“Everything okay in there? Masyn didn’t seem very happy when we were leaving.”

Peyton didn’t have a clue what was going on, although I couldn’t really speculate myself. “I’m sure she’s fine. I don’t know what her deal was tonight. It’s been a weird day all around.”

“Are you surprised Beau wasn’t more upset?”

“About?”

She laughed, and I drove. “My guess is this isn’t how he envisioned his wedding night going.”

“You’re right, this was a hell of a lot better.” Thankfully, she felt the same way about her sister that we did. “But to answer your question, no. Beau was a mess when I got to his parents’ house this morning. I think he’s relieved at this point.” I wasn’t sure any of this had really hit him, either. Right now, he felt relief, but that didn’t mean over the next few days he wouldn’t crash into a pit of despair, cradling a beer in one hand and Felicity’s picture in the other.

“Yeah, you haven’t really told me what happened. I’ve kind of drawn my own conclusions.” Peyton cracked the window and turned her face toward the air coming in.

“Are you hot? I can turn the air on.”

She shook her head and more of her blonde curls fell from her hairdo. “No, just enjoying the way the air smells and the breeze on my face. Subways don’t lend themselves to hanging your head out the window.”

“Do you want to know?”

Peyton had gone along with everything asked of her today with almost no explanation. And she’d done it willingly and been pleasant through it all. If she wanted answers, I’d tell her what I could.

She gave up the freedom the wind and the window provided to face me again. “Know what?”

“About this morning.”

Peyton leaned back and rested her head on the seat, keeping her attention on me. “Sure, if you want to tell me.”

I didn’t believe she wasn’t interested, regardless of the tone she tried to take. I think she assumed she’d be left out. She wasn’t in our click, and her mother and sister had shut her down anytime she’d tried to get involved—it was easy to conclude she’d never know the truth.

“You already know Beau tried to call off the wedding. I guess when Felicity realized he was serious and not going to back down, she told him she was pregnant—gave him a fake pregnancy test and everything.”

Peyton didn’t seem all that surprised by her sister’s actions. Her head bobbed in understanding, and she didn’t try to explain away anything her family had done. I’d be embarrassed as hell and begging for forgiveness, or at the very least, I’d want a chance to prove my last name didn’t mean I was anything like them.

“If Beau gets a girl pregnant before he gets married, he loses his trust fund. Hence the reason for racing to the altar. If he didn’t seal the deal and tie the knot before she started to show, he’d be out millions.”

Her brows lifted so high, her forehead practically disappeared, suddenly in disbelief of what she heard. “Please tell me you’re joking.”

“Wish I was. It gets better. Your parents had him sign a prenup. If the wedding didn’t take place through any fault of Beau’s, he had to pay your parents back the money they’d spent on the wedding…which he couldn’t do if Felicity was pregnant and they weren’t married.”

She turned in the seat completely, her left shoulder now pressing against the upholstery, and gawked at me in disbelief. The wind still raced through the crack in the window, continuously blowing her hair in her face.

“I guess Beau broke down and told his mom—not his dad, though. And she took the prenup to their attorney, Josten—the guy he met with this afternoon. And Josten told him the best thing he could do was marry her to keep the trust fund, wait the year the prenup stipulated to be free of the wedding costs, and then divorce her before she would get any type of alimony.”

“Holy crap. He was going to do it? Why?”

I let out a short huff through my nose. “Oh, he wasn’t going to leave her. He was going to stay and suffer.” Thinking about it had me seeing red all over again.

“What for? He’s way too young to be in an unhappy marriage.”

“He believed she’d take the baby and move closer to your parents.”

Her mouth opened and closed several times, yet nothing came out. If she’d flopped around on the ground, she would have looked like a fish gasping for air. I put the car in park in my driveway and waited to see if she had a response.

“Sorry, I’m kind of dumbfounded. I knew my sister was conniving, but this is worse than anything I believed her to be capable of. And I’m appalled my mother obviously knew what was going on and didn’t put a stop to it.”

