A Forever Kind of Love

“You don’t want to go in there,” he warned her.

She glanced at him and raised her brows in question.

“Act two,” Corey answered. “A solo performance by the great Elizabeth Dubois. Someone picked up one of your granddad’s pipes, and she went into hysterics. Last I saw, three people were holding her up and one was fanning her.”

Mya clenched her fists at her sides and opened her mouth in a silent scream toward the sky. She resumed her seat on the swing, bringing one leg up again and resting her chin against her knee.

“You think I could get away with shaking her senseless just one time, or would I go to jail for assault?” she asked.

Corey shrugged as he looked out over the yard. “Kandice Lewis is the district attorney now. Doesn’t she still owe you a favor for filling in on the cheerleading squad when she was too drunk to make the games?”

“Stop it.” Mya laughed. “She suffered from some kind of stomach thing. I doubt Kandice has ever been drunk a day in her life.”

“She was always one of the good girls.”

“Unlike me?”

“You said it,” Corey returned with a chuckle. Mya caught him with an elbow to the arm. “Hey.” He held up his hands. “I always liked the bad girls.”

“Only fair, since you’re the one who helped them earn their reputations in the first place.”

Mya watched his profile as a slow smile drew across his face. She could only imagine what was going through that pretty little head of his.

She couldn’t deny that he was still pretty, though Corey would throttle her for using that particular word to describe him. Mr. Macho Baseball Hero never considered himself pretty, but with that strong jaw and those signature light brown Anderson eyes, Corey was not just pretty, he was as gorgeous as ever.

Mya was touched that he’d returned for her granddad’s funeral. Coming back to Gauthier was probably as hard for Corey as it had been for her. As far as Mya knew, he no longer had family here. According to her grandmother, the last of the Andersons, his eldest brother, Leon, had moved somewhere up north after their father died of a heart attack a few years ago. It was the same thing that had taken their mother during Corey’s first year of high school. The two middle boys, the twins, Stefan and Shawn, had both left with the assistance of the legal system.

Baseball had saved Corey from a similar fate, but for most of his youth, he had been as bad as his twin brothers. Especially when it came to her. With her he had been deliciously bad. The kind of bad that made a girl’s toes curl and her skin tingle. God, it had been a long time since she’d had that kind of bad in her life.

If only things had ended differently.

Mya put a choke hold on those thoughts and wrestled them back to the corner of her mind she wasn’t allowed to visit unless she was drowning her sorrows in a glass of merlot. Today had been enough of an emotional brain suck; she didn’t need the ghosts of her past mistakes adding to her inevitable breakdown.

“Gosh, I’m just ready for this day to be over.” Mya pushed her fingers through the tight, springy ringlets that her naturally curly hair produced when dried by the sun.

“Been rough on you, huh?” Corey asked.

She hunched her shoulders. “I just thought he would be here longer, you know? He always used to say that dying wasn’t an option.”

“Sounds like something Big Harold would say.” Corey chuckled. He pushed the swing with his foot, then stretched his right arm across the back.

Mya let the motion lull her back to that calm place she’d found before her mother had interrupted her peace. Her bare foot lightly grazed the porch’s floorboards as it swayed back and forth. The paint had started to peel in spots, another indicator that Granddad had been suffering with cancer long before he let anyone know. There’s no way he would have allowed any part of this house to go downhill if he’d been feeling well enough to fix it.

If she had been here, maybe she would have seen the pain in his eyes.

Guilt twisted in her gut, but Mya accepted the pain as penance. She looked out over the yard of the house where she’d spent the first seventeen years of her life. Cars were parked haphazardly within the fenced-in portion, while others lined both sides of the street. Everyone had respected the side yard where Granddad’s vegetable garden brimmed with plump tomatoes drooping from the vine, flowering heads of cabbage, peppers, okra and about a dozen other vegetables that had fed the people in this small town for years.

Before she returned to New York she would pick the vegetables that were ready. She couldn’t stand the thought of the fruits of Granddad’s hard work falling to the ground and dying.

Mya blew out a shaky breath, willing the tears to remain at bay.

“It was a nice service,” Corey said after a stretch of surprisingly comfortable silence. Though it wasn’t all that surprising. She and Corey had always been at ease with each other. That had been part of her downfall.

“Granddad deserved it,” Mya said. “He’s probably walking around heaven with his chest sticking out, bragging about all the people who showed up for his funeral.”

“People around here loved Big Harold.”

Mya simply nodded. If she tried to speak, the tears would start flowing again.

Too late.

She swiped at the moisture that had collected in the corner of her eye. “Don’t even try it,” she said when she saw Corey’s hand reach for her. “Just because we’re talking, it doesn’t mean you can touch me. Keep those paws right where they are.”

He held his hands up, then placed them on his thighs. Mya studied the fingers fanned out across his black slacks. The nails were clean, cut nice and short. He’d always taken extra care in making sure he didn’t bear the telltale signs of an auto mechanic like his dad.

All those years ago, when they would lay wrapped in each other’s arms talking about their futures, Corey used to tell her that he refused to get trapped in the family tradition of fixing cars for a living. It’s what his twin brothers had done in between their many run-ins with the law.

After an incident that nearly landed him in jail, Corey had turned his life around in their senior year of high school. He did everything he could to show the people in Gauthier that he was not going to follow in Shawn and Stefan’s footsteps. Yet the people around here had lumped him in with his brothers anyway.

“Thanks for coming back here for Granddad’s funeral,” Mya felt the need to say. Facing the judgmental tongues of Gauthier could not have been easy for him.

He stared at her for a long, drawn-out moment before finally answering with a simple, “You’re welcome.”

She zoomed in on the curve of his jaw. His skin was still smooth, that beautiful, roasted pecan color. It was marred by a thin strip of pink that stretched from his ear almost to his neck.

“What happened here?” Mya asked, trailing her finger along the slightly puckered skin. Touching him was a mistake. Her finger burned hot.

He turned to her, those light, grayish-brown eyes taking on that smoldering look that was the precursor to her panties sliding off back in high school.

“Car accident,” Corey answered. “About three years ago.”

His voice had lowered. It had the same effect as his gaze. Both caused her heart to beat faster within the walls of her chest.

No way. She was not going there again with Corey Anderson.

Mya tore her eyes away and sat up straight. “I need to get inside.”

“I’ll come with you,” Corey said, pushing himself up from the swing.

“No.” She put a hand on his shoulder, then jerked it back. Stop touching him! “I don’t need you to follow me.”

“Peach—Mya,” he corrected. “I’m trying to be a nice guy. It’s been fifteen years. All that stuff should be behind us.”

That’s what scared her. It should be behind her. But one look at those sexy eyes and that just-right-for-her mouth and she was that stupid teenage girl who used to escape out the window of this very house to be with him.

“It is behind us,” Mya lied. “I’m just tired. It’s been a rough day. I’m going to go inside, kiss a few cheeks, say a few goodbyes and head to one of the back rooms for a nap.”

“You sure?”