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One
“Six inches is too long!” Shelby Sohappy glared across the table, across all the flowers piled on the table, across the tulle and the candy strewn over the table, to her older sister.
But it wasn’t Juniper’s reaction to Shelby’s words that caught her attention, and held her there.
She felt it before she saw it. His response.His, always his. The change crackled through the air. And she told herself not to look. She told herself to keep her focus on Juniper, the bride, her sister, her best friend, and direct all wedding preparation complaints to her.
But she turned her head anyway.
As if he’d put his finger beneath her chin and swiveled it toward him. That’s how powerful the impulse to look was.
Kit Carson.
Damn Kit Carson.
Her eyes clashed with his, electric and upsetting. And his mouth curved—even more upsetting. “Six inches is too long? Maybe that’s why I’m still single.”
That earned a round of groans from the table—and Shelby should also groan. But instead she felt like her body had been lit up.
She had learned a lot since middle school.
That you didn’t actually need algebra. That body glitter wasn’t worth the hassle. That the girls who wouldn’t let you sit with them would—in fact—peak once school ended and spend their adult years trying to reconnect with people they had once been mean to so that they could sell them lip gloss, leggings and the secrets of success and wealth and sisterhood, as long as you bought their weight loss shakes.
She’d learned that she was stronger than she’d imagined. That loss wouldn’t kill you, even if you might wish it had.
But she hadn’t learned how to control her physical response to Kit Carson, a man who was soon to be practically family, the best man to her maid of honor, her longtime, shame-fueled object of lust.
Yeah. She hadn’t learned that.
“That’s not why you’re single, bro,” said Chance, her sister’s fiancé, and everyone laughed.
So Shelby laughed too. What choice did she have?
She felt like a foreign tourist pretending they understood what was happening around them. She was just lost. In ribbon curls and Kit Carson’s excess of six inches.
Howmanyinches more?
She didn’t need to know the answer to that.
She didn’t even need towonderit.
Nope.
“Six inches,” Juniper said, holding up a ribbon and a pair of scissors, and letting the edge glide effortlessly across it, resulting in a rather impressive curl, “is not too long at all.”
Shelby ignored Chance and his brothers chuckling at that.
So did Juniper.
Shelby wondered, not for the first time, how the hell this had happened.
The Carsons and Sohappys had been enemies for generations. To the degree that the first time she’d spotted Kit Carson at a football game when she’d been in seventh grade and he’d been in tenth, she’d felt a deep, instinctive recoil in her soul.
At least, she liked to tell herself that’s what it was.
Because it couldn’t possibly have been anything else. She’d been dating Chuck already by then. Well,datingwas a strong term. They’d been twelve, after all. They’d walked down to the diner in Lone Rock and had shared a milkshake with money Chuck had gotten collecting bottles and taking them to the can return.
They’d gone down to the river and skipped rocks.
