Which made him feel even worse about the way he’d used her. Explaining that he’d only kissed her in order to make his ex-girlfriend jealous wouldn’t be easy, but he didn’t deserve easy. He’d made an asshole move. He would own up to it.
The sound of a woman laughing on the other side of the bar quickly caught his attention, but when his eyes fell on Aubrey and Chandra, neither one was laughing. As if she’d sensed him, Aubrey’s gaze darted to his. And held.
His craving for a drink grew so intense that Sam could taste the liquor on his tongue.
He needed to leave.
He pushed his ginger ale aside and started to move out of the booth, but Ian and Dale both stopped him.
“Where you going?” Ian asked.
“I can’t be here with her,” Sam said.
“Are you really going to let Aubrey run you out of The Corral?” Dale asked. “It’s been ten years, man. Stop being a pussy.”
“Fu—”
Ian put a hand up. “Do you want her thinking she can run you?”
“I don’t give a shit what she thinks,” Sam said.
He just knew he needed to go. Now. Even though she and Chandra had taken a table on the complete opposite side of the bar, knowing Aubrey was in this same room sent his discomfort level through the roof.
He tried to get up again, and once again, Ian stopped him.
“Just chill, Sam. It’ll say more about you if you stay than if you get up and run.”
Shit.
Sam knew his friends were right, it was just that he didn’t care. He did not want to be here.
But instead of giving in to the urge to sprint out of the bar like an Olympic track star in the 100-meter dash, Sam settled back into the booth.
“Hey, did I tell you about the reality TV show producer who stopped in at Trey’s the other day?” Ian asked. “He saw a picture of the school bus Trey converted into a house, and wanted to talk to him about joining some new show on one of those home and garden networks.”
Sam knew what his friend was trying to do with the swift subject change, but it wasn’t going to work. Not tonight. His mood had taken a turn for the worse and there was no going back. Instead of joining in the conversation, Sam picked up his watery ginger ale and went back to brooding.
* * *
Aubrey swirled a fried mozzarella stick in the bright red marinara sauce she’d plopped onto her plate, pretending her appetite hadn’t skipped town the moment she walked into The Corral and spotted Sam sitting with Ian Landry and Dale Chauvin. Just seeing the three of them together tightened her chest with a yearning unlike any she’d felt in years. At one time, she would have been included in that number.
Ian and Dale had been Sam’s best friends in high school, which meant she’d naturally spent the majority of her time with them. How many Saturday afternoons had she spent hanging out in the detached garage at Sam’s, pretending to like professional wrestling because that’s what the guy’s liked to watch.
Aubrey chanced a quick glance at the other side of the barroom and noticed Dale staring at her. He swiftly averted his eyes, but it was too late. She knew he was watching her. Which probably meant they were all watching her. Discussing her. Discussing the past and what she’d done.
Aubrey knew returning to Maplesville wouldn’t be easy. She also knew she would not be able to avoid the disquieting reminders of her past. She’d done her best to prepare herself for her first encounter with Sam after all these years, but no amount of preparation could have readied her for the punch to the gut she’d received when she saw him earlier today. His mouth locked with another woman’s.
The swath of jealousy that had rushed over her had no place in her mind. What right did she have to be jealous over the woman in Sam’s life?
She peeked over at the table and once again caught Dale and Ian both staring. They quickly looked away, but her self-consciousness still blossomed into a living, breathing thing.
Though it wasn’t just the booth of men over there who had her feeling self-conscious. Just being out in public, surrounded by some of the same people who had witnessed her uttermost embarrassment, had Aubrey ready to crawl out of her skin. This was her first time going out since arriving back in Maplesville. She’d spent the past two weeks holed up in the spare bedroom at her sister’s house, and if she could have it her way, Aubrey would have preferred to remain in the room indefinitely.
