by Stacey Keith
Lexie grabbed her backpack for protection. “Here? In front of people?”
“Okay, I’ll just wait until you’re asleep like I always do.”
Lexie’s horrified expression was worth the effort it took to keep from laughing. Cassidy watched her daughter disappear in a crowd of other fourth-grade girls with ponytails and bright rubber wristbands.
Now all she had to do was run home and watch this ridiculous video everyone seemed so worked up about. Of course they were reading things into it that weren’t there. She and Mason were just old friends, and—
“Cassidy!”
With a feeling of pure dread, she spun around and saw her mother’s friend, Mrs. Connors, waddling toward her. She had a cigarette in her mouth, and they weren’t even off school property yet. Mrs. Connors collected cats and gossip with equal insatiability, and Cassidy wasn’t so much surprised to see her as she was surprised to see her here. Then she remembered that Mrs. Connors did a little substitute teaching. Mrs. MacFarland, the principal, must have called her in.
“Walk with me, Sugar.” Mrs. Connors steered her with one hand. “Can’t smoke in the teacher’s lounge, and now they don’t like me smoking where the kids can see.”
“Don’t you have to teach class?” Cassidy said, hoping she didn’t sound too desperate.
“Nah. Second period.” Behind a cedar only slightly wider than she was, Mrs. Connors whipped a silver lighter out of her smock, lit the cigarette, and took a long drag. “We smokers. They hunt us for sport, you know.”
“Mrs. Connors, I really—”
“You can spare an old woman two minutes. I’m not here to tease you about your beau.”
“Ah, see, that’s the thing. I don’t actually have a beau.”
“That right?” Mrs. Connors turned a sharp, all-seeing eye on her. “Says you, I suppose. But here’s what I got to tell you, and I want you to listen.”
Cassidy waited, but it cost her. Every cell in her body screamed at her to run away—not just back to her house, but back to last week before Mason Hannigan and nosy, camera-wielding Little League dads were even on her radar. For a second, Mrs. Connors’ face went blank, as though she couldn’t remember what she wanted to say. Then the bell rang announcing the start of the school day, and all the cogs and wheels in her head seemed to lurch forward again.
“Hell. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Hell.”
Cassidy’s heart sank. No way was she going to let herself get buttonholed into an impromptu church sermon by Alice Connors. “Listen, I have a thousand things I need to do before Lexie gets home.”
“I know all about you, Cassidy Roby. I know you’ve struggled. I know how hard it’s been for you to hold your head up after Parker Nolen dumped you. Where’s he hid himself these days—Houston? San Antonio?”
Utterly confused now, Cassidy stood blinking at her while the last of the stragglers yanked backpacks out of their parents’ cars and made the mad dash to class.
“So you made a mistake with that Nolen boy. Pfffft. Who cares? Only difference between you and everyone else is that you got caught.”
No, Cassidy thought, I am not having this discussion. Not with one of my mother’s friends. This stuff was personal. Even if Mrs. Connors meant well, talking about it in broad daylight felt like one of those dreams Cassidy had where she was standing naked in the line at Wal-Mart.
“You’ve always been my favorite of Priscilla’s girls,” she went on. “When Hank was alive, I always used to say to him, ‘That Cassidy’s got a lot of spunk’. But ever since your Lexie come along, you’ve been hibernating like a mama bear with her cub.”
“I have spunk?”
“Time to come out, Cass. Stop trying to apologize for something that happened a hundred years ago. Folks got no leave to judge anyway. Oh, sure, everything looks nice and tidy on the outside here in Cuervo. But all you need do is scratch a little and you’ll find that everybody’s got their own version of hell, a hell of their own making.”
“Mrs. Connors, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I gotta hunch that life is fixin’ to open a door for you real soon.” Mrs. Connors squinted against the cloud of smoke. “Spare your sweet mama the pain of watching her daughter slam that door shut again. It won’t be easy, I know. There are a whole bunch of folks here who won’t like seeing you rise above your place. Souls in hell always enjoy the company.”
