“Did you?”

“I was a shit heel,” he said, resting his back against the railing.

“A deflowerer of virgins,” she said, nodding her head in agreement.

He winced. “If I told you I never stopped thinking about you, all this time, would you believe me?”

“No,” Annajane said, unsmiling. “Because if you’d thought about me, even once, I’m pretty sure you could have figured out how to get in touch with me over the past two years.”

“You’re not easy, are you?” Mason said, with an exaggerated sigh.

“Not anymore, no.”

“Listen.” He touched her elbow lightly, and she jerked it away, but he took it again. “Will you please listen?”

“No,” Annajane said. But she didn’t move.

“I fell hard for you that summer,” Mason said.

She gave a snort of disbelief.

“I did. Honestly. But it wouldn’t have worked out. Your mother made me realize that.”

She whirled to face him. “My mother? What are you talking about?”

He raised one eyebrow. “She never told you she called me, did she?”

“No,” Annajane said. “Why would Mama have called you? She didn’t even know we were seeing each other.”

“Your mother is not a stupid person, Annajane. She figured it out.”

Annajane’s jaw dropped, and she felt a shiver go down her spine. “All of it?”

“Yep,” Mason drawled.

“Oh, God. And she never said a word to me. Never let on she knew.” She grabbed Mason’s arm. “What did she say?”

“Enough. She called me on my cell phone. From yours. I guess you’d left it lying around the house, and she took a look at the call history. Listened to some of the voicemails I’d left you … about meeting me out at the lake house.”

Annajane remembered those voice mails. Her face burned with the memory of those sexy messages Mason loved to leave.

“Long story short, she told me to stay away from you. I tried to point out that you were nineteen, and legally of the age of consent, but that didn’t cut much ice with your mother. She was very clear that I should get the hell out of your life and stay out. And she made some threats that weren’t very nice.”

“My mother? Threatened you? And you believed her? My mother wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

“Your mother said she would call the sheriff and have me arrested for statutory rape. And even if the charges didn’t stick, it would ruin my life and ruin my family’s reputation. And she meant every word of it.”

“But it’s not true,” Annajane said. “You didn’t rape me. Nobody would have believed a story like that.”

Mason shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. She was so intent on getting you away from me, she would have eventually cooked up something that would work. Anyway, you had to go back to State, and I was headed off to Penn. I decided maybe we should just cool it.”

“Nice of you to let me know,” Annajane said. “Coward.”

“You’re right,” Mason agreed. “I suck. And the longer I went without talking to you, to try to explain things, the easier it got to just avoid Passcoe, and you. Pokey gave me reports of what you were up to, though.”

“She did?”

“I heard about the guy in your marketing class. An SAE, right?”

“He was an ATO actually,” Annajane said. “And dumber than a box of rocks.”

“And wasn’t there some mysterious Asian guy you went with in New York? Pokey said you got his name tattooed on your ass.”

“His name was Nouri,” Annajane said. “And he was Pakistani. And no, I did not get his name tattooed on my ass. It’s a very small butterfly and it’s on my hip.”

“I’d like to see that,” Mason said. “I’m very interested in entomology, you know.”

“Fat chance.”

“Pokey says you’re currently unattached,” Mason said.

“Pokey has a big mouth,” Annajane said.

“You haven’t asked me if I’m seeing anybody,” he said.

She turned toward him and raised one eyebrow, almost afraid to ask. “Are you?”

“No,” he said, drawing the tip of his finger up her forearm. “I’ve been saving myself for you.”

Annajane gave him her sweetest smile. She plucked his hand from her arm and dropped it. “What a waste. Nice try, Mason.”

She hopped off the flagstone veranda and set out onto the golf course in her bare feet.

“Hey! Where you going?” Mason called after her.

“To get my damned shoes,” she muttered.

*   *   *

With a newly minted marketing degree in hand, Annajane took a job in Raleigh, working for a start-up fast food chain called PoBoyz. She set up PoBoyz promotions at high school football games, stock car racetracks, and minor league baseball games. She worked eleven-hour days and got promoted twice within eighteen months. And then her supervisor called her in for a face-to-face on a Friday at four o’clock.

Phoebe, the department’s administrative assistant, gave Annajane a dark look.

“What?” Annajane asked. “It might be good news. I totally killed with that football game promotion. The franchisees said they’d never had so many buy-one get-one coupons fulfilled.”

“It won’t be good,” Phoebe warned. “She never hands out attaboys on Fridays. Mondays are for attaboys. Fridays are for … well, I hope I’m wrong.”

Eileen, her supervisor, got up and closed the door as soon as Annajane walked into her office. One look at her boss’s face and she knew Phoebe had been right.

“I’m sorry,” Eileen said, without preamble. “This is awful. I hate this. But I have to let you go.”

“Why?” Annajane knew it was bad form to ask, but she’d never been fired before.

Eileen stared down at her desktop. “Howard Dewberry’s nephew just graduated from college.”

“So?” But Annajane knew what was coming next. Howard Dewberry was one of the company founders.

“The kid needs a job, and he thinks marketing would be ‘fun,’” Eileen said. “And you know the kind of budget we’re working with. I can’t afford two marketing assistants. Anyway, Annajane, the truth is, you’re too good for this job. You’re smart and hardworking, and you’ve outgrown PoBoyz. I’m doing you a favor, really.”

Annajane got up with a sigh. “Funny, it doesn’t feel like a favor.”

She kicked around Raleigh for another six months, sending out résumés and doing temp work, but when her savings ran out, she faced the inevitable and moved back to Passcoe.

But not to her mother’s house. Not after the blowout they’d had after Annajane confronted her about making threats to Mason.

Instead, she got a crappy job selling ads for the town’s only radio station, and she rented a crappy half of a duplex on a crappy street on the outskirts of town.

It didn’t take long for Pokey to start matchmaking once Annajane moved home.

“What did you say to Mason at my wedding?” she demanded one day while they were sitting at her kitchen table. Pokey was spooning cereal into Denning’s mouth, and he was spitting it out just as fast as she shoveled it in.

“Nothing,” Annajane said. “I just let him know I wasn’t interested in getting together.”

“That’s a big fat lie,” Pokey said. “I saw you watching him at the wedding. And he was watching you. For God’s sake, why don’t you just sleep with him and be done with all the cat-and-mouse games?”

“I did sleep with him, and then he dropped me like a bad habit,” Annajane said. “Remember?”

“You were just kids,” Pokey said. “Anyway, you can’t keep avoiding him forever. He’s moving back to town, you know.”

Annajane’s pulse gave a blip. “When? Why?”

“Daddy finally talked him into giving up the job at Dr Pepper,” Pokey said. “He’s coming to work at Quixie.” She looked over at the kitchen clock. “And I’d say he should be getting into town right about now.”

She gave Annajane an innocent look. “He hasn’t seen the baby in months. I made him promise to stop by as soon as he gets in.”

Annajane stood up abruptly. “Pokey! This isn’t funny. You should have told me you were expecting Mason. I don’t appreciate…”

The kitchen door swung open, and Mason stepped inside. He stopped in his tracks when he saw that his sister had company.