“I just want—” He cut off so he wouldn’t allow the desperation he felt to color his words. “It’s a small town,” he finally said. “I’ll find out anyway.”
She cast another look at the stone and then focused on him again. “Don’t,” she said again. “If I find out you’ve searched this out, I’ll never speak to you again.”
He had no doubt she meant what she said. Farrah always had. The horseback riding in the parade she said she’d never do proved it. So what if he’d found an old picture of her as Island Park’s rodeo queen? Leading the princesses on their horses, that glittery tiara on her head? She said she wouldn’t do it—and she hadn’t.
Hot, electrical pulses shot through his body when she touched his fingers, then his arm. “Please don’t make me do that.” Her voice wafted across the inches between them, and he was still trying to figure out what she meant and how to get his muscles to stop twitching from her electrifying touch when she stepped past him and strode away.
After several moments, he got his body back in order long enough to turn around. Farrah had already ate up the distance to her car, and she slid behind the wheel of her sleek, black sedan and put on a pair of oversized sunglasses that only made her more exotic, more like a celebrity.
He couldn’t tell if she was looking at him or not, but he lifted his hand in a half-hearted wave, wondering if she’d just said shewantedto talk to him again.
chapter
two
Farrah cursedher luck as she drove back into town. How could she have predicted that Darren Buttars of all people would be at the cemetery on a Wednesday morning? Why in the world was he even there?
Then she’d seen his brother and sister-in-law, and everything had made sense. How she’d told him not to look up Gary also made total sense.
Darren asking about Bolt, her cat which he didn’t even like, made no sense.
And the way she’d practically begged him not to do something that would cause her to stop speaking to him made zero sense.
She hadn’t spoken to him in two months.
“Doesn’t mean you don’t want to,” she muttered to herself as she turned onto Main Street and aimed her car toward Center.
But she had a line, and Darren had crossed it. More than once. He’d asked her about riding her horse in the parade. She’d said no, citing the fact that she didn’t have a horse. He’d gotten someone else to ask her. Tucker. The parade organizer. The rodeo queen.
Honestly, couldn’t they find someone else to carry the colors in a parade?
Answer: Yes. Because the parade had happened a few days ago, and someone else had trotted their horse down Center and Main, holding the flag aloft just fine.
Farrah might have been able to handle all the needling, but Darren had gone one step further. He’d actually submitted her application to be the flag-bearer. And that crossed the line, and she had to dosomething. It was the principle of the matter.
She missed him though, sometimes more than she cared to admit. More than she’d thought she would. More than she had patience for.
She pulled into the bowling alley parking lot and eased around the building to the back. They didn’t open until noon in the summer, and she glanced at the clock as she pulled into her spot. Only ten-thirty.
Didn’t matter. She had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do. She entered through the back of the alley, switching on lights as she did. The manager, Guy Mansfield, would be in shortly, so Farrah took a few minutes to go down to the dark, quiet, dead lanes.
When she’d first started at the bowling alley a year ago, being inside such a huge building when it was closed had scared her. Now she only found peace in the way things that were normally very noisy sat quietly, waiting for someone to come enjoy them.
In a lot of ways, Farrah felt the same. She’d lived for several years in the spotlight, with people and sound all around her. But now, she mostly existed on the sidelines, near the back, quietly waiting for someone to come notice her.
She crossed her arms as she stared down the sixty-foot-long lane, the pins down at the end in their perfect formation.
“I like it here,” she said to the empty building. The light behind her cast shadows toward the pins, and she startled as the air conditioner kicked on with a hefty clunk of pipe noise.
“Thank you for bringing me home.”
She’d fought the Lord every step of the way, but He’d kept at her until she’d admitted defeat and returned to Vermont.
Sometimes, when the bowling alley was operating at maximum capacity, she missed the vibrancy of Los Angeles. Sometimes, when it snowed and she could barely see through the swirling snowflakes, she missed the warmth in California.
But only sometimes, which was a further testament to her that leaving LA had been the right thing to do.
She just never thought she’d find herself back in Island Park, the town she’d vowed never to set foot in again.
