Chapter One
“C’mon people,” I muttered, traversing the grocery parking lot for the third time. “The sales aren’t that good this week. It’s time to wrap it up.”
I could go to the bigger supermarket in Charmed, but I preferred this smaller one in Goldworth, near my office. Less people. Less judgment.
Less parking space.
Spotting a mom shouldering two reusable canvas shopping bags with two kids in tow, I cranked the wheel in her direction. She smiled quickly and pushed her kids in front of her as she approached an SUV, as if she was used to being stalked. As anyone who shopped here should be.
I groaned under my breath at the big cartoonish honey bee sticker on her back window that sported a dialogue bubble saying, “It’s sweeter in Charmed!”
I was so tired of honey. I despise it, honestly. I know that sounds like a random and insignificant fact, but when you live in a town like Charmed, Texas, that lives and breathes by the stuff, it can become a thing. Not that I’m averse to sweet. Chocolate, for instance, could easily run from my tap and I’d celebrate, but I have issues with a substance made by one insect throwing up on another, then party number two spending the next couple of days playing with vomit.
There’s a disclaimer to living in a town that breeds bees and brags of World Famous Honey on its welcome sign. You know a little too much about the process.
Summer was the hardest to stomach—no pun intended—with the annual Honey Festival kicking off right after school kicked out. It was even more everywhere than usual. Every retailer sports a stash of jars from whatever apiary hits them up first. Every restaurant sells them at the checkout. Hell, even the Quik-Serve convenience store had a supply on the counter last time I was in. I couldn’t pop in for a coffee and a package of chocolate donuts without being accosted by honey jars.
This summer was a little better. My best friend, Lanie, was back in town with her new hubby (wink, wink) and so the consummate honey frenzy was overshadowed by a tinge of gossipy drama. The festival’s annual dance had all eyes on her, and no one noticed that I showed up to help her out. I don’t usually go. Most of the good townspeople of Charmed don’t care much for me, and that’s okay. I gave up on that fight a long time ago. Small towns are good at holding on to ancient grudges or still living through their high school days. I get it.
Once upon a time, my eighteen-year-old self was scandalous. Heaven forbid. My sins then evidently tainted the next decade, the perfect sainted (cough) man I married, and my mother, who apparently could never again hold down a job. (Side note: she wasn’t holding down a job the previous decade, either.)
So anyway, there was the festival, including the ridiculous Honey Wars, with crazy people hawking their self-labeled jars on every sidewalk, and then the Lucky Hart carnival a month later. It’s not honey-driven, but it’s crazy too. Or it was, anyway. I haven’t stepped foot inside that carnival in six years, since my divorce from said saint, now-the-mayor, Dean Crestwell.
As honey-bee-reusable-bag-mom drove away, I pulled into the spot and got out, ready to go load up on chocolate anything in those evil plastic grocery bags that I’m gonna go to hell for. My cell buzzed from my wristlet and I pulled it out and laughed as I answered, entering the store.
“Just couldn’t stand it, could you?”
“I know, I’m worse than a mom.”
It was Lanie. Calling from Vegas, where she and Nick were vacationing after renewing their vows. With real rings. That’s a story for another time.
“Are you kidding me?” I said. “You are a mom. You fawn more over that dog now than anyone I’ve ever seen.”
I was house-slash-dogsitting while they were gone. Lanie kind of inherited a Rottweiler when her old neighbor skipped out, and while it was a little iffy at the beginning, Ralph had won her over. The jury was still out for me in that regard, but I had to admit, Ralph was kind of sweet. When he wasn’t licking himself.
“He’s family,” Lanie said.
“Well, he’s fine,” I said. “I shared my blueberry muffin with him this morning, and gave him a bacon treat before I left.”
“See, you’re a softie, too,” she said.
“Don’t ever say that out loud.” I stopped in front of an end cap of chocolate syrup. I’d seen some vanilla bean ice cream in Lanie’s freezer and that would be a great compliment. I kept walking, though. It was a maybe. I could always come back. “How’s Vegas?”
“I’m down $100 already today,” she said, “So I’m playing the penny slots and waiting on my handsome hubby to finish his game and come whisk me off upstairs for naked room service.”
