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He’d gotten a quick glimpse of blond hair, glasses too big for a narrow face and a skinny body. After that, Ryder’s attention had been claimed by the woman trailing behind.
After his marriage to Brittany and their turbulent on-again, off-again relationship spanning back to high school, Ryder had learned to keep his awareness when it came to the opposite sex well under wraps.
That didn’t mean he didn’t notice beautiful women. Hell, he was still a guy. And the woman who’d been standing on the sideway was definitely a beautiful woman. Her dark blond hair had been pulled back from her delicate features and wide blue-green gaze. At first glimpse, her eyes had widened with concern, then surprise as her warning to the boy died on her lips. Pale pink lips that had glistened with a hint of expertly applied makeup.
She hadn’t had the look of a local picking up pizza for the family. Jeans and T-shirts were the typical dress code for almost every eating establishment in town, and her beige linen slacks and pale green blouse guaranteed she’d stand out—as if her beauty alone wasn’t enough to set her apart from the crowd.
His instant attraction had caught him off guard. The ink on his divorce papers was barely dry, so even looking at another woman felt as smart as hitting himself in the head with a hammer. For the second time.
Only as he’d walked away did he realize that the woman looked familiar. Something in the not quite blue, not quite green of her eyes. In the expressive eyebrows a shade darker than her hair. In the heart-shaped contours of her face.
If the woman had indeed been Lindsay Brookes and if she’d ignored him as he’d called out her name, well, that was one smackdown he definitely deserved.
When he thought of the way he’d treated her after that one night their senior year, Ryder cringed. He tried hard not to think about the way he’d so pointedly dismissed her. He’d had his reasons at the time, good reasons, though Lindsay couldn’t have known that. She couldn’t have thought anything other than the obvious—that he’d slept with her on the rebound during another breakup with Brittany, used her and tossed her aside.
“Hey, why the frown?” his older brother, Bryce, asked as Ryder stepped into the kitchen. “Don’t you know pizza’s happy food?”
“It’s...nothing really.” He set the boxes on the granite island as he accepted the bottle of beer Bryce handed him with a nod of thanks. He couldn’t help smiling as his brother moved around the kitchen with an ease that caught him a bit off guard.
Sure, all Bryce was doing was chopping a quick salad to add some veggies to their “guy night” dinner, but it was still strange to see him in his role as a dad. At times, when one of the boys called out “Dad,” Ryder still expected his own father to be the one to answer, not his brother.
Though Ryder had tried to visit once or twice a year, getting together with Bryce’s family over the holidays or taking a trip over summer break to Disneyland hadn’t clued him in to how hands-on his brother was in his day-to-day dad duties. Since moving back the previous fall, Ryder had gotten a real chance to see Bryce, and his wife, Nina, in action.
The couple worked well together, their conversation filled with lighthearted teasing, respect and a love that had stabbed him with a sense of envy—even before his divorce.
“Do you remember Lindsay Brookes?” he asked. “She was in my grade in school.”
“Think so. Real bookworm, right? Kind of a know-it-all?” Bryce asked as he made quick work chopping a green pepper.
“Yeah, but she wasn’t like that. Not really.”
“I don’t recall the two of you being friends back then.”
“She helped me out our senior year.” He’d always prided himself on getting decent grades, despite his jock status, but that year he’d done more partying than studying and his test scores had started to reflect that. “She tutored me in calculus.”
“Sounds like a brain to me.”
“Oh, yeah, she was supersmart.” Ryder gave a short laugh. “And she couldn’t seem to stop herself from pointing out when someone made a mistake. She thought she was being helpful. She never seemed to get that the other kids didn’t see it that way.”
“Right after graduation...she surprised everybody when she started hanging out with that Pirelli cousin, right?” Bryce asked over his shoulder as he opened the fridge and pulled out a small carton of tomatoes.
“Yeah, I guess they’d gotten to be friends over the years when he came to town to visit his family, but then that summer...” Everyone else might have been surprised to see the shy, quiet girl hook up with the brooding Tony Pirelli, but all Ryder had felt was relief. He couldn’t have broken her heart too badly if she’d immediately fallen for another guy. Lindsay and Tony had been inseparable that summer.
“I don’t know what a hunk like that sees in a book-brain like her,” Brittany had scoffed when the two couples ran into each other at the Fourth of July picnic in the town square.
