Read Return to Willow Lake for Free Online Page A

email, and his queue was full of work
stuff. Endless work stuff, sandwiched between a few notes from women. Yeah, he
was “dating.” In a town like this, with a population that couldn’t fill a high
school stadium, that simply meant he was keeping his options open. On the menu
today—he could go to the climbing gym with Lannie, and there were worse things
than staring at her cute butt while holding the belaying rope. Or, he could go
to Viv’s for dinner. She was a sous-chef at the Apple Tree Inn, and she had
trained at the Cordon Bleu. Third option—an open invitation from Shakti, who
practiced a form of yoga she liked to call Yoga Sutra.
    His buddies on his mountain biking team envied him the
attention from women. And hell yeah, he loved women. He loved their soft hair
and their curvy bodies, the flowery scent of them and the lilt of their
laughter. He loved them all, yet to his dismay, he wanted only one. And the one
he wanted was Lady Insanity herself, Sonnet Romano.
    No. Correction. She was not the one he wanted. She was the one
he wanted to avoid.
    Contacting her had been a bad lapse, and it was convenient to
foist the blame on something other than himself. He hadn’t spoken to her since
that night. Yeah, that night. But he’d felt
compelled to contact her today because something weird was going on. After the
epic night of sex, he’d been pretty sure it was their secret.
    Yet now he was not so sure.
    His friend Daphne, aka the ace internet mole, had alerted him
this morning that something was up. A web-based rumor mill had published a nasty
little bit hinting that the daughter of a certain candidate for the U.S. Senate
was into, ahem, post-wedding hookups.
    Politics was a dirty business. In the race for public office,
nothing was off-limits, not even the candidate’s family. In making a run for
national office, Laurence Jeffries was putting everyone in his orbit in the
spotlight. Zach wondered if the guy had thought about that when he’d decided to
go for it.
    Zach’s own father—still serving time for defrauding the city of
Avalon—certainly hadn’t taken Zach into consideration. Sometimes, Zach thought
that was what tied him to this little town, long after he should have left. He
had something to prove; he wanted to show people that he wasn’t anything like
his father.
    Upon seeing the link to the hookup story, Zach had impulsively
sent Sonnet a text message. A heads-up; it was the least he could do. He didn’t
actually worry too much on his own behalf. Thanks to his father, Zach was beyond
the point of embarrassment. But Sonnet had always been super sensitive about her
reputation.
    Yet the moment he’d hit Send, he started wondering if the rumor
mill had simply made a lucky guess, or if they really knew something. Or if
there had been a different wedding…and a different guy.
    He batted at a fly buzzing around his head and got back to
work.
    She probably wouldn’t respond. Ever since the wedding—the
post-wedding-champagne-fueled sex they’d enjoyed—Sonnet had been in hiding. To
be honest, Zach was okay with what had happened—hell, he’d liked it, but Sonnet
insisted they weren’t a match. No way they were a match, despite the
mind-blowing boathouse encounter, and she claimed they were both old enough to
realize it. She wanted them to go back to being friends, the way they’d been
since kindergarten.
    He wanted more. She wouldn’t let him convince her, though. She
made it clear that being with him would put a crimp in her future plans. Fine,
then, he thought. He had plans, too.
    But he missed her. Shit, he really did. He missed the
friendship, the easy feeling of being with someone he felt completely
comfortable with. Most guys had a family to lean on, but not Zach. He was the
son of a bad man who was behind bars. His mom had left when he was a kid,
remarried and then died of cancer. So he was not exactly a member of the
all-American family. Through the years, Sonnet had become his default