The Peach Keeper Read Online Free PDF Page B

been here?”
    “Since my dad died.”
    Colin’s shoulders dropped a little. “I was sorry to hear about what happened.” Her father had been hitand killed trying to help someone change a tire on the interstate during what would have been Willa’s senior year in college, if she hadn’t flunked out. Another thing her father hadn’t known about. “He was a great teacher. I had him for chemistry in eleventh grade. He had a dinner for his AP students here at his house once.”
    “Yes, I remember.” She’d hated those dinners, actually having kids come to her house to see how she lived. She would hide in her room and pretend to be sick. There was nothing wrong with the house, it was just old and small, nothing like the mansions half the kids lived in.
    “I’ve thought a lot about you over the years, what you were doing, what mischief you were getting yourself into.” He paused. “I had no idea you’d been here the whole time.”
    She just stared at him, wondering why it mattered.
    He circled the living room again, looking around, then didn’t seem to know what else to do, so he sat on the couch with a weary sigh. He ran his fingers through his dark hair. His hands were large. He was a big man, with a big presence. No one had seemed to notice that in high school. His time away had changed him, had given him a confidence, an air of independence, that he didn’t have before. “So what are you doing these days, Willa Jackson?”
    “I own a sporting goods store on National Street.” There. That sounded responsible, didn’t it? Normal and practical.
    “What do you do for fun?”
    She gave him a funny look. What kind of question was that? “Laundry,” she answered, deadpan.
    “Married?” he asked. “Kids?”
    “No.”
    “So no progeny to teach how to TP the high school lawn, or decorate the teachers’ cars with peanut butter, or put scandalous quotes on the school marquee, or switch the items in the school lockers of the entire graduating class?” He laughed. “That was a classic. It had to have taken all night.”
    It was like it was a fond memory to him. But she’d purposely not revisited her pranks in years. And she hadn’t given Colin a second thought. Now, suddenly, she was remembering the look on his face when she’d been escorted out of the school by police after pulling the fire alarm. The whole school was out on the lawn. It was her , they’d whispered. Willa Jackson was the Walls of Water High School Joker! Colin Osgood had looked completely poleaxed. Though whether it was because it was her or because he couldn’t take credit for her pranks anymore, she didn’t know.
    They stared at each other from across the room. She watched as his eyes traveled down her body, and she was about to call him on it when he said, “So, are you going?” He nodded to the invitation still in her hand. “To the gala?”
    She looked down as if surprised to find the invitation there. She put it on the computer table, giving it a dirty look, as if this was all the invitation’s fault. “No.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because it doesn’t have anything to do with me.”
    “So you only go to parties that have something to do with you? Your birthday party, for example.” After a short silence, he frowned and said, “That sounded funnier in my head. Sorry. Everything suddenly starts to seem funny when you’ve been up for forty-eight hours. I laughed at a speed limit sign on my way over here. I have no idea why.”
    He was sleep-drunk. That explained a lot of things. “Why have you been up for forty-eight hours?”
    “Couldn’t sleep on the flight from Japan. And I’ve been trying to stay awake all day so I could go to bed at a regular hour and not get hopelessly lost in the time difference.”
    She looked toward the window. “Did someone drive you here?”
    “No.”
    She met his eyes. They were dark and unnerving and very, very tired. “Are you okay to drive home?” she asked seriously.
    He smiled. “That