Susan Wiggs - Return to Willow Lake

Sonnet grabbed a safety pole and clenched her jaw. Her stomach turned to a ball of ice. You made me drop the key, she silently seethed. Prepare to die.

His name on the screen reminded her that she should have taken him off her contact list months ago. Unfortunately, that didn’t mean she could erase him from her mind. She used to look forward with pleasure to his text messages, but now the thought of him made her shudder.

Given where she was now, her relationship with Orlando moving ahead, Zach could ruin everything. Having sex with him the night of Daisy’s wedding had been the ultimate boneheaded move on both their parts, and she bloody well knew it. As soon as she’d floated back down to earth, as soon as the pink cloud of champagne and wedding bliss wore off, she had felt a terrible twist of foreboding in the pit of her stomach. In one foolish act, they had changed their friendship irrevocably, and not for the better. Her father had just introduced her to Mr. Wonderful; she needed to focus on Orlando, not get drunk with Zach Alger.

She hadn’t spoken to him since. He’d called a bunch at first, sent text messages, and she finally texted him back and said, Don’t call me. Don’t text me. Can we just leave it at that?

His calls had stopped, and she told herself she was relieved. There was nothing to say. What were they going to say? Sorry I screwed up a beautiful friendship? Have a nice life?

Willfully she pulled her mind away from the lost phone and focused on the more immediate problem. The missing key. Now, there was a boneheaded move for you. When your boyfriend finally gives you a key to his amazing midtown east apartment, losing it immediately is a bad move. Sure, it was an accident, but the symbolism was hard to ignore.

On top of that, she was going to be late. Both her father and Orlando were sticklers for promptness, yet somehow she’d fallen behind. And now she didn’t even have a way to send Orlando a text.

Her stomach clenching, she found a vacant seat and sat down. Across from her sat a teenage girl and her mother. Sonnet studied their reflection in the window glass of the subway car. The two of them looked alike, except for the way the mother’s Nordic coloring and blond hair contrasted sharply with the girl’s nappy hair and café-au-lait skin. She wore her mixed heritage like an ill-fitting garment. Sonnet related to that kind of discomfort because once, not so long ago, she’d been that girl—biracial and wondering just where she belonged.

The girl had her iPhone turned up too loud, and through the earbuds, Sonnet recognized the thud and angry tones of Jezebel, the latest hip-hop sensation. The chart-topping song was called “Don’t Make a Ho into a Housewife” or some such nonsense. Though she was no fan of the genre, Sonnet was aware of Jezebel from the scandal blogs and magazines. She was the latest of many to be doing time for something or other.

The girl listening to the music looked angry, too. Maybe she was having a bad day. Maybe she was ticked off at her mom. Maybe she was wondering why her dad only got in touch with her on Christmas and on her birthday, and half the time he forgot the birthday. Maybe she was trying to figure out what she was supposed to do in order to get his attention.

In the window glass, her gaze met the girl’s. Both glanced quickly away, perhaps recognizing in each other a kindred spirit.

You’ll be fine, Sonnet wanted to reassure the girl. Just like I’m fine. Fine.

As she approached her stop on the subway, Sonnet tried to come up with something plausible to tell Orlando about the key. Saying she’d dropped it on the subway sounded so…so careless. And she did care. Having access to his apartment, his private space, was a huge step for them as a couple. It meant something, something big.

The very thought of it made her heart skip a beat. To Sonnet, this was not a pleasant sensation.

* * *

Zach Alger stared down at the screen of his iPhone. He shouldn’t have sent that text to Sonnet. He really, really shouldn’t have sent it. What was he thinking? He wasn’t thinking.

Maybe being in church affected his judgment. Although he wasn’t in church, attending services. He was doing wedding prep work at Heart of the Mountains Church, getting ready for a big video job here. So at the moment, it didn’t count.

He wrote down a couple of measurements—they were cramming too many people into the sanctuary, but he’d deal—and then paused to check his phone. Good, no reply. He scrolled to email, and his queue was full of work stuff. Endless work stuff, sandwiched between a few notes from women. Yeah, he was “dating.” In a town like this, with a population that couldn’t fill a high school stadium, that simply meant he was keeping his options open. On the menu today—he could go to the climbing gym with Lannie, and there were worse things than staring at her cute butt while holding the belaying rope. Or, he could go to Viv’s for dinner. She was a sous-chef at the Apple Tree Inn, and she had trained at the Cordon Bleu. Third option—an open invitation from Shakti, who practiced a form of yoga she liked to call Yoga Sutra.

His buddies on his mountain biking team envied him the attention from women. And hell yeah, he loved women. He loved their soft hair and their curvy bodies, the flowery scent of them and the lilt of their laughter. He loved them all, yet to his dismay, he wanted only one. And the one he wanted was Lady Insanity herself, Sonnet Romano.

No. Correction. She was not the one he wanted. She was the one he wanted to avoid.

Contacting her had been a bad lapse, and it was convenient to foist the blame on something other than himself. He hadn’t spoken to her since that night. Yeah, that night. But he’d felt compelled to contact her today because something weird was going on. After the epic night of sex, he’d been pretty sure it was their secret.

Yet now he was not so sure.

His friend Daphne, aka the ace internet mole, had alerted him this morning that something was up. A web-based rumor mill had published a nasty little bit hinting that the daughter of a certain candidate for the U.S. Senate was into, ahem, post-wedding hookups.

Politics was a dirty business. In the race for public office, nothing was off-limits, not even the candidate’s family. In making a run for national office, Laurence Jeffries was putting everyone in his orbit in the spotlight. Zach wondered if the guy had thought about that when he’d decided to go for it.

Zach’s own father—still serving time for defrauding the city of Avalon—certainly hadn’t taken Zach into consideration. Sometimes, Zach thought that was what tied him to this little town, long after he should have left. He had something to prove; he wanted to show people that he wasn’t anything like his father.

Upon seeing the link to the hookup story, Zach had impulsively sent Sonnet a text message. A heads-up; it was the least he could do. He didn’t actually worry too much on his own behalf. Thanks to his father, Zach was beyond the point of embarrassment. But Sonnet had always been super sensitive about her reputation.

Yet the moment he’d hit Send, he started wondering if the rumor mill had simply made a lucky guess, or if they really knew something. Or if there had been a different wedding…and a different guy.

He batted at a fly buzzing around his head and got back to work.

She probably wouldn’t respond. Ever since the wedding—the post-wedding-champagne-fueled sex they’d enjoyed—Sonnet had been in hiding. To be honest, Zach was okay with what had happened—hell, he’d liked it, but Sonnet insisted they weren’t a match. No way they were a match, despite the mind-blowing boathouse encounter, and she claimed they were both old enough to realize it. She wanted them to go back to being friends, the way they’d been since kindergarten.