“Kind of shines a whole new light on it, huh?”

“It’s embarrassing.”

“You can’t pick who you’re related to.”

I had no idea how to comfort Peyton. I didn’t know her well enough. The only thing I could offer was company. I didn’t have anywhere to be in the morning, and I wasn’t tired, just irritated and unwilling to continue watching Masyn act like a fool. “Do you want to come in? We could watch a movie or hang out on the back porch. I’m sure Masyn has a swimsuit here if you want to go swimming.”

“Sure. I’m not in a hurry to deal with any of this.”

I turned the car off and climbed out. When we reached to the door, I had to use the spare key again to get inside. I hadn’t left any lights on, so the foyer was dark as Egypt when I closed the door. Peyton waited for me as I kicked off my shoes.

I finally hit a switch so she could see where she was going. “Masyn’s room is on the right. Check the dresser—I’m sure there’s something in one of the top drawers.”

“She has her own room?”

“More often than not, she stays here on the weekends.”

“And you’re sure she won’t mind me wearing her swimsuit? That’s kind of personal—like sharing panties.”

“If she cares, I’ll buy her a new one. Your other options are swimming in your bra and underwear…or nothing at all. Take your pick.” We didn’t have to get in the pool, but the cool water and a beer called my name. After a day like this, there was no place I’d rather be. And since Peyton didn’t argue or take me up on another suggestion, I went with it.

“I’ll see what she has.”

That’s what I thought. “I’m going to put on some shorts. Meet me in the kitchen once you’ve changed.”

I closed the door behind me and went to my room. Early June was the perfect time for swimming at night. The water was warm, the air wasn’t sweltering, and there was no risk of sunburn. Once I’d gotten my trunks on, I expected Masyn’s door to be closed. To my surprise, it was open, the light was off, and Peyton’s clothes were neatly folded in a pile on the bed with her heels on the floor. I continued down the hall and turned the corner into the kitchen, and my mouth fell open.

Not once, in all the times Masyn and I had gone swimming together, had I ever seen the bikini Peyton had on. Her back was to me, and the bottoms clung to her ass in an erotic temptation. I hadn’t been checking her out at the church or at Sadler’s. Standing behind her half-naked, I almost started to salivate. Just because my heart belonged to another woman didn’t mean I was immune to beauty. It wasn’t a thong, but it wasn’t a brief, either. It was somewhere perfectly in between. Peyton’s legs went on for miles, even though she wasn’t overly tall, and her waist created perfect curves that flowed into her butt.

I leaned up against the refrigerator to admire the view for a moment or two longer, and my shoulder shifted against a piece of paper that caused a magnet to fall to the floor. Startled, she spun around, clutching her heart.

“Holy crap, you scared me.” She took a couple of deep breaths and finally dropped her arms to her sides, exposing what little I had yet to see.

The front was as glorious as the back with even less material covering it. Masyn and I needed to talk about where this came from and who she’d been wearing it for at my house. I forced myself to look away when her nipples pebbled and her dark areolas showed through the white fabric. If that swimsuit did this to me when Peyton had it on, I’d never be able to hide my attraction to Masyn. Peyton was hot as sin, but even with her long hair now down in loose curls around her shoulders, she had nothing on Masyn.

Masyn—who was latched on to Toby Hayes. Fuck me.

I refused to dwell on that. I couldn’t do anything about it tonight, and I wasn’t going to try. I did make a mental note to put that swimsuit in my drawer after I washed it.

“You ready?”

“Should we grab towels before we got out?”

I walked toward the sliding glass door. “There’s a box of them out on the patio.”

Peyton didn’t hesitate getting into the pool, although she didn’t race to hide under the surface, either. She took her time testing the water with her toes, and then she walked down the stairs, and I dove in. When I resurfaced, she went under, and all I could think of when she stood up was Chevy Chase watching Nicolette Scorsese in the pool in Christmas Vacation. Peyton was a wet dream—literally.

