“Oh, yeah. I didn’t want to marry her at all, but she was pregnant and my daddy is the preacher in a little church up in Lindale.”

“Why are you tellin’ me this?” Tawny asked.

“Just need to bare my soul to a stranger who don’t give a damn what I did,” he said. “I was sittin’ here prayin’ to God to give me a sign about what I’m supposed to do come Sunday mornin’, and you walked by. I figured you might be my sign.”

“God wouldn’t send me to be anyone’s sign,” Tawny laughed.

“My girlfriend, also a preacher’s daughter, and I had this big fight and I got drunk,” he said. “So I wound up in bed with another preacher’s daughter for a whole weekend. My girlfriend and I made up the next week, but . . .” He let the sentence trail off.

“But then the other preacher’s daughter turned out pregnant, right?”

“We shouldn’t have been drinking or having sex, but things happen.” He shrugged. “It was a shotgun wedding, and then she had a miscarriage at two months.”

“Life ain’t fair, is it?” Tawny said.

“My girlfriend and I were still in love . . . you can guess the rest. My wife’s religion does not believe in divorce. My parents don’t believe in it, either, even though our church doesn’t send folks to hell for it.”

“Twisted-up mess, if you ask me. How old are you?” Tawny asked.

“Twenty-two. Been married six months.”

“Sounds like you’ve got a lot of soul searching to do in the next couple of days.”

He rubbed a hand across his chin. “If you were my wife, what would you do?”

“I’d never have married you to begin with, but since she did, I imagine I’d shoot you for cheating on me,” she answered.

“And if you were the woman I’ve loved since I was in the third grade?”

“I hope I would have had enough sense to back off until you were a free man.”

“Hope?” he asked.

“I can’t judge. I haven’t walked a mile in either of those women’s shoes. Maybe your wife loved someone else, too, but she doesn’t know how to get out of this horrible marriage and she’s puttin’ the job on you. You should talk to her—and listen to what she has to say. Just the two of you.”

Maybe you should practice what you are preachin’. There was Granny Annie’s voice in her head again. You should try paying attention to Zed and your sisters like you do to strangers.

“Thanks for listenin’ to me. You might have been my sign after all. I’ll probably check out early tomorrow mornin’ and go back across the river. See if I can get this straightened out,” he said.

“Sure thing.” As she covered the distance to her own little cabin, Tawny could hear all kinds of night insects and animals who’d come out to play under the light of the moon. When she was inside, she slid down the back of the door and wrapped her hands around her knees. “Granny, I’ve done some really stupid things that I don’t want to tell Dana and Harper about. They’ve never been on probation or made the bad choices that I have. I just can’t tell them. Don’t leave me. I need to hear your voice sometimes.”

She cocked her head to the side, but all she heard was wind rattling through the trees.

CHAPTER SEVEN

For the second night in a row, Harper was restless. When not even an evening of mindless drinking and dancing or picking up a sexy cowboy for a one-night motel fling sounded good, she considered taking her temperature to see if she was sick. She paced around the cabin a few times and finally pulled an old gray sweatshirt over her head and went outside. She didn’t even slow down at the porch but kept walking, following the trail by moonlight to a little cove in the bend of the lake where she couldn’t even see the cabins.

She went right to a big flat rock jutting out at the shore. It was one of Granny Annie’s favorite places to take the girls fishing in the summer. Sometimes they’d talk, but most of the time they just enjoyed the quiet. If they were lucky, they’d take home a whole string of fish to fry. The memories calmed her—right up until the tiny hairs on the back of her neck started to prickle and Wyatt walked out of the shadows. He sat down beside her and covered her hand with his. Peace surrounded her like a warm blanket on a cold Texas night.

“The guys are having a Die Hard marathon tonight in one of the cabins. I couldn’t sit still and watch the third one, so I told them I was going for a walk,” he explained. “I figured you’d be out dancin’ the leather off your boots.”

“I might have learned my lesson with that business last week,” she answered. Suddenly, the sweatshirt was too warm despite the chilly night breeze coming off the water. Not one of the men that she’d used to get Wyatt Simpson off her mind had ever caused the kind of heat waves he did simply by touching her hand. “What do you do when you’re not fishin’?”

“Get my stuff ready for another fishin’ trip. What about you? What did you do before you came here?” He gently squeezed her hand. “They say you never forget your first love. I think they might be right.”

“Is that a pickup line?”

“Nope.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “I have not been a saint, believe me. But no one ever quite measured up to the feelings that I had with you. I don’t know where you are in your life right now, but I just wanted you to know that.”