It wasn’t until he set me down next to the fairly unkempt dirt road that I realized we weren’t just stuck in the woods. We were obviously on someone’s property—his property, if the narrow driveway, the beat-up Toyota pickup, and the battered wood cabin were any indicators.
“There,” he said, stepping a solid three feet away, almost as if he couldn’t stand to be next to me. He wrinkled his nose. It only then occurred to me that after an eighteen-mile bike ride, I probably reeked. Fantastic. Mountain man was all delectable fresh water, and I probably smelled like a shoe.
“You all right now?” he asked. “Those pine needles are slick.”
I had to physically fight the urge not to step back toward him to answer. What the hell was wrong with me?
“Um, y-yeah,” I managed, unable to cover my stammer. “I’m f-fine.”
His gaze dragged over me. In the sunlight, his green eyes were clearly flecked with gold. We stared at each other, letting the sounds of the wind in the trees and the cry of the osprey fill the space between us. My heart thumped. A vein in the man’s temple twitched.
“So, um, thank you…” I ventured, waiting for him to fill in his name. I extended a hand, telling myself it was the polite thing to do, not because I wanted to touch him again.
But the man only stared at it, then shoved a hand into his wild hair and looked back up at me like I’d just offered him a handful of stinging nettles.
“Do you need a ride home?” he asked abruptly.
“I, uh, it’s okay, I can just—” I took a step backward, and immediately, my ankle buckled. Shit. I could stand on it, but the idea of riding nine miles home sounded like pure torture.
Goldilocks (as he had become the second he refused to tell me his name) glared at my ankle like it had personally offended him. I glared back. He blinked.
“Let me grab my keys,” he grumbled and jogged down the hill into the house, returning a few moments later. “Come on,” he said, and before I could reply, squatted down and scooped me into his arms, dangling my feet over one elbow.
Damn. That smell. It really was even better up close.
“Here.” Goldilocks dumped me unceremoniously into the passenger seat of his burnt-orange pickup, then dusted off his hands, like he was trying to get rid of all traces of me.
He paused, one hand on the door while he watched me situate myself. When I looked up, his penetrating green gaze practically bore through me.
“What?” I asked, suddenly picking at my hair. God, I probably still had pine needles everywhere. We were quite a pair. Yeti-locks and the pine needle bear. Awesome.
The stranger jerked, as if pulled out of a trance, then folded his mouth into a thin, tight line. “Nothing,” he snapped and shut the door in my face.
I sat awkwardly as he walked around the car, got in, and started it up. The windows were down and the old engine was loud, but that did nothing to distract from the immediacy of his scent crowding me in the small cab. Rainwater, yeah. And something else, something sweet. Caramel? Chocolate?
I wasn’t ready to think about just why I was so interested.
“Um, that’s my bike on the road,” I pointed out as he backed past the old Schwinn lying in a heap by the potholes.
Goldilocks rolled his lips together, cast his eyes upward like he was searching for patience, and stopped the car to throw the bike in the back.
“Your tires look like shit,” he remarked once he got back in and started driving. “No wonder you crashed. They are completely bald.”
“They were fine until I hit that pothole up there. The bigger problem is probably that I had my eyes shut.”
At that, his full mouth twitched again. This time it was definitely noticeable.
“You were riding with your eyes shut?”
I blushed. “Only for a second. Don’t you ever get that feeling when you’re just kind of caught up in how good something feels? I was coasting, and the wind was blowing, and it just felt awesome.” I sighed, and giggled to myself. “Well, until I toppled down the hill and busted my ankle. But before that I felt…free.”
“Free,” he repeated quietly. The thrum of his voice filled the car, and almost matched the engine.
We passed more than half the drive around the lake without saying anything beyond me giving directions and him grunting in response. Either the radio didn’t work, or the guy wasn’t feeling music. But I wasn’t the kind of person who could sit easily in silence.
“So, um, I haven’t seen you around. Have you lived on the lake long?”
