Famous In A Small Town

“I didn’t hear you come in.”

“Are you my keeper now?”

“No. Dad mentioned—”

“Would you both back off? I’m twenty-seven years old, and I’ve been living on my own in a major metropolitan area for the past couple of years. I think I can handle Slippery Rock without accidentally falling on some guy’s penis and impregnating myself.”

Levi blinked. “It isn’t that we don’t think you can take care of yourself—”

“Sure it is.” Savannah stood and began to pace. “You want me to be helpless, but I’m not. I’m like Mama.” At least I want to be.

Mama Hazel was always calm, always knew what to say and how to fix a hurt. She baked pies and loved her family.

“Mama has a purpose.”

“And I don’t?” She didn’t know why she was picking a fight with her brother. It was stupid and childish, especially when she wasn’t sure she wanted the things she kept telling her family she wanted. She liked singing, and she was good at it, but there was a difference between the fun of karaoke night with a few friends and singing in front of an audience in an arena. In having all those people scrutinize her every move. There were good points, too, like meeting little girls who wanted to be singers. A few of them had looked up to her. At least, it seemed as if they had.

Levi just watched her for a long moment. “Mama worked in the Peace Corps, Van. She didn’t vagabond all over the world with a hobo sack over her shoulder.”

“I’m not a vagabond, and my luggage is Louis Vuitton. I lived in Nashville and I’ve been on tour with the top artist at the label.”

Levi nodded as he finished his biscuit.

“Fine, I have no illusions about world peace and I’m not curing cancer. That doesn’t mean my dreams are inconsequential.”

She just needed to figure out what her dreams were. Did she want to go back to Nashville and face the music? The one part of the city she liked was the weekend music program the label put together for underprivileged kids. Helping those kids find their music had been the highlight of her months there. Now she wasn’t welcome in Nashville and definitely not in the music program.

“They could be so much more, Van. You had a scholarship to the university. You were talking about med school.”

“And then I realized I didn’t want ten more years of school. I wanted...something else.”

Levi waited, watching her expectantly. “What is the something else?”

“I don’t know.” She crossed her arms over her chest.

“Is that why you’re here ‘on a break’ now? Because you don’t know what you want?”

“Is that so wrong?” She didn’t wait for his answer.

Savannah stalked out of the barn and started down one of the trails leading to Slippery Rock Lake, which separated Walters Ranch from the Tyler’s orchard. Through the trees she could see sunlight dancing over it.

What was wrong with her? Getting turned down by a guy was no reason to take her frustrations out on her family. And keeping this lie that things in Nashville were perfect was ridiculous. Things were so not right in Nashville it wasn’t even funny.

She’d gone to Nashville to try to get people to notice her the way that nobody had in Slippery Rock. To validate her in some way. When she was onstage she was more than Levi’s sister. Offstage, though, she was still the kid someone had left on the steps of a police station with her name pinned to her jacket.

The truth was that she didn’t know what she wanted. She liked singing, but had found out that she detested being on a big stage in front of thousands of people. She enjoyed working with the kids in the music program, but she didn’t play an instrument so mostly she’d just encouraged their interest. Now she was back in Slippery Rock, pretending she had her life together, when in truth it was falling apart and she had no idea how to make things right or if she even wanted to.

She’d been wrong to come back here.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Savannah should have kept driving and completely reinvented herself in some town where no one knew who she was.

She could use some distraction.

As she neared the lake, she saw Collin sitting on the hood of his old pickup truck, staring out over the calm water. She hadn’t realized she’d walked so far.

“Hi,” she said as she neared him. Brilliant May sunlight gave his blond hair streaks of white, which was just unfair. Women in Nashville paid hundreds of dollars to beauticians for streaks like that.

“Savannah.”

“You say that like you’re unhappy to see me,” she said, leaning against the fender of his truck and shooting a flirtatious look his way.

Collin glanced at her. “I’m not.”

“Not unhappy to see me? I figured,” she said, pretending she couldn’t read the disdain in his expression. He might have turned her down last night, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself from flirting with him again. “What brings you to my side of the lake?”

“Technically, you’re on my side.”

Savannah grinned wickedly. “Do you want to know what brought me to you, then?”

Collin sat straighter. “No.”

It was the panic in his eyes that did her in. It was fun flirting with a man who was reluctant to flirt back. It wasn’t fun to flirt with a man who was not only not interested but potentially afraid of her. Although why Collin would be fearful of her, Savannah couldn’t quite figure out.

“You don’t have to look at me like that. I’m not going to jump your bones out here.” Savannah stood straight, smoothing her hands over the thin tank top she wore. It was royal blue and she knew it contrasted nicely with her skin.

“I can take care of myself, whether or not you want to jump my bones,” he said, and she thought she caught a hint of laughter in his voice. It seemed like progress. She didn’t want him to hate her, after all. They could be friends. “Well, I didn’t come here to see you—”

“And I didn’t come here to see you,” she put in.

“So how did we both wind up here?”

“I needed a break from Levi the Lecturer.” She shook her head when Collin started to say something. “Or maybe he deserved a break from me. I was in a mood.”

“And now you’re not?” Collin seemed genuinely curious.

“I’m trying to not be in a mood. Being in a mood gets me into trouble. By the way, he has no idea about last night, and he’s not going to.” And maybe, if she really was going to make a change, it should start now. “I should apologize for all that. I...um...” She wasn’t quite sure how to explain last night without laying bare those old insecurities.

“‘Was in a mood’?” Collin asked, and this time she definitely caught a hint of laughter in his voice.

“Something like that.”

“What caused the mood?”

Nope. Not going there. Collin Tyler might not hate her, but that didn’t mean she needed to dump all her baggage on him. He was barely an acquaintance. She shook her head. “Doesn’t matter.”

Collin nodded. “I was in a weird mood, too,” he said.

“So you did want to dance with me?” Savannah leaned her shoulder against the truck and crossed one foot over the other in the dirt.

“No,” he said, a little too quickly, a little too harshly. She couldn’t ignore the quick hit of pain. Stupid pride.

“Don’t go getting all soft on me now,” Savannah said. “Tell me how you really feel.”

He didn’t look at her for a long moment. When he finally spoke, he seemed completely focused on a tree with branches hanging low over the smooth water.

“Savannah, I have... There’s a lot.” He drew his brows together. “You’re Levi’s sister. I just don’t think about you that way.”

Oh. Well, that was way more information than she wanted at—Savannah glanced at her watch—ten o’clock in the morning. The day after she’d made a serious come-on to the man.

“Maybe we could be friends,” he said.

The feelings she felt around Collin were definitely not the friendship breed of feelings. Good thing she was decent at covering up her true feelings. That was the one thing in life she’d always been good at.

“Sure, whatever. I just wanted to apologize because I had a little too much to drink last night. But I’m going back to Nashville in a couple of weeks, so we don’t have to pretend we’re friends or anything. We can just go back to being Levi’s sister and Levi’s best friend. It’s all good,” she said, hating the words even as she said them. Hating the intentionally careless tone she’d pushed into her voice.

Savannah was pretty sure she didn’t want to be Collin’s friend.

He might not think he wanted her as his girlfriend—not even in the short term—but she definitely didn’t want to just be his friend.

And if no one ever called her Levi’s sister for the rest of her life, it would be too soon.

She backed away from the truck, feeling Collin’s gaze on her the way she’d felt his hands the night before.

“See you around, friend,” she said and then turned and walked away from him as quickly as she could.

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