“Why are you such a mess?”

I snorted and flipped my tangled hair over my shoulder. “I got caught in the rain on my lunch break and almost ran some poor woman over in my haste to get back to work. I can’t believe no one told me I looked like a drowned rat all day.” I rolled my eyes and went to move another step or two back from him but he caught my wrist in his hand and tugged me closer.

My lungs stopped working and my heart fell out of my chest and landed at his feet when he took his free hand and ran his thumb along the delicate curve below one of my eyes where all my eyeliner had retreated to.

“This actually looks familiar. I remember the first time you snuck makeup from one of your girlfriends at school and couldn’t get it off.” He repeated the process on the other eye and I had to suck in a breath out of desperation because his face was starting to get blurry from lack of oxygen to my brain. “You didn’t know the stuff was waterproof and spent an hour trying to scrub it off with the hose in the backyard because you knew your dad would lose his shit if he caught you with it on. You just ended up looking like a soggy raccoon.”

I remembered the incident just as clearly as he seemed to, only I was having a hard time thinking straight because his thumb was now dancing across the high arch of my cheekbone and skipped even lower to glance across the ruby I wore right above my lip.

“You ran home and asked Maria what to do. She sent you back with olive oil and saved the day.” I gave him a lopsided grin. “It wasn’t too long after that that I started wearing as much makeup as I could cake on my face just to get under his skin. Some habits stuck with me, I guess.”

I saw his chest shudder as he took a deep breath and something dark moved across his sky-blue eyes. He opened his mouth like he was going to say something else then changed his mind and snapped it closed. He dropped my wrist like it was on fire and took a step back from me. I didn’t bother to try and hide the disappointment that his retreat caused.

“So talk to me about the store.”

I sighed a little, but if he wanted to talk business I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. At least he was carrying on a conversation with me.

I ran over the basic ideas I had given Nash earlier. I told him that I really thought their clients would love the opportunity to represent not only the shop but their favorite artists and I was happy that he seemed to agree. He told me his idea about offering prints and graphic pieces of art to sell as well as apparel and I had to admit I was impressed with his entrepreneurial mind. He had always been a lot more than a pretty face and a jock. I was happy to see he hadn’t lost that as he had grown into adulthood.

We tossed ideas back and forth for twenty minutes or so and I told him he was in charge of wrangling Rule and Nash because he knew them better than I did in order to get them to give me designs I could use. He readily agreed and then we fell into an awkward silence as it was obviously time to go. He told me he would have something for me by the end of the following week and I nodded in agreement. We turned in different directions, him toward the stairs and me back toward the light switch on the wall, when he suddenly said my name in a very strangled tone.

“Salem . . .”

I looked at him over my shoulder and lifted a brow at the intent look on his handsome face.

“Yeah?”

His boots clattered on the wooden floor as he stalked toward me. His mouth was in a tight line and his eyes were bleeding blue fire at me.

“What is that?”

He walked right up to me. He didn’t stop until his chest was almost pressed into my back. For someone who had actively avoided me for weeks and weeks and didn’t seem thrilled to have to share the same space as me, he sure didn’t have any kind of problem at all putting his hands on me.

He collected my heavy fall of two-tone hair in his hands and pulled it all up and off the bare expanse of my shoulders and neck.

From one shoulder to the other I had a field of Texas bluebonnets and in between all the flowers were tiny little sparrows. It was a big tattoo, bright and pretty, that took up a lot of real estate on my skin and in my heart. The flowers and birds were so lifelike it looked like a photograph not a painting made of flesh and ink. It was the first tattoo I had ever had done and it had withstood the test of time pretty well over the years. Normally it was hidden by my hair or whatever I was wearing for the day, but with this shirt, the entire thing was on display and it was no wonder he was looking at the ink like it was going to jump off my skin and wrap him in memories.

“I got it done as soon as I left Loveless.” My voice was a little shaky even though I meant to sound defiant. The flowers were the exact same color as the heartbreak in his blue eyes that day I left.

“I drew that for you.” He sounded mad. He sounded hurt. I couldn’t blame him for either.

“I know you did, Rowdy. I might have had to leave Texas, but it was never my intention to make you think I was leaving you and Poppy as well.”

His finger traced along the field of flowers and he said more to himself than to me, “You never thought it was weird I liked to draw. Everyone else always told me to focus on football. Everyone said I was going to go pro, so I shouldn’t waste my time with studying or messing around with art. You always told me to do what I wanted. You were the only one that ever said it was okay that I was really good at more than one thing. I drew this picture for you for your birthday when you turned sixteen.”

I was going to jump out of my skin and then I was going to jump him if he didn’t stop stroking me like that. I let out a shuddering breath.

“It was beautiful. The gesture and the picture. You always were extremely talented and I thought your art should be on display. I never forgot you, Rowdy. I always took you with me wherever I ended up.”

He said my name again, only this time he sounded confused and lost. I gasped a little as his hands suddenly gripped my shoulders and he spun me around. Before my mind could catch up to what was going on, he was backing me up toward that fun-house mirror. When my bare shoulders hit the chilly glass I gasped, which worked out perfectly for him because he suddenly dropped his head and clamped his mouth over mine.

