Famous in a Small Town Read online

  Savannah slid behind the wheel and turned the key. “Nothing,” she called out. As if he couldn’t tell the engine hadn’t come back to life. “Idiot,” she mumbled. She returned to the front of the car. “Is there still a tow truck in town?”

  “Bud still has one, but he closes at five.”

  She checked her watch. Nearly seven. Calling Bud would have to wait until morning. Collin eyed her for a long moment as if weighing his options, and then went around to the driver’s side, sliding behind the wheel. Savannah watched as he turned the key.

  “Did you know your check-engine light’s on?”

  “Yes, I was aware.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Nothing, it’s been on like that since I bought the car,” she said, deliberately baiting him. She didn’t know why. Collin Tyler was one of the nicest guys she’d ever known, even if he’d barely said ten words to her during her entire life. Outside of this conversation, anyway.

  Collin sighed. “I meant what’s wrong with the engine,” he said, and she thought she detected a bit of annoyance in his voice. Good, he was annoying her, too. He could just get right back in his dirty, old truck with his dirty shirt and dirty jeans and she’d call the ranch and get on with her humiliating re-entry to life in Slippery Rock, Missouri.

  Couldn’t be any more humiliating than the way she’d left Nashville; the only thing missing from her exit had been the proverbial “A” she was positive a few people would have liked to sew onto her clothes.

  “How would I know what’s wrong with the car?”

  “You never had it checked?” He leaned out of the car and, despite the waning sunshine, she could clearly see the incredulous look in his clear, blue gaze. “You’ve had this car at least four years, Savannah.”

  “They never said anything about it when I had the oil changed. Which I do religiously, every three thousand miles, just like the manual says.”

  “Did you even ask them? Did you take it to the dealership?”

  “Of course not, I was in LA and then Nashville. I wasn’t driving it back to Slippery Rock to have the oil changed. I took it to one of those ‘thirty minutes or it’s free’ places.”

  Collin sent her a pitying look. Savannah stood straighter. Of course, she should have had the check-engine light checked but after a while, it became a kind of game. See just how far she could go before something happened. And then she’d mostly forgotten about it, chalking it up to a defective sensor or an overactive light or...something.

  “Not the dealership here. A general Honda dealership where they could run diagnostics.”

  “Oh.” She hadn’t thought another dealership would look at her third-hand Honda. God, she was an idiot. “It’s never done anything like this before. If it had, I would have taken the light more seriously.”

  He sighed and the sound had an interesting effect on her. All the heat that had been building up inside her morphed into a burning desire to smack the long-suffering look right off his face. Up until she’d made the right turn instead of the left, Savannah hadn’t had a violent bone in her body. Interesting.

  “A check-engine light, all on its own, is serious.”

  “As I discovered when the car stopped working. For now, could we save the lecture? I’m sure I’ll do something equally stupid at some point, and then I’ll happily listen to you drone on and—”

  “Did you check any of your other gauges?” he interrupted.

  Savannah blinked. “No.”

  “Because the battery seems to be fine, the coolant isn’t off the charts, but the gas seems completely nonexistent.”

  She peered over Collin’s shoulder. Sure enough, the red gas gauge pointed straight down, hanging at least an inch under the letter E.

  She really was an idiot. Savannah closed her eyes, and would have thunked her head against the roof of the car had Collin not still been sitting in her seat.

  “I didn’t think to check that,” she said, her voice quiet.

  “I’ve got a full can in the truck—never know when you’re going to need gas on the farm.” He climbed out of the car and pushed past Savannah.

  “Of course you do,” she said to the air.

  Collin Tyler, Good Samaritan, would never let his vehicle run out of gas. He would never ignore a check-engine light, and if his vehicle did run out of gas or stop working for some reason, he would have a solution.

  Savannah Walters, Screwup, would forget to check her tank when she left Memphis, and would run out of gas five miles from her destination.

  He returned with the portable can, opened the tank and began filling it through a large yellow funnel.

  “This old can only holds a couple of gallons, but it’ll get you into town. You should fill up as soon as possible.” And there he went with the free advice. He just couldn’t help himself. And here she was wanting to stomp her feet or sink into the ground.