I was hit as always with that mix of being so damn happy for her, fighting through her baggage to find her soul mate. And feeling so damn envious.
“So you’re calling me why?” I asked.
“I saw a slot machine themed with pancakes and I thought of Ralph,” she said.
I nodded. “Of course you did.”
“Did we miss anything interesting at the carnival?” she asked. “Or did you go?”
I snorted. “What do you think?” I picked up a bag of peanuts and then put it back down. Salty wasn’t the thing tonight. It had been a long day at the office, and besides, celebrations were all about the chocolate.
It was over. As of yesterday, that damned infernal beast that descended upon the little town of Charmed every year was over. Forever. Not everyone shared my view or saw the summer carnival as beastly. Kids loved it, of course. A lot of the adults still rolled out for it in spades, probably grabbing the one last chance to mingle and see who was doing what—or who—since the Honey Festival the month before.
I always looked at it as one more year in the bag. One more summer of successful absenteeism. That festival would probably go on till the end of time, but now, with Charmed taking on a new entity—a planned outdoor entertainment area that everyone was buzzing about—the carnival itself would stop here no more.
The Charmed city council had voted in a bid to build a permanent mini-theme park, boardwalk, and restaurant-and-retail row on Bailey’s pond near my mother’s trailer park. Lots of sales tax dollars from surrounding towns, more local jobs, something for people to get excited about besides flying insects and honey (thank God). And an end to the yearly nomadic reach of Lucky Hart Carnivals.
It was a win-win, and I was so friggin excited, I couldn’t stand it.
I’d forced myself to go out there with Dean for years, just to prove a silly point. Smiling, flirting, overly doting over my husband every time a certain hooded gaze landed my way. A gaze that was once the most intense and mind-altering drug I could ever know.
Prove a point to whom? To Dean? To myself? To the man behind the eyes?
Yep. Absolutely. And now I never had to think about it, demean myself, or avoid an event again. Not that I ever should have in the first place. I should have been above it all. But hey, small towns have big memories and every time I tried to forget about the very public Carmen Frost Public Humiliation of Summer 2001, someone was always around to remind me.
I breathed in deeply, savoring the satisfaction as I rounded the cookie aisle at the grocery store. Chocolate-covered graham crackers were just the ticket to celebrate.
“I know,” Lanie said. “I just thought maybe you’d surprise me. Where are you?”
“The grocery store,” I said. “Getting some party food.”
“You having a party without me?”
“Can’t help you had to go honeymooning,” I said. “I filed two briefs today, settled a divorce case in mediation, and spent most of the afternoon avoiding Judge Constantine and his unibrow.” And Lucky Hart Carnivals was trucking along their merry way. “I’m having a comfort food extravaganza to celebrate.”
Lanie chuckled. “Comfort food meaning three batches of brownies?”
I laughed out loud and then held up a hand to a woman who took a break from studying various Oreo flavors to give me a double-take.
“Sorry, I’m having a moment,” I said. “Don’t mind me.”
I grabbed my package of bad-for-me and turned back. Smack into a broad chest with a set of arms that felt just as solid. One of the hands attached to them gripped my upper arms as the chocolate grahams crushed between us.
“Oh! I’m so—”
Then my eyes panned upward. Into the eyes of the drug I thought I’d never see again. Eyes that had gotten older and wary. That were supposed to be gone. They flashed with as much surprise as I’m sure mine did, in the two-second span we both stood there frozen with cell phones to our ears.
“Shit,” I exclaimed.
“Carmen?” Lanie voice called in my ear from somewhere far far away.
Backing up a full step so that he had to let go of me, my mind went on a roller coaster ride. Ha. Roller coaster. That was ironic. Or delusional. Or perhaps I was just having a stroke and my life was flashing by as the man I’d spent fifteen years trying to forget stared down at me. Regardless, I got a five-second speed reel in my head of all of it. All of us. Me and Sullivan Hart.
“Sully,” I managed finally.
“Su—Sully?” Lanie said, her voice tilting up at the end. “As in Sully?”
