grunt of frustration rolling through me as I let my left hand hang over the edge of my door. I slowed the car down as I hit the Main Street drag, not wanting to give any of the small town cops a reason to give me a ticket.
Lord knows they were bored enough that it didn’t take much.
I wasn’t even sure why I was so annoyed and frustrated with Noah. He was just making conversation, just asking questions — but they were questions no one else had asked. And, to make it worse, they were questions I didn’t have answers to — at least, not reasonable answers.
I had the ones I’d been told, the ones I’d rehearsed, the ones I’d repeated to myself night after night until they stuck, until I believed them, too.
But it wasn’t just his questions that had thrown me, it was the man, himself.
I think I recognized him even before he told me his name. Maybe that was why I’d been so insistent that he tell me. It was hard to forget the boy I crushed on as a young girl, and continued to fantasize about up until the very day I left Stratford.
The first time I’d laid eyes on him, I was only nine years old, and he was the cute boy who sat in the pew in front of me in church.
The last time I’d seen him, he was a drunken mess, yelling at his older brother at a farm house party about who was man of the house now that their dad had passed away.
That was five years ago, when I was fourteen and sneaking into my first party. I remembered I didn’t drink a drop that night because I was afraid I’d end up just like Noah Becker.
But five years had changed him.
He wasn’t a mess anymore.
That pecan brown hair of his that used to curl around his ears was cut clean and short now, making his strong jaw stand out even more than it had when he was a boy. Those eyes that had tipped me off to who he was before he’d offered his last name were the same as they were the last time I’d seen him — cobalt blue, almost gray around the pupil — but now, they were a little less haunted, and a little more determined, like he had something to prove, just like I did. His arms and chest were fuller — a sight I got to inspect quite closely after he stripped his shirt off — and he was tan the way only a man who works outside can be.
He’d grown up, from a boy to a man, and everything about him was just bigger. His presence was larger than life.
More than anything, his confidence poured off him in waves, or maybe it was cockiness. Either way, he’d thrown me. I’d walked into that distillery with my head as high as my heels, and I was prepared to show this town that I was the new Ruby Grace Barnett — polished and poised just like my mother, ready to take on this town with my husband-to-be as the future State House Representative of North Carolina. I’d left that knobby-legged, freckle-faced little girl behind and come back as a well-to-do woman.
At least, that was the plan.
In reality, I’d stood barefoot on Noah’s dirty old t-shirt and giggled as I poured whiskey from a barrel for the first time.
Classy. Mama would be proud.
And maybe that was the most frustrating part — that not only had I strayed from the plan, from the woman I wanted others to see me as, but that I’d also had fun in the process.
The truth was, I could have stayed in that old, grimy warehouse full of whiskey barrels with Noah Becker all day. He made me laugh, and for that one hour in time, I wasn’t just Anthony Caldwell’s future wife. I wasn’t a smile and a handshake and a side kick.
I was just me.
But Noah’s questions at the end of our tour had whipped me back into reality real fast, and here I was, finally making the turn toward home.
Back to the real world for Ruby Grace Barnett.
My phone rang as I pulled down our long driveway, the familiar white house stretching out before me. It was two stories, completely symmetrical, with a porch that wrapped all the way around. Like any southern belle’s dream, there was a swing on the porch, and a garden Mama had cared for