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We were sitting in a booth at Bettie’s Biscuits, discussing my campaign with Grant and Jo seated across from us. The fortuitous seating put me close enough to Evan that I could feel the heat of him next to me through his slacks, his tailored shirt snug around his biceps. I didn’t know what they put in our water to grow men like him, but there were a few too many of them for my comfort. Made it hard for a regular girl like me to keep her wits.
I honestly hadn’t noticed until recently. Maybe it was that my sisters had paired off with their men, leaving Mama and me alone and abandoning our sisterly pact to stay single until Mama found somebody.
But the truth was that our town held a long-standing belief that we were cursed, thanks to our grandmother stealing Grandpa from another woman when they were just girls. Every man we’d ever loved had either died or left and never came back. Grandpa died in a tractor accident. Daddy died in a car accident, and so did Daisy’s high school sweetheart at eighteen. Jo was smart enough to never fall in love until Grant, and the only boy I ever loved? He went to Harvard, and I never saw him again.
Until two stupid days ago.
Historically, I preferred to think Duke had just been blinked out of my world, existing in some place I’d never visit, like Mars, or maybe the bottom of the ocean. But then he had to show up with a pulse and everything, looking better than I’d ever imagined he could. My shock at his absolutely unfair handsomeness was my own fault—I typically imagined him with his legs mangled by a gangster for screwing over his daughter. Maybe even with his face misshapen, a few teeth missing, nose broken to the point of grotesque.
Oddly specific, I know. But I’d had a whole lot of time to imagine and found it therapeutic to daydream about him spitting out his teeth.
Once upon a time, we’d been on the homecoming court. We’d spent summers on the river, sun-kissed and carefree. Four years we were together before he left for Harvard. Six months after that, I busted him with another girl.
He’d been pulling away since he’d come home for Christmas break, suddenly too busy to talk and too stressed to even discuss his next visit. And I let it go. I let it go when a rich, beautiful blonde girl started showing up all over his social media and in his life because I trusted him. Until she answered his phone too late one night while he was in the shower. After months of letting it go, I’d built up a nuclear storage facility’s worth of ammunition. In that nuclear fight, I asked him point blank when he was coming home, and he said he didn’t know.
And that was the end of that.
It took me months to stop crying. Years to get over him.
And now he was here to contest my campaign.
I found myself completely unprepared for the shock, made a little worse by bringing another rich, beautiful blonde girl home with him. She looked a lot like the girl he’d cheated on me with, but I’d stared at her pictures long enough, I could have picked her out in a lineup. I guess he had a type: everything I wasn’t.
The thought soured my stomach.
Between me and Doug Windley, the political playing field was even. But throwing Duke into the mix was a problem. He was neutral in the sense that he hadn’t been in Lindenbach while we’d been squabbling over everything from bringing big box stores to town to managing the surge in our homeless population. But after a mayoral scandal that my family may or may not have had our hands in, my family was public enemy number one. Of course, plenty of people were so sickened by the mayor’s betrayal, they’d switched sides altogether. And then there were those who were done with the whole racket and wanted nothing to do with it.
Duke would appeal to them most of all.
I caught myself frowning and wiped my face clean of it, turning to Evan again.
My crush on our town’s favorite lawyer had been well documented by my sisters, who loved to shove me in his direction anytime they could, whether it be at town hall dances or community projects. We’d worked closely to keep Goody’s out of town, the massive warehouse store with prices so low, it would have put our entire Main Street out of business.
Even after that, he had no idea I existed.
Okay, maybe he had some idea I existed, but romantically? Nada. We’d gone to dinner, had drinks, danced and the like, but he never made a move. Jo always said he just didn’t know I was into him. Short of flashing him, I didn’t know what more I could do.
