“Oh, yeah.”
She sighed and handed over her debit card, aware that a line had formed behind her. Not glancing back, she said a quick little prayer that her card went through the first time and let out a breath of relief when it did.
Getting fired sure had put a crimp in her style.
“Do you want a bag?” Cliff asked. “We charge for them now. Ten cents each.”
She had at least a dozen bags in the back of her car. Not that she’d remember them. “Not necessary.” Since she always forgot her bags, she was an expert and scooped the loot into her arms. Everything fit but the bag of chips.
Cliff helpfully added them to the top of the pile. Lily thanked him, pressing her chin down on the chips so as to not lose any of her precious cargo. “Got it,” she assured him.
Cliff lifted his hands and she started to leave, sidestepping to avoid bumping into the customer coming up to the register. Lily was halfway to the door when something made her glance back at the line.
Which was how she saw the very last person on earth a woman wanted to see when she felt like roadkill, didn’t have on her good moisturizer or her lucky lip gloss …
The guy who’d once upon a time starred in all her fantasies as the man of her dreams: Aidan Kincaid, wearing cargo pants and a dark blue T-shirt with a Search-and-Rescue emblem on the pec, a radio on his hip, looking dusty and hot and tired and sexy as hell.
Her heart began a slow and way too heavy beat, and she whipped her head around to face forward again.
“Lily? Lily, is that you?” a woman just in front of her asked.
Lily blinked at her.
“Mrs. Myers,” the fiftyish woman said helpfully. “Your high school English teacher.” She beamed. “Why, I haven’t seen you in years. How are you doing, dear?”
Lily’s mind raced, leaving her unable to formulate a thought past her instinct to flee. She’d hated English. She’d paid her sister to read the books and write her papers, and in return, Lily had done all of Ashley’s math and science and taken on her work hours at the resort their dad had run. “Uh …”
“Is your mother still happily retired and traveling around?” Mrs. Myers asked. “I lost track of her after …” The woman trailed off and her face filled with sympathy. “After … everything,” she finished gently.
There Lily stood in a dress and Uggs and crazy hair, with Aidan probably watching this entire debacle, and Mrs. Myers wanted to casually discuss the single most soul-destroying incident that had ever happened to Lily.
Over a mountain of crap food that she was holding on to with her chin. And those Cheetos stains weren’t going anywhere …
Thankfully, Mrs. Myers’s cell phone rang, and she got busy searching for it in a purse the size of Texas.
Lily let out a breath and stole a quick peek at Aidan, nearly collapsing in relief because he didn’t appear to see her.
Miracles did happen …
Before her luck could run out, she said a quick “Nice to see you” and hightailed it to the door.
Chapter 3
Lily Danville was most definitely back in town. Because he couldn’t help himself, Aidan watched as she rushed to the door balancing an armful of junk food. Nice to know some things hadn’t changed.
Clearly she was trying to avoid him—a plan he could get behind. He had no desire to take a walk down Memory Road either, especially when that road had ended in a spectacular crash with no survivors.
Just the walking dead.
Still, after all these years she looked the same, hauntingly vulnerable and yet somehow tough at the same time. It was that willowy, curvy body coupled with those drown-in-me green eyes that she so carefully didn’t turn his way.
She almost got away, too, and then neither of them would have had to face each other, but someone jostled her at the doorway. Lily staggered backward, right into a five-foot postcard display of the Colorado Rockies.
The entire thing began to wobble.
With a gasped “Oh, no!” Lily reached out for it, sacrificing her bag of chips to do so. The bag hit the floor and then a package of donuts slipped out of her arms as well, landing next to the chips.
And that was it. The domino effect came into play, and sure enough the cherry pie went next.
The very last thing to go was the postcard display itself, falling over with dramatic flair, scattering postcards and Lily’s armload from here to Timbuktu, leaving her standing there, a junk food massacre at her feet.
“Damn,” Cliff said. “That always happens.”
“I’m so sorry!” Lily bent and began to scoop up the postcards.
“No worries,” Cliff assured her. “Seriously, I’ll get it.”
Very carefully not looking at the line where Aidan stood, she shot Cliff a grateful smile and vanished so fast that Aidan had himself half convinced he’d imagined the whole thing. Except the postcards sprawled across the floor said otherwise.
So did the odd ache in his chest.