Small Town Lies

By eleven-thirty, I’d officially gone from annoyed to wondering whether friendship should come with legally enforceable abandonment clauses, because Callie had been gone forty-five minutes, the guy she’d disappeared with had apparently been worth stealing our only transportation for, and I was beginning to suspect my best friend had forgotten she’d brought another human being to Miller’s Field.

Pulling my phone from the back pocket of my shorts, I checked the screen even though I already knew what would be waiting for me.

Nothing.

My last three messages still sat unanswered beneath her name.

Where are you?

Did you seriously leave?

The third had come after another ten minutes of watching the empty tree line.

If you left me here for a penis, I swear to God, Callie.

Still nothing.

“Unbelievable,” I muttered, shoving the phone back into my pocket as somebody tossed another piece of wood onto the bonfire.

Sparks curled toward the black Alabama sky while music pounded from a pickup near the trees, and all around me, people shouted conversations over one another, passed bottles between hands and wandered in loose groups across Miller’s Field.

I knew half the people out here.

Unfortunately, that also meant half of them knew me, and when my gaze traveled toward the row of trucks and stopped on one belonging to a guy I’d gone to school with, the idea of asking him for a ride lasted about as long as it took me to picture what would happen afterward.

By breakfast tomorrow, Mrs. Larkin at the diner would’ve known what time I’d climbed into his truck, what I’d been wearing, whether I’d smiled when he dropped me off and probably whether our imaginary wedding would be held at the Baptist church or Methodist.

No, thank you.

Grayson Ridge could turn a ride home into an engagement announcement before the coffee finished brewing, and I wasn’t desperate enough to spend the next week explaining that no, I wasn’t secretly dating some guy because he’d driven me twelve miles.

Closing my eyes, I blew out a breath before reaching for my phone again.

Jeremy was going to love this.

My brother’s name sat near the top of my recent calls, and after considering whether spending the night beneath a pine tree might be preferable to admitting what had happened, I finally tapped the screen.

He answered on the fourth ring.

“What’s wrong?” Jeremy demanded, his voice competing with several others behind him.

I tipped my face toward the sky.

Not hello.

Not Hey, Hails.

Apparently once a man became a sheriff’s deputy, his little sister calling after dark automatically meant blood, bail money or some fresh catastrophe requiring paperwork.

“Nice to hear your voice too,” I replied, walking farther from the bonfire.

“Hailey,” Jeremy warned, followed by the muffled sound of someone speaking near him. “I’m working. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong exactly,” I admitted, dragging the toe of my sandal through the grass. “I need a ride.”

Nothing came through the phone for a second.

There it was.

Big-brother silence.

“Where are you?” Jeremy finally asked, his voice flattening enough that I knew he wasn’t going to enjoy my answer.

Closing my eyes, I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Miller’s Field.”

The silence that followed had considerably more personality.

“What the hell are you doing at Miller’s Field?” he demanded.

Glancing toward the bonfire, where somebody was pouring something from a bottle directly into a girl’s open mouth while her friends cheered, I lifted one shoulder.

“Church revival,” I replied.

“Hailey,” he growled.

“I came with Callie,” I explained, turning my back on the fire. “She met some guy, apparently forgot I existed and took off with him.”

Jeremy went quiet again.

“She left you there?” he demanded, every trace of irritation disappearing beneath something sharper.

“Her truck is gone, she isn’t answering her phone, and unless she learned how to turn invisible sometime in the last hour, I’m gonna say yes,” I replied.

“Goddamn it,” Jeremy breathed before somebody called his name.

His voice became muffled while he responded, followed by a metallic slam that made me pull the phone away from my ear.

When Jeremy came back, I already knew.

“You can’t come, can you?” I asked, curling my free arm around my stomach.

He released a rough breath. “I’m ass-deep in something right now, Hailey. I can’t get free.”

My gaze moved toward the trucks, and although asking somebody out here still ranked somewhere between humiliating and guaranteed town gossip, I wasn’t about to make my brother abandon whatever had him sounding that distracted.

“It’s fine,” I assured him. “I’ll find somebody.”

“No,” Jeremy replied so quickly that my eyebrows climbed.

“I know people here, Jeremy,” I reminded him. “I’m not stranded on the side of a mountain.”

“I said no,” he repeated, his voice softening slightly. “Give me ten minutes. I’ll get somebody there.”

My hand tightened around the phone. “Who?”

“I’ll call you back,” he replied as the voices behind him started moving again.

“Jeremy, I don’t need you sending some deputy out here to collect me like I’m being arrested,” I argued, already imagining a marked cruiser giving Grayson Ridge enough material to keep me socially occupied until Christmas.

“You keep arguing and I might,” he warned before returning to me. “Stay near the fire where people can see you.”

Frowning toward the flames, I shifted my weight. “I’m twenty.”

“Good for you,” Jeremy replied without missing a beat. “Stay by the damn fire.”

The call ended before I could tell him exactly where he could shove the damn fire.

Lowering the phone, I stared at the screen before shoving it into my pocket.

“Asshole,” I muttered, turning toward the bonfire.

Fifteen minutes later, headlights cut between the trees.

I’d spent most of that time wondering which unfortunate deputy Jeremy had bullied into becoming my personal taxi service, and since I’d already decided I was going to hear about this until my fiftieth birthday, I was prepared to climb into just about any vehicle that appeared.

Then the black truck cleared the trees. My stomach dropped before the headlights finished sweeping across the field.

I knew that truck. I’d ridden in it more times than I could count, usually with Jeremy beside me and Briggs behind the wheel, and apparently recognizing it from fifty yards away in the dark was another piece of information my brain had decided was important enough to keep forever.

You’ve got to be kidding me.

The truck rolled across the grass before stopping several yards from the bonfire, and I stood watching it while irritation crawled up my spine and tangled with something warmer I absolutely refused to examine.

Of all the people Jeremy knew, all the deputies he worked with and every man in Grayson Ridge who owned a damn vehicle, he’d called Briggs.

The driver’s door opened, one boot hit the grass, followed by another, and Briggs Slade climbed out wearing faded jeans and a T-shirt, his gaze moving across the crowd before landing directly on me.

Of course, Jeremy had sent the one man I’d spent the last two years trying very hard not to want.