“Move, Joe. Move now or I swear I will knee you for every woman who you ever talked to the way you talked to me on that plane, and I am so not joking right now.”
His eyes go wide, and he quickly releases me. I take off running, rounding the corner, dashing through the gate seating area and back down the ramp, where I find myself bumped and cursed, but I’ve lived years in Los Angeles. Crowds don’t bother me. Bumps don’t bother me. Losing my camera, my way of earning income, that would destroy me right now. Finally, I manage to work my way past the exiting passengers, to reach the entryway to the plane. “My camera,” I announce at the door. “I left it on my seat.”
“Which seat, honey?” says the flight attendant, a nice Texas woman, with a big blonde hairdo and a vocabulary of “y’all” and “fixin’” that I know all too well.
“I don’t remember my seat number,” I say. “Can I just go look?”
“Yes, yes, go.” She motions me forward. “I’ll help you.”
I all but run down the tiny aisle, and thank God, another attendant is walking toward me with my camera. My relief flows out with appreciation, and it’s not long before I’m exiting the plane, wondering where my head is that I’d leave my precious camera, one that had taken me years in LA to afford, behind. Back in LA is the answer. I want to be back in LA, working my way through and up the fashion world chain of command.
But I’m not, so I refocus on an old mission that minus Joe, is now one dimensional. I hunt for a bathroom while my cellphone rings, and I don’t have to look at the number. I answer with a greeting. “Hey, Linda,” I say, knowing this will be my best friend from college who is now a rather accomplished photographer in her own right. She’s also my ride.
“You’re here! I can’t believe you’re here. You’re home, honey and just in time for the holidays to ramp up in three weeks. Though good gosh, it’s going to be a hot season. It’s still ninety outside today.”
“Three weeks from now is Halloween and yes, my birthday, neither of which is a holiday and home is not Dallas, it’s Sweetwater. And just to be clear, it gets cold for about a day or two, the week of Halloween every year in Texas, if you can call the first time it gets to fifty degrees for the season, cold.”
“You’re from Texas, which makes this home. Furthermore, your parents don’t own the ranch in Sweetwater anymore. They moved to Austin, but you chose to return to Dallas because it’s familiar. Just another reason, you’re home. End of topic. Next up. Your birthday most definitely is a holiday, as is Halloween. Good grief, woman. I have work to do on you. It’s a good thing you are home. I’m out front,” Linda continues, “and a really rude police officer just threatened to tow me, so you need to get here now.”
“Oh God.” I hustle my pace. “You, woman, are always getting in a fight with someone.”
“You don’t get in enough fights as far as I’m concerned, or you wouldn’t have been blacklisted along with your boss for his mistakes.”
“He was blacklisted for something that didn’t happen.”
“He should have protected you.”
“He can’t even protect himself right now.” And, I add silently, reminding myself to stay focused. I have skills, not just with a camera. I coordinated many a huge event through him. I can put those skills to use.
“Oh God,” Linda groans. “I have things to say about your boss, but the jerky officer is at me again.” There is what I believe to be knocking on her window. “I have to go. Hurry! Get to me quick!” She disconnects, and ugh, so much for the bathroom. I see the sign but pass it by. I can’t have Linda getting towed, or worse, spouting off like she does and getting in bigger trouble. Thankfully, Dallas Love Field is rather compact and the walk is short or it was, way back when. It’s remodeled, and nothing is as it was or where it was. I navigate here and there and pass through the security exit to find Linda standing there, her red hair piled haphazardly on top of her head.
“He directed me to a parking spot,” she says, hoisting up her boobs, which might not be bigger than mine, but she bravely displays her assets today with a deep V of cleavage cut into her T-shirt. “These helped.”
We burst into laughter and then launch ourselves at each other, hugging fiercely before she pulls back. “I only have ten minutes. Let’s get to baggage claim.” She tugs me forward, and I groan with how full my bladder is.
“I have to pee, like now. I have to. This is non-optional.”
She grabs my arm and drags me forward. “This way. I know where a bathroom is.”
