SLOW PLAY (7-Stud Club #4) - Christie Ridgway Page 0,15
Her arms flew out. “It’s not my business anyway.” She spun and began to walk away.
This might be the last time he ever saw Harper Hill. “What about you?” he called to her retreating back. “You engaged? Been married?”
“Not me.”
“No surprise,” he said, his voice low.
Not low enough, because her sprint slowed. She turned around, stalked back. “What was that?”
“Keep on walking,” he said, his temper rocketing. “It’s what you do best, isn’t it?”
Her body slowly drew up, adding another couple inches of height. Sparks flew from her eyes and her face infused with pink color. “I can’t believe you just said that.”
She looked angry. But not as angry as he was at this instant, because of what she was driving him to do. He took a step forward. His hands shot out to grasp her shoulders.
Then he yanked her body against his. From experience, he knew when she was on tiptoe their mouths would perfectly align.
They still did.
The kiss was anger for this moment, punishment for all the years of nightly dreams, heat because…because she made him hot. Then it softened to tenderness. Nostalgia crept in next. His chest hurt.
Shit.
He let her go, stepped back, and stared at her, his body thrumming with mingled resentment, desire, regret.
“A mistake,” he finally choked out.
“We always were,” she said, then ran.
Chapter Four
The next night after dinner, Harper’s mom sat on her bed watching her go through the boxes on the top shelf of the closet. Nestled in the first was a tiny pair of red cowboy boots. “Oh, cute,” she said, holding them up to show her mother. “When did I go through a cowgirl phase?”
“Never,” Rebecca said. “Your great-aunt, the first Harper, sent them and they were already too small by the time you could walk. But I couldn’t bear to throw them out.”
Harper frowned down at her big feet. “Well, their time has come now.” She dropped them into a garbage bag sitting on the floor.
Wincing, her mother fished them out of the plastic. “I’m not ready to let these go yet. And no one is forcing you to do this, by the way.”
“I’m heading out again, I told you. Tomorrow. The next day at the latest. And this time I won’t leave all these memories behind, just…just cluttering things up.”
Her mother’s speculative look made Harper quickly turn back to the closet. In another box she found a photo and a withered wrist corsage. “Ew,” she said, dropping the browned flower. Then she peered at the old picture. “I can barely remember the dance. My date was five other girls. Is that sad?”
“You never had your eye on any one particular boy until…”
“Yeah, until.” Harper tossed the photo into the “Keep” pile because those besties had been great fun, which seeing Sophie again had reminded her. Maybe Harper had missed having them in her life.
Maybe she’d missed them a lot.
“I can’t blame you for waiting for Maddox and then getting stuck on him,” her mom said. Cradled in her hands was the framed photo that had been propped atop her nightstand. The picture showed the two of them on the beach, Harper wrapped in his arms.
Her smile couldn’t have been brighter then. Looking at the two of them together, one tugged at her lips now. Then she frowned. “I didn’t get ‘stuck’ on him.”
“Obviously not,” Rebecca agreed, “since you left six years ago and haven’t spent more than forty-eight hours at home at a time after.”
Except for now. Harper resolutely pawed through the box of high school memories and then consigned report cards and frayed braided thread bracelets to the garbage bag.
“I wanted to see the world, Mom,” she said. “Just like my father.”
Her mother grimaced. “Maybe I made that sound too romantic.”
“Or it could be it’s in my genes.” It was better to think she’d inherited her father’s wanderlust over her mother’s unrequited attachment to a man who didn’t feel the same level of emotion in return.
“You did enjoy your travels, didn’t you?”
Four and a half years of seeing the world had been wonderful in many ways. But the teaching assignments lasted nine months, so it was never quite enough time to settle in, to feel cemented in a group of friends who became true family. So many of her students and their families had given so much to her that she couldn’t regret though—knowledge of the world, other cultures, other foods, and finally the understanding they were all one humanity together.