Downtown Bootleg was awash in red, white, and blue. The decorating had started days ago, and now the entire town was decked out for Independence Day. Lake Street was closed to vehicular traffic and it had been transformed into a veritable carnival. Booths sold food and drink, and games were set up all up and down the street. Crepe paper and helium balloons—all red, white, and blue—were everywhere. More booths sold little flags, buttons, pins, and other novelties, and a fireworks stand down by the lake had a line that was already at least twenty deep.

The noise of the crowd buzzed around me. Seemed like just about everyone in Bootleg had turned out, locals and tourists alike. Wasn’t often that there were this many people in one place in a town like ours. Kids darted in and out of their parents’ legs while they chatted with friends and neighbors. Most people held red plastic cups—filled with sweet tea, lemonade, moonshine, or beer, depending on who was holding them.

Mine was just lemonade, although I was thinking a cup of strawberry moonshine didn’t sound like a bad idea. Crowds were not my favorite thing. My dad always used to tell me I was too damn sensitive, and maybe that was true. But the press of people tended to get overwhelming.

“Well, hello, Jameson Bodine.” Misty Lynn Prosser wandered over, swaying her hips more than was natural. Her hair was big, her makeup thick, and her boobs were practically busting out of her I heart America tube top.

“Hey, Misty Lynn,” I said, my back stiffening. I hoped she’d go away quickly.

“Where’s your brother?” she asked.

“Which one?”

She looked me up and down. “You know which one.”

“I don’t know where any of them are.”

“All right.” She smacked her gum a few times. “You tell Gibson I was askin’ for him if you see him.”

“You ever gonna give up on that?” I muttered under my breath. She glanced back at me, so I gave her a little smile. “Sure thing, Misty Lynn. Say, how’s Rhett’s nose?”

She lifted one shoulder. “Fine, I guess. You didn’t break it.”

I almost said that’s a shame, but decided letting her walk away was the better choice.

A light touch on my shoulder made me spin around.

“Sorry,” Leah Mae said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

Before I could stop myself, I was grinning at her like an idiot. She looked like sugar and sunshine in a yellow tank top with a few little blue flowers embroidered on the front. Cut-off jeans showed her long legs, and red toenails peeked through her sandals. Her long hair was down, and she had a white flower tucked behind one ear.

“That’s all right,” I said. “Didn’t expect to see you still here.”

“Neither did I,” she said. “But my dad isn’t doing so well. It didn’t feel right to leave.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Thanks.” She fiddled with a lock of her hair. “He seemed better this morning. I made sure he got a good breakfast, and Betsy is spending the afternoon with him. He wanted to come into town, but I talked him into going back to bed after he had a coughing fit. I had to threaten to call Doc Trevor on him, though.”

I laughed. Clay Larkin had never struck me as the sort of man who took orders well. “Hopefully with you here seein’ to him, he’ll be up and about in no time.”

“I hope so, too,” she said with a smile.

Scarlett appeared at Leah Mae’s side, seemingly out of nowhere. “Y’all are here! Good. We need more people to run the obstacle course.”

She grabbed Leah Mae’s hand, and my wrist, and tugged us up the street after her. I tossed my cup into a garbage can on the street corner as we passed.

“What obstacle course?” Leah Mae asked.

Scarlett didn’t stop, dragging us alongside her. “Haven’t you done the obstacle course before?”

“I don’t think so,” Leah Mae said.

I had definitely never done the obstacle course. In fact, I’d always made myself scarce until it had begun because I didn’t want someone—like Scarlett—trying to make me do it.

“It’s been a tradition for a while, but maybe it hadn’t started last you were here,” Scarlett said. She turned toward Gin Rickey Park. “You need a partner, but there’s two of you, so that’s already settled.”

And that was why I avoided the obstacle course. It didn’t look difficult, in and of itself. Climbing over things, slogging through mud, and jumping in the lake were all fine. It was the partner aspect that kept me away. You didn’t just go through the course with another person. You did it tied to your partner. Being fastened to another person with a rope was not my idea of a good time.

But if Scarlett meant for me to do the course with Leah Mae, that would mean…

“Hold on there, Scarlett—”

“This will be fun,” Scarlett said.

“I don’t think I’m wearing the right shoes,” Leah Mae said.

“You’ll be fine,” Scarlett said. “Barefoot’s better anyway.”

We got to the edge of the field where everyone was getting ready to begin. Bernie O’Dell stood nearby wearing an American flag t-shirt. He had a megaphone in one hand and lengths of rope draped over his other arm. Bowie, Devlin, and Jonah were all there, along with Cassidy and June. Apparently Gibson was smart enough to stay away. I didn’t see him anywhere.

