The Peach Keeper Read Online Free PDF

gotten.
    She was now the debt-free owner of a business and a home, all thanks to her father, who had left her the house and made her the beneficiary of his life insurance policy. Being an adult was important to him. She owed him this. This was her penance for causing him and her grandmother so much grief, for her astounding inability to tamp down all her restless energy when she was younger and live the quiet life they wanted.
    Springsteen was singing “I’m on Fire” when she opened the door. She looked up, and the man on her doorstep said, “We meet again.”
    Any sound that might have been forming in her throat disappeared. When she opened her mouth, all that came out was breath filled with dissolved words.
    “You ran away so fast today that you forgot this.” He held out the invitation.
    She took it quickly and, inexplicably, hid it behind her back.
    He put his hands in his pockets. He was still wearing the same pants and dress shirt from earlier, now dry and resembling crumpled paper. The sharp light fromthe globe beside her door was making him squint a little, causing small lines to crinkle around his eyes. He stared at her a moment before he said, “I took the blame for all your pranks in high school. The least you can do is invite me in.”
    That snapped her out of it. “You didn’t take the blame, you took the credit ,” she said.
    He smiled. “So you do remember me.”
    Of course she remembered him. It was what made being caught on Jackson Hill all the more embarrassing. Even though she’d never paid much attention to Colin in school, everyone knew who he was. He was an Osgood. But he’d always been eclipsed by his popular and headstrong twin sister. Not that he seemed to mind. He probably could have been as popular as Paxton was, but he’d never seemed as interested as his sister in running for student body president every year and joining three million different clubs. He’d mostly hung out with boys who wore pastel polo shirts and played golf on the weekends. He’d seemed destined to come back after college and take his father’s place as King of the Links, but for some reason he stayed away. She had no idea why.
    Willa hadn’t intentionally tried to frame him for her pranks in high school. At the beginning of their senior year, she’d snuck out one night and put a quote by poet Ogden Nash on the school’s marquee. CANDY IS DANDY BUT LIQUOR IS QUICKER . She’d overheard Colin say it—he’d been quoting it all day—and she’d thought it was funny. What she didn’t know was that Colin had just turned in an independent-study essay on Ogden Nashthe day before, so she had inadvertently pointed the finger at him. No one could ever prove it was Colin, and his parents had made absolutely certain that Colin was never held accountable, but every prank Willa had pulled up until then, and every one after, had been credited to him. He had earned the respect of being the Walls of Water High School Joker, the hero of students, the bane of the teachers’ existence. It was only when Willa had actually been caught, three weeks before graduation, that everyone had realized it was her, not Colin.
    “Are you going to let me in or not? The suspense is killing me.”
    She sighed as she stepped back. When he entered, she closed the door behind him, then she stepped over to her iPod speakers next to her computer and turned the volume down, before Springsteen could sound any sexier. She turned to see Colin walking around, absently running his hand over the back of her super-soft couch. It was that kind of couch. You just had to touch it. After almost seven years, it was the first new thing she’d bought for the house, and it had been delivered just days ago. It was expensive and impractical, and she felt suitably guilty, but she was ridiculously in love with it.
    “No one told me you’d moved back,” Colin said.
    “Why would they?”
    He shook his head as if he didn’t know the answer. “How long have you