by Hanna Hart
“Noah?” Nash repeated with a confused frown.
His friend nodded toward the vertical window next to the door. It was a stained-glass window. The panes were golden and turquoise, and in the center was a colorful rendition of Noah’s Ark floating in the sea. Tiny panes of colored glass surrounded the depiction like a frame.
Nash ignored it and knocked harder on the front door, impatient and now annoyed that his good deed was going to go unnoticed.
“Forget it,” he said after several more minutes of waiting. “Let’s head back.”
Just as they began walking back toward the car, Nash heard a voice call out, “Hey, wait!” and he turned around to see a woman running across the lawn to meet them.
She had long brown hair and wore jean shorts, rain boots, and a long-sleeved black sweater.
“Sorry,” she called out. “I was out in the barn, and I didn’t hear ya’ll.”
“Oh, hey!” Wesley said, all smiles as he began walking back up the lawn to meet the property owner. “We’re from next door.”
“Oh yeah?” she asked with some amusement, jutting a hip out.
“Yeah,” his friend confirmed. “We were just wondering if you’d heard about the tornado reports?”
Nash had one foot in the car, still a fair distance from the pair. He could faintly hear their conversation but exited the vehicle completely when he saw Wesley wave him over.
He smiled brightly, wanting to make a good impression on his neighbor, but as he walked up, his expression fell, and he realized that his neighbor wasn’t a stranger at all.
It was his ex.
Chapter Four
Sophia
Sophia desperately needed to install something in the barn that would alert her when someone rang the bell.
They made things like that, right?
Some sort of secondary notification machine, or maybe an app?
In the course of the two weeks she’d been at the new farm property, she’d missed deliveries twice because she hadn’t heard the bell from the rest of the farm.
Luckily, in this case, she’d been headed to the garage when she caught sight of two men walking across her lawn.
One, a tall brunette, walked back toward an obnoxiously raised red truck with his hands in his pockets.
The other, a fair-haired man who looked to be in his late twenties, turned to wave at her when she called.
He walked up to her and introduced himself as Wesley Knox. He had light blond hair that was so fair that the hairs of his brows were nearly imperceptible.
Wesley reminded her of the famous country star Phoenix Brooks; tall and lanky with shaggy, light hair.
He was incredibly cute, and she thanked the stars that she didn’t miss the bell.
“I sort of knew the owners of this house,” Wesley said in a warm, friendly manner. He nodded up toward her front porch. “Mr. and Mrs. Willis!”
“Yeah, that’s right!” she said with a smile.
“Anyhow,” he continued, gesturing behind him toward his friend, who was now coming up the driveway.
“Me and my friend Nash were talking about how this place is…” he trailed off, his eyes going skyward as he thought of a polite way to say your house is old and rickety. “Well, everyone’s been talking about the tornado warning, and we wondered if you wanted us to help you reinforce the property? We brought some braces just to make sure that you’d be covered against any strong winds. Stuff like that.”
Sophia’s heart began to pound hard in her chest, and she felt her face go red.
“That’s completely up to you, though,” Wesley continued awkwardly. “I probably wouldn’t be crazy about two strangers coming onto my property and nailing holes in my pretty house, so if you’re not interested…I mean,” he trailed off. “We just thought we’d ask since we’ve been spending the last couple of days doing tornado prep on the ranch next door.”
Sophia wasn’t purposely silent, nor was she offended by Wesley’s kind gesture to protect her admittedly old house from the wind warnings.
But as soon as she heard the name Nash come out of Wesley’s mouth, she felt like she couldn’t breathe.
Looking behind him, she could confirm that yes, the Nash he spoke of was the same Nash she’d dated five years ago.
As Nash walked up, Sophia looked him over. She was in shock, but she tried hard not to let it show.
She set a hand on her hip and tilted her head to the side. She forced a charming smile as she met his eyes and said, “Nash,” by way of greeting.
She briefly wondered if he came purposely to see her, but any thoughts that he’d known he’d find her living at the white farmhouse disappeared as she saw his face go sullen.
“Sawyer,” he said, instinctively using her last name to greet her just like he always used to do.
Wesley frowned and looked between the two with amused confusion. “You guys know each other?”
Nash seemed happy to ignore the question. Typical.
Sophia nodded and decided to fill in the blank for the poor guy. “We knew each other when we were just teenagers,” she simplified, preferring not to get into the whole ordeal.
It was true, at any rate.
The pair met at nineteen, dated when she was twenty-two, and broke up two years later. They hadn’t spoken in three years, and she’d heard a rumor that he got hitched, but looking down, she didn’t see a ring.
“I didn’t know you moved,” she said, still feeling lightheaded.
Seeing him made her feel like she’d just been caught doing something wrong. Suddenly, she regretted every decision she’d made that day, from what clothes to wear to her decision to go without her usual cat-eye makeup.
Nash let out a small “humph” but didn’t respond.
Wesley could clearly feel the tension in the air, looking between them once more before putting on a wide smile and asking, “Well, ain’t this a small world.” Then he gestured toward her windows and said, “You’ve got a beautiful house here.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“I’d hate to see the storm do any damage to it,” he added and proceeded to detail the simple ways they could fortify her place against the storm.