My brain might not have known what to do with his sudden switch in demeanor toward me but my body had no trouble responding. My back arched. My arms reached up to twine around his neck. My ni**les got hard and my mouth did its very best to seal itself to his forever. My tongue twisted around his and I whimpered as his hands slipped around my waist to pull me up higher on the toes of my heels in order to match his impressive height. Thank God I typically wore ridiculous shoes, or getting all the good stuff lined up would have been impossible.

It wasn’t a sweet kiss. It wasn’t a delicate kiss. I could taste the past and his resentment in it. I could feel that he was chasing down ghosts as his teeth nipped a little harder than they should have along the plush curve of my bottom lip. None of that mattered, though, because this was Rowdy and to me he felt like everything that had ever been good or made me happy in this whole entire world.

His hands were a little too hard, his breathing a little too fast, and when I leaned even more fully into him I could feel that his heartbeat was erratic and unsteady. I was trying to climb up him, trying to get inside of him, and just when I got my hands up to the back of his head so I could pull him even more fully to me, my phone decided to ring from where it was stashed in the back pocket of my shorts.

Carl Perkins was singing “Honey Don’t,” and while I would have been glad to ignore it and continue kissing the boy I had always wanted to kiss in another way than good-bye, I couldn’t because it was finally my sister calling me back.

I dropped back to my feet and let my arms drop from around Rowdy’s neck. I dug the phone out and hit the touch screen to answer the call.

“Poppy?”

As soon as my sister’s name fell off of my lips Rowdy’s entire behavior changed. Dark shutters fell across his pretty eyes and he stepped deliberately away from me. Without another word he turned on his boot heel and headed for the stairs. He didn’t say good-bye, didn’t look back. There was no acknowledgment that we had been involved in a very serious lip lock just seconds before. He just vanished, leaving me all keyed up and with more questions than I had had before. Damn him and damn the past that seemed to be standing in the way of where I wanted to be.

CHAPTER 5

Rowdy

IT WAS SO HARD to keep the memories at bay once the door they had all been closed behind was flung open. One after another they chased me across all of my waking hours and danced behind my eyelids at night.

I remembered the first time Poppy ran across the yard between our houses and asked me if I wanted to play. I was so used to being overlooked, so used to being forgotten and alone, that I almost ran in the other direction. She was so cute—all knobby knees and long pigtails. She smiled at me and told me we could be friends forever and I remembered even at ten years old thinking I never wanted to be without her smile and her kindness.

I remembered Salem being patient and funny as two kids trailed after her like she was the queen of the world. She never tired of the questions, of the attention, of fixing up my hurt feelings when I had a bad day at school—which there were a lot of—and she never looked at me like she found me lacking even when everyone else in my little world was trying to guide me in a direction I wasn’t sure I wanted to go. She was always my biggest cheerleader and it never mattered if it was because I scored a touchdown or drew her a picture.

Along with all those memories came the other ones, the ones that made it hard to breathe and made my head throb and my heart hurt.

I remembered Poppy and her big, sad eyes telling me she would never love me the way I loved her, that we would always be from two different worlds¸ and therefore it would never work out. I literally put my young and soft heart in her hands and she had chucked it back at me like it was nothing. I had had a crush on her—was so sure that I’d loved her—for what felt like forever. I just knew she was my one. She was steady. She was unfailingly kind and generous. She was lovely inside and out, but to her I wasn’t enough. I didn’t have the right background, the right upbringing, and in all honesty the right skin color for her to ever be able to bring me home and tell her dad she was spending the rest of her life with me. I would have given her the world—only she didn’t want it—or me.

I also remembered standing in the driveway watching Salem and her dad scream at each other while she threw all her things into the back of a rusted-out Belvedere and her telling him point-blank she was never going to step foot in his house or in Loveless again. She was my best friend. She was the one that always made everything better, and even at fifteen I remembered thinking I would never make it the rest of the way through high school without her. How was I supposed to pick which college I was going to go to? I was going to tell my foster parents, Poppy, everyone, that I didn’t want to play football, I wanted to paint and draw. I wanted an art scholarship not an athletic one and Salem was the only one that would support me in that. I needed her to give me the strength to fight for it, but in the blink of an eye she was gone.

She saw me where I was lurking and got back out of that car so that she could give me a kiss—a real kiss—on the lips and I remembered she tasted salty and sweet because she was crying as she told me good-bye. It was my first kiss and the memory of it was tied to watching yet another person I cared about leaving me on my own. She tried to tell me she would write, call, send a carrier pigeon, but I just walked away from her because I couldn’t listen to it and I knew she was lying. Once she was gone, I wouldn’t matter anymore, which had proven to be true.

Now all those memories were tangling and colliding with the new ones I had of the way grown-up Salem felt pressed against me. The memory of the way my dick twitched when I saw her standing at the top of the stairs that first day she got hired to work at the shop. There was the irritating remembrance of the way she burned as hot as the sun when I touched her and that she still tasted salty and sweet, but now I was old enough to want to know if she tasted that way everywhere on her body, not just on her pouty lips. I couldn’t stop seeing the way her dark eyes gleamed like polished onyx, or stop thinking about the way her full mouth felt better than anything I could ever remember feeling, and the fact she tasted like chocolate and history in the best and worst way was haunting me every minute of every day. I knew that if her phone hadn’t gone off I was a split second away from trying to get my hands in the waistband of those short-shorts she had been wearing, and even closer to tugging the shoulder of her sexy top the rest of the way off. I wanted to touch all that caramel-colored skin and put my mouth on the pointy tips of her br**sts that I could feel poking into my chest.