared that nobody would believe me, that they’d assume I was just trying to get money from the family. But now I was afraid they would see my situation, see my station in life and try to take Max from me.
They had everything—money, power, influence. I worked at Rosie’s and lived with my mom.
God, just thinking about it made me sick with indecision. It felt unfair to Darcy and Rich, no matter what I thought of them, to keep their grandson a secret after their son had died. Part of me believed they would want to know him just to have a piece of their son back.
On the other hand, it had been seven years. Max was six. What if they didn’t believe me? What if they assumed I was making it all up for a paycheck. I couldn’t stand the idea of them rejecting my son. It killed me just to think that was a possibility.
I hadn’t even considered what Levi would do or think. Other than my initial guilt over sleeping with Logan on the same night I kissed Levi, I hadn’t considered his feelings.
Besides, he’d been gone since Logan’s death. He went to college and just… never came back home.
I guess I assumed he would never come home, that he was out of my life forever.
That I would never have to have this conversation.
But here he was. Standing in front of me and talking about that night. The night we kissed.
“What’s your point?” I asked him. The sky had grown even darker in the minutes we’d been standing here. The twinkly lights danced behind him, but his face was cast in shadow. “We kissed. One time. A lot of years ago.”
He shoved his hands into his pockets and shifted on his feet. “We just never talked about it,” he said.
Knowing I was being over the top with my bitchiness, but unable to stop myself, I said, “What’s there to say? Look, Levi, you’ve been gone for a long time. I hope you didn’t think I was going to wait around for you or something.” Letting my eyes grow wide and dramatic, I added, “I hope you weren’t waiting around for me.”
His shoulders straightened, and he turned his head to the side, giving me a view of his strong, ticking jaw. This was how he’d act when he used to get mad at me when we were kids. Even in elementary school, I remembered him looking away, the muscle in his jaw popping as he thought up what to say. “God, Ruby, no, I just—”
“There you are,” his mom’s breathy voice called from a few feet away. “We’ve been looking for you.”
Levi and I instinctively took a step apart, like we’d been caught doing something untoward. Even though I’d backed up too, I couldn’t help but be irritated at how quickly he wanted to distance himself from me in front of his parents.
He turned to face Darcy with a charming smile on his face and his shoulders relaxed. “Hi, Mom.”
She stepped up to him and gave him a quick hug and a kiss on the cheek. “Is this where you want to eat?”
“Sure,” he said with a smile. “And I wanted to say hi to Ruby. Mom, you remember Ruby, don’t you?”
Darcy Cole turned her gaze on me as if only just noticing my presence. Her shrewd green eyes gave me a fast once over, determining my measure. Finding me lacking. “I don’t think we’ve had the pleasure.”
I wouldn’t call it a pleasure, but I’d only met Levi’s parents about a hundred times since kindergarten. “Levi and I went to school together,” I told her, forcing a smile.
“Oh, of course,” she said, her small smile just as strained as mine. “That was so long ago. I have trouble keeping track of his classmates.” She turned and waved her husband Rich forward. Where Darcy was all fashionable socialite in a khaki skirt and pale blue sweater set, her husband, Rich, was the quintessential cowboy—a crisp pair of Cinch jeans, shiny cowboy boots, a dress shirt with pearlized snaps and a big ass cowboy hat. They looked like they belonged in the glossy pages of some magazine called “Cowboy Couture” or something like that. “You work here though? My son would like to eat here, we’ll need a table for three.”
“Mom,” Levi laughed patiently. “Why don’t you go find the hostess and I’ll say goodbye to Ruby.”
Another quick up and down from Mrs. Darcy Cole before she nodded politely. “I can do that.”
“Thank you.”
“Come on, Rich. Levi’s in the middle of saying goodbye.”
I stared at his parents’ backs as they walked through the seating area and tried not to bubble over with irritation. The way Darcy Cole talked about me was beyond degrading, like I was some play thing they were forced to wait for Levi to finish with.
“If it makes you feel any better, she treats every female like that.”
My head whipped around, and I turned the full force of my glare on Levi. “It doesn’t make me feel
better.”
“She’s impossible,” Levi continued, clueless. “Nobody is good enough for her. Her standards for me are beyond ludicrous. It’s like ever since Logan, she’s been completely obsessed with finding the right genetic match for me to carry on the Cole family name.”
His casual mention of Logan’s passing sucked the wind from my sails. “She doesn’t have to worry about me,” I murmured, more to myself than the man in front of me.
He focused on me again. “Anyway, I’m sorry if she seemed rude.”
“It’s fine,” I told him. And it was. I refused to let people like Darcy Cole walk into my life and try to make me feel useless. I was nothing to her, but that was fine because she was nothing to me too.
“I’d like to catch up with you sometime, Ruby,” Levi said softly, changing topics completely. “Dinner, maybe?”
My heart jumped in my chest and butterflies fluttered on cobwebbed wings. His eyes were so green in this light, his body so big and muscled and… imposing. Again, that urge surfaced, to run my hand over his head just to see what it felt like and then over his stubbled jaw.
And then across his broad chest.
That was weird, right?
That would have been a weird thing to do.
Good lord, what was wrong with me?
“It’ll be fun,” he coaxed, when I didn’t answer him. “We can reminisce about how mean you were to me in high school.”
“Levi, it’s sweet of you to offer, but—”
“But you’d like to pay?” he jumped in, a teasing smile pulling at the corners of his mouth. “I insist on paying, Ruby. It’s not that I don’t believe in all that equality stuff, it’s just that I’m the one dragging you away from your very busy life and so I feel like it’s my duty to provide sustenance and libations.”
Feeling increasingly flustered, I ran a hand through my wild hair. It got tangled halfway through and I had to tug my fingers free. “It’s not that, it’s just that—”
“Mommy!”
Oh no.
Oh shit.
Trailer Park Heart Page 9