This motivates me, and I step up my pace all too willingly, and it’s only a minute before her phone is ringing, and she stops. “This is important. It’s about a job. I have to take it.”
“Bathroom?”
She points. “That entrance on the left. They just changed the signs, and they’re hard to see, but that’s the women’s restroom.”
That entrance is not nearby and I really can’t linger to wait on Linda. I hurry forward and my phone rings now, too. Afraid it’s the real estate agent who’s supposed to show me rentals, I dig for my phone, grabbing it only to find it’s Linda calling. My brows furrow and I look behind me to find her motioning wildly, but I don’t have time for this. I have to go to the bathroom. I round the wall to the entrance as she’d directed and smack hard into a body. A man’s body. A man in the women’s bathroom.
“Wrong bathroom, woman,” the grumpy man snaps, giving my well filled out T-shirt a once over.
“Are you serious right now?” I demand.
“Get out of the way.” The man literally grabs my arms and sets me against the wall.
“Are you crazy?!” I demand, ready to call security, but he’s already walking away.
I drop my bag that’s killing my arm, push off the wall, and face the bathroom, looking for a sign; certain that man was a jerk to hide his embarrassment for going into the women’s restroom. Instead, the sign reads “Men” and I want to crawl into the hole my embarrassment is digging in the floor.
I turn to make a rapid departure, grab my bag, and proceed to run into another hard body. “Oh God. I’m sorry. I—” My gaze lifts and I gasp at the familiar man now holding my arms, touching me for the first time in six years. I’m touching him, too, my hands curled on the black tee that stretches over a chest that proves to be more impressive than ever. He’s a man now, but then Roarke Frost was always all man. “Roarke,” I whisper as if the name in my mind isn’t enough confirmation. I need it on my lips, the way I once needed him on my lips.
“Hannah,” he breathes out, his voice low and rough. His brown eyes are still that warm milk chocolate, but I was always the one who melted in the heat of any moment spent with this man.
“Oh my God, I’m so sorry,” Linda gushes, appearing beside us, huffing and puffing. “I was stuck on the call, and I couldn’t call you and well, as you know, I directed you to the wrong bathroom.” She’s rambling, her attention turning to Roarke, who is still holding onto me. Who is still focused on me and me alone. “Sorry,” Linda repeats. “Sorry—she went the wrong way because I told her wrong.”
“I’m not sorry at all,” Roarke says, his eyes warming with the words. “I can’t believe you’re here.”
“In the men’s bathroom?” I joke, trying to get off the topic of why I’m in Dallas. “It’s a game we play in LA.” I cringe with the stupid comment.
His dark brows dip. “Game?”
“That was a joke that’s going nowhere. There is no game.”
The air thickens between us, memories pushing and pulling, pushing and pulling. I want to push him away. I want to hold onto him and pretend nothing ever went wrong. “You look good, Hannah,” he says finally. “Your hair is longer and I swear your eyes are a little greener.”
Anger bristles inside me. My hair. My eyes. That’s all he has to say after—well, everything that happened? “Why are you here?” I ask.
“I’m on my way to Kentucky to work with a horse,�
� he says, which isn’t a surprise. His family always trained horses, but he’s taken that to a whole new level. He’s now a YouTube sensation, The Horse Wrangler. Which I know because I’ve been watching the videos that I will never admit to watching. “Are you home to visit?” he asks. “Aren’t your parents in Austin now?”
“I’m here for work,” I say because it’s not a lie. I am here for work and for a place to live, but that’s beside the point. “A fast in and out trip.”
A man clears his throat, and Roarke grabs my bag and motions me toward the wall, and when I nod, he catches my hand the way he used to catch my hand. It’s familiar. He’s familiar. So is the heat rushing up my arm and across my chest. No one makes me feel what this man makes me feel, and this makes me angry. He betrayed me. He hurt me. He hurt me.
“I get back Friday night,” he says. “We need to talk. We’ve needed to talk for a long time. Can I see you?”
Of course, he returns Friday, I think. Of course, he wants to talk now when he hasn’t tried once in six years. “I leave Friday morning.”
