Kaitlyn Rice - Renegade

Tracy’s early-morning stint on her exercise bike had been unnecessary. Her heart had been getting a rather rousing workout ever since her shower. She picked up her tea and took a long swig.

When he reached the swing set, Riley looped an arm over the top beam and ogled her with one side of his mouth tilted up. “Criminy. You’ve grown up, little girl.”

“Guess that happens to everyone.” She drank again to wet her throat with the warm liquid, then clutched the carafe against her pounding chest. “I’m not a little girl anymore.”

His gaze shot down her body, and back up. “I’ll say. What’s it been, about a million years?”

The man was too hunky for his own good, and she was tempted to mimic the obvious way he’d checked her out. Instead, she trained her eyes on a lock of hair falling across his forehead. “I was almost sixteen when you left, and I’m twenty-nine now. You were the math whiz.”

“My question was purely rhetorical,” he said. “I’m perfectly aware of how long it’s been. I was the one banished from town, remember?”

“What brings you back now?”

He squinted toward the hills. “There’s no reason to stay away now that Otto is gone.”

“Are you visiting your grandma?”

“Not exactly.” He glanced back over his shoulder. “I’m renovating her house. I’ve just come back from the hardware store.”

Tracy studied the dilapidated two-story he’d grown up in. For at least half a century, that house had sat next to her parents’ limestone cottage. The proximity of the two adjacent, tree-lined lots in the country had fostered strong friendships—and stronger feuds.

For years, Tracy’s mom and stepdad had tried to help Otto and Vanessa Collins aspire to better living. Until the night their son had lured Tracy’s underage sister away from home, and changed everyone’s lives in the process.

“I don’t think it’ll take too much to make it livable,” Riley said, turning around again.

Tracy drank her tea and kept her eyes on the house. It definitely needed work, but she’d thought the Collins family would try to sell it as a fixer upper.

When she realized the significance of what Riley had said, Tracy’s tea seemed to curdle in her throat. She choked out, “You aren’t planning to live out here, are you?”

Riley’s eyes turned dark before he averted them. He began to peel flakes of paint from the top beam. “That makes the most sense to me,” he said as he flicked a piece off his thumbnail. “I can work on the place easier if I’m living in it.”

“And then?”

At her question, the gaze he aimed in her direction was so intense that she turned her eyes away, pretending interest in a pudgy robin hopping across the yard. In her peripheral vision, Tracy noted that he had crossed his arms over his chest. The seeming force of his will eventually caused her to look up. “And then I’ll stop working on it.”

“And keep living here?”

He shrugged.

Tracy shook her head. “You think you can waltz back into Kirkwood now and stay?”

“I don’t see why not.”

Tracy sipped her tea once more and realized the last of it was bitter. She unscrewed the thermos lid and poured the liquid onto the grass, then set the container back on the swing seat. Lifting a hand to her mouth, she clamped the nail of her pinkie finger between her teeth.

When he reached out his hand to pull hers from her mouth, she jerked away.

“Don’t get all bent out of shape,” he said. “I was only trying to stop you from biting your nails.”

“Just don’t touch me,” she said, and her loss of composure sent her eyes careering down his body, over the ribbed white undershirt that clung to a muscled chest and revealed, when his arms were raised to the cross-beam, an inch of enticing bare skin at his flat abdomen, just above the low-slung jeans.

She pulled her shocked eyes up to his glittering ones. The realization that she was drooling over her family’s nemesis didn’t help at all. Clenching her hands into fists, Tracy said, “Otto wasn’t the only one who wanted you gone.”

“Oh, really?”

She held his gaze.

“Did you want me gone?” This was said in the same patient voice he’d used when she was a scrawny girl and he was her not-so-secret crush.

“I was a kid. What did I know?”

“You knew me. Did you try to stand up for me?”

She started picking the paint off the swing set, too, thinking back to the day she’d found out Riley was gone. The phone calls had come first. The high school geometry teacher had called the Gilbert house, looking for Tracy’s older sister, Karen. Riley’s basketball coach had called his house. Neither teenager had made it to school that day, the teachers reported. And in retrospect, no one in either family could remember seeing them the night before.

Within a half hour, the two families had discovered empty closets, missing personal items and not a word of explanation.

Everyone had looked to Tracy then, of course. Karen had been seeing Riley for a couple of months, but Tracy had been his buddy since days of training wheels and tree houses. None of the parents seemed to know how hurt Tracy had been by the first betrayal—when Karen had sought Riley’s attention and he had all too willingly given it.

They didn’t know how left out Tracy had felt every time her best friend parked near the train trestle to do who-knew-what with her sister.

They’d expected Tracy to know everything.

She hadn’t known anything.

Somehow, that seemed to be the biggest betrayal of all.

“Did you defend me?” Riley prompted, grabbing her hand.

She probably would have if she hadn’t been nursing a broken heart. She tried to release her hand again, but he held it firmly, confiscating her attention at the same time.

“How could I?” she asked. “You left with Karen before she finished high school. Otto said—”

“Since when would you believe anything my father said?”

Being close to Riley tangled Tracy’s insides like one of Claus’s pilfered balls of yarn. She needed to escape. Wiggling her hand loose, she said, “Since you proved him right.”

“The people of this never-never land sent me out on the plank before they heard a single word in my defense.”

Tracy edged past him, toward the fence. “You had no business taking my sister to California with you.”

“Maybe she was ready to leave,” Riley said from behind her. “And maybe I was a convenient ticket out.”

“People haven’t forgotten.”

“Then people need to enrich their lives.”

He sounded closer. Tracy turned her head and saw that he was following her across the grass with her forgotten thermos. She scrambled over the fence and turned around. “My mom’s health has been fragile,” she said. “I don’t want her to be upset.”

“Don’t worry,” Riley said with a smile that seemed too sincere to be believable. “I was planning to walk over and visit your mom and stepdad later this afternoon.”

“You can’t.”

He shifted his weight. “I’ve been gone for over thirteen years and I haven’t seen your sister in just as long. Your parents will listen to reason.”

“No, I mean they’re not there,” Tracy said. “They’re on vacation. Dad took Mom to visit relatives.”

Riley gave her a long assessing look, followed by a nod. “Gran said your mom had been in the hospital. Is she okay?”

Tracy felt comfort touch her heart as Riley seemed to slide back into his old role as friend. Until she watched him step closer and recognized how easily he could hop the fence and catch her waist between his potent-looking hands.

The thought was provocative in more ways than one.

She stepped back. “Mom had a scare with pneumonia, but she’s better now.”