She declined at first, sensing Nash’s discomfort with the situation, but the more Wesley insisted, the more it sounded like a good idea.
“Will it leave much damage?” she asked, gesturing toward the nail guns they were pulling out of the truck.
“Ah,” Wesley said, his voice going high as he considered it. “A little bit, but we can patch those up in no time. Besides, better to have a few little holes around the place than come home to a pile of rubble, right?”
“Fair enough,” she laughed. “What about you?” she asked Nash. “You still game to fix up my house, knowin’ that it’s mine?”
Nash speared her with a hard stare. “No, not really,” he snapped.
She smiled.
He still looked as perfect as ever.
“Do what you like,” she said with a shrug. “If you want to do the work, I’d be grateful. If not, I’m willing to risk it.”
She made sure to address Wesley when she said that, not wanting to give Nash the satisfaction of her potential gratitude.
“No,” Wesley said at the very same time Nash let out a stubborn, “Fine by me.”
“Fine,” she said with a dismissive shrug. “Thanks for stopping by.”
“What?” Wesley said, frowning between the two of them. He gave his friend a pleading look, then turned back to Sophia and said, “Don’t risk the storm. Please? We’d be happy to help.”
“I wouldn’t,” Nash laughed stubbornly.
“Yes, you would,” Wesley insisted, his eyes going wide. “Because that’s why we came here, remember? To be helpful neighbors.”
“What’s goin’ on?” Lauren asked, emerging from the house with Imogene in her arms.
“Mama!” Imogene exclaimed happily, extending her arms out to Sophia.
Sophia took h
er into her arm, balancing the girl on her hip and looking back to Wesley, who had a look of adoration on his face.
“Aw, this is your daughter?” he asked.
“This is Imogene,” she said with a smile, watching as Wesley reached a hand toward her.
“Hi there, Imogene,” he said. “You’ve got a great name.”
“Thanks,” her daughter said shyly, assessing the man.
“I think so too,” Sophia added. “But I’m sort of biased.”
“How old are you?” he asked, and her daughter answered that she was two years old. Nearly two and a half.
That half always mattered to kids, and Sophia hardly understood why. Just wait until you were older, she wanted to say. At twenty-seven, she was hard-pressed to tell someone she would be twenty-eight at the end of the year. It felt like some deep, dark secret.
Sophia pointedly avoided Nash’s eyes, but she could feel his gaze on her.
Her heart was pounding furiously enough that she handed Imogene to her sister-in-law and asked Lauren to take her back inside.
When she turned back around, Wesley was headed toward the red vehicle. When he reached the shiny red truck bed he announced, “Well then, it’s settled! We’re going to start renovations on the house ASAP. We can’t have you running around here with your little girl, risking being swallowed up by the storm.”
It was clear the blond wasn’t going to let it go, and she was thankful for his help. She’d seen the tornado warnings across social media and on the news, and frankly, her only plan had been to hole up in the basement until the storm was over.
She brought the boys out drinks as they worked and made chit-chat with Wesley as they nailed barricades to the windows.
Sophia learned a lot about him while they were at her house. He was twenty-nine, had a younger sister he adored, lived in a three-bedroom bungalow in the country, and worked at the billionaire ranch next door as a horse trainer.
He’d also mentioned how Nash didn’t just work at the ranch; he owned it.
Sophia felt suddenly embarrassed. She’d heard about the Havenview ranches, but she’d never connected the name with her ex-boyfriend.
And if it was true, which it clearly was, that meant that her ex was rolling in billions of dollars.
Billions.
She tried to put it out of her head, focusing on her conversation with Wesley.
He seemed like a nice guy. Very nice. It was only that he was friends with Nash that made her think twice about befriending the man.
The two men worked on her house for two hours before calling it quits. It was nearly seven, and she offered to buy them dinner, but both declined.
Nash hadn’t said a word to her since they started work. It wasn’t until Wesley began loading the truck back up with the supplies they hadn’t used that Nash finally spoke.
“You have a daughter?” he said quietly, not looking at her.
She sat on her porch steps and looked up at him, the setting sun shining in her eyes. He stood, leaned against the white banister of the stairs, arms crossed.
“That’s right,” she said, daring him to comment.
He stared out across the yard. Her eyes traced the familiar curves of his face, and she felt something like a sick flutter in her stomach.
She wondered if he would demean her for getting pregnant so soon after they broke up or if he would open up old wounds, but he did neither.
“Cute,” he said.
And just like that, whatever battle he had been wanting to have with her seemed to disappear.
“She is,” she agreed.
Silence passed between them, and she heard Nash let out a begrudging sigh.
He sat down on the step next to her and rested his head against his hand, elbow on his leg as he said, “So…I guess we’re neighbors now.”
“I guess so,” she agreed. “Let’s not be nightmare neighbors, okay?”
He let out a breath of a laugh. “I hadn’t been planning on it. I’d been planning on being a nice neighbor. You know, the kind that wastes his afternoon helping you patch up your shack?”