An announcement sounds for a flight and he grimaces. “I’m late. That’s my flight, and I have to head through security. Damn it. We need more time.” He scrubs his jaw, a good three-day dark shadow there, dark like the hair on his chest where my fingers used to play often. But that was then and this is now. “There are things I’ve wanted to say to you for a long time.”
“It wasn’t meant to be,” I say. “Let’s just leave it at that, Roarke.” And the truth is that there is nothing that he can say that changes anything.
His gaze lingers on mine and then lifts skyward before lowering. “I have to go. Hannah—”
“Go, Roarke. That’s what you told me years ago. That’s what I’m telling you now. Go. Because it’s what’s right for you and me. And you’re holding my hand.”
“Yes, I am, and I don’t want to let it go.”
“But we both know you will. Just like you did before.” The words burn out of me, anger in their depths.
His jaw clenches, and he lifts my hand, kissing my knuckles. “Goodbye, Hannah.” He turns and walks away, bypassing the bathroom by necessity, no doubt. He’s leaving. Even when I left, it was because he’d checked out. I lost him before I lost him or what went down would not have gone down.
Linda steps in front of me. “You know the Horse Wrangler? Oh my God, I need details.” She glances over her shoulder. “That man’s butt in jeans. That’s part of what makes him an internet sensation, you know? Women love him.”
I grimace. Yes. Yes, they do. Just one of the reasons I’m not going to share details of a long time crush on my next door neighbor that became a summer engagement gone wrong.
“The way he was looking at you,” she continues. “Did you and he—” She joins two fingers. “Did you—”
“Bathroom,” I say. “I need a bathroom before I can properly decline to share details. Now all you get is a grunt.”
She grimaces and motions me forward. “After the bathroom.”
I grab my bag and we start walking. And yes, I get my bathroom escape, but Linda gets nothing on Roarke. That’s a closed subject, just as it’s a closed chapter of my life, and yet, when I lay down in her spare bedroom that night to sleep, I can almost smell that man’s cologne: an earthy, rich scent that is all man. The wrong man for me.
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ALSO BY LISA RENEE JONES
THE INSIDE OUT SERIES
If I Were You
Being Me
Revealing Us
His Secrets*
Rebecca’s Lost Journals
The Master Undone*
My Hunger*
No In Between
My Control*
I Belong to You
All of Me*
THE SECRET LIFE OF AMY BENSEN
Escaping Reality
Infinite Possibilities
Forsaken
Unbroken*
CARELESS WHISPERS
Denial
Demand
Surrender
WHITE LIES
Provocative
Shameless
TALL, DARK & DEADLY
Hot Secrets
Dangerous Secrets
Beneath the Secrets
WALKER SECURITY
Deep Under
Pulled Under
Falling Under
LILAH LOVE
Murder Notes
Murder Girl
Love Me Dead
Love Kills (October 2019)
DIRTY RICH
Dirty Rich One Night Stand
Dirty Rich Cinderella Story
Dirty Rich Obsession
Dirty Rich Betrayal
Dirty Rich Cinderella Story: Ever After
Dirty Rich One Night Stand: Two Years Later
Dirty Rich Obsession: All Mine
THE FILTHY TRILOGY
The Bastard
The Princess
The Empire
THE NAKED TRILOGY
One Man
One Woman
Two Together (November 2019)
*eBook only
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Lisa Renee Jones is the author of the highly acclaimed INSIDE OUT series.
In addition to the success of Lisa’s INSIDE OUT series, she has published many successful titles. The TALL, DARK AND DEADLY series and THE SECRET LIFE OF AMY BENSEN series, both spent several months on a combination of the New York Times and USA Today bestselling lists. Lisa is also the author of the bestselling LILAH LOVE and WHITE LIES series.
Prior to publishing, Lisa owned multi-state staffing agency that was recognized many times by The Austin Business Journal and also praised by the Dallas Women’s Magazine. In 1998 Lisa was listed as the #7 growing women owned business in Entrepreneur Magazine.
Lisa loves to hear from her readers. You can reach her on Twitter and Facebook daily.
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