“Are you saying that Cuervo is hell? I love Cuervo. I don’t—”
“You go on thinking that,” she said, crushing her cigarette butt underfoot. “But just you remember what I said.”
Stunned, Cassidy watched her tramp back to the school building. Was this what being a crash dummy felt like? She couldn’t get back to her house fast enough. All she wanted was to lock the door and hide there until all this craziness blew over.
She turned to go, but stopped mid-stride. Wait a minute.
Locking the door.
Wasn’t that what Mrs. Connors had warned her about?
* * * *
Finally.
Mason spotted Cassidy emerging from the football field, heading west. Three times he’d jogged around her daughter’s school. He had to take his morning run anyway, so why not kill two birds with one stone? He didn’t know if her daughter walked to school or rode the bus, but figured it was worth a try. But one more lap spent peering at all the kids and someone was going to call the cops.
Grabbing the hem of his T-shirt, he stopped to wipe his sweaty face and discovered that he’d have to set a harder pace if he wanted to catch her. Cassidy moved fast. She’d already barreled around the corner. Mason doubled down, glad he’d managed to out-pace Jasper and the others. He could lose them altogether if his luck held and then have a chance to talk to Cassidy without the chaperones.
He felt… What was the word for it? Alive. Like a light had been switched on. Maybe something had been missing from his life and until now he hadn’t realized what it was. Living in Dallas was great, everything he’d dreamed of and more—the three-story mansion with its magnificent indoor/outdoor pool. His 3,000-square-foot fishing cabin. His ten cars. But lately it seemed as though the house had gotten bigger, lonelier and emptier. Everyone he met only knew Mason Hannigan, Quarterback. No one remembered Mason Hannigan from Cuervo, the one who used to pitch a tent directly on the football field every night before a home game.
It had meant something different then. Winning wasn’t about the money or the advertising contracts. It was about the team. It was something Mason tried with all his might to hang on to even now. Especially now. It was one of the reasons he valued close friendships with his teammates, why he believed friendship to be the secret to their success. They weren’t just pro-athletes looking for personal glory. They were a team. Coming home for Coach’s award ceremony only reinforced that. Then he’d seen Cassidy again. Mason rounded the corner, expecting to catch sight of her. When he didn’t, he put on his after-burners and bolted to the end of the street. There she was in her cute pink running shorts and pink hoodie. He admired her tanned, lean legs, the way her hair blazed gold where the sun caught it, and the same tongue-tied feeling of the night before came over him. She seemed both different and familiar somehow, and all he could think about was getting close enough to find out if what he felt was real or just a high school flashback. “Cassidy!” he called to her.
When she turned, she was already on the porch of an old clapboard house. There was a fat orange tabby sleeping in a puddle of sun. Two sycamores grew in the front yard and their branches met in the center, forming a canopy. And there she stood with a kind of dazed expression, all pink and cheerleader-y, and she was so damned pretty it made it hard to concentrate on things like words. Just by breathing, she managed to cast a spell over him. He knew then that the memory of her gazing at him from the porch would burn itself into his brain cells forever. He
would always see her just as she was in this moment, demure and sexy as hell, and the heat of it found its way right down to his stomach. “Hey,” he said, winded from chasing her but manfully determined to hide it. “This your house?”
Instead of answering, she whipped her gaze to a house across the street. A woman with pink foam rollers was giving them a hard stare through the window.
“Oh, boy. That’s Mrs. Felps, isn’t it?” he asked.
“Yep. And she’s got her phone in her hand.”
To hell with Mrs. Felps. He drew one hand over the back of his neck and hoped he didn’t smell too sweaty. Jasper said women dug the smell of male sweat, that he’d read it in Men’s Health magazine, but Mason had his doubts. He lifted the hem of his T-shirt again and scrubbed his face with it, surprised to see Cassidy feast her eyes on his abs and chest. What do you know, he thought, and his optimism took an upturn.
“Where’s your, uh, posse?” Cassidy asked, her cheeks a flaming testament to having peeked.
