Christmas in a Small Town

by Kristina Knight

  “That’s good, since we don’t seem to have an aisle.” The words seemed to rumble from his chest, vibrating between them and making the little hairs on her arm stand up. Weird. Camden rubbed her hand along her arm, and the engagement ring she’d forgotten to take off winked at her in the dim light.

  “Wow,” he said, taking her hand in his and letting the light catch the different facets of the three-carat ring from Tiffany & Co. Camden kept her focus on the half-full glass before her. Her skin tingled where his hand held hers, and tension set off butterflies in her stomach. Camden snatched her hand away. How could she have forgotten the ring? And how could she have a physical reaction like this to a guy she’d known for only a minute? Her stomach never got jumpy like this with Grant. At best, she was lukewarm around him, but suddenly, the bar seemed hot and humid, as if hundreds of people were crowded into it on a steamy summer day. Not a handful of people on a chilly fall night.

  “Nice rock,” he said, leaning against the bar, facing the big dance floor she had crossed only a few minutes ago. Camden kept her focus on the wineglass. She wasn’t interested in marrying the man she’d been engaged to for the last few months, and she wasn’t interested in flirting with the man who’d sidled up next to her in this bar.

  “I didn’t pick it out.” Now, where had that come from? She’d been blown away by the ring when Grant presented it to her back in the summer. Sure, it was heavy on her hand, and it snagged on everything. But it—

  No, Camden shut down that train of thought. Yes, Grant had bought the ring for her. But Grant had also been screwing her maid of honor in a closet about fifteen minutes before they were supposed to pledge their love—or at least fidelity—to one another. So...she had no reason to feel sentimental about this ring or guilty that she was happy she could now take it off and never wear it again.

  Camden wasn’t quite sure what she wanted, but she knew diving into a flirtation with a stranger wouldn’t help her figure it out. She needed to focus.

  “It’s a nice-looking dress, though.”

  “Not my style.”

  “I find that hard to believe. You wear it too well.”

  Because she’d been trained to wear it well. Her mother had started her on the pageant circuit when she was nine, and after her father died, the pageants had become almost weekly occurrences. Still, having a stranger comment on her appearance was nice. Maybe a little stalkery, but nice. “Yeah, well, it’s not like it takes a special set of skills to wear designer clothing.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  Okay, that upped the stalker level a little too high. She was not going to let some cowboy in a small town take her to his trailer just because she’d walked out on her old life.

  “I’m going to finish this glass of wine and be on my way. You can scurry back over to your buddies now and tell them what a hateful witch I am.”

  “You don’t seem all that hateful. Maybe a little sad. But not hateful.” His voice was kind, kinder than she probably deserved after walking away from everything and everyone the way she had done. But she still wasn’t letting a stranger talk her into bed. No matter how sexy his voice sounded in the darkened bar. “You’re wearing a ring you didn’t pick out, and a dress that isn’t your style. Seems to me like this has not been your day.”

  “Try lifetime,” she said and twirled the stem of the wineglass between her fingers. And she was not going to keep talking to a perfect stranger about her life. She was not feeling like herself, but she wasn’t completely desperate.

  “How much do I owe you?” she asked Merle, who was looking from Camden to the man at the bar and back again.

  “Ten dollars,” the older man said.

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  “I pay my own bills,” Camden said and turned to look at the man standing beside her.

  He was tall, built like a football player. His skin was a rich brown, and there were golden flecks in his brown eyes.

  And she knew him.

  He was taller than she remembered. His shoulders wider. His voice deeper. But the laughter in the gaze was the same, as was the crooked tilt to his mouth. Camden clapped her hand over her mouth. Oh, God, she wanted to sink through the floor of the bar.

  Of all the bars, in all the world, why did she have to walk into Levi Walters’s?

  * * *

  “CAMDEN?”

  Levi blinked once, twice, then a third time. This brain tumor–epilepsy thing was getting out of hand. He’d gone from imagining a beautiful woman in a wedding dress to imagining Camden Harris—a girl he hadn’t seen since he was fourteen. Not girl. Woman. From the tilt of her pretty head to the smooth shoulders, full bust—

  Levi slammed his hand against the bar, and Camden jumped. So did Merle. And he was pretty sure he’d gotten the attention of everyone else in the bar, too, from annoying Collin and Aiden to Juanita, who stuck her head around the corner of the door leading to the kitchen.

  “Sorry.” He swallowed. “I’m not crazy, right? You’re Camden Harris.”

  “Hello, Levi.”

  Her voice was the same. A little twang, which was odd, because she lived in a fancy part of Kansas City and competed in beauty pageants. At least, she’d been on the posters of several pageants around the university campus where he played football.

  Slight southern drawls weren’t welcomed in those circles. For beauty pageants it was full-on, south-of-the-Mason-Dixon drawl or what he considered broadcaster cool, with no hint of an accent. From anywhere. Or maybe he was reading too much into a short conversation.

  He needed to get a grip on himself or he was really going to lose it. Levi didn’t like to prove people right on the crazy side of things. He was steady. Not impulsive. He considered options, developed a plan of action. He didn’t rush into decisions.

