rubber toilet gasket and took off crawling on her hands and knees for the front of the store and the cash register. Pleeease let me make it out of here. Let me be invisible. Let me make it to the front door—
“Ouch!” She bumped into something hard, nose-first, and pulled up short. That was a knee. Male, covered in denim. And it smarted. She grabbed the bridge of her nose, which was stinging bad enough to make her eyes water.
“Lose something?” a smooth voice asked from overhead.
Oh. My. God. She knew that voice. Oh, how she ever knew that voice. It was dark and smooth and deep and she hadn’t heard it in fifteen years. It had gained a more mature resonance, but beyond that, the voice hadn’t changed one iota.
“I asked you a question, miss. Did you lose something?” the voice repeated impatiently.
Her mind? Her dignity? Definitely her pride.
She forced her gaze up along the muscular thighs, past the bulge that was going to make her blush fiercely if she dwelled on it, past the lean, hard waist beneath a black T-shirt, up a chest broad enough to give a girl heart palpitations, and on to a square, strong jaw sporting a sexy hint of stubble. But there was no way her gaze was going one millimeter higher than that. She was not looking Finn Colton in the eye. Not after he’d caught her fleeing the hardware store on her hands and knees.
“Uh, found it,” she mumbled, brandishing the hapless gasket lamely.
“Rachel?” the voice asked in surprise.
Her gaze snapped up to his in reflex, damn it. She started to look away but was captured by the expression in his green-on-brown gaze. What was he so surprised at? That she was crawling around on the floor of the hardware store? Or maybe that she still lived in this two-bit town? Or that she looked like hell in ratty jeans and a worse T-shirt and had on no makeup and her hair half coming out of a sloppy ponytail? Or maybe he was just stunned that she’d dared to breathe the same air as he, even after all these years. She hadn’t been good enough for him then; she surely wasn’t good enough for him now.
Her gaze narrowed. She had to admit Finn looked good. More than good. Great. Successful. Self-assured. The boy had become a man.
For just one heartbeat, they looked at each other. Really looked at each other. She thought she spotted something in his gaze. Longing, maybe. Or perhaps regret. But as quickly as it flashed into his eyes that unnamable expression blinked out, replaced by hard disdain.
Ahh. That was more like it. The Finn Colton she knew and loathed. “Finn,” she said coldly. “You’re standing in my way. I was just leaving.”
With a sardonic flourish of his hand, he stepped aside and waved her past. Jerk. Watching him warily out of the corner of her eye, she took a step. She noted that his jaw muscles were rippling and abruptly recalled it as a signal that he was angry about something. All the Coltons had tempers. They just hung on to them with varying degrees of success. Finn was one of the calmer ones. Usually. He looked about ready to blow right now, though.
Hugging the opposite side of the aisle, she gave him as wide a berth as possible as she eased past. She made it to the cash register and looked up only to realize that just about everyone in the store was staring at her and Finn. Yup, men were as bad as women when it came to gossip.
She had to get out of there. Give them as little fodder for the rumor mill as possible. She was finally starting to get her life together, she had a new job, and she didn’t need some new scandal to blow everything out of the water when she was just getting back on her feet. She fumbled in her purse for her wallet and frantically dug out a ten-dollar bill. The clerk took about a week and a half to ring up her purchase and commence looking for a small plastic bag to put her pitiful gasket in.
She snatched it up off the counter, mumbling, “I don’t need a bag,” and rushed toward the exit. But, of course, she couldn’t get out of there without one last bit of humiliation.
“Miss! Miss! You forgot your change!”
Her face had to be actually on fire by now. She was positive she felt flames rising off her cheeks. She turned around in chagrin and took the change the kid held out to her.
“Don’t you want your receipt? You’ll need it if you have to return that—”
She couldn’t take any more. She fled.
She didn’t stop until she was safely locked inside her car, where she could have a nervous breakdown in peace. She rested her forehead against the top of the steering wheel and let the humiliation wash over her. Of all the ways to meet Finn Colton again. She’d pictured it a thousand times in her head, and not once had it ever included being caught crawling out of the hardware store in a failed effort to dodge him.
Knuckles rapped on her window and she jumped violently. She looked up and, of course, it was him. Reluctantly, she cracked the window open an inch.
“If you’re going to faint, you should lie down. Elevate your feet. But don’t operate a motor vehicle until any light-headedness has passed.”
He might be a doctor, but that didn’t mean he needed to lecture her on driving safety. Sheesh. He didn’t even bother to ask if she was feeling all right! She snapped, “Why, I’m feeling fine, thank you. It was so kind of you to ask. I think I’ll be going now. And a lovely day to you, too.”
She rolled up her window and turned her keys in the ignition. Thankfully, her car didn’t choose this moment to act up and coughed to life. She stomped on the gas pedal and her car leaped backward. Finn was forced to jump back, too, or else risk getting his toes run over. It might have been petty, but satisfaction coursed through her.
She pulled out of the parking lot with a squeal of tires that had heads turning up and down Main Street. How she got home, she had no real recollection. But a few minutes later, she became aware that she was sitting in her driveway with her head resting on the steering wheel again.
Finn Colton. Why, oh why, did he have to come back to Honey Creek after all these years? Why couldn’t he just stay in Bozeman with his perfect job and a perfect wife, two point two perfect kids, and a perfect life? Heck, knowing him, he had a perfect dog and drove a perfect car, too.
All the joy had been sucked right out of this day. And she’d been so excited to cash her first paycheck and have a few dollars in her pocket to start doing some desperately needed repairs around the house. Cursing Colton men under her breath, she dragged herself into the house and got to work fixing the toilet.
The gossip network took under thirty minutes to do its work. She’d just determined that, although she’d miraculously managed to get the right-size gasket, her toilet was officially dead. She was going to have to replace all the tubes and chains and floaty things that made up its innards.
Her phone rang and she grabbed the handset irritably. “Hello.”
“Hi, Raych. It’s me.”
Carly Grant, her sometimes best friend, sometimes pain in the ass, second cousin. They’d been born exactly one week apart, and they’d had each other’s backs for their entire lives. Carly had stuck by her when no one else had after Finn dumped her, and for that, Rachel would put up with a lot of grief from her scatterbrained cousin. Rachel’s irritation evaporated. “Hey. What are you doing?”
“I’m wondering why my home girl didn’t call me to tell me she ran into the love of her life down at the hardware store. Why did I have to hear it from Debbie Russo?”
“How in the heck did she hear about it?” Rachel demanded.
“Floyd Mason told his wife, and she had a hair appointment at Eve’s salon at the same time Debbie was having a mani-pedi.”
Rachel sighed. Telephone, telegraph, tell a woman. Sometimes she purely hated living in a small town. Actually, most of the time. Ever since she’d been a kid she’d dreamed of moving to a big city. Away from nosy neighbors and wide open spaces … and cows. Far, far away from cows.
She’d