A Cold Creek Reunion by RaeAnne Thayne Read Free Book Online Page B

mom I ran into the bleachers going after a foul ball in P.E.”
    “Want me to do it again?” she asked with much more bravado than true courage.
    His beady gaze narrowed. “Try it, you little bitch, and I’ll take more from you than just your freaking history paper.”
    “This history paper?”
    At Taft’s hard voice, all the tension coiled in her stomach like a rattlesnake immediately disappeared. Ronnie was big for a seventh grader, but compared to Taft, big and tough and menacing, he looked like just what he was—a punk who enjoyed preying on people smaller than he was.
    “Yes, it’s mine,” she blurted out. “I would like it back.”
    Taft had smiled at her, plucked the paper out of Ronnie’s greasy fingers and handed it back to Laura.
    “Thanks,” she had mumbled.
    “You’re Lowery, right?” he said to Ronnie. “I think you’ve got P.E. with my twin brother, Trace.”
    “Yeah,” the kid had muttered, though with a tinge of defiance in his voice.
    “I’m sorry, Lowery, but you’re going to have to move. We’re studying for a Spanish test here. Laura is my tutor and I don’t know what I would do if something happened to her. All I can say is, I would not be happy. I doubt my brother would be, either.”
    Faced with the possibility of the combined wrath of the formidable Bowman brothers, Ronnie had slunk away like the coward he was, and in that moment, Laura had known she would love Taft for the rest of her life.
    He had moved on to high school the next year, of course, while she had been left behind in middle school to pine for him. Over the next two years, she remembered going to J.V. football games at the high school to watch him, sitting on the sidelines and keeping her fingers crossed that he would see her and smile.
    Oh, yes. She had been plenty stupid when it came to Taft Bowman.
    Finally, she had been in tenth grade and they would once more be in the same school as he finished his senior year. She couldn’t wait, that endless summer. To her eternal delight, when she showed up at her first hour, Spanish again, she had found Taft seated across the room.
    She would never forget walking into the room and watching Taft’s broad smile take over his face and how he had pulled his backpack off the chair next to him, as if he had been waiting just for her.
    They hadn’t dated that year. She had been too young and still in her awkward phase, and anyway, he had senior girls flocking around him all the time, but their friendship had picked up where it left off two years earlier.
    He had confided his girl troubles to her and how he was trying to figure out whether to join the military like his brother planned to do, or go to college. Even though she had ached inside to tell him how she felt about him, she hadn’t dared. Instead, she had listened and offered advice whenever he needed it.
    He had ended up doing both, enrolling in college and joining the Army Reserve, and in the summers, he had left Pine Gulch to fight woodland fires. They maintained an email correspondence through it all and every time he came home, they would head to The Gulch to share a meal and catch up and it was as if they had never been apart.
    And then everything changed.
    Although a painfully late bloomer, she had finally developed breasts somewhere around the time she turned sixteen, and by the time she went to college, she had forced herself to reach outside her instinctive shyness. The summer after her freshman year of college when she had finally decided to go into hotel management, Taft had been fighting a fire in Oregon when he had been caught in a flare-up.
    Everyone in town had been talking about it, how he had barely escaped with his life and had saved two other firefighters from certain death. The whole time, she had been consumed with worry for him.
    Finally, he came back for a few weeks to catch up with his twin, who was back in Pine Gulch between military assignments, and she and Taft had gone for a late-evening