Last First Kiss (3 page)

As a boy, he’d loved that bewildering, beautiful girl and lost her. Maybe this was his chance to be the man who finally got a shot at righting past wrongs.

He dug his fingers into his palms and let Annie Carson’s lamp burn into him.

Chapter Three

A
NNIE
SQUINT
ED
IN
the not-quite-dawn light.
What’s that racket?
Atticus nestled beside her, fast asleep, but not for long at this rate. Good Lord, had Grandma Kane returned to pound the front door a second time? No, wait . . . the sound came from farther off—more of a banging. Or hammering. Yes, that was it. Someone hammered out by the barn.

Her patience might stretch with salt-water taffy resiliency, but everyone had a breaking point. Annie gritted her teeth and disentangled from Atticus’s sweaty body, tucking his stuffed orca under his arm to replace her presence. Her terrycloth robe hung on the door hook. She shrugged it over her Rad Mama sleeping t-shirt, knotting the tie loose at her hips.

The racket increased as she plodded down the stairs. Each pound reverberated through her throbbing skull. Her mouth tasted gross and she needed a drink of water, stat. Lesson learned—scotch was a brief, bad fling never to be repeated. Her reflection stared from the carved oak mirror at the base of the stairs. Not exactly a formidable sight. More befuddled hedgehog after ill-advised relations with an electrical socket.

Turned out pixie cuts looked cuter on Pinterest.

She eased out the back door and peered around suspiciously, but it was hard to feel menace with such a glorious sunrise unfolding. Knife-edge peaks were saturated in a golden glow, and the range’s pinnacle, Mount Oh-Be-Joyful, flushed a rosy pink. She inhaled deep, savoring the hint of wild hyacinth and pine—the evocative scents conjuring long forgotten memories of braiding daisy chains with Claire or eating sun-warmed strawberries straight from the vine. Flowers sprouted in odd clumps along the dirt path, a rainbow hodgepodge of purple sage, yellow blazing stars and the last of the dusky blue lupine. Later, she’d pick a bouquet with Atticus for the dining room table like she used to as a girl. The old house had a neglected, dusty feel, too long lonely. It needed TLC, not just in the form of paint and shingles, but love and laughter.

She padded closer to the hammer strikes and each blow fractured her fledgling optimism. Grandma Kane had always seemed determined to continue the feud, hollering like a mad ox if she and Claire snuck across the ranch to go blackberry picking or hiking. Her big sister did particularly stellar impersonations of Grandma screeching, “Carrrrrrrsssoooooons, I see you, don’t think I can’t.”

Their simple, if isolated, life complicated after Claire decided they needed to put their foot down, stop the homeschooling, and spend time at Brightwater High School, figuring out how the world operated off Five Diamonds before they turned eighteen. For the daughters of Kooky Carson, this was the equivalent to traveling to a Martian outpost, a strange environment where no one ate quinoa, listened to the Grateful Dead and Ravi Shankar, or read
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Claire graduated after one year, leaving Annie alone with two hundred suspicious strangers, most of them sporting the last name Kane. Honestly, that family bred like jackrabbits in the backfield, all tall, green-eyed, good-looking, and loud. So loud. A family genetically programmed to yell-talk.

Except one.

No time to entertain
that
particular line of thinking, not when rounding the corner, amped, ready to go Hatfields vs. McCoys. Grandma Kane would never pluck another feather off a Carson chicken, not on her watch. Those hens were her friends, not food. If there must be a fight, Annie would defend them to the last—

She skidded to a halt as he glanced up—not an old woman, but
him
, crouched beside the coop, hammer clutched in one big hand.

“Sawyer?” All she could do was gape, wide-eyed and breathless—too breathless. Could he tell? Hard to say as he maintained his customary faraway expression, the one that made it look as if he stepped out of a black-and-white photograph.

“Annie.”

She jumped. Hearing her name on his tongue plucked something deep in her belly, a sweet aching string, the hint of a chord she only ever found in the dark with her own hand. It was impossible not to stare, and suddenly the long years disappeared, until she was that curious seventeen-year-old girl again, seeing a gorgeous boy watching her from the riverbanks, and wondering if the Earth’s magnetic poles had quietly flipped.

