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1
CHEYENNE
Iwas staring into the eyes of the man of my dreams. I’d know those eyes anywhere. I’d looked at them for hours when I was a teenager.
“Excuse me,” the guy with Slade Shepherd’s eyes said.
“Mumborph.”
Yes, that was the actual word that came out as I stood on the front porch of my best friend’s fiancé’s dad’s cabin, freezing my tuchus off.
Even if this guy wasn’t Slade Shepherd, that face would render any woman speechless. Well, anyone who was attracted to tall, muscular guys with aquamarine eyes. Eyes that seemed to probe into the depths of your soul.
“Slade!”
Someone called out that name, and I jumped. We were just standing there, staring at each other. How long had we been doing that?
And someone had just called him Slade.
Was it possible? No. No way.
“Wrong room,” the male voice said.
I turned and saw Brody, the groom’s best friend and best man, standing behind me. I had been thinking how good-looking he was just a few minutes ago. Now he looked bland in comparison to my dream guy.
“Yeah, sorry,” the guy who looked like the grown-up twin brother of a teen pop star said.
That was it. He was probably related to Slade Shepherd somehow. Maybe he was even the guy’s dad.
No, that wasn’t possible. Slade would be this age by now. So yeah, maybe he was an identical twin brother. But would his name also be Slade? And Slade Shepherd didn’t have any siblings. I remembered that much about him.
“You’re bunking with me,” Brody said. “Hope you don’t mind snoring.”
“Actually, I just heard Erika’s not using her room,” I jumped in to say. “I could take that and you could sleep here. Especially since it looks like you’re already settled in.”
I leaned around him to peer into the room. I’d already noted an open backpack on the bed, but now I saw a pair of hiking boots next to that bed and some clothes on the floor too.
Slade Shepherd’s discarded clothes. I almost swooned, but then I reminded myself this could not possibly be Slade Shepherd. Not here in my tiny hometown. No way.
“Slade Reynolds,” the guy said, holding out his hand. “You must be Cheyenne.”
I stared down at his extended hand. He knew my name. He knew my name. He knew my name. It didn’t matter if he was the real Slade or a completely different Slade. I’d fantasized so many times about the guy with those eyes saying my name.
Could this count as a dream come true?
“Slade’s my neighbor,” Brody explained behind me. “Gage too.”
In front of me, Slade withdrew his hand. Oh crap. I was supposed to shake his hand. I’d missed the chance to touch him. I was going to have to stop being a silly fangirl if I wanted to make it through this weekend.
I took a deep breath and looked at Brody, trying to pretend the man standing to my right in the doorway to the bedroom looked like anybody else. “You both live up here?” I asked.
“Cheyenne here just flew in from Texas,” Brody told Slade. “She’s the maid of honor. She grew up here—a good friend of Abbie’s.”
“We were best friends in high school,” I told Slade, stepping off to the side so I could shift my attention from Brody to Slade.
As Slade’s gaze connected with mine, my heart started pounding furiously again. Abbie. I had to talk to her. Surely, she’d remember my crush on Slade Shepherd.
But no, by the time we’d become good friends, my crushes had shifted from teen heartthrobs to real boys. I’d actually lost interest in Slade by then, anyway. It started to wane when he put his music career on hold to join the military. Just like Elvis, media outlets said at the time. Although Slade was in a boy band, and public attention to that band was divided between all four boys, so the news might have flown by most people’s radar. Not mine.
