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“Hey, Tulsi? What’s up? You okay?”
Tulsi sniffed away her tears and sat up, her lips parting to tell Mia she was fine, but then she saw the man in Mia’s passenger seat and all her words fell away.
There, not fifty feet from the truck, wearing a black cowboy hat and a denim button-down that made his hazel eyes look a dreamy greenish-blue, sat Pike Sherman. His sandy brown hair was shorter than the last time she’d seen him and the skin at the edges of his eyes was lightly wrinkled, but otherwise he looked exactly the same—except more impossibly handsome. The years had banished the last of the adolescent softness from his cheeks, transforming his strong jaw into a thing of angular beauty. The rest of his face was equally chiseled, gentled only by his full lips. Those soft, generous lips that had once kissed hers with enough passion to make the world stop turning.
Even before she met his eyes, Tulsi was having a hard time catching her breath. When her gaze connected with his, the wind rushed out of her like she’d taken a hoof to the gut.
Suddenly, she felt like she was naked in a polar ice storm, not fully clothed in the middle of a sweltering southwest Texas summer evening. The look in Pike’s eyes wasthatchilling and so ripe with contempt Tulsi had to fight the urge to flinch.
At that moment—as her heart lurched and her throat locked with panic—she was forced to rethink everything she’d assumed for the past seven years. Because, at that moment, she understood that Pike Shermanhatedher. He hated her with a passion as hot and intense as the passion they’d shared when they were kids.
“Earth to Tulsi.” Mia reached past Pike to wave a hand out the passenger window. “Are you coming or not? We’ve got to jam, sister.”
Tulsi wrenched her gaze from Pike’s, but her heart was still beating so fast her voice trembled when she asked, “Coming where?”
“To the meet and greet.” Mia shook her head, sending her red curls bobbing gently. “Are you sure you’re okay? Did you drink enough water today? You know we had six people down with heat stroke in the medic tent by noon.”
Tulsi forced a smile. “I’m fine. I can’t make it to the meet and greet. I have to go take care of some stuff at home. But y’all have fun.”
Mia frowned. “All right, but text me when you get home, okay? I want to know you didn’t pass out on the side of the road somewhere.”
“Will do.” Tulsi braced herself to keep her smile in place as she turned her attention to Pike. “Nice to see you, Pike. Glad you could make it home for the week.”
His full lips thinned and stretched, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Nice to see you, too, Tulsi. Sorry you can’t join us tonight.”
I’ll bet you are, Tulsi thought to herself. The man looked like he’d rather take a cactus needle in the eye than spend another second in her company and she saw relief flicker across his features when Mia waved goodbye and accelerated toward the ghost town. As her best friend pulled away, Tulsi hopped off of the tailgate and stood barefoot in the dust, watching the truck fade into the distance, her head spinning and her belly filling with butterflies.
No, not butterflies. This was something bigger than butterflies. Her stomach was alive with the furiously beating wings of a hundred birds, a thousand paper cranes like the ones she and Mia used to fold out of wrapping paper in college to decorate their grungy apartment. Pike Shermanhadn’tforgotten her. Pike didn’t look fondly back on their days together as an experiment conducted by a younger, more foolish version of himself. Pikehatedher, which meant…
He must have really loved her, after all. The opposite of love isn’t hate. The opposite of love is indifference. Hate is passion with a mean streak, wearing sadder, uglier clothes, but it’s still passion. Pike still feltpassionatelyabout her. Looking into her eyes made a man who was on top of his game in every sense of the word look like he wanted to tip over her truck with his bare hands, and that changed…everything.
Absolutely everything.
“Oh my God,” Tulsi whispered to herself, wrapping her arms tightly around her waist as she sagged against the side of her truck. “What have I done?”
You did what you had to do. It doesn’t matter if he loved you once, he doesn’t love you now. And there’s no guarantee he would have loved anyone or anything once his freedom was taken away.
Besides…it’s too late now.
It was true. It was too late for anything Pike once felt to matter. Choices had been made, paths had diverged, and there was no changing the past. It was time to get in her truck, pick up her daughter, and pretend she’d never laid eyes on Pike Sherman.
As she drove to her father’s house, Tulsi did her best to talk her heart out of her throat and all those winged creatures in her belly back to roost wherever they’d come from. But some things don’t respond well to reason. Some things—like hearts and dreams—dance to the tune of a different drummer, and once he begins to play, all bets are off.
CHAPTERTWO
Pike
Pike’s handscurled into fists, but he kept his shoulders relaxed and his gaze trained out the window. His little sister was exhausted from her long weekend and stressed out by the impending meet and greet, but she wasn’t stupid. If he didn’t watch himself, Mia would figure out that seeing Tulsi had upset him and from there it was only a hop, skip, and a jump to figuring out why.
And that wasn’t. Going. To happen.
He’d kept all the shit with Tulsi buried for seven long years. He wasn’t about to dig it up now. The only thing that had made their breakup bearable was knowing no one knew he’d been dumped by the only girl he’d ever loved. No one had realized he and Tulsi were together so there had been no witnesses to the messy aftermath, and that’s the way he intended to keep it. He would make it through the week, avoid Tulsi as much as possible, and do his best not to come back to Lonesome Point in the near future.
Or ever, if he could help it. As far as he was concerned, if he never ran into Tulsi Hearst again, it would be too soon.
He hadn’t been looking forward to seeing her before tonight, but he’d never imagined looking into her eyes would send pain slicing through his ribs and stabbing straight into his heart. He was a twenty-nine-year-old man who had dated some of the most beautiful women on the planet, for God’s sake, not some lovesick kid. He didn’t know what the fuck was happening to him.
Tulsi was beautiful, but notthatbeautiful. The blond curls and big blue eyes were killer, but her bow-tie lips were thin and her chin came to a point too close to her square jaw. She was a good six inches shorter than the women Pike dated, and the proportions of her petite frame were far from ideal. Her torso was almost as long as her legs, her thighs bordered on stocky, and she had the strangest feet he’d ever seen—short, stubby, and nearly as wide as they were long.