Ryder had made some sound of agreement, but he’d known then that he’d done the best thing—if not the right thing—in breaking things off with Lindsay. Though he and Brittany had broken up during that brief period when he slept with Lindsay, his girlfriend would have made Lindsay’s life a living hell had she found out about the two of them.
“That’s right. And then—” Bryce cut off, and he made a face as he put down the knife. “When did we turn into a couple of women gossiping in the kitchen?”
“Probably about the same time you put on that apron,” Ryder said with a tip of his beer bottle in his brother’s direction.
Bryce looked down before defensively saying, “Hey, these tomatoes are juicy.”
Ryder’s grin faded away as he thought of what his brother hadn’t said.
And then Lindsay got pregnant.
He and Brittany had already moved into their dorms by then, but the Clearville grapevine traveled long-distance. When he first heard the news, for a panicked, “what the hell am I going to do?” moment, he’d wondered even as his brain rejected the very idea.
Couldn’t be mine.
It was just one time.
We used protection.
No way. There’s no way...
And then Brittany had quickly filled him in on the details—how everyone knew Tony Pirelli was the father, how his family was in an uproar because Tony refused to marry Lindsay, how Lindsay’s family had left town in disgrace. All of it as juicy as Bryce’s vine-ripe tomatoes.
“Why the trip down memory lane anyway?”
“I heard she’s in town for a few weeks to help out her grandmother, and I thought I might have seen her when I was picking up the pizzas. She looked...good.”
“Her grandmother?” Bryce asked, an incredulous note filling his voice.
“No, not—” Ryder caught sight of the smirk his brother was trying to hide a split second too late and tossed a nearby towel into Bryce’s grinning face. “Very funny.”
Catching the towel with ease, he draped it over one shoulder. “I’d say Lindsay’d have to look spectacular to catch your eye. Haven’t you sworn off all women since the divorce?”
“I didn’t mean it like that.” Although the hell of it was, Lindsay had looked spectacular. But more than that, she’d had an air of confidence, of success. A woman who’d found her place out in the big wide world and a far cry from the girl who’d struggled to fit in at tiny Clearville High. “I was glad to see that she’s doing well.”
In a small way, it eased the burden of that old guilt he’d been carrying around. Sure, he’d been a stupid, horny teenager, but that was no excuse for treating Lindsay the way he had. He owed her an apology and an explanation at the least and, maybe if he was lucky, a way to make up for his behavior at best.
Thanks to the phone call he’d received earlier that day, he knew he’d get his chance soon enough.
Chapter Two (#ulink_e493db00-6025-587f-a366-a9a9480340ad)
She’d survived.
Her first run-in with Ryder Kincaid on only her second day back in town, and she’d survived.
Lindsay blew out a breath, still more shaken by the split-second encounter than she liked to admit. Ten years. Ten years! She was supposed to be over him. She was over him. Just not quite over the shock of seeing him, that was all.
Glancing around the pizza parlor play area, she felt her heartbeat settling as her gaze landed on Robbie. She’d quickly agreed to his request to play the video games while they waited for their order. She needed a moment to herself, and she’d hoped he might have a chance to talk with some of the other kids racing between newer video games and older throwbacks from when she was a kid—foosball, air hockey, even a tiny basketball hoop and net. But Robbie had locked in on conquering alien invaders and had barely done more than lift a skinny shoulder in a halfhearted shrug when one of the other boys stopped to talk to him. Within a few seconds, the boy wandered off and Robbie hunkered down over the joystick, his bangs falling over the frames of his glasses.
Her heart ached for her son. For the all-too-familiar shyness that made something inside him shut down when he tried to talk to kids his own age. Lindsay remembered the feeling so well. The fear, the panic of doing the wrong thing, saying the wrong thing. And the self-consciousness that made it seem that no matter what she did or what she said, it was always wrong.
She knew she couldn’t expect too much. She and Robbie would be in town for a few weeks—just long enough for her to convince her grandmother that it was time to sell the house and move to Phoenix to be closer to Lindsay and her parents. But during that short time, she hoped Robbie would find some kids to hang out with. Clearville was a tourist town, always filled with summer visitors—most of them families with children. It would do him so much good to make new friends, and maybe the short time frame would help him be more open to the possibility. It was something she’d encouraged on the trip up from Phoenix, not that her suggestion was well received.
“I already have a best friend,” Robbie had insisted stubbornly.