He darted a side-eyed green look at me. “A few years.”
I ventured a smile. Okay, he was talking. “Where were you from originally?”
Another suspicious glance. Jesus, the guy could seriously break glass with his intensity. “Connecticut.”
“Connecticut, really? You’re a long way from home. What brought you all the way to Newman Lake?”
He worried his jaw for a minute, and a gust of wind through the window caused his beard to wave slightly. I didn’t even like facial hair on men—it obscured the face, not to mention made it scratchy when you kissed—but this guy, those eyes. I swear, I could barely see anything past them.
“I just wanted a change of pace,” he said finally, gripping the steering wheel so hard his knuckles turned white.
I nodded. “I get that. That’s why I’m back myself, I suppose. I was actually living in New York for the last eight years, believe it or not. But I grew up here, so this is home, I guess. I’m Maggie, by the way. You, um, you actually look kind of familiar. Are you sure we haven’t met before, maybe back in the cit—”
“We don’t need to do that,” he cut in abruptly.
I recoiled against the force of his voice. “Don’t need to do what? Turn left here, by the way.”
His eyes remained steadfast on the road as he turned onto West Newman Lake Road. “The whole getting to know you thing. ‘What’s your name, where’re you from, blah, blah, blah.’ I don’t give a shit who you are, and that’s all you need to know about me. I’m taking you home because it was the quickest way to get you the hell off my property.”
Then he finally did look at me again, and his expression sliced like a knife. Everything about him seemed etched by a razor: the long line of his nose, the chiseled edges of his muscles, the angles of his bent knees and elbows. There was nothing soft about this man. He was sharp. Feral.
I flinched. I couldn’t help it. His eyes flickered over me with something I might have confused with concern if I didn’t already know what a dick he was.
“Hey,” he started. “Ah—Maggie. I—”
“It’s fine,” I said, hating how small my voice had become. I crossed my arms and wrapped my hands over my shoulders, hugging myself. I had already lived with someone who treated me like shit. I wasn’t interested in putting up with it from complete strangers, ride home or not. “You can pull over at the sign right there.”
“It’s all right, I’ll just drive you down to the—”
“It’s fine,” I said again. “Just pull over.”
He opened his mouth like he wanted to say something more, then sighed and did as I asked. I hopped out while he pulled my bike down from the bed. I took it and wheeled it to the curb, limping on one foot. The pain was already better, but I’d be exclusively swimming for at least a week if I still wanted to compete next month.
“You all right?”
When I turned around, Goldilocks was back in the driver’s seat, his door still open as he watched my progress. One long, muscled leg balanced on the ground. I parked the bike, then hopped back over to him as defiantly as I could.
“I’m the hell off your property now,” I told him evenly. “So we don’t have to do this. Thanks for the ride.”
Before he could reply, draw me back in with those hypnotic green eyes and that scent that made me forget where I was, I shut the car door in the stranger’s face. Eager to return to the house that, for all its faults, never left me feeling
as disoriented and confused as I’d been for the past twenty minutes.
4
Where are you, Flower?
Just four innocuous words, but they might as well have been bombs dropped through the clear morning light. I sat up in my bed, the old double mattress and creaky metal frame I had moved to a sleeping shack on the edge of the property. The shack, originally constructed as a shelter for ice fishermen in the thirties, had a sink, but no running water, and would heat up like a sauna by mid-July. But it was a quiet space of my own and allowed me to get a good night’s sleep when Mama stumbled in a 2 a.m., like she had the last three nights. People used to joke, even at church, that my mother was a bigger party animal than her teenage daughter. They had no idea.
It was a few minutes after five in the morning, and the lake was relatively silent. If I went outside, I might see deer in the garden, or maybe a family of wild turkeys scuttling around the property. Bass fishermen were the only people up at this hour, floating around the lake’s glassy perimeter.