Stop. Just say no to unwelcome physical reactions
. Her body might turn traitor, but her mind wouldn’t let her down. She’d fallen for this guy’s good looks before, believed they mirrored a goodness inside—a mistake she wouldn’t make twice. No man would ever be allowed to stand by and watch her crash again.

Never would she cry in the shower so no one could hear.

Never would she wait for her child to fall asleep so she could fall apart.

Never would she jump and blindly fall.

Sawyer removed his tan Stetson and stood. Treacherous hyperawareness raced along her spine and radiated through her hips in a slow, hot electric pulse. He clocked in over six feet, with steadfast sagebrush green eyes that gave little away. Flecks of ginger gleamed from the scruff roughing his strong jaw and lightened the dark chestnut of his short-cropped hair.

“Hey.” Her cheeks warmed as any better words scampered out of reach. The mile-long “to do” list taped to the fridge didn’t include squirming in front of the guy she’d nurtured a secret crush on during her teenage years. A guy who, at the sole party Annie had attended in high school, abandoned her in a hallway closet during Seven Minutes in Heaven to mothballed jackets, old leather shoes, ruthless taunts, and everlasting shame.

He reset his hat. “Did I wake you?” His voice had always appealed to her, but the subtle rough deepening was something else, as if every syllable dragged over a gravel road.

She checked her robe’s tie. “Hammering at sunrise kind of has that effect on people.”

He gave her a long look. His steadfast perusal didn’t waver an inch below her neck, but still, as he lazily scanned each feature, she felt undressed to bare skin. Guess his old confidence hadn’t faded, not a cocky manufactured arrogance, but a guy completely comfortable in his own skin.

And what ruggedly handsome, sun-bronzed skin it was, covering all sorts of interesting new muscles he hadn’t sported in high school.

“Heard Grandma paid you a visit,” he said at last.

Annie doused the unwelcome glow kindling in her chest with a bucket of ice-cold realism. He wasn’t here to see her, merely to deal with a mess.
Hear that, hormones? Don’t be stupid.
She set a hand on her hip, summoning as much dignity as she could muster with a serious case of bedhead. “Visit? Your grandma killed one of our chickens and baked it in a pie. Not exactly the welcome wagon. More like a medieval, craz—”

“Subtlety isn’t one of her strong points. We had words last night. It won’t happen again.” He dusted his hands on his narrow denim-clad hips and bent down.

Unf.

The hard-working folks at Wrangler deserved a medal for their service. Nothing else made a male ass look so fine. “Found this too.” He lifted her forgotten bottle of scotch.

“Oh, weird.” She plucked it from his grasp. “Wonder how that got out here?” Crap, too saccharine a tone, sweet but clearly false.

He raised his brows as his hooded gaze dropped a fraction. Not enough to be a leer, but definitely a look.

Her threadbare terrycloth hit mid-thigh. Here stood the hottest guy west of the Mississippi and she hadn’t shaved since who-the-hell knows and sported a lop-sided bruise on her knee from yesterday’s unfortunate encounter with a gopher hole.

Maybe she failed at keeping up appearances, but God as her witness, she’d maintain her posture. “About your grandma—I was two seconds from calling the cops on her last night.”

“That a fact?” The corner of his wide mouth twitched. “Next time, that’s exactly what you should do.”

“Next time?” she sputtered, waving the bottle for emphasis. “There sure as heck better not be a next time!”

That little burst of sass earned the full force of his smile. Laugh lines crinkled at the corners of deep-set eyes that belonged nowhere but the bedroom. As a boy, he was a sight. As a man, he’d become a vision. “Why are you back? I mean, after all this time?”

My husband wanted to screw other women while I kept the house clean.
“Divorce-induced homelessness.” She dropped the bottle to her side, somehow managing to keep her voice steady.

Sawyer glanced to the farmhouse, jaw tightening. The place appeared even more run down in the light of day. The earlier idea of infusing the home with love and happiness seemed laughable now. Instead, it looked like work, and more work.

“The coop should hold your hens for the moment,” he said at last. “But the wood’s rotted. What do you say I come ’round tomorrow and replace the frame?”

More Sawyer? Desire and panic converged, churning against her lower ribs. “That’s okay. I can handle it,” she answered quickly—her autopilot answer for everything these days. There had to be a DIY YouTube video for henhouse repairs, right? Move along, nothing to see here. No divorcée in distress up at Five Diamonds.