“Kick off your shoes and empty your pockets,” Scarlett said. “Hey Dev, you got the ropes for everyone?”

“Yep.”

“Ropes?” Leah Mae asked as she stepped out of her sandals.

“Ah, hell.” I took off my shoes and put my phone and keys on top of them. Leah Mae put her things next to mine. “Yeah, ropes.”

“All right, y’all,” Scarlett said, raising her voice. “Devlin’s with me. Jonah, you pair up with June. Bowie, that puts you with Cassidy, and Jameson can team up with Leah Mae. Y’all know how this works. Devlin and I are gonna kick everyone’s asses. Got that?”

Devlin handed out lengths of smooth, braided rope to each pair. I took one and let it drape from my hand, feeling like I couldn’t quite make eye contact with Leah Mae.

Jonah and June stood facing each other and wound the rope around their waists. Bowie looked like he was having a hard time taking the last couple of steps to get close enough to Cassidy. She snatched the rope from his hand with a roll of her eyes and got in front of him.

“Come on, Jame, work with me here,” Scarlett said, shoving me and Leah Mae together. “Can you get it, or do you need me to tie it for you?”

Leah Mae and I stood facing each other, just inches apart. I swallowed hard. Good lord, she smelled like citrus and sunshine. How in the hell was I going to do this?

“I, uh… I think I can…”

“Get in there,” Scarlett said, giving me one final shove. “I gotta get roped in.”

I practically crashed into Leah Mae and had to put my arms around her to keep from knocking her over. “Sorry.”

Her body was up against mine, her face close. She laughed softly, her breath warm against my neck. “That’s okay. We have to tie ourselves together?”

“Yeah.” I wound the rope around our waists. Now that she was pressed against me, I didn’t much want that to end. “You know how it is. Bootleggers can’t do anything normal. Even an obstacle course.”

I tied the rope behind her and tried to think of something—anything—to calm down my raging hard-on. One wrong move and Leah Mae was going to rub up against it and that was liable to kill me dead on the spot. But good lord, she smelled good.

“All y’all listen up,” Bernie O’Dell said into his megaphone. “Here’s the rules, and I mean for you to follow them, so don’t go gettin’ any ideas about cheatin’. Partners must stay tied together at all times. Everybody keeps their feet on the ground. No piggybacks or carryin’ each other. The course begins here and ends at the lake. Y’all gotta jump in, but don’t go drownin’ your partner once you’re in the water. We clear?”

Whoops and hollers sounded from around the field.

“Line up, then,” Bernie said.

Everyone’s first attempts at moving while attached to their partners were halting at best. People stumbled, laughing. Giggled as they fell over and struggled to get up.

“I think the trick to this is walking sideways,” I said.

Leah Mae and I turned our faces toward the start line. My arms hung awkwardly at my sides, but I wasn’t sure what to do with them. We managed to get to the start line doing a kind of side-shuffle. Just walking wasn’t so bad, but I had a feeling the rest of the course wasn’t going to be so kind.

Bernie raised his megaphone again. “On your marks. Get set. And, go!”

Jonah and June fell next to us before they’d hardly gotten started. Cassidy and Bowie got off to a better start, moving down toward the first obstacle just behind Scarlett and Devlin. Those two seemed to have the right idea. They were holding each other tight so they could move fast.

“Tell you what.” I slid my arms around her waist. “I think we have to just commit. And I want to take Scarlett down.”

She put her arms around my neck. “Let’s do this.”

With our bodies pressed close, we started side-shuffling across the field. After a few steps, we picked up the pace, and pretty soon we were going at a good clip. Leah Mae laughed and her hair blew in my face, but I didn’t care. We covered the distance across the field and made up a good portion of the space between us and Scarlett and Dev.

The first obstacle was a maze of old tires. They were set right up against each other, so we had to pick our way through them. We hopped in and out, still moving more or less sideways so we could both see where we were going.

Scarlett and Dev were still in front of us, as were Cassidy and Bowie. I heard a screech behind us and risked a quick look. Sierra Hayes—a girl who still wore her hair in a pair of braids, despite being twenty-five—was paired up with Amos Sheridan, and it was not a pretty picture. He seemed to be trying to get her to walk backwards while he did the leading, but she kept tripping over the edges of the tires.

“We’re pretty good at this,” Leah Mae said when we hopped out of the last tire, one leg over, then the other.

“Sure are.”

The next obstacle was a long beam. There were half a dozen of them, all the same length and thickness—barely big enough for two people. Cassidy and Bowie had somehow gotten up one of them faster than Scarlett and Devlin. They shimmied their way down while Scarlett and Devlin got onto the one next to it.