“I know, but would it be so bad to meet some new friends?” she’d asked, careful not to bring up the reminder that his best friend had recently moved across the country.
Scott Wilcott and his family had been their next-door neighbors for the past three years—a lifetime for little boys. The two had bonded instantly, and Lindsay had been so grateful, not only for Robbie’s friendship with Scott, but also for the time her son got to spend with Scott’s father. She knew how important it was for her son to have a male role model in his life. Gary Wilcott had helped fill that void by including Robbie in their family outings and making the boy feel as welcome in their home as he was in his own.
With the Wilcotts moving away, Lindsay worried as much about Robbie missing Gary as she did about him missing Scott.
“Lindsay? Lindsay Brookes?”
Starting at the sound of her name being called out amid kids laughing and bells and whistling going off in the gaming area, she turned in the small booth to see a short, curvy blonde woman heading in her direction.
“Cherrie... Been a long time, hasn’t it?”
“Ten years!” the other woman agreed.
And yet not nearly long enough, Lindsay thought as she kept her smile firmly locked in place. Along with Brittany Baines, Cherrie Macintosh and a handful of other girls had ruled the school back in the day. The popular kids who could make life hell for anyone not in their small circle. As a shy bookworm, Lindsay had mostly escaped their noticed.
Mostly.
“Did you hear Lindsay Brookes got herself knocked up?”
“I’d have thought that girl would die a virgin!”
“They always say it’s the quiet ones who surprise you.”
“She must have done it on purpose to trap Tony Pirelli.”
“Well, it’s not like a guy that hot is hanging out with her for her brain!”
“Goodness,” Cherrie remarked, “if I hadn’t heard you were coming to town, I don’t think I would have even recognized you. I mean, you were such a mousy little thing back then, weren’t you?”
Yes, she had been. But that was a long time ago, and she wasn’t that girl anymore. She had five years under her belt working for a high-profile PR firm in Phoenix. She could put on a smile and spin the truth with the best of them. Reminding herself of that, she slid from the booth.
In high school, she’d hated her above-average height. Hated anything that might make her stand out in a crowd, and she’d spent most of those years hunched over—even when her nose wasn’t buried in a book. But she’d learned—heck, studies proved—that tall people were often seen as smarter and more successful than people of a lesser stature. And even in low-heeled sandals she’d chosen to wear to run for pizza, she towered over Cherrie. “You’re right. I was. Thank goodness we aren’t all still the people we were back in high school.”
Cherrie blinked as if trying to figure out the subtle dig behind Lindsay’s words. “Oh, sure. I mean, that was, like, forever ago, right?”
Was it Lindsay’s imagination or had a hopeful note entered the other woman’s voice? As if Lindsay might have forgotten the cruel gossip that had shadowed her those last weeks before she and her parents left town.
Without Brittany and the rest of the squad around her, Cherrie didn’t look all that intimidating. If anything, she appeared a bit needy and eager to please. Someone who would have gone along with the other kids as a way to fit in.
Lindsay wouldn’t have expected to feel sorry for anyone in that old group from high school, but maybe that also proved how much she had changed. “You’re right. All water under the bridge now.”
“Yeah, sure. It is. And it will be great to catch up with everyone at the reunion next month. You’ll still be here then, won’t you?”
Lindsay could think of few things she wanted to do less than attending her ten-year reunion. Reminiscing over four years of pure hell? Yeah, that sounded fun. “I’m not sure if I’ll make it or not,” she said to Cherrie.
“Oh, well...” The other woman gave a small laugh. “It’s funny, though, if you’d been here a few seconds earlier, we could have had our own minireunion. You just missed seeing Ryder Kincaid. You know he’s moved back, right?”
“I’d heard something about that.” Under the bridge or not, Lindsay wasn’t about to churn up that water by admitting to Cherrie—who still seemed to enjoy spreading a bit of gossip—that Ryder’s presence had prompted her own return to their hometown.
Leaning forward, Cherrie said, “He left Brittany, you know. Out of the blue. Total surprise. Brittany and I, we’re still, like, best friends, though we don’t see each other much. I had hoped she’d come back for the reunion, but she said it would be too hard. All those memories of her and Ryder together, you know? She’s trying to be strong, but you can tell she’s devastated.”
“Well, I’m sorry to hear that,” Lindsay said, the words not entirely untrue even if her concern wasn’t so much for Brittany.