But she knew that wasn’t realistic. Deanna, her older sister by six years, had ordered Aubrey out of the house, and told her not to come back for at least four hours. She’d recruited Chandra to—in her words—make sure Aubrey didn’t spend the time sitting in a parking lot somewhere.
Her sister knew her well, despite the fact that they only saw each other once every two or three years.
“You want to play some pool?” Chandra asked.
Aubrey shook her head. “Is anyone staring?” she asked, her eyes returning to the mozzarella stick. “Or, you know, whispering behind their hands or anything?”
“A few,” Chandra said. “What do you expect? It’s a small town. People talk and stare if you leave the house with mismatched socks.”
“Well, I gave them a lot more than that to talk about.”
Chandra waved that off. “People will talk. Gossip is a fact of life around here. But, if it’ll make you feel any better, a lot of the people here tonight have no idea who you are. Half the population in Maplesville wasn’t even here ten years ago.”
That was true. Over the past five or so years, Deanna had kept Aubrey abreast of all the changes that had been happening to their small hometown, which wasn’t all that small anymore. Most of the sugarcane fields that had surrounded the outskirts of town were no longer there. In their place were chain restaurants, an outlet mall, and condos.
She felt sorry for the high school kids. Now that all the cane fields were gone, their options for make-out spots were pretty slim. There was always Ponderosa Pond, but the foliage there didn’t provide the kind of privacy that those tall sugarcane stalks did. Aubrey couldn’t help the slight grin that curved up the corner of her mouth at the memory. She’d spent her share of afternoons flat on her back in the middle of those sugarcane fields.
Stop thinking about that!
Thoughts of those long ago escapades should be the farthest thing from her mind, especially with the man she’d shared them with sitting just a few yards away, loathing her.
Not only that, but now that her niece, Felicity, was a teen, Aubrey didn’t want to think about what the high school kids did. Her sister thought sending Felicity to that all-girls Catholic school in Covington would shield her, but Aubrey knew better. Back when she was in high school, the girls from the Catholic school were ruthless in their pursuit of boys.
Aubrey pushed those images out of her head and propelled her thoughts back to the present.
As she looked around The Corral, she recognized a few faces, but Chandra was right, a lot of the people in here tonight had not been living in Maplesville when she left a decade ago. Her eyes returned to the side of the bar where Ian, Dale, and Sam sat.
She sucked in a quick breath.
They were no longer hiding the fact that they were looking at her. Ian and Dale both stared with curious expressions. Sam’s face, however, held something completely different.
Scorn. Unmitigated scorn.
It was suddenly hard for her to swallow. The lump that had formed in her throat blocked everything.
“He looks like he wants to strangle you with his bare hands,” Chandra said, taking a sip of her strawberry daiquiri.
“Don’t look at them,” Aubrey admonished.
“Why not? They’re looking at us. Well, probably at you.” Chandra gave them a little wave.
“Oh, God.” Aubrey fought the urge to drop her head to the table and repeatedly thump it on the scarred wood. “I knew I should have stayed home.”
“Stop it,” Chandra said. “Sam Stewart does not own Maplesville. You’re free
to go wherever you want, and if he strains his eyes giving you that death stare it’ll be exactly what he deserves. As if he has room to judge you.” Chandra huffed. “He sure as hell isn’t a saint.”
The nausea she’d felt when she’d witnessed that kiss between Sam and the musical’s director earlier today reared its head again.
“Didn’t you tell me that Sam and his girlfriend broke up?” Aubrey asked.
Chandra’s forehead furrowed. “Which girlfriend?”
Oh, nice. That certainly helped.
Not.
“Taylor Mitchell? She’s directing the musical my niece is in.”
“Oh, yes! I heard that Felicity landed a featured role in this year’s production!” Chandra squealed, her smile a mile wide. “Like auntie, like niece.”
“About Taylor?” Aubrey said. She loved her best friend, but Chandra had the attention span of a grain of rice. “She’s new to town, isn’t she? Taylor?”
“She moved here a few years ago. I think she’s originally from Baton Rouge.”