“This looks like it’ll just take some balance,” I said.

“Balance I can do,” Leah Mae said.

We stepped onto the beam, and she wound her arms tighter around my neck, pressing her cheek to mine. It was a lot like dancing. We slid one foot down the length of the beam, far as we could go without falling. Then brought the back leg up to meet it. We got a good rhythm going and it didn’t take us long to get to the end of it. Jumping off was harder, but we managed to land on our feet.

After the balance beams, the course veered to the left, and I saw why. The Bootleg Springs Fire Company had used fire hoses to turn an empty lot into a giant mess of sloppy brown mud.

“Come on, Jameson,” Leah Mae said. “Let’s get dirty.”

Oh lord, there went my dick again. We were squished together so tight, I had to hope she was too focused on the course to notice.

A few pairs had passed us, including Cassidy and Bowie. They didn’t slow down, but went barreling into the mud—and paid the price. It was thick, and Cassidy’s foot got stuck. Bowie kept going and the two of them toppled over into the muck. Scarlett and Devlin went down ahead of us, laughing as they tried to get up and slipped.

“Okay, we got this,” I said. “Together, now.”

Leah Mae and I moved like we had on the balance beam, each moving one leg out, then bringing the back leg in to meet it. Our feet squelched through the thick mud, making sucking and smacking sounds every time we moved. Leah Mae laughed, and the feel of her body trembling with her laughter was just about the sweetest thing I could imagine.

The mud sucked at my foot as I tried to take the next step. I pulled up harder and my foot came free, but my balance faltered.

“Uh oh,” I said, and Leah Mae clung harder to my neck.

I didn’t want to fall on her, so I leaned backward instead. I fell straight back into the mud, sending up a spray of brown droplets. Being tied to me at the waist, Leah Mae fell smack on top of me.

“Are you okay?” she asked. She had a few drops of mud on her cheek.

“Yeah, you?”

She nodded. Her face was so close, and the weight of her body felt good on top of me. But that was not a train of thought I needed to be riding, so I focused on how to get us back on our feet.

“Now I see why this ends in the lake,” she said.

“Yep,” I said. “We’re almost there. Let’s just see if we can get up.”

A few more pairs passed us, but I figured there wasn’t much chance of us winning at this point, anyway. We had to roll around a bit before we found an angle that worked. God in heaven, I was rolling around in the mud with Leah Mae Larkin. By the time we got to our feet, we were covered. Judging by the state of the couples struggling around us—either still in the mud, or hauling themselves out of it—most everyone was falling in.

“Come on, we got this,” Scarlett shouted, just ahead of us.

“Not happening, Scarlett Rose,” I said, and Leah Mae and I made a break for the dock.

We side-galloped our way down to the water and onto the wood slats of the dock. Scarlett and Dev were right here with us. Leah Mae had the height—and leg length—advantage on Scarlett, and just as we got to the edge, we overtook them.

Without a care for how we were going to manage to avoid drowning while tied together at the waist, I launched us off the end of the dock.

We plunged into the warm water feet first. Leah Mae kept her arms around my shoulders, and we both kicked. Our heads broke the surface and we came up laughing.

“Did we win?” she asked.

“I have no idea.” I wanted to hold onto her, but I had to tread water for both of us.

Water dripped down her face, glinting in the sunlight. I had to look away because what I really wanted to do was kiss her. We were wet and smiling. Breathing a little hard. It was a perfect moment for kissing. Or would have been, if things had been different.

But things weren’t different. Leah Mae was someone else’s girl, not mine. I wasn’t the sort to violate that. She wasn’t mine to kiss, no matter how much I wanted to.

“We should get over to the beach,” I said.

Technically, I think we could have untied ourselves at that point, since the race was over, but it would have been tough in the water. So we swam sideways, mostly using our feet to propel us toward the shoreline. It was awkward getting out, but we managed. Once we were back on land, we got the rope undone.

Scarlett came over, dripping wet, and high-fived us. “Well done. You two make a good team. But we still won.”

I was going to let her have it, but Leah Mae piped up, a smile on her lips. “Yep, y’all won second place.”

Scarlett laughed and met my eyes. “I knew I liked her.” She pointed at Leah Mae. “Rematch next year, Larkin.”

“You’re on, Bodine.”

Scarlett walked up the beach with Dev while Leah Mae and I shook some of the water off our clothes. The jump in the lake had washed the mud off. Mostly I tried to keep my shirt covering my manly parts, considering my dick was trying to cause a scene. But the feel of Leah Mae’s body against mine was not one I could forget.