“It’s not a—”

“Everything’s under control.” It was bad enough having him here at six a.m., catching her hung-over and half dressed. No way would she become a pitiful charity case. After all, a gal had to keep a shred of pride when her life frayed.

“Okay, whatever you say.” The strange light in his eyes from a moment ago—that flare . . . or spark of interest—smothered like baking soda on a grease fire. The swift change startled her even though she’d never forgotten that remote look, the way he could pack up his thoughts and retreat to God-knows-where. In fact, at seventeen, she’d squandered far too many hours sitting on sun-warmed rocks along the river, trying to decode the meaning behind his various brow quirks and private half-smiles.

“I have a question too.” Looks like her brain’s caffeine withdrawal prodded her to do incredibly stupid things like try to gain closure, an answer to the
why
she’d been rolling like a boulder up the back of her brain for the last decade.
Why did he invite her to that stupid party? Why did he never come to the closet?
She had gone hoping Sawyer Kane would be her first kiss. Instead, he became the first guy to break her heart.

Sawyer stilled.

A truck backfired in the distance.

A red-winged blackbird laughed from atop a wood rose.

“Go ahead then, what do you want to know?” So he still did that trick too, the one where he scoured all emotion from his tone.

She bit her inner cheek hard, the faint taste of copper flooding her mouth. Her stomach waffled. Did she really want to hear the reason he betrayed her all those years ago? It was ancient history, water under the bridge. “Never mind, I forget.”

He tilted back his Stetson, running his intense gaze over her face. “You haven’t changed much.”

The simple statement threatened to fell her. He had no idea everything was different. The dreamy, hopeful girl she’d been, the one he’d known all those years ago, had her atoms obliterated and her soft underbelly refashioned, armored with titanium plates. She didn’t run barefoot through meadows or jump blindly into rivers.

Not anymore.

“Thanks for the repair job,” she said, stepping back, blinking rapidly. He’d fixed the coop, but no one could fix the cracks in her confidence and imploded self-esteem. She needed to do that—if only she knew how. Was there a
Self-esteem for Dummies
?

Then he moved. Close. Closer. Way too close. The old magnetic pull between them hadn’t lost any potency. The air charged. So much so that when he reached out, cradling her cheek, she expected a zap. “I missed you, Annie Girl.”

Her heart beat sideways at his use of the old nickname.

“I . . . ”
missed you too. God. So much.
“I have to go.” She took another step backward and then another. “And anyway, I’m not staying, at least not for long. My family’s decided it’s time to sell the farm.”

“Sell?” His body went rigid. “But this place has been in your family forever. All your history is here. How can you let it go to a stranger?”

Who was he to come around at an ungodly hour, in those tight faded jeans that showcased his . . . everything, touching her cheek, giving her unsolicited guidance? Her chest heated. Is that why he was here—being the good cop to Grandma Kane’s bad cop? “I appreciate your help with the coop, but let’s not pretend you’re giving impartial neighborly advice. Your family wants the property back. Trust me, I get the situation. I was raised with it, but we can get more for Five Diamonds than your grandmother could ever offer.”

He dropped his chin, leveling a penetrating stare. “That’s not what I meant, it’s not about the feud. You know I don’t care about any of that.”

She used to believe that, had once fooled herself into believing they were kindred spirits. “I don’t know anything about you anymore, Sawyer. Maybe I never did.”

She pivoted and strode toward the house, clenching the scotch bottle. Why did he come, force her to feel things better forgotten? She was almost at the stairs when a large, powerful hand closed on her upper arm, not a grip, but a gentle touch that halted her mid-step. Her heart pounded, her belly breaking into wild flutters.

Slowly, so slowly, she turned.

He held her gaze squarely, as if daring her to look away. “You know who I am,” he said.

She couldn’t reply, even if she knew what to say. She couldn’t blink or swallow or think. The only sound beside the wind came from their shallow breaths. She and Sawyer might be water under the bridge, but it looked like that water was churning, roiling whitewater.

But even if, purely hypothetically speaking, she still wanted him in that same heady way that threatened to consume her at seventeen, it didn’t make a damn difference. She wasn’t that carefree girl anymore. And what she wanted, and what she needed, were two vastly different things.

“Please, let me go.” No mistaking the desperate edge to her voice.