It was like a bird chirping in my ear, as I held up my chin and tried not to notice the rest of him. The thick dark hair, not as long as it once was, maybe shoulder length, but enough to be pulled back with what looked like a leather strap, a pair of Ray-Bans shoved up on top. The light scruff on his face. His smell, the heady mix of something woodsy and adrenaline that I’d still know if I were struck deaf, dumb, and blind. The way he ran a hand over his face, inhaled deeply and made his gaze go guarded like he used to do when he felt anxious.
He was anxious?
He mumbled something into his phone and put it in his pocket.
Suddenly, I was eighteen again. Standing in the second empty parking lot of the day and sweating through my clothes. Clutching a duffle bag to my body as the wretched sickly sweet smell of melted cotton candy baking on the asphalt stung my nose. I’d seen him since then, of course. From a distance. Years ago. I was so over it.
So why was the sudden one-on-one giving me chest pains? Why were his eyes so friggin intense? Ignore it! So what that your fingers are going numb! Maybe it was a stroke. He was supposed to be gone, damn it. Gone with that cursed carnival.
“Let me call you back, Lanie,” I mumbled, the phone already lowering before the words were out of my mouth.
“Hey,” he said, clearing his throat.
I willed my face to go neutral and unaffected, but I couldn’t really feel it anymore, so it was kind of a crap shoot. I would have given anything at that moment for a speed superpower so that I could flash out of there the next time he blinked. Assuming he blinked. He hadn’t yet.
“Hey.”
“How’ve you been?” he asked.
No. We weren’t doing that. We weren’t catching up like old buddies.
“I thought—you—” I gestured something with my hands that I hoped demonstrated awayness.
His eyes narrowed, however. Crap. He didn’t understand the universal sign language for Why the living hell are you still here?
“You thought what?” he asked.
“The carnival left,” I said. “I assumed you were with it.”
He nodded. “You don’t know.”
“Know?” I echoed, crossing my arms over my chest and backing up another step.
No, I clearly didn’t know. Was I supposed to? Were there people that knew and left me out of all the things to know? My heart thundered so loudly in my ears, it was all I could do not to clamp my palms over them.
Why was he here?
“About the Bailey’s Pond project?” he prompted, crossing his own arms.
A tattoo peeked out from his muscle, under a shirt sleeve. The tattoo. Shit. It was all I could do not to run my thumb across my left breast where its clone resided.
My mouth went dry as all kinds of confusion exploded in my head. Keep it together. Don’t show weakness. He left you.
He left you.
A calm washed over me and all my strength as a professional business woman, as just a woman who’d been through and seen a few things, came back and held me up. What did it matter that the love of my life, the man that shattered me into a million pieces in a stadium parking lot was standing in front of me fifteen years later looking good enough to lick from head to toe?
I was better than that.
“What about it?” I asked. “Your carnival won’t be coming through here anymore.”
An eyebrow shot up, and the hazel flecks in his eyes danced. “That’s right. Shaw will bypass all of Cedar County from now on.”
Something familiar and yet not knocked on my skull. Something I should know. Seems there were quite a few things I should know.
“Shaw?”
“My brother,” he said, gesturing to his phone like that would clear it up. Bingo. Shaw Hart. I had a vague recollection of a sulky pre-teen boy hanging on the outskirts. Sully’s half brother. “He’s running the road show now.”
I blinked, and the warning bells started to ding. Shaw was on the road? Sully wasn’t on the road? Hell no, he wasn’t on the road, he was standing in my grocery store. My grocery store. The small one in Goldworth near my office that I frequented instead of the Charmed supermarket for the sole purpose of running into less people.
“And so you are--?” I prompted, a sick acidic burn starting low in my belly.
Somewhere deep in my psyche I knew the answer before he could tell me.
“The major investor in the development,” he said, his voice smooth. The tone deep and the words slightly lazy as they rolled off his tongue, just as I remembered it. Why did I remember it? “The park will be named The Lucky Charm, but that’s not public knowledge yet.”
I just nodded. “Good for you,” I said, as my lawyer brain started ticking away.