  Running out of gas. It was a teenage mistake, not something a twenty-seven-year-old should do.

  Collin finished filling the tank, closed the hatch and nodded. “See if she’ll fire this time,” he said.

  Savannah slid behind the wheel and said a please, please, please before cranking the key. When the engine roared to life, she sank back against the beige seat.

  Collin tossed the gas can into the bed of the truck and then crossed back to the front of the Honda, closing the hood. He tapped twice on the roof of the car. “Gas up on your way out to the ranch, Savannah, and get that check-engine thing looked at. Better to be safe than sorry.”

  He offered a quick wave and in a moment was behind the wheel of his truck. He pulled around her, honked his horn once and drove toward the setting sun.

  Better to be safe than sorry.

  Savannah closed her door and then pressed back into the seat.

  She glanced into the rearview and smirked. “Well, Savannah, not making that left really is turning out to be a great decision.” She put the car in Drive and continued through to the town.

  The last rays of sunlight sank into the earth as she turned off the main road and onto the gravel lane that led to her childhood home.

  She’d stopped in town to fill the gas tank. There’d been no sign of Collin or his big truck, thankfully, and the kid working the register in the station had barely looked up from his magazine long enough to take the twenty she’d pushed across the counter. Then she took the long way to the ranch, so that it was now after eight. For as long as she could remember, Bennett and Mama Hazel retired to their master suite by eight, and they were both up before dawn.

  She stopped for a moment under an old maple tree. The porch light was on, glimmering in the twilight, as it had been every night for as long as she could remember. The last one in for the night was supposed to turn it off, and she wondered if Levi was the straggler tonight or if their parents had changed that eight o’clock bedtime habit.

  Her brother, older by nine months and a full school year, rarely stayed out late. Or at least he hadn’t when they were kids. She had no idea what he did as an adult. He’d been gone, to college and then playing in the NFL, while she’d finished school and waited tables at the Slope. She’d left for the reality show just before the injury that had taken him out of football forever.

  Didn’t matter. She would park, grab her overnight bag from the backseat and worry about the rest of her luggage tomorrow. Assuming she stayed past tomorrow. Savannah was still unsure just what she wanted to do. Go or stay. Wait out the scandal she knew was coming or run as fast and as far from it as she could.

  Her father’s beat-up F-150 sat under a tall tree at the side of the house, along with a newer model that had Levi written all over it—from the flat-black paint job to the chromed bumpers and roll bar. Mama Hazel’s familiar station wagon was gone, probably traded in for the navy sedan that sat under
the carport. Savannah couldn’t remember the last time Mama Hazel drove herself anywhere, but she liked to have a car handy “just in case.”

  Huh. All the cars were accounted for, so who’d left the light on?

  She took a deep breath as she pulled the old Honda in behind Bennett’s truck.

  Savannah climbed the steps of the familiar farmhouse with her overnight bag slung over her shoulder. Her hand shook as she reached for the white-enamel doorknob and she willed it to still. This was her home. The place she was safe.

  How many times had she been told that as a child? Never, not a single time, had she wanted those words to be true more than she did now. There was a storm coming, one that could shatter her, and she had a feeling she would need the strength of these old walls if she were to withstand it. Maybe, just maybe, if she hid here long enough the storm would never come.

  Her agent had said as much. If she left quietly, if she stayed away, maybe nothing would come of her indiscretion.

  Savannah swallowed hard and twisted the knob. The door swung in, opening to the small entryway with its familiar hardwood floors and the same brass hat rack in the corner that she remembered from her childhood. Stairs, with that familiar navy blue carpet runner, rose a few feet in front of her, dividing the living area from the dining room and kitchen. A lamp remained on near Mama Hazel’s rocking chair, the book she was reading lying pages-down on the seat, and in the low light she could see the pictures of Levi and her lining the wall. Levi’s trophies were on the mantel. She crossed the room, ran her fingers over a new frame and caught her breath.

  They’d framed the write-up in the Slippery Rock Gazette of her third-place finish in the talent show. She hadn’t even called them after, had just said yes to the trip to Nashville and taken off. Under the frame was a