AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I racked what was left of my exhausted brain and came up short.
The truth was, I wasn’t close to anyone in Sisters. The only person I’d been close to before I moved had been out of town as long as me. So the he she mentioned couldn’t possibly be Ian Wilder—my childhood best friend, the hero of my youth, and the only man I’d ever really trusted.
The man who, to the best of my knowledge, still called London home.
My ribs squeezed a little when I thought about him, but I blew out a slow breath and shoved it aside.
Along with this spidey sense, I also had a killer bullshit meter, and it was so very common to have the two screaming in tandem if the staring happened to come hand in hand with a creepy dude. That wasn’t this, though. From the moment I felt the attention on me, I’d known that it wasn’t anything nefarious.
But now, paired with the conversation I’d heard, I had to wonder exactly who she was, and who he was.
The bright-eyed barista behind the counter looked up and scanned the line. “Harlow?”
I stepped forward and accepted the cup with a polite smile. “Thank you,” I said.
With the cup pressed to my lips, I took my first sip and turned, then promptly choked on the mouthful of whipped cream and coffee when I found myself face-to-face with a very pretty young woman with dark chestnut-colored hair and a wide smile.
As I coughed, her face bent into a grimace. “I’m so sorry,” she gushed. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
Once my windpipe was unblocked, I managed to smile. “It’s all right. I don’t think I’ll meet my demise thanks to pumpkin spice and too much whipped cream.”
She laughed, studying my face with open curiosity. “Are you … Harlow Keaton?” she asked. Then she rushed to speak again when my expression must have betrayed a bit of my hesitancy. “I heard her say your name, and I wasn’t sure if it was you before that. You probably won’t recognize me. I was little when you left town.”
I straightened, giving her facial features a closer once-over. Something about her tugged on a thread in the back of my mind. The shape of her smile. The color of her hair. The eyes.
“Holy shit,” I whispered. “You’re a Wilder, aren’t you?”
She stuck out her hand. “Guilty as charged. I’m Poppy,” she said. “I recognized you from pictures.”
“You know, I didn’t feel old until this very moment,” I admitted. “Thanks for that.”
Again, she laughed. But it was a sweet, unassuming laugh, and even though my skepticism of new people was deeply ingrained, I found myself unable to conjure a shred of it aimed toward her.
“Did I see you in Redmond?” she asked. “I was shopping with my brother’s girlfriend, and I could’ve sworn it was you.”
Because the Wilder family was huge, Poppy had no shortage of brothers. If I remembered correctly, she had four. The temptation to clarify which brother’s girlfriend danced on the tip of my tongue, but I swallowed it down. There was no way Ian was single, not after all this time.
“You might have.” I gestured toward my table. “Do you want to sit?”
She eyed the computer and stack of notebooks. “Are you working? I don’t want to interrupt.”
I sighed dramatically. “I’m pretending to work,” I said. “The coffee was a desperate attempt to see if copious amounts of sugar would help. I should probably just have my sister pick me up because it’s not going to happen.”
Poppy’s face lit up. “I can drive you. I was about to leave anyway, and we can catch up in the car.”
As I took a careful sip of my drink, I weighed the sincerity in her words and her eyes, and good Lord, she meant it. Being without a car in Manhattan was the norm, but here, it required a bit more juggling, and here was this woman who hadn’t seen me since she was a kid … willing to cart me around simply because I used to be friends with her brother.
Small towns were a whole vibe, and I still hadn’t quite adjusted.
“Are you sure?” I asked her.
“I’d be happy to.”
My head spinning from the sudden shift in my day, I packed up my laptop bag and hitched it over my shoulder. I tapped out a quick text to my sister that she could drop off Sage at our parents’ house whenever they were done playing and slipped my cell into the front pocket of my bag. Poppy waited by the door, tapping away on her phone with a tiny smile on her face.
With my coffee in hand, I approached, my eyes narrowing when she quickly tucked her phone away and adopted a very innocent expression.
“Why does that look make me nervous?” I asked.