  He didn’t even usually rush into flirting with women, especially women he didn’t know. So, naturally, now that he had, it had to be someone he used to know.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked, and the question threw him. What was he doing here? What was she doing here? And in a wedding dress?

  “I live here.” Levi sat on the stool beside her. “What are you doing here?”

  A half smile crossed her wide mouth but didn’t reach her eyes. Camden shook her head. “Paying my bill.” She stood, and her high-heeled shoes clacked against the hardwood. She pulled a ten from the little bag strapped around her wrist and left it on the bar. “I’ll see you around, I guess.”

  “I live here,” Levi said and felt like an idiot for repeating himself. And in such a lame way. Of course they’d see one another—Slippery Rock was a small town. His ranch and her grandparents’ farm were next to each other. It would be a miracle if he didn’t bump into her now and again.

  He reached out, and a sharp little burst of attraction hit him hard when his hand brushed her arm. Which was just weird. Sure, he’d felt a little heat when he took her hand to look at the glimmering rock on her finger, but that was when he’d been in the mood to seduce the sexy stranger at the bar.

  Camden Harris wasn’t a sexy stranger. She was the girl next door. The girl with the big brown eyes who tagged along after him during her summer visits with her grandparents.

  The girl who hadn’t been back to Slippery Rock in at least a decade and, as far as he knew, whom her grandparents hadn’t seen in at least as long.

  Calvin and Bonita had pictures of Camden, though, and he’d seen them on several occasions when he stopped in to check on them. One more reason he should have recognized her as soon as she walked into the bar. But he hadn’t. The girl—no, woman—in those pictures was confident. Happy.

  The Camden standing next to him at the bar...wasn’t. Something had changed. Whatever that something was, it wasn’t his business. He should just back off. Camden Harris was a childhood acquaintance,
not a personal friend.

  “Yes?” she asked, and Levi realized his hand still gripped her arm, holding her in place. He let go quickly, and her arm fell to her side.

  “Nothing, nothing,” he said, and she turned to go. “Wait! You didn’t say what you were doing back in town.”

  She turned to face him, and those big brown eyes went soft, her mouth turned down and Levi wondered what might have happened in Camden’s privileged life that would make her look so sad.

  So lost.

  So...familiar.

  And that wasn’t right. Of course she was familiar. Her hair was the same walnut brown he remembered, and her eyes were still big and round and had those honey-colored flecks that mesmerized him. She was taller, but that was normal. What twelve-year-old didn’t grow a few more inches in their teens and early twenties? He’d put on about fifty pounds of muscle and added nearly three inches to his height since graduating high school.

  Only it wasn’t the color of her hair or her eyes that drew him in—it was something else. Something to which Levi didn’t want to get too close. Something that might be a little bit dangerous for a man who liked to consider and think his way through life, because his impulse was to pull Camden Harris into his arms to make that look go away.

  Levi Walters had too much going on in his life to let a woman with a sad look on her face distract him, though. He had very specific plans, and those plans had specific goals, and getting distracted with Camden Harris was definitely not part of the plan.

  “I’m just here for a few days. Visiting my grandparents,” she said, but he didn’t think she was telling him the whole truth.

  “In a wedding dress.”

  She shrugged, and the half smile that crossed her face made a little of the lost disappear. “I already told you the dress isn’t my style.”

  “And the ring wasn’t your choice.”

  “Something like that.”

  The evasive answers were interesting. More interesting than the conversation he’d been avoiding with Collin and Aiden. More interesting than the fact that he had a video conference with his investment counselor in the morning about making an offer on a portion of the Harris land he’d been renting for the past two years.

  “Is coming here your choice?”

  She looked around, and he wondered what she saw in the weathered floor, the neon signs and the dim lighting. He saw familiarity. Safety. Home. The sign behind the bar had been partially unlit for as long as he could remember. The juke in the corner had played the same songs since he was in high school, with the exception of Merle adding Savannah’s single a few months before. The vinyl on the booth seats was cracked, and the chairs were scuffed.

  It was perfect to him. Not a shiny disco ball in sight.

  “Yeah. Coming to Slippery Rock was my choice,” she said, and when she looked at him again, he thought he saw more confidence in her expression. In the set of her shoulders. That zing of attraction buzzed a bit brighter. “I’ll see you around, Levi.”

  “See ya around, Camden,” he said as she crossed the room. Her footsteps seemed to echo in the bar long after the door closed behind her.

  Camden Harris was back in town. This might be the most interesting thing to happen to Slippery Rock in...okay, that wasn’t fair. A lot had happened over the past year. Savannah had scandalized the town, as had the revelation that Sheriff James Calhoun had been having an ongoing affair with the favorite local rebel, Mara Tyler. The tornado had nearly destroyed the town. And Aiden Buchanan had finally come back.

  But Camden...

  That was interesting on a whole other level.

  “I guess we figured out what’s bugging Levi,” Collin said, coming up behind him at the bar. He pulled his wallet from his rear pocket.

  “Yeah, we thought there was trouble at the ranch. Turns out, Levi Walters just needs to get laid,” Aiden added. Levi started to give a sharp reply, but that would only encourage the two of them. And they weren’t wrong.