I looked back at my phone. The screen still glowed with the message, sent from an unknown number. No. This couldn’t be him. Theo was in jail for what he’d done. He was supposed to be serving a full six months—a drop in the bucket, as far as I was concerned, but still something. Long enough that he was supposed to forget about me. Let me go. Move on with his life and let me try to recover mine.
It could be from a friend, one of the many members of his entourage. The kind of idiotic yes-men that only very rich people travel with. It wouldn’t have been the first time he’d gotten one of them to mess with me.
I breathed. That was all this was. A message sent through a visitor’s phone, a cheap prank meant to rile me up. But he wasn’t a danger to me anymore. I was safe here. As safe as I could be, anyway.
I dialed the first number I could think of, eager to erase the nasty gag. Calliope picked up on the second ring.
“You bitch.”
I exhaled and flopped back onto my pillow to stare at the open rafters. “Hey, Cal. You awake?”
“I am now, damn you. How’s the sticks? Bored yet?”
I chuckled. “Not at all. You’d be surprised how much there is to do. I get to strip wallpaper off two bathrooms today. Top that.”
“Well, I would be sleeping until ten if it wasn’t for you.”
“Shut up. You wake up at six every morning to go to the gym.”
“Weekdays, darling. Weekdays.”
I smiled. She was giving me a hard time, but if I knew my former manager, she’d been up for hours going to a daybreak SoulCycle session, making phone calls, and basically running half of New York. Calliope was the hardest-working woman on the eastern seaboard and had been since we first met in college. After getting her start doing music A&R right out of NYU, she was picked up by a much bigger firm just last year. Two pretty big clients followed her, and I was supposed to be her third…until I fucked it all up. Our professional relationship was over, but she was still my best friend.
“So what’s up?” Calliope asked. “I know you didn’t call to give me the goods on your mom’s remodeling. Is Eloise behaving herself?”
I thought back to last night, when Mama had gotten back around two thirty and parked the car sideways in her spot. The tires had slid against the gravel, causing a minor avalanche of gravel to shower the chicken coop and my shack, waking us all up. I’d gone up, straightened out the car so our neighbors could get by, and then put her to bed.
“She’s…fine,” I said. “Today. You know her. She’s pretty functional most of the time. Honestly, it’s the driving I worry about most.”
“Dude. She needs to get hooked up with Uber.”
“Dude yourself,” I retorted. “This is an unincorporated community forty-five minutes from the nearest city, not the five boroughs. We don’t have Uber, and taxis only exist if you’re willing to wait an hour or more. We have our own cars and the trucks of weird men at Curly’s.”
“Is there really a bar named Curly’s?” Calliope asked. “Just the name of that place sounds like I’d get hepatitis from a water glass.”
I snorted, rubbing my hand on my face. “Don’t knock it ’til you try it. I had my first gigs at Curly’s. They have a killer karaoke night, you know.”
“Is that where I’m losing your talent to? A fucking sing-a-long bar with wannabe cowboys?”
I sighed and rolled over. Even though she had helped me pack my car, Calliope made no secret of the fact that she thought I was making a mistake in leaving. She had wanted me to stay with her instead, go back to waitressing, save money, and keep trying to get my singing career off the ground.
But in the end, she hadn’t argued because she knew the truth too. She knew exactly what kind of power Theo’s family had in New York. Even if I wanted to come back, it would be that much harder with one of the biggest entertainment names bearing a personal grudge against me.
“He texted me this morning,” I said. “Or a lackey, maybe.”
The line went very quiet.
“Ah, shit,” muttered Calliope. “What did Psycho say?”
“He asked me where I was,” I said. “And he called me ‘Flower.’”
Calliope groaned. “That name was always creepy as fuck. It made him sound like a pedophile.”
I cringed—not because Theo was much older than me, but because Callie was right. Once, I had loved it. His attention. His obsession. I was his flower, he said, meant to make his life more beautiful, in every possible way.
