Page 1 of Sterling Stone

1

April

[Stone]

Commitments.

After a lifetime of them, it should come as no surprise that I hate commitments. Especially the kind that lure me from settling into my easy chair, watching a ballgame, enjoying a beer, and soaking up rare moments of quiet.

But when a good friend retires from professional football, you want to celebrate that achievement with him, especially when you never had the same opportunity.

Neither the retirement nor the higher level of play.

As much as I hate the idea of commitments, I never hesitated when it came to making deeper ones. More important ones by the names of Clay, Judd, Knox, Ford, Sebastian, and Vale.

A rare smile curls my lips as I glance one more time at myself in the hotel mirror. My family is one of the few things I easily smile about. Their success stories. Their love lives in recent years. Their growing families.

Smoothing my hand down the silky tie over a crisply starched white shirt, I stare at my reflection.

“Not too bad, old man,” I mutter, examining the silver that exceeds the black strands that once dominated my hair and the muted white playing a losing game of hide and seek in my thin-layered beard. Crinkles meet the corners of my blue eyes. Eyes that have seen too much over my forty-five years. The years that keep creeping toward fifty.

With a sigh, I swipe two fingers near my temple, although I don’t have a single hair out of place.

I’m in Knoxville for the weekend. The timing worked out perfectly. I’ll make an appearance at the dinner, stay for a drink, and then sneak away for my brother’s fight.

He doesn’t know I’ll be there. He doesn’t want me to know what he’s doing late at night in the backrooms of certain bars, but I know everything about my siblings.

I should, as both the sheriff of Sterling Falls, our small West Virginia mountain town, and as their oldest brother.

My daily fight is feeling older when age is a privilege. I’ve lost too many people too soon—family members, good friends, and folks I couldn’t save on the job—before they ever reached the same age I’m presently sporting.

On that note, I step into the quiet hotel hallway and tug my phone from the pocket inside my suit jacket. Scrolling for the Uber app my nephew helped me download, I double-check where I’m headed this evening. With my head lowered, I’m busy thumbing my phone screen when something hard and rather nondescript jabs my chest.

It isn’t the force of the item so much as how startled I am that causes me to stumble backward, dropping my phone. At the same time, a woman propels backward in the opposite direction, and I reach for her before she’ll completely fall.

With my hands on her upper arms, holding her steady, warmth drizzles beneath my large palms over her thin, long-sleeved shirt. Which makes no sense. Lowering my gaze, I note the offending object. The jarring poke came from an open book.

When I feel her stiffen beneath my hold, I release her.

“Are you okay?” I say at the same time she says, “I’m so sorry.”

“I’m the one not looking where I was going,” I assure her, as her apology isn’t necessary. I bend to retrieve my phone.

“No, I had my nose stuck in a book.”

I offer what I hope is a warm smile. No real harm. No foul.

“It must be some story,” I say next, but then I catch on her face.

Because looking back at me is the most gorgeous woman I’ve ever seen.

Her skin looks like polished sunshine, shimmery bronze, and glowing just as brightly. Her hair is as dark as West Virginia coal, wild and loose around a goddess-like face. Then there are her eyes—a captivating grey-blue, almost silver, which feels prophetic considering my last name.

I’m Stone Sylver.

And she is striking.

She is also staring back at me, and we pass uncounted seconds just gazing at one another until I process our current position.