well, but before he could kiss me, night patrol stopped us.”
“They caught you?” he whispered.
She shook her head. “No, we hid from them, and then my kiss keeper took off his blindfold and guided me back to my cabin.”
“You never kissed?” he asked, his voice barely a rasp.
She couldn’t stop herself from smiling. “No, he kissed me but not at the well. He kissed me outside of my cabin.” She walked up to the well and ran her fingertips over the smooth stone then glanced over her shoulder at her fake boyfriend. “Do you want to know if I ever figured out the identity of my kiss keeper?”
7
Jake
Nothing moved. No breeze. Not a peep from the kids. It was as if nature itself sat stupefied along with him.
Natalie looked down the path that he knew led to the teen girls’ cabin, then brushed her fingers across her lips. A quick, unintentional movement, or perhaps it was muscle memory. But her pink cheeks and the girlish curve to her lips all but confirmed that she’d thought about that kiss just as much as he had.
Not that kiss.
Their kiss.
Sweet Christ! Natalie Callahan was his kiss keeper. Of all the women in all the trench coats in all the airport screening lines, what were the odds of not only meeting her but going along with her con that was really his con to get her family’s land?
Ping! Ping! Ping!
The smile faded from her face. “Do you need to get that?”
He frowned. “Get what?”
“Your phone.”
Dammit!
He pulled it out to find a text from Charlie, then shoved the phone back into his pocket. “It’s not important.”
“Well, do you want to know if I ever found my kiss keeper?” she asked again.
He swallowed hard. She never saw him. He’d made sure of it because of all those damn kiss keeper rules. No looking at each other. No disclosing your name. But she was right. They hadn’t kissed at the well. He’d never contemplated that their kiss at the cabin didn’t count.
“Jake, are you okay?”
He shook his head to get his mind back on track. “I’m fine.”
A lie.
He was the furthest thing from fine. No more than three feet away stood the girl, now the woman, who he’d thought about night after night. He’d held onto the memory of her through his darkest days.
He cleared his throat, half dreading and half wanting for her to say that she knew it was him.
He shifted his weight. “Did you ever figure it out?”
She sat down on the edge of the well and glanced inside. “No, I didn’t. The funny thing is, I didn’t want to kiss a boy back then. No, that’s not true. I’d thought about it, but—”
“Was it a good kiss?” he asked, hating himself for asking, but he’d always wondered if it meant as much to her as it had to him.
Her cheeks went all rosy again, and she smiled the same smile he remembered from that night when he left her, standing in the moonlight outside the cabin with her face partially covered by a bandana.
She pressed her fingertips to her lips again. “It was the perfect first kiss.”
She wasn’t wrong. It was. He remembered everything about that night and everything about her.
His phone pinged again, and he stiffened.
“Is it your work or your family? Are you sure it’s not important?” she asked from her perch on the well.
He took out his phone to see another notification of a text from Charlie, then set the device to mute. “I can get to it later.”
He had to get his head in the game. But this, finding her, threw one hell of a curveball into his plan. She watched him carefully with those trusting ocean-green eyes. But he wasn’t one to be trusted. Even if he wasn’t there to persuade her grandparents to sell, he wasn’t the man for her.
He wasn’t the man for anyone.
He could only imagine that the other Jakes she’d dated were much like the douche canoe he’d watched dump her and move on in real-time. But he was no better. In fact, he may be worse. Maybe once upon a time, there was a chance for him to be one of the good guys—a family man and a loving husband like his father had been—but all that promise and potential evaporated the moment he learned of his parents’ deaths.
No, if he wanted the control and the power that he’d focused on achieving for more than half his life, there was only one way