  Not that he was going to sleep with Camden Harris. That zing of attraction was just a zing. A reminder that it had been too long since he’d taken time away from Slippery Rock to be with a beautiful woman.

  Like Camden. Levi shoved the thought away. “What do we owe you, Merle?”

  “Thirty’ll cover it,” the older man said.

  “I got it—loser buys, remember? And who was that, anyway?” Collin leaned against the bar, holding out a handful of bills to Merle.

  “She looked familiar. Kind of,” Aiden added.

  “Camden Harris.” Levi turned his attention to the door again and then pulled a few bills from his wallet, but Collin pushed the money away. Right. Because Collin and Aiden lost at darts. Levi needed to get his mind back inside the bar. “You remember. Calvin and Bonita’s granddaughter. She used to spend her summers here.” Neither Collin nor Aiden said anything, and that brought Levi’s attention fully back inside the bar, not out there in the night with Camden. “She used to tag along with us to the lake on really hot days. Camden Harris.”

  Aiden snapped his fingers. “That’s how I know her. She did the beauty pageant thing with Julia while they were in college. The two of them traded off winning and losing there for a while. Until Camden was crowned at the state level and went on to the national competition.”

  “Julia competed in pageants?” Julia was a beautiful woman, but she didn’t have the slick polish Levi associated with beauty pageant contestants. She was too genuine for that. For that matter, so was Camden. At least, the Camden he remembered. The woman he’d spoken to a few minutes before was a stranger, in a wedding gown, wearing a ring she said she didn’t want. Weird.

  “Something her mom got her into. After her parents died, it was a way to keep that connection going. Plus, she wanted to save the money they left her, and academic scholarships only went so far. The pageant circuit paid the difference.” Aiden leaned an elbow on the bar. “I wonder if Julia knows she actually came to town?” he muttered.

  “Julia’s been talking to Camden?” Even more interesting. Camden had made it seem like this visit was a spur-of-the-moment thing, but if she’d been talking to Julia, it probably wasn’t. So what was up?

  “They text, Facebook now and then. She was supposed to be getting married this weekend. Today, actually. Obviously that didn’t happen.”

  Obviously. Levi watched the door for a few more minutes. Camden was engaged. Or had been engaged. Was still engaged? And now she was in Slippery Rock, wearing the dress and the ring, but apparently alone. Interesting on that whole other level.

  “You fellas gonna leave sometime tonight? I’d like to close,” Merle said. He was leaning against the counter on the back side of the bar, arms crossed over his flannel-clad chest. He tapped the toe of one well-worn boot against the rubber matting on the floor.

  “Sorry,” Collin said, pocketing the change Merle had left on the counter.

  The three of them walked out of the bar, got into their cars, and each went in a different direction from there. Once Levi was out of town, he considered what might have brought Camden to town.

  It could be she was just running away.

  It could be that the deal he was about to close with her grandfather had brought her.

  It could be anything, really.

  The narrow road leading to the ranch and the Harris property split, and Levi paused, watching the lane that would lead to Harris land, for a long time. No taillights shone down the lane, not that he’d expected any, and despite the late November date, the foliage blocked out any light that might have shone from the porch or yard lights at the Harrises’.

  Probably she was tucked up in one of the guest rooms Bonita kept in pristine condition despite the fact that no visitors had been at the farm since Levi was a teen.

  Probably she was just here for a quick visit, like
she’d said.

  Probably he shouldn’t wonder what might have brought Camden back to Slippery Rock.

  In a wedding dress.

  He really needed to stop thinking about what she looked like in that dress.

  Levi put the truck back in Drive and turned to go down the road that would lead to his parents’ home and then around to his own. All the lights were off at the main house, which meant Bennett and Mama Hazel had gone to bed and Savannah was spending the night at the orchard.

  He shouldn’t let Camden’s reasons for coming to Slippery Rock get under his skin, but her evasive answers in the bar were doing just that. The memory of her soft hand in his still made his palm hot. But her evasiveness, that was the issue here. He had a deal going with Calvin, and he didn’t want that deal messed up. More than that, he liked the older couple. They were like grandparents to him, and maybe it was crazy, but Camden showing up now, when they’d decided to sell—it only made sense if she wanted something from them.

  Like money.

  Levi gripped the steering wheel as he crossed over the cattle guard separating his drive from the county road.

  He would find out what Camden was up to. Then he’d get back to his plans for Walters Ranch. And he’d take a weekend off, maybe go to Little Rock or Tulsa for a few days. He knew women in both cities who would be glad to hear from him, who wouldn’t expect more than a weekend’s worth of fun.

  He turned off the truck and went inside, toeing off his boots in the mudroom and slinging his beat-up jacket on the wall hook.

  Camden Harris was back in town, and he would find out what she was up to.

  CHAPTER THREE

  CAMDEN BLEW TWO sharp blasts into the whistle. The border collie who had been working his way through the course of inclines and tunnels stopped and his head swiveled to look at her. She held him there, not moving, for a slow ten count, then blew into the whistle again, giving him the go-ahead to complete the course.