Being an investor—especially one getting the name of his corporation included in the project—meant bringing major capital to the table. Investing that kind of money would mean sticking around long enough to watch the progress. Or it would if it were me. An accountant would probably set up a per diem for his stay. And seeing as nothing had even started yet—dear God he could be there in Charmed for months.
“So you’re here for a while, then?” I added, digging my nails into my upper arms.
Sully blinked a couple of times, giving me a studying look like he was contemplating his words. That was bad.
“I bought a house, Carmen,” he said. “In Charmed. I’m not leaving.”
There was one of those moments where things spin around and lights look funny. I blinked it clear and just breathed in lieu of words. There were none. He bought—
“You—” I shook my head and forced a smile. “You what?”
Sully gave me a long look followed by a glance toward the Oreo lady. She’s not gonna save you, buddy.
“I assumed you’d probably heard.”
I chuckled. “Why?” I asked. “Why would I hear about random people buying houses?”
Like how I did that? Making him a nobody to me to lessen the tension and maybe slow my heart rate? But now why didn’t I fucking hear about him buying a house? I went to Chamber breakfasts. Occasionally. Wasn’t there someone there that would have known? I couldn’t pump gas without someone telling me about my ex-husband’s latest hilarious Facebook post. Or my mother’s most current medical issues. But let the hot carny that made me an overnight sensation come back and buy a house in Charmed, and nobody has anything to say?
Sully held up a hand. “I don’t know. Never mind.” He laid the hand against his chest, and my eyes fell to it of their own accord.
Damn it, I’d loved his hands. The long, roughened fingers of a working guy, even back then. My mind flashed to what they looked like—what they’d felt like on my skin a hundred years ago, and I felt the heat rush to my face.
“I mean, what do you think? I hang out with realtors?” I said, hearing how stupid that sounded.
“Sorry,” he said, backing up, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else. “I guess I figured—small town. You’re a lawyer—”
“How’d you know that?” I asked.
The tired expression went focused as he tilted his jaw just slightly. I saw the spark. The challenge. The grin that pulled at his lips. He grabbed a new package of chocolate grahams from the shelf without breaking eye contact with me, and switched them out with the one in my hand.
“Well, people do talk to me.”
Oh. Hell. No.
No he didn’t.
I lifted my chin, and refused to look away. No matter what was liquefying in my chest as his gaze burned through me. No matter what images flashed like a movie reel in my head. I wouldn’t give him that satisfaction.
“Good for you,” I said, placing the package back on the shelf. I needed them more than ever but I would not need them in front of him. “Welcome back to Charmed.”
I made to walk around him, but the heat from his hand on my arm stopped me.
“Carmen, wait.”
His voice was like hot honey over my body.
I hate honey.
I was proud of myself. My acting ability to not suck my tongue down my throat, or choke on my own spit, or jerk my arm free like I’d been bitten by a rabid squirrel—was Oscar-worthy. Instead, I patted his hand and smiled up at him, slowly stepping to the side until his fingers slid free.
“We’re grown-ups now, Sully,” I said, wondering where the hell the words were coming from. “It’s all good. Have a great day.”
And I walked away. And out. And to my car. The pains stabbing through my middle stealing my breath. Damn grateful for nothing else in my hand because being chased down for shoplifting cookies while in a blind haze of what-the-fuckery would have been the final icing on a messed up cake.
Fumbling for my keys, I hit the button and got in as quickly as possible. I had to leave. Now. Before he came out. Before I could see what he was driving and then obsess over every other that vehicle I saw in every other parking lot in Charmed. Before I could succumb to the temptation of watching to see where he went. Where he lived, what his home looked like.
“Leave,” I whispered, my voice sounding vaguely desperate. I felt the burn behind my eyes and I shook my head and tilted my head back. “No. You will not cry, damn it.”
I blinked at the roof. I was thirty-three. Eighteen was a long time ago. Suck it up, Carmen.
I took a deep breath and faced forward, just in time to see him walk out of the store. He’d slid the sunglasses down over his eyes, causing a stray lock of dark hair to fall next to his face. He was probably twenty-five feet away, and I could feel that strand of hair on my fingertips.
Without another look, I pulled out and drove away.