Page 17 of The Hometown Heartbreaker

I turned to find Gio Russo walking towards me, eyes crinkled in concern rather than mischief.

“I’m heading to the hospital. I need to check on Buddy.” It was technically true, but mostly I wanted to put as much distance between myself and Dawson Lockhart as possible. My hands trembled, not from the night air, but from the aftershocks of the encounter. I hoped he didn’t notice.

He stepped closer, just enough to lower his voice. “You want a ride? I can take you.”

I hesitated, shifting from foot to foot. “Are you sure? I don’t want to make you miss the⁠—”

He cut me off with a gentle wave of his hand. “I wasn’t even technically invited. I went full Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn.”

My brows lowered as I tried to figure out what he meant.

“Wedding Crashers,” he offered, explaining the reference to the actors who starred in the movie.

“Oh right.” I smiled, and he extended his arm towards what I assumed was his vehicle.

“Shall we?”

“Yeah, thanks, if you’re sure.”

He opened the passenger door of his SUV dramatically and bowed, like a chauffeur in a black-and-white movie. That made me laugh—a short, sharp sound that shook off some of the tension coiled in my chest. I slid into his Audi. It still smelled new, leather and ozone and some faint citrus from an air freshener he’d probably bought on a whim. Gio got in, started the engine, and pulled away from the ranch. We drove away from the farm, the fairy lights, and the distant, pulsing hum of wedding music, which faded in the rearview until it was just another echo in the dark.

Neither of us spoke for the first mile. I watched the beams of the headlights paint the road in yellow stripes, watched them dip and bounce as we hit the gravel. I was waiting for my brain to catch up with my body. It felt like my heart was running on one set of instructions—get out, get away—while my mind lagged a few steps behind, still replaying the last ten minutes on a loop.

I glanced at Gio. He was alert, but relaxed, one hand on the wheel, the other tapping a casual rhythm on the console as if he were perfectly at home in this situation. Maybe he was. Small towns had a way of making you believe everything was under control, even after a decade of chaos.

He cleared his throat and finally broke the silence. “You want to talk about it, or should I put on some music?”

I considered pretending nothing happened, but that was pointless. Gio, of all people, would see right through it. “I’m fine,” I said, which was a lie, but not a dangerous one. “It was just weird, seeing him again.”

He nodded like he understood the full weight of that sentence. Maybe he did. It wasn’t just the seeing. It was the way Dawson’s presence had consumed me, the way his voice had made the years fall away, the way my body had instantly remembered what it was like to be his. I’d told myself I was over him, that I’d moved on, that high school heartbreak didn’t count in the real world. But my lungs were still filled with the smoke and memory of him, and I didn’t know if I would ever truly clear the air.

But at least I hadn’t fallen to pieces. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I nailed the reunion, but I hadn’t been reduced to a blubbering mess of unresolved feelings. At this point, I was counting that a win.

I stared out the window and tried to make sense of the landscape, tried to anchor myself to the present. The fields were silvered by moonlight, the houses spaced wide apart, the ocean a black promise just beyond the hills. Nothing here was the same as I remembered, and yet it all felt inevitable, as if my return to this place had been written in some small-town DNA code that refused to let go.

6

ONE EX, OVER EASY

Dawson

Sadie Shepard was back, and she’d only gotten more beautiful.

I hadn’t slept a single minute last night, and honestly, who could blame me? Some news deserved to keep a man awake: a barn fire, a hard frost in May, a bear in the chicken coop. Sadie Shepard walking back into my life after twelve years? That wasn’t just news. That was the universe’s mic drop.

It was difficult enough to try and wrap my head around her return, but then there was the reason she was here. Buddy Shepard—the man who’d once dragged himself to a calving cow with a shattered collarbone and then showed up to the Annual Police and Fireman’s Fundraiser pancake breakfast the next morning, arm in a sling, acting as if nothing happened—was lying in the ICU hooked up to machines that beeped and breathed for him. The man who cut firewood for every widow in the ZIP code each winter without fail. The man who built wheelchair ramps for veterans on weekends. Who always, always paid his bar tab in cash.

Men like Buddy Shepard weren’t fragile, they were cut from a different cloth. He reminded me of a combination of the Dos Equis and Marlboro Man. Tough. Indomitable. Indestructible. They didn’t make men like him anymore.

I knew the kind of cloth Buddy was cut from because I’d grown up idolizing it. My dad travelled a lot for business when I was growing up, and Buddy had been like a surrogate father to me for two decades, teaching me everything there was to know about horses, respect, and the proper way to shake a man’s hand. He’d shown me how to change the oil in a ‘69 Chevelle, how to throw a perfect spiral, how to tie a fishing knot and cast a line without tangling it, and how to stand up to a bully without ever raising my voice.

He taught by example. He was tough, solid, and impossible to knock off his axis. Once, when I broke my wrist riding broncs, Buddy told me not to let anyone see me cry. He didn’t say it to be cruel, it was a lesson in composure, in dignity, in holding a little bit of yourself back from the world. I took the lesson to heart, maybe too much.

And now he was lying in the ICU, after a heart attack and stroke, most likely wired to more machines than the NASA control room.

I loved that man. Hell, everyone did. But when he lost his daughter, Sadie’s mom, he shrunk a little. He wasn’t the same after Rosie died. He was a shadow of a man. And from what people said, even that version was a shell of himself. He never recovered fully from losing his wife to cancer. I didn’t remember Mrs. Shepard because I was only two when she passed away. But my parents talked about what a lovely woman she was and how Buddy lit up every time she walked in a room, or even if her name was mentioned.

Sadie was all he had left, and I ruined that for him too. I should’ve been the one to keep her close. Instead, I did the one thing she couldn’t forgive. The one thing no one could forgive. My own mother couldn’t look me in the eye for weeks after Sadie left.