“If I had to guess, probably at the Double Aces, skulling beers. I make them run every day during the season. They hate it, but games won in the fourth quarter are always won because of cardiovascular conditioning… and I’m totally boring you, aren’t I?”
She flashed him a smile that made his heart do its own tiny wind-sprint. “Not even a little,” she said. “Who wouldn’t want to know how y’all manage to rack up so many victories?”
A lot of women, he wanted to say, but it pleased him that her interest seemed genuine. He dropped down on the porch steps and patted the place next to him. “Wait. I don’t suppose Mrs. Felps would let you get me a glass of water first, would she?”
“Be right back.”
He waited, listening to the screen door clatter and the sound of her feet retreating to the kitchen. The orange tabby heaved itself up, arched its back and then sat again, this time with its tail wrapped around its legs. Mason had the distinct impression of being sized up and found wanting. The cat slitted its eyes at him, one tom to another, and Mason thought, Better get used to it, buddy. I’m not that easy to get rid of.
“Here you go.” Cassidy handed him a glass of water. She sat, pulling her knees up to her chest, close enough for him to smell her bath soap and the light floral fragrance of her shampoo. Mason tried not to sniff her too obviously, but just sitting here beside her made him stupidly happy, as though the piercing blue sky and all those puffy little clouds, the thick syrupy sunshine, the chirping birds, had all been created just for them. It was like living inside an old-fashioned snow globe, only Texas style, with falling leaves instead of snow.
Every part of his body had a heightened awareness that she was next to him. He could reach out and touch her, if he dared. But he didn’t dare, not yet. Mason had a hunch that full contact would ignite a fuse in him that nothing in this life or the next could put out. Hell, he didn’t even know if she liked him, despite having caught her staring.
“It’s a sweet place you’ve got here,” he said, casting around for evidence of male occupation. Across the street, Mrs. Felps now had the living room curtains clutched in one hand and the receiver death-gripped in the other.
“Grams left it to me and Lexie just before she passed.” Cassidy stretched out her legs and Mason tried frantically to hold onto the thread of their conversation. Whoa, boy. Focus.
“So it’s just you and your daughter then?”
Oh, that was brilliant.
Cassidy slid him a look. “It never seems that way, but yes. My folks are just two blocks over.”
“Oh, hey, I saw your folks this morning.”
“You did?”
“Nobody comes through Cuervo without seeing Doak.” He hoped she didn’t think the visit to her parents was some lame attempt to get close to her, which it totally was.
“Did my mom invite y’all to dinner?”
“Yep.”
“Oh, well. A shame that I’ll probably be working.”
No, she wasn’t. After giving him a funny-but-not-exactly-disapproving stare, Priscilla Roby had referred to a calendar she’d posted on her refrigerator. The calendar had little stars penciled in above the same days each week. Mason guessed they were the days when Cassidy worked, and the granddaughter, Lexie, needed babysitting. “How about tonight?” Priscilla had asked him. “We can get the whole family together and make a special occasion out of it.”
“Have you ever fed a quarterback plus three offensive linemen?” he’d asked her.
“Can’t say that I have. But Doak can get the fryer out and we can fry a turkey just like we do on Thanksgiving.”
Since Doak didn’t argue, and Temple, Jasper, and Brian were all making hand signals urging him to say yes, and there was a photo of Cassidy on the refrigerator wearing a bathing suit and walking with her daughter on the beach (eyes front and center, Mason. Front. And. Center.), he’d agreed. Then he’d remembered Priscilla’s curious expression and worried if she was already on to him.
He’d never maneuvered this hard in his entire life.
“It’s tonight,” he told Cassidy. “Your mom said she’d call. She wants you to bring…” Mason couldn’t remember what she wanted Cassidy to bring because Cassidy was running her hands down her legs. He could tell she did it unconsciously, but that only made the one hundred percent pure grain lust fire even hotter through his veins.