“Hey!” she said, slapping him on the arm. “It isn’t a shack! It’s classic.”
“It’s a dump.”
Sophia rolled her eyes. “It’s beautiful, and it’s going to be even more amazing once I finish all of my renovations on it. It’s just going to take a while, that’s all.”
“I’m sure.”
“It’s going to have character. Not like your dime-a-dozen cowboy resort,” she teased.
“Hey,” he said, mimicking her tone from earlier.
“I don’t want to fight with you, Nash.”
“But?”
She laughed. “But you make it easy.”
“Right back at you,” he said, then smirked.
He stood as Wesley came back up to the porch. She thanked them for his hard work, marveling at how strange it was to see him again. How strange this whole day was.
The random pop-in to protect her house from the storm.
The run-in with her ex.
The realization that Nash was now her neighbor.
“I’ll be seeing you around, Sawyer,” he said as he walked back to his truck.
And just like that, they were gone.
She couldn’t believe the strangeness of it. She felt like she was on eggshells for the rest of the day.
See, Nash wasn’t just an ex.
He was the ex. The one that got away. The love that she would compare all other loves to.
To properly express what Nash was to her would be to use a word that made Sophia feel like a terrible cliché.
He was her soulmate.
He knew the core of her. He knew her thoughts before she said them aloud. He was, as the Psalms put it, “The one whom her soul adored.”
She hated how trite it sounded, but it was true. Once upon a time, he had completed her.
Their breakup left them both with hurt feelings. You don’t love someone that fiercely and then feel indifferent about breaking it off.
For that same reason, they could never stay friends. They hadn’t even tried.
Seeing him now brought a welt of emotion into her throat, but she buried it.
She had gotten very good at that over the years.
Chapter Five
Nash
Nash got way more than he bargained for going to the little farm next door.
The odds that his ex-girlfriend was neighboring his ranch seemed almost insane.
He hadn't seen her in over three years and had no desire to do so. Sophia Sawyer was like a bitter beer. The idea of her sounded so good, but the reality left a bad taste in his mouth.
The last he heard, Sophia had moved away from Texas. Now she was living in the same neighborhood as him?
He wasn’t suggesting she had followed him to Tillsonburg or sought him out in any way. Nash was probably the last person Sophia wanted to see.
But it was odd.
“So that was your ex-girlfriend?” Wesley asked as they got back into Nash's big red truck.
Nash pulled in a breath, slamming his door shut and staring a moment at the oak door of the property before pulling the truck into reverse.
“Yep,” he said.
“Wow. How long did you date for?”
Nash shrugged. “Couple of years. It was forever ago.”
“Did you know she was moving to Tillsonburg?”
Nash blinked rapidly and then offered his friend a sarcastic smile. “Does it look like I knew?”
“No, I guess not,” Wesley laughed and shook his head. “She's uh…she's a firecracker.”
“That's Sophia.”
Wesley reached a hand back, awkwardly twisting it to be able to scratch his back. There was a beat of silence, and Nash leaned forward to turn the radio up. Just as a classic AC/DC mantra came pouring out of the speakers, Wesley began to speak again.
“That must've been awkward for you,” he said.
“I have no des
ire to repeat it anytime soon if that's what you mean,” he said, his fingers still tentatively touching the volume knob for the radio. He glanced over at Wesley to see if he was going to speak again and noticed a peculiar expression on his best friend's face. “Why are you asking?”
“No, I'm just curious,” Wesley responded quickly, leaning back in his chair. “At least she's protected from the storm.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Nash waved him off with humor.
As soon as he caught sight of Sophia, he wanted to spin on his heel and leave, but once he saw her little girl come out of the house, he knew he couldn't just leave them there, unprotected from the storm.
For all he knew, her husband or boyfriend or whatever would come home later that day and laugh about the two chumps who fixed his house up for free.
But no…from everything he’d heard, she’d moved there alone. Everyone who talked about the “new girl” all said she was single. Then again, nobody had mentioned her having a daughter, either.
Picturing Sophia as a mother was strange to Nash. He had never imagined her in a maternal role. She’d always seemed so wild to him, so untamed. He knew—he’d tried desperately to rein her for in two years.
His thoughts twisted to Kenzie, as they often did, and her desire to have children. He wondered what their child would have looked like. Maybe they’d have a boy with his strong jaw and her honey-brown skin.
A part of him regretted not having a baby with Kenzie. If he had of just done it, maybe she would still be alive. Maybe it would have changed everything.
Or maybe nothing would have changed. But even if nothing did, at least he would still have a piece of her in their child.
Nash banished the thought from his mind.
He didn’t want to think about Kenzie—or Sophia, for that matter.
But as the days went on, it became clear that Nash wasn't about to be free of Sophia since Wesley brought her up every spare chance he could, asking again how long ago they had dated and if Nash had any hard feelings toward her.
“Hard feelings?” he repeated, testing the words out as the two of them sat at the ranch bar for a drink. “No, not really. I just got sick of chasing her around.”