Nash Brothers Box Set - Carrie Aarons Page 0,79

thought the world couldn’t tell them boo. Those teenagers had their whole lives ahead of them, and they expected to be living them together.

“Thank you,” I croak out.

The truck passes the sign for Fawn Hill, Bowen navigating us through town. He ignores my sincerity. “You still stay with your parents?”

Of course, he wouldn’t know that I bought my own place, finally, last year. We don’t know each other anymore.

“No, I have a townhouse on Conover.” I smile.

“I know the development.” He hasn’t looked at me since we got in the car.

Part of me was hoping he’d say he was proud of me, that he’d always believed I could be independent of my political father. But, like always, he says nothing.

Fawn Hill is deserted, most people are sitting down around the dinner tables with their families at this time. I take advantage of the darkness that’s set in … to stare at Bowen as he drives.

The set of his cheekbones, his eyebrows, his jaw … they’re all filled with so much fury.

As he pulls the car onto the one lane road that leads around the circle of my townhouse community, I direct him to a stop just outside my door.

When he only grunts a goodbye, I melt.

I forget that I wasn’t the only one who lost everything in that accident.

My hand reaches for his face, my fingertips feeling over the rough of his barely there beard. It’s more like a five-o’clock shadow and is the exact same shade of the neat cut of his locks. The move must shock Bowen because his head whips around, and the minute his eyes lock onto mine, I’m clued in on the tiniest shred of vulnerability.

He’s opened the door just a crack, and I search his expression, finding only pain, and it breaks my heart open. Bowen always seems to know how to make my heart weep.

“I’ll say it for the thousandth time, but I hope you hear me. I don’t know what it is I did to make you hate me so much, but I’m sorry.”

I slide out of the passenger seat and slam the truck door in frustration. The prickly sense of old scar tissue being cut open again stays with me for the rest of the week.

2

Bowen

The throbbing in my collarbone aches like a thousand painful memories past.

Fawn Hill’s recent down-pouring of rainstorms isn’t good for the scar tissue that runs rampant through the healed injury, and I could probably say the same for my heart.

I open the blinds on my barbershop windows, fat drops from the sky coating them and leaving Main Street a blur beyond the glass.

Thank God the library isn’t on Main Street. It’s closer to the elementary school, set off the main couple of roads in Fawn Hill, and I’m an appreciative bastard for that. If I had to look across the street every day and see her, I might go mad.

Hell, I was already halfway to insane. I lived in the same town that my high school sweetheart and I had grown up in … and she still lived here, too. I was at the mercy of every person in this town who could still feel the undeniable chemistry between Lily Grantham and me and whispered about it as we passed.

Lily Grantham.

Fuck, did it have to be her on the side of the road? What the hell was the world trying to do to me?

And why can’t I get the feel of her touch on my cheek out of my heart, my head, and scrubbed from my skin?

Her smell still lingers in my truck. Every time I’ve gotten in the thing for the last four days, I can smell the lavender mixed with warm vanilla … the scent she’s worn for years. I don’t even know the perfumes name, or I’d have probably bought myself a bottle before now. To smell in the sanctity of my home like some weird serial killer.

Really, I just missed her more than fucking anything.

Lily had always been tiny. She was smaller than petite … her lithe, tight body was something out of Neverland. I’d always been a giant, and she’d been the pixie that fit perfectly in my lap.

How I wished I could have lost control in that car, pulled her on top of me and felt those small curves under my hands again. Since we’d been together, Lily had become a woman. Over the last ten years, I had to avert my eyes not to notice the sway in her