He stared at her digging her thumbs into the muscles of her calves and then stared harder as they wended their way back up her thighs. Sweat sheeted his skin. When she turned her head to look at him, the urge to kiss her made every muscle in his body seize. Her lips were inches away, pink and pillowy and slightly open. Christ, she was killing him. He was close enough to see each individual eyelash, the way sunlight made her irises appear even bluer. There were downy hairs on her cheeks and a beauty mark on her left temple. Since when did he even start noticing things like that? She went to his head like one beer too many, and for one crazy moment, she seemed to sway closer as if maybe she wanted him, too. His heart beat faster. Was it possible? Did Cassidy want him? There was a roaring in his ears as he leaned in to taste her and—
“There you are,” came Jasper’s voice from somewhere not far enough away. “We’ve been looking for you everywhere, and believe me when I tell you that everywhere ain’t a long ways to look.”
Mason dragged his gaze away from the pure carnal temptation of Cassidy’s lips and saw all three of his buddies grinning at him from the sidewalk. No one was even remotely sweaty. Temple had a cruller stuffed in his mouth. A white bakery bag bulging with goodies dangled from Jasper’s hand. Brian held a Styrofoam coffee cup and a jelly doughnut and was regarding him as though nothing had happened, as though it weren’t perfectly fucking obvious what he’d been trying to get going here.
Jasper gave Cassidy his Boy Scout smile. “Ma’am.”
“Please, call me Cassidy.”
“There’s a terrific bakery in town,” he remarked. “Would you like a doughnut? Plenty to spare.”
“It’s my sister Maggie’s bakery,” she said proudly.
Go away, Mason silently urged them.
“That’s a fine-looking house you have,” Temple observed. “Older than mid-century, isn’t it?”
In his head, Mason did a high-pitched, mocking imitation of Temple saying, Older than mid-century, isn’t it? Since when had Temple turned into Frank Lloyd Wright? He dashed one hand through his hair to keep from charging over there and punching him until he shut his mouth.
“Oh, and we also saw inside your old courthouse,” Brian said as though she’d done the construction herself. “The lady there told us all about its history.”
Cassidy popped to her feet, clearly eager to talk about it, while Mason took a few deep breaths. If he looked at Cassidy’s ass while her back was to him, his friends would see and tease him about it all afternoon. If he didn’t, he�
�d hate himself for being a coward.
So he looked. Her ass was high and round and a perfect fit for his hands. You’re not even halfway through the first quarter of this game and you’re already too sunblind to see the football, he told himself.
“Oh, no! Muffins!” Cassidy cried, rousing him from his thoughts.
Muffins?
Only then did he realize the orange tabby had squatted two inches away and was about to pee. Mason saw an insolent gleam in the cat’s green eyes that must have been the kitty equivalent of throwing a penalty flag. He jumped up while Cassidy lifted the wily bastard and dropped him on the lawn. When she leaned over to scold him, though, Mason couldn’t tear his eyes away. And no matter how wrong it was to stare at her like this, no matter how urgently he told himself to stop, he kept right on doing it.
Jasper cleared his throat rather dramatically. Behind his fist, he muttered to Brian and Temple, “Yep. He’s a goner.”
Chapter Three
From her lace-curtained kitchen window, Cassidy watched Mason and his friends wander up the street. Were they staying at the Cattle Rancher motel? That place was a notorious stopover for traveling salesmen, cheating spouses and ardent teenagers. Rumor had it that Kayla and Mason had been seen leaving the motel on the morning after prom.
Cassidy swiped a glass off the drain board, filled it with water and drank it down. He must have some terrific memories to look back on, she thought bitterly. Hey, at least he took Kayla to a motel. In her case, she never made it past the backseat of Parker’s Mustang.
What was wrong with her? Why was she even thinking these things?
She gazed at him over the rim of her glass, marveling at his long powerful legs, his broad shoulders, his easy grace. All four men were what her sister Maggie would call “specimens,” but for her, no one compared to Mason. She’d almost kissed him in broad daylight on her own porch. Had she lost her mind? How easy was it to imagine what people were saying about her now. That Cassidy can’t stay away from athletes, you know.