Kicking under the water, I found my way to the steps, sat on the third one from the top and leaned back. She watched me as if she anticipated something. If she thought I would hit on her, it wasn’t going to happen. Or maybe she was waiting for me to start a conversation. I wasn’t good at this kind of thing. It was easy to talk to the women in Harden, because even if we weren’t close, we all knew something about each other. I knew nothing about Peyton other than her sister was heinous.

“If you were in New York, what would you be doing right now?”

Her hands skimmed the top of the water, and she turned in a slow circle, creating a tiny ripple. “On a Saturday night, in New York…I’d probably be in my apartment reading a book in bed. If my roommate wasn’t home, I might be reading while taking a bubble bath.” She leaned her head back and looked up at the sky.

“Really?” I wasn’t calling her a liar. I just found it hard to believe.

“Really. I’m not my sister, Lee. I don’t date. I don’t club. I have a handful of friends I’m close to, and we do stuff together during the day or after class.” She stopped staring at the sky and met my eyes. “What? I’m a homebody.” Her nervous giggle was sweet, and her apprehension was accentuated by her shoulders rounding inward with a shrug.

“I get it. I prefer my house to going out. Not that I won’t go out or that I don’t, because I do. Other than Sadler’s, it’s usually bonfires or cookouts at a friend’s house. Low key.”

She wasn’t buying what I was selling, even though it was true.

“So, you have friends other than Beau and Masyn?” she teased.

“Yeah, I have other friends. As you pointed out, I know everyone in town. I’m pretty tight with Masyn’s brothers, and Beau’s, too. We’re all like family.”

“That’s so foreign to me. I don’t like my own family; I sure wouldn’t want someone else’s.” She glided through the water on her stomach as she talked. The water lapping against the sides of the pool always seemed infinitely louder at night when there was no traffic on the street, or kids playing, or people mowing their grass.

“I don’t think most families are like yours.”

She flipped over onto her back and kicked her feet to move her body through the water in graceful, swanlike motions. “More are like mine than you’d think.”

“Then you definitely need to move out of the city and find your tribe.”

“I have a tribe. I don’t have a village.” She’d moved back into the shallow end of the pool less than three feet from me. Peyton stood, and the white bikini top left absolutely nothing to the imagination.

My dick stirred in my shorts. I hadn’t thought this through. At all. “You want a beer? I don’t have any wine.” I needed a breather, and cold air would kill any chance of my admiral standing to salute.

“No, thanks. I need to be able to drive back to the hotel.”

To keep from embarrassing myself, I turned around first, then I stood and pulled my shorts away from my body. They clung to me the same way that bikini did on Peyton’s curves. Just as I’d predicted, once I got inside, the air-conditioning squashed any possibility of arousal. I stood in front of the open refrigerator for a couple of minutes longer than necessary to ensure I didn’t lose the battle.

The knock on the front door startled me. With an open beer in hand, I went to see who was here this late at night. I sure as hell wasn’t expecting Masyn to be on my porch.

I stood back so she could come in—she did not. “Why are you knocking?”

“I just stopped by to bring you your truck and keys.” Masyn dropped them in my hand.

“So why not come in?”

She hitched her thumb over her shoulder toward the driveway. “You have company, and Toby’s waiting for me.”

I exhaled loudly and ran my free hand through my wet hair. “What are you doing, Masyn?”

“I told you.”

Fine. If that was the game she wanted to play, far be it from me to argue. “I’ll see you tomorrow then. I sent Ty a text while we were at Sadler’s about working on your car.”

“Sure. See you then.” Masyn sucked at disguising her feelings. She didn’t want to come in for fear of witnessing something she assumed was going on. And even worse, getting in the truck with Toby somehow held more appeal. She couldn’t stand him.

“Don’t try to prove a point by doing something stupid.”

“See you later.”

I grabbed her wrist and pulled her to my chest. She resisted until I wrapped my arms around her back. I was at a loss for words. There was no reason for her behavior. I hadn’t done anything wrong—I hadn’t done anything at all. Jealous Masyn wasn’t anywhere near as attractive as the girl who claimed my guest room and demanded I make her omelets.