“How long has she and Sam been together?”
Chandra waved that off. “They were never really a thing.”
“It didn’t look that way today when he kissed her,” Aubrey said.
She hated that it bothered her. Hated that it mattered to her at all who was on the receiving end of Sam’s kisses. She had no claim to him or his kisses.
“What’s going on in that head of yours?” Chandra asked.
“Nothing.”
“Come on, Aubrey. That thing between you and Sam was a long time ago. It’s not as if you came home expecting the two of you to get back together.”
An uncomfortable weight settled in Aubrey’s gut.
“No.” She shook her head. “I never even considered the possibility.” She swirled the straw around her glass. “It would be nice if we could at least be…I don’t know…cordial to each other. I know Sam and I will never be friends, but those hostile looks are a bit unnecessary, aren’t they?”
“Totally,” Chandra said. “You should go over there and talk to him.”
Aubrey choked on her vodka and cranberry juice. “Are you out of your mind?”
“I’m serious,” Chandra said. She tipped her head toward the booth where Sam, Ian, and Dale still sat. “Why does Sam get to dictate the tone of your relationship now that you’re back home? Go over there, say hello, and let Sam know that you don’t plan to isolate yourself just to make him comfortable.”
But that’s kind of what she was planning to do.
“Go on,” Chandra urged.
There was merit to her friend’s suggestion. It wasn’t practical to think that she could avoid all the places where she might run into Sam the entire time she was in Maplesville.
She wasn’t even sure how long she would be there. She’d sold all her furniture and packed up her meager belongings when she left L.A. a few weeks ago, making the week-long journey with her brother-in-law, Paul, in the passenger seat of the big rig he drove for a national trucking company.
Accepting that she could no longer sustain living on her own hadn’t been easy, but when she found herself rationing ramen noodles and a pack of hot dogs, that’s when Aubrey knew she’d hit rock bottom. She’d come back home at Deanna’s insistence, accepting her sister’s invitation to live with her family rent free while Aubrey paid off credit card debt and finished the degree she’d been working on for the past two and a half years.
Aubrey wished she could say accepting her sister’s charity had been the lowest point in her life, but if she was being honest, it didn’t even make the top five on her list. Life hadn’t turned out exactly as she’d planned.
“So, you going over there and spelling out how things are going to operate, or do you plan to just walk on eggshells around Sam for the next year?”
The next year?
Was she prepared to remain in Maplesville for an entire year? What if she didn’t have a choice?
Just the thought nearly caused Aubrey to break out in hives. It wasn’t that she didn’t like her hometown, nor did she think she was too good for it. But she was too big for it. She’d always been a big-city girl trapped in a small town. There was just so much world out there to explore, and she wanted to see it all.
Unfortunately, seeing the world cost money, and right now the money in her savings wouldn’t get her much farther than the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Although that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Casinos lined the Gulf Coast. She could possibly land herself a singing gig in one of them.
Oh, for goodness sake. She was allowing herself to become as distracted as Chandra.
“You’re right,” Aubrey said. “I need to get this over with. Better to just lay everything on the table from the start, right?”
“Of course,” Chandra said. “It’ll make things easier between you and Sam.”
Aubrey picked up the drink she’d been sipping and took a gulp, cringing as the alcohol burned a path down her throat. Several curious gazes landed on her as she coughed like a chain smoker and pounded on her chest.
Okay, so that wasn’t the smartest thing I’ve done this week.
“You trying to kill yourself?” Chandra asked.
Well, it would prevent her from having to talk to Sam.
“I’m good,” Aubrey said.
Taking a deep breath, she got up from the table and forced herself to take a step. Then another. And another.
As soon as she started in their direction, Ian and Dale both looked away, but Sam’s eyes remained on her, tracking her every move as she made her way to the other side of the bar. Her heart beat like a timpani within her chest. Unease tightened her skin, making her itch with the urge to cut a quick right and head for the door instead. But she remained on her path forward, until she came upon the booth where the men sat.