“I mean, they were together forever,” Cherrie stressed, “the perfect couple and the marriage everyone thought would last!” Lowering her voice a bit more, she added, “Ryder’s not talking, but what can he say? To just walk away like he did...”
The buzz of her words blended in with the laugher and sirens from the play area. What did Lindsay really know about Ryder? In all truthfulness—despite what her teenage heart had believed back then—she’d hardly known him as a boy. She didn’t have any idea what kind of man he was now. What kind of father he might be...
When she heard about his divorce and that he’d moved back to Clearville, Lindsay had taken it as a sign—after a decade of secrets, half-truths and out-and-out lies—it was time to come clean. But this couldn’t be simply about doing the right thing. Telling the truth had to be about doing the best thing for Robbie. Her son mattered most, more than the guilt she’d carried for so long, more than Ryder’s rights as a father. Robbie came first.
Every story had two sides, and while Brittany’s still-best friend, Cherrie, would know Brittany’s side, Lindsay needed to hear Ryder’s. She needed to know the kind of man she was letting into her son’s life. Needed to know that he wouldn’t turn his back on her son the way he apparently had done on his wife and marriage.
Lindsay swallowed hard even as nerves swirled through her stomach. After more than a decade of loving and at times hating Ryder Kincaid from afar, it was time to get up close and personal.
* * *
“Now, there’s the granddaughter I know and love! I was wondering when she might show up.”
Lindsay rolled her eyes at her grandmother Ellie’s teasing as she stepped into the kitchen and self-consciously ducked her head. She pushed her heavy glasses farther up her nose, wishing she’d had time to shower and do her hair and makeup, not to mention put in her contacts before coming down for breakfast.
Back home, Robbie would fix himself a bowl of cereal and some fruit during the week and was content to play video games or watch television on the weekends, giving Lindsay the time she needed to get ready in the morning. But as she’d learned on her first day, Ellie didn’t believe cold cereal and a banana was an adequate meal for a growing boy.
By the time Lindsay came down, her grandmother had fixed a spread worthy of an all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet. And while Ellie insisted she loved to cook, Lindsay was there to help take care of her grandmother, not to be taken care of.
So on this morning, as soon as she heard sounds coming from the kitchen, she’d hurried from the bedroom after doing no more than brushing her teeth and putting on the glasses she needed to keep from killing herself on the way down the stairs. She smiled wryly as she saw the vast ingredients her grandmother had already compiled in that short amount of time.
Flour, eggs, sugar and blueberries for homemade pancakes, potatoes for hash browns, a thick slab of presliced bacon, a kettle of fragrant chamomile tea already brewing on the stove and in the middle of it all, her grandmother. Ellie Brookes was a tiny woman with the type of petite build Lindsay had always envied. Her silver-streaked blond hair was pulled back into a short ponytail at the nape of her neck and she wore a ruffled apron over her beige capris and pale blue T-shirt.
Anyone who mistook her grandmother’s small stature as a sign of fragility would quickly change their minds when they witnessed her sharp wit disguised behind a sweet smile on her round, slightly lined face.
“This isn’t the real me, Gran,” Lindsay said with a glance down at the pink pajama bottoms decorated with shoes and a matching T-shirt that read If the Shoe Fits, Buy It! “Not anymore.”
“Of course it is, dear. You’re hiding the real you behind those fancy clothes of yours, same way you used to hide behind all those books back in high school.”
Lindsay’s jaw dropped a little even as she stepped up to the worn Formica counter and reached for the loaf of bread. “That’s not— Those fancy clothes as you call them are the real me. I’m a professional now. I have an image to maintain. It’s an important part of my job.”
A job that was still hers—at least for now. With the PR firm going through a buyout by their main competitor, she’d heard plenty of rumors that no one was safe.
“An image,” her grandmother murmured beneath her breath as she expertly cracked eggs into the mixing bowl. “You are more than an image.”
“I’m not saying that’s all I am. Only that—”
“It’s all you allow people to see,” Ellie interrupted before flipping on the mixer to punctuate her statement and have the last word.
Lindsay shook her head at her grandmother’s undeniable hardheadedness. Had she really thought this would be easy? she asked herself as she bent toward the lower cabinets for a skillet. She pulled at the cupboard door once, then again and almost lost her balance and tumbled backward when it finally gave way.
“Careful, dear,” Ellie called out over the high-pitched whirl of the mixer. “That door sticks.”