I shuddered and closed my eyes, though I knew the refuge of darkness would only be temporary. It had been more than a year since our explosive ending, and three months since the verdict that had landed him in jail, but his face still haunted me whether I was asleep or awake. It winked, cajoled, sneered, threatened. I was beginning to accept that Theo was simply a ghost who would follow me around my whole life, for better or for worse.
Ironic, really. After all, marriage, the one thing he wanted, was never something I could give him no matter how many times as he demanded it. His proposals were orders, not requests. “Marry me,” he’d say, as if I didn’t have a choice. But always, always, there was something deep down that told me not to say yes. Maybe I should have. It was the last refusal that became his downfall and mine.
But this time, as I shut out the world, it was a pair of green eyes that flashed unbidden, instead of Theo’s dark brown. They’d been appearing all week since I’d crashed on the side of the road. Every time some part of Theo came to mind—the curl of his lip, the arrogant tip of his nose—some feature of that strange, curt man with the wild hair and angry eyes would immediately replace it. For the last seven days, his face was like a fly that wouldn’t buzz away, though it seemed to chase away the worst of my fears too.
When my heart rate slowed, I shook away the face. I didn’t need to be thinking about him, or any man right now. I needed to figure out how to be normal again. How to be me.
“Just…will you keep tabs on him for me, Cal? I know you two move in a lot of the same circles, and if—I don’t know, if he’s somehow out, you’ll hear about it. Just let me know, okay?”
Text messages I could tolerate. They were easy to delete. But Theo had the resources to find out where my mother lived or send someone to find me. He was lazy by nature, but I also knew not to underestimate him. There was nothing Theo del Conte loved more than nursing a grudge, and incarcerated or not, right now I was probably his number one nemesis.
“Of course,” Calliope said. “And in the meantime, tell me about the lake hotties. I am so over these metrosexual assholes in the Village. Give me some farm boys to fantasize about. I’ll even take a Curly cowboy. Have you run into luscious Lucas?”
I chuckled. “Well, yeah. But sadly, he’s not so luscious anymore.”
“For real? Oh that’s tragic. Let me guess: two babies and a beer gut.”
“No babies yet, but the beer gut is making progress. And I’ll raise you a bald spot.”
Oka
y, so I was being a little mean. Lucas still looked just fine—like you’d expect an average twenty-seven-year-old with a taste for Bud Light to look. I’d bet money he was on a lot of most eligible bachelor lists within the Newman Lake zip code.
“Don’t disappoint me here, babe. There’s got to be some hot mountain man who can fuel my fantasies. Give up the goods.”
I gulped. I didn’t want to think about him. No. I wouldn’t.
But there he was again, in the back of my mind. Green eyes scattered with sparks. A lean, muscled chest. That thick mane of wild hair. It wasn’t fair. I didn’t even know his freaking name.
“Who the fuck are you thinking about?” Calliope’s sharp voice cut through my quickly clouding thoughts.
I touched my suddenly heated cheeks. Christ, that escalated quickly. “No one,” I said. “I didn’t say anything.”
“Bullshit. Lady, your silence was so deafening it practically split my eardrum. Spill.”
I closed my eyes, and the tan, bearded face appeared, framed by a halo of unkempt gold. The breeze outside blew in the fresh scent of the lake water, and just as fast, I felt his arms under my legs and back again. The heat coming off his skin, his hands, his arms.
Shit. What was I doing? The guy—Goldilocks—was a complete and utter asshole.
“There’s no one,” I repeated again. “This place is just stacked with the same tired dudes who are always here. Pickup trucks and beer guts. That’s it.”
“Yeah, but I bet those dudes have filled out since high school, huh? Farm boys look good in them t-shirts.”
“Callie, what would you know about it? You’ve barely left Manhattan your entire life.”
I could practically hear my friend rolling her big brown eyes. But Calliope knew me better than anyone, which also meant she knew when I wouldn’t talk.
Vote Then Read: Volume I Page 175