Chance of Rain by Amber Lin Read Free Book Online Page A

panties. “That I’m going to join the club. The small town club where we get in each other’s business.”
    “Yeah, you wouldn’t want to accidentally make any friends.”
    He paused, his fork midair. “Sometimes I think you’re all sweet and innocent. Then times like this I wonder if you don’t know exactly what you do to me.”
    Her eyes widened. “I don’t think I do anything to you.”
    His eyes were dark with questions. It was all too easy for her lust-addled mind to interpret it in carnal challenge. Do you want to?
    God , yes , everything.
    But instead she would do nothing, say nothing, because he needed her neighborly support, not her tongue on his ruddy skin. And even if that was sexual attraction simmering in his eyes, he wasn’t going to stick around. No point starting something that would lead to heartache.
    So when he quietly finished his meal and thanked her, when he stood to leave and she walked him out, when he leaned in close enough that she could see light brown flecks in his dark brown eyes, feel the kiss of his breath on her lips and drown in the heat of his body, she turned away.
    “Natalie.”
    “Have a good night,” she murmured, even as her body strained for him.
    “Natalie,” he repeated. “Invite me in.”
    “You’re already inside,” she said, but she knew that wasn’t what he meant. He meant inside her bedroom, inside her body. Inside her heart again, which still remembered the bruises from all those years ago.
    “Let me in,” he said, and time rewound to a decade earlier when she’d asked for the same thing. Different circumstances but ultimately the same. And been soundly turned away.
    “How long would you stay?”
    Surprise flickered in his eyes.
    She pressed on. “Will you show up at the diner tomorrow and we’ll tell everyone you’re my boyfriend now?”
    A brief pause. “No.”
    “No,” she repeated, her voice tinged with bitterness. “So I’m good enough to cop a feel in the dark but not for anyone to know. Well, sorry. Not interested.”
    “It wasn’t like that. You said you understood.”
    Had she? “I knew you were unhappy here. I just didn’t know why. I wish you would’ve opened up to me.”
    As she spoke the words, she realized it had been too much to ask of a frustrated, angry teenage-boy-turned-man. She ducked her head, confused and dismayed.
    He wasn’t so easily deterred. He reached out as if to take her hand, instead trailing curled fingers up the side of her hand. She didn’t even know that was a sensitive place, but his whispered caress lit a hundred nerve endings from her pinky to her wrist, like a shooting star streaking across the blank, dark expanse.
    “Can I stay the night?”
    Part of her thought, finally. After all these years. Finally.
    But Barry’s words had not only been true for Sawyer but for her. You don’t realize how much you changed while you were gone , or how everyone moved on without you. She had changed while Sawyer had been gone, she’d moved on, and she was not eager to offer herself up for rejection once again. Was she? Twelve years ago she hadn’t been enough to keep him. Grasping at smoke would only make it disappear.
    “I don’t—” she stuttered. “I can’t—”
    He pressed a finger to her lips. “It’s okay. Don’t explain.”
    Wearing a small smile, faintly rueful and sweetly understanding, he left.
    She peered out her window, watching the headlights of his truck break the darkness and drive away. Had she made a mistake? With each minute, each mile that fell between them, her body cooled, and her heart ached. The look in his eyes rubbed her raw until she finally identified it. Not only longing, not only lust—but loneliness.
    A cup of hot tea and a book failed to relax her. Her focus was snagged by mental snapshots—Sawyer’s grateful smile when she fed him, the solemn, yearning look in his eyes when he’d asked to come in. She picked up the phone and hit the number on speed dial. When they