Several awkward seconds ticked by before Aubrey broke the silence.
“Uh, hi,” she said.
Dale looked up at her from the booth. “Oh, hey! Aubrey!” he said, his eyes wide with feigned surprise. “When did you get back in town?”
Seriously? Did he really think she would buy his shocked act when he’d been sneaking glances at her table for the past half hour?
“A couple of weeks ago,” she answered, playing along. It was like a bad sitcom come to life.
“Welcome back,” Ian said.
“Thanks,” Aubrey returned. “I hear congratulations are in order. Deanna told me you got married.”
Even as she chatted with his friends, Aubrey was uncomfortably aware of Sam’s every breath. His contemptuous glare stayed on her as he remained silent, sitting next to Ian in the booth.
The butterflies flittering around in her stomach grew more persistent with each moment that passed.
Finally, she looked directly at him and attempted a small smile. “Hi, Sam.”
His expression didn’t change a fraction as he continued to stare at her for several long moments before, without saying a word, he slid out of the booth, threw a ten-dollar bill on the table, and walked away.
Aubrey would trade what little belongings she had for the floor to open up and swallow her right this instant. She glanced at Ian and Dale, and the pity she saw staring back sent her embarrassment skyrocketing.
She never should have come here. Not just to this table. Not just to The Corral. But to Maplesville. She should have followed her personal rule for the past decade and just stayed away.
Aubrey turned, wanting nothing more than to grab her purse and get out of there, but before she could take a step, a massive hand clasped her wrist. Dale gave her arm a light tug before releasing her. He padded the seat next to him and gestured with his head.
“Sit down,” he said. “It’s been a long time.”
Aubrey knew what he was doing, and her heart expanded with gratitude, even as her pride still smarted from Sam’s rebuff.
“It’s okay,” she said with a wan smile. “I should go home.”
He took her by the
forearm and tugged more firmly this time. “Don’t let Sam’s salty ass run you away from here,” Dale said. He dragged the bowl of spicy bar mix Ian had been snacking on to his side of the table. He popped a couple of peanuts in his mouth before pushing the bowl toward her. “So, how’s it been going?”
She looked at him, then at Ian. Ian’s lips lifted in a small smile, and then he winked, something he used to do when he teased her.
Overwhelming relief washed over her. And just like that, she felt at home. She slid into the booth and smiled.
“Okay,” she said. “It’s been going okay.”
Chapter 2
Lifting the pot from the stove, Aubrey carried it over to the sink and drained the Roma tomatoes in the colander her sister had placed there. Then, per Deanna’s instructions, she immersed them one by one into a glass bowl filled with ice water.
“Tell me again why we’re going through all this when a jar of spaghetti sauce would work just fine?” Aubrey asked.
“Because your niece is into ‘clean eating,’” Deanna said, making air quotes. “I’m indulging her for now.”
“You’ve always been good at indulging the whims of teenagers,” Aubrey said with a laugh.
“You’re talking about the week you became a vegetarian when you were in the ninth grade?”
“Until Daddy came home with a box of Popeye’s fried chicken.” She and Deanna both burst into laughter. Aubrey wiped tears of mirth from the corners of her eyes. “I attacked that chicken like I hadn’t eaten in a month.”
“Yeah, well, Felicity is holding out longer than you did. She’s been on this clean-eating kick since Lent. The only reason Paul isn’t complaining is because he’s been on the road so much these last few months.”
“And he keeps that rig stocked with junk food,” Aubrey said. “I ate more honey buns and Cheetos during that week-long drive from the West Coast than I did all of last year.”
As if he’d heard his name, her brother-in-law entered the kitchen and went straight for his wife, wrapping his arms around her from the back and planting a kiss on her neck. His pale skin and ash-blonde hair was in direct contrast to Deanna’s smooth mahogany tone.
Any Time You Need Me Page 2