Toby honked the horn, and Masyn pulled away. “I gotta go.”

“Masyn, so help me God, there’s not a cop in town who’d go looking if Toby went missing.”

“Got it, Dad.” She stepped off the porch and started down the driveway.

“I’m serious. Don’t test me,” I called out after her.

She didn’t respond. Instead, she threw up her hand and waved. And when she opened the passenger door, Toby leaned out from the driver’s side with a smug grin on his ugly face.

“Hey, man.” His need to stake his claim only served to piss me off. He’d no more have Masyn Porter naked in his bed than I would.

I flipped him off and went back inside. Douchebag.

I drained my beer before making it through the kitchen and then stopped to grab another one from the fridge. When I slid the glass door open, Peyton twisted in her seat on the edge of the pool to stare at me. A meek smile rose on her lips, yet it did nothing to wash away the sadness from her eyes.

“I was starting to think you weren’t coming back.”

With a few long strides, I joined her and dangled my feet in the water. “You thought I’d leave you out here alone? You must have some really dick friends.”

“You were gone a long time just to get a beer.”

“So you assumed I was abandoning you?” I laughed and gave her a quick side hug while drinking from the bottle in my other hand. “Not sure how people do things up north, but in the South, a guy never leaves a woman like that.” I let her go and stretched my arm out behind her to lean back on my palm.

The crickets and the frogs provided the music for the evening, and Peyton kicked at the water to keep the gentle lapping of the waves going.

Her arms were locked behind her, and her shoulder nearly touched her ear when she turned to look at me. “I admit, I’ve never met anyone like you before, Lee.”

“Not sure I know how to take that.”

“Most people our age are uncertain of who they are. You not only seem to know, but you take pride in it.”

“Plant firm roots.”

“I don’t follow.”

“You ever seen a fig tree?”

“Probably, although I can’t say for sure.”

“Stay put. I’m going to go grab my phone.” I took one step away and spun back. “I promise I’m not deserting you.”

She giggled. “Got it.”

I snatched another beer while I was inside. When I returned and sat next to her, I pulled up an image of the wild fig trees in South Africa near Echo Caves. “Looks like an ordinary fruit tree, right?” I was about to get all philosophical—not really my cup of tea, but this was one thing I firmly believed. I’d heard it years ago, and it had stuck with me.

“I suppose. I don’t see a lot of those in the city.”

“Point is, it doesn’t look like anything great. I mean it’s a big tree, but what you see above the surface isn’t what makes that tree so different from any other. To anyone who doesn’t have knowledge of just how special it is, it looks like any other tree.”

She nodded, even though the confusion in her expression indicated she didn’t have a clue where I was going with this.

“Roots. That’s what makes it extraordinary.”

Her brow quirked and her head tilted to the side.

“Most trees have root systems that spread out like a fan under the dirt.” I talked with my hands to indicate what I meant. “To support the weight of the trunk and branches, the roots extend out past the diameter of the tree. And while they go out for dozens of feet, they’re only a couple of feet deep. They can be the most beautiful trees you’ve ever seen, but if bad weather comes through, they’re easy to uproot, and they die under the pressures of the storm.”

I was losing her. The faraway gleam in her eyes and her furrowed brow indicated her confusion.

“The fig trees”—I held up my phone again to remind her which tree I was talking about—“may not be as pretty above ground where they’re exposed to the storms and everyday weather, but you can’t pull up something with roots that go four hundred feet below the surface. God plants us where we can grow deep roots. Unfortunately, most people are too busy pruning the bushes to water the soil.” I shrugged and took a long draw from my beer.

She swallowed hard. “I’ve never stayed anywhere long enough to grow roots.”

“Darlin’, roots aren’t about location. They’re knowing who you are at the core. And that, is about your soul.”

“I wouldn’t have pictured you as the religious sort.”

“That’s because you’re looking at the foliage and haven’t had time to see the roots. The fig tree was a sermon that stuck with me in high school. But religion doesn’t have to be Bible thumping and speaking in tongues.”

I’d perched in a church pew every Sunday from the time I came into this world until I graduated; in middle school and high school, there wasn’t much to do if you weren’t involved in youth group. Yet even when I was doing stupid shit as a teenager, the roots had already taken hold and shaped who I was, refusing to let me sway too far—my dad made sure of that. It was important to him.

She swatted at my arm playfully. “I know that. I guess it’s different, depending on how you were raised.”

I finished the third beer I’d had since we got here. I needed to slow down. Between what I’d consumed at Sadler’s and these, I felt pretty good. It wouldn’t take much more before I’d need to call Masyn to babysit—and that wouldn’t go well at all.

“I can’t deny that. I can only tell you that at some point, you have to give up your hope for a better past, embrace your present, and change your future. Just because your roots aren’t deep now doesn’t mean they can’t grow.”

Peyton looked at me like I was the only person who’d ever told her she could have value; she just had to find it and harvest it. Her mind tried to protect her and tell her other people defined her worth even though her heart was winning the battle, wanting to believe me. It was a lot to read from facial expressions and body language, but I’d dealt with enough insecure women in my life to recognize the signs. And the few women I’d met from big cities were the worst—everything was a competition: their looks, weight, job, salary, house.

Foliage—not roots.

It was another one of those things that drew me to Masyn. Before tonight, I’d never seen the petty bullshit women pulled. She didn’t try to be anything other than exactly who she was—and that wasn’t a carbon copy of everyone else. Whether Masyn recognized it or not, she didn’t try to blend in and be just like the next girl—her quiet confidence was one of her most attractive traits.

Something shifted in Peyton’s eyes, a flash of fear I would have missed had I not been looking. She wasn’t afraid of me; she was terrified of the ideas I’d planted. As they settled, they rocked her. “I should get going.”

I didn’t argue or try to convince her to stay. Instead, I helped her off the cement and grabbed her a towel even though she was mostly dry at this point. When I let her into the house, she scurried down the hall with her head down, not saying a word. I hung out in the kitchen, waiting for her with another beer in my hand. If Peyton was leaving, I was safe to collapse in my bed without worry.

She emerged a few minutes later, carrying her heels in one hand and the towel and Masyn’s swimsuit in the other. I took the towel and bikini and tossed them into the laundry room.

I joined her in the foyer and opened the door. Peyton didn’t walk through it immediately.

“Thanks for making today not so…awful.”

I smirked. She was cute. “Anytime, darlin’. If you end up staying in town, let me know. I’ve gotta work, but I get off at three every day. Beau, Masyn, and I can entertain you while you’re here if you’re up for it.”

She chewed on her lip, and then her tongue snuck out, swiping moisture over them in a perfect sheen to highlight their fullness. This was why the fourth beer was a bad idea. Apparently, I’d stared too long or given off a vibe I hadn’t meant to. The next thing I knew, Peyton’s hands were on my hips and her lips on mine. Everything about it felt good, yet nothing about it felt right.

I pulled away, worked up and breathless. “I can’t.” My Adam’s apple bobbed when I swallowed hard. The knot in my throat almost choked me.

She’d misread a signal I hadn’t tried to send, and now rejection colored her cheeks a rosy red. “Oh my gosh, I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking.” If she could’ve found a place to hide, she would have.

“Don’t be. You’re a gorgeous girl—”

“You’re just not interested,” she muttered under her breath, defeated.

I grabbed the back of her neck and pulled her forehead to my lips where I placed a kissed. I took her chin in my fingers—still holding my beer at my side—and smiled. “Let me know when you’re leaving town. I’d love to hang out, and I’m sure Masyn and Beau would, too.” I wasn’t quite as certain about Masyn, though I knew Beau, at any cost, would want to escape the hell of his parents’ house. And it was my way of confirming she was correct.

I was only interested in her friendship.