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Chapter 1
There are definite moments in life that change a person. Danni had that moment when Jackson Hand left the town of Sherwood. At seventeen, she thought they would live happily ever after with Jackson, but when she graduated high school she learned the harsh reality that love didn’t always last and her heart could be broken.
Jackson was a year older, her brother Ben’s age and going nowhere which is what made him decide that he needed to leave town. It took a while to get over Jackson. A long while. And in the process of getting over him, she found someone else who had always been there for her. Danni’s brain knew that he was off limits but her just wouldn’t listen to her head. He was her brother’s friend, Walker Wild.
Walker was much older than her. He was big and scary to some but not her. Danni knew that beneath that stern exterior was a quiet and sensitive man. He was everything that Jackson was not and never would be to Danni. He had always been her protector. Had always been her friend but he would never be her lover. She had her fantasies though and they were heavenly.
So, she lives alone on the outskirts of Sherwood in a small, log cabin. She doesn’t own much, because she doesn’t need much. The front and back porch are her favorite place to be because they are peaceful.
Crickets sing, large, bullfrogs hop into her pond that feeds into a creek. The song they sing at night can be heard before a loud splash lets her know they have gone for a swim. There’s also an owl that entertains her on warm, summer nights.
Her family worries about her need for seclusion. What does she do out here all alone? Her parents forced her to get a cell phone when she moved into the cabin because it was so isolated, sitting back from the road surrounded by woods. Danni had refused to get a house phone. She doesn’t have a television or cable.
She did have internet for research. Danni reads, to fill her free time. Books are her haven where she gets lost from the reality of life’s cruelty. Small towns are filled with sadness. Not much crime but a lot of heartache.
The truck she drives to town where she works in the pub is the same one that she was driving when he left her. An old, beat-up Ford that has seen better days, but she can keep it running all by herself. That is all that counts as Danni is concerned.
Danni Rose Hatfield had worked hard that day at the garage that her grandfather owned. One day, Hal Mills promised her, he would pass it on to her when he no longer felt the need to get up and go to the garage, day in and day out. She wasn’t sure that day would ever come, knowing her grandfather. She loved seeing him every morning, so she didn’t really care if he ever passed it to her.
Tomorrow was Friday. In the evening and on Saturday, Danni would work at her father’s pub, her second job, not that she really needed it. Her father, she thought needed her more than she needed the job.
She liked being around the people of her small town, Sherwood, Ohio. Backwards, not going anywhere, Sherwood. A tobacco town where people worked hard year-round, but there was little in the way of employment unless you drove for over thirty miles. Most people did that including most of her brothers but Matt who owned a farm on the outskirts of their little, town and Seth who worked at the pub with her.
Danni snuggled into her chair on the back porch with the laptop resting on her thighs typing away at her latest attempt at a manuscript. She was never satisfied but what author was? Was she an author? Could she self-publish this one?
Her youngest brother, Seth was the only one in her family who knew what she did besides Walker. They both encouraged her to keep writing and publish her work one day. Walker was the only one who had read anything, and he thought she was good.
She gazed in the distance, hearing sounds of the night. An owl hooted from where he perched in the trees. She got lost in the past. She often did. Her memories overwhelming her with a sadness that she thought had died long ago with the girl who no longer believed in fairy tales. Danni lived in the real world now where she knew that Walker would never feel about her the way she did him.
Eight years since, Jackson Hand left town with a kiss and a hug and a weak ass, “I’m sorry, Danni. I love you baby, but I’ve got to find my own way. Don’t wait for me, baby.”
That harsh reality had opened her eyes to how life really was. She was a realist if not still a hopeless romantic. She wanted Walker to see her as more than Matt’s little sister. The piggy tailed little girl who used to follow them around. Chubby faced, nose covered in freckles. Sure, she had grown up and developed curves in all the right places, but Danni didn’t think that Walker saw that woman she had become.
At twenty-six, tiny laugh lines were beginning to form at the corners of her eyes. Her hair was as dark now as it was when she was eighteen. Her mom had gone prematurely silver at thirty-two. She often wondered if she would too. Men thought she was beautiful, but Danni didn’t date. She was interested only in Walker Wild, but he didn’t take any notice in Danni Hatfield.
Her hair was an unruly mess tonight. While she wrote, she tended to run her fingers through it, making it crazy. She pulled the nearly black, curls up and secured them with a clip letting long strands flow down her back and pieces frame her face. Her red lipstick from this morning had faded but the black eyeliner that made her eyes pop was still vibrant and looked good. Danni didn’t need anything else. She was a stunning woman.
She heard his boots on the leaves and twigs as he rounded the house looking for her, knowing exactly where she would be. After a year of this, he would know.
Walker wasn’t exactly homeless. He could live with his mother. She didn’t know why he didn’t. She saw him walking one night after leaving the pub and stopped him. Danni asked him where he was going, and he brushed her off. After a few times, of seeing him walking without a direction, she waited and followed Walker, he was sleeping in
the park, showering in the gym or at one of his friend’s houses. He worked for her father too, washing dishes at the pub.
Danni hated it that Walker had nowhere to go. She hated what had happened to him. She still didn’t believe he was guilty of what he had confessed to. Walker wouldn’t sell drugs. It wasn’t in his nature to do anything illegal but his brother, that was another story. For some reason, Walker had taken the fall for Jesse and five years in the Lebanon Correctional Facility.
He rounded the house and the sight of him took her breath away as it always had. She thought maybe even when she loved Jackson, she had a bit of a crush on Walker. He was tall. His shoulders were broad and his waist lean. His legs were long and muscular and when Walker took a seat beside her he stretched them out in front of him and crossed his tennis shoe covered feet at the ankles. Walker was comfortable with Danni and it made her feel good that he was. Walker wasn’t comfortable with just anyone.
Danni smiled at him and was rewarded with a rare, Walker smile that lit his face and made him more beautiful than handsome. His olive skin was dark from putting up tobacco on her brother’s farm. His jaw was dark with whiskers because he only shaved every few days. Walker ran his hands through his hair and it naturally, fell back in place.
Walker and Matt were nine years older than her, but she could remember her childhood feelings of hero worshipping this man. He was always kind and tender with her even when some of Matt’s other friends were not. They didn’t want the little sister tagging along but not Walker. He didn’t mind her being a pest.
“Hard at work?” He asked.
Even his voice, deep and smooth caused a ripple of warmth to creep up Danni’s spine and the cells beneath the surface of her skin began to tingle. She wanted him in the worst way, but she knew that he saw only Matt’s little sister when he looked at her.
“I am. How was the pub tonight?” She asked.
His pretty, eyes, fringed by long black lashes locked on her. They were so dark that in the moonlight, surrounded by the thick woods she could barely discern between the pupil and the iris. His jaw was rough tonight, and Danni wanted to reach out and caress Walker’s cheek. She knew he wouldn’t like that. He was a loner. He didn’t date women. He didn’t flirt with them even when they threw themselves at him.
“Same crowd as always for a Thursday night.”
She nodded.
“How’s the book coming along?” Walker asked.
“I think it’s okay,” she said feeling less than excited about the words she was putting on her laptop. She couldn’t find the right way to convey what she wanted. The outrage and frustration she wanted her readers to feel if she ever let anyone read it.
She would though, one day. She kept putting them down, chapter after chapter. One day, she would get it right. Write every day, every author kept saying and that is what she did.
“I’m sure it is better than you give yourself credit for,” Walker disagreed. “You’re too hard on yourself.”
This one she hadn’t let him read. This one, Walker wouldn’t like. It was about a man who confessed to a crime he didn’t commit. She hadn’t figured out the why part yet. Why her character had done what he did and why Walker had confessed to his crime when she was sure that he didn’t do it either.
She closed her laptop and focused on Walker. “Staying tonight? Or just checking in?”
He smiled sheepishly. Behind her house, twenty paces, was a barn of sorts. He called it that. She called it a large shed with a loft. In the loft, Danni stored all kinds of things that she had no room for in the small cabin that she had purchased two years ago.
When she discovered that Walker was sleeping in the park, she made a bed for him on a cot that was really, too small but it was better than sleeping outside in the elements. The cot was in the shed because Walker would never sleep inside the cabin on her sofa.
She could offer but Danni knew that he would refuse. She left him with a pillow and a few blankets. The shed had electric so when the nights became colder, she could put an electric heater outside for him too, so he would be warm enough.
“I’m staying.” He looked away and Danni knew that his pride was taking a beating for accepting her charity. “You know I appreciate this.”
