A few minutes later, she fell asleep smiling. And woke up in the morning with the pillow under her head.
At eighteen, Jonathon had left Palo Verde with $5,168.36 in his checking account—all earmarked for living expenses. His only other possessions were a partial scholarship to Stanford, two suitcases, a desk lamp, a used laptop, a backpack and a veritable mountain of student loans. He’d hitched a ride from their hometown to the coast in Matt’s BMW. Jonathon hadn’t been back since.
Palo Verde was a small but historic town on the highway between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe. When he’d left in the mid-nineties, it was only just beginning to climb out of the economic slump that had cursed it since the gold rush ended more than a hundred years before. Now Sacramento had grown enough—and was expensive enough—for people to commute from Palo Verde. On a purely intellectual level, Jonathon supposed Palo Verde wasn’t such a bad place to live. The town had a certain charm to it. Not the sort that any teenage boy would appreciate, but surely plenty of people liked musty old buildings and the gently rolling foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains.
Nevertheless, during the drive Jonathon practically itched to turn the car around and get the hell out of there. If someone had asked him a month ago, he’d have sworn that nothing short of the coming apocalypse would have enticed him back to Palo Verde. Maybe not even that. If the world was coming to an end, why would he go there?
As they entered Palo Verde, with Peyton safely nestled in her car seat in the backseat, and Wendy beside him in the front, Jonathon clenched his hands so tightly around the steering wheel that he feared he might snap it in half. Sure, it was unlikely, but if anything was going to imbue him with Incredible Hulk-like powers, it would be this.
Wendy’s family was in the rented minivan behind them on the highway. She sat with her iPhone, carefully dictating directions from the GPS map, as if he hadn’t spent the first eighteen years of his life trapped in this God-forsaken hellhole.
“Okay,” she said in a half whisper since Peyton was asleep. “It looks like this road will merge with Main Street just ahead.”
“I know.”
She ignored him. “And then, a couple of miles into town, Cutie Pies will be on your left.” “I know.”
“It looks like there’s parking on the street, but according to Claire’s email, it fills up pretty quickly, so if we don’t get a spot, we should circle around to the back of—”
“I. Know.”
Wendy dropped the phone in her lap and held up her hands. “Hey, I’m just doing my part as navigator.”
“I grew up here.” He blew out a slow breath, prying the fingers of his left hand off the steering wheel and giving them a flex. “I don’t need a navigator.”
“Things can change a lot in fifteen years.”
He didn’t need her to tell him that. He was a completely different man than the boy who’d left town straight out of high school. He’d always thought it odd that spending his whole life wanting to escape from Palo Verde, he’d end up living in a city with such a similar name. Of course, Palo Alto was a completely different kind of town. The bustling intellectual hotbed of technological development. A city with many brilliant, very rich men. And he was one of them. So there was no reason at all that just breathing Palo Verde air should stir all his rebellious instincts. Yet it did.
It made him twitchy with energy and shortened his already strained temper. As if she sensed his mood—not that he was doing a great job of hiding it or anything—Wendy reached out a hand and gave his leg a stroke that she probably meant to be soothing. “It’s just been a while since you’ve been back. I was trying to help.”
He could feel the heat of her hand through the fabric of his jeans and it made his thigh muscles twitch. Instantly, he knew what he really wanted. The one thing that would expel all the anger and tension roiling inside of him. Sex. Good, clean, emotionless sex would do the trick. He could skip the drive through town to Cutie Pies and head up to the hairpin turns of Rock Creek Road, pull off into the trees, tug Wendy onto his lap and screw her right here in the front seat.
It was a good plan if he ignored the baby sleeping in the back of the car. It’d be even better if he didn’t know emotionless sex was impossible with Wendy.
And then there was the minivan full of in-laws behind them. And the wedding reception Wendy’s helpful cousins had planned for them.
He took little pleasure in knowing that once the wedding reception was over, he could leave Palo Verde and never look back. It didn’t even help knowing that tomorrow Matt, Claire, Ford, Kitty and Ilsa would arrive for the reception. Having his best friends and their families there would make things better, but only a little bit. Before he could get through that reception tomorrow night, he still had lunch at Cuties Pies—that part wouldn’t be bad. But he’d begun to wish he’d refused to come into town the day before the reception. Two whole days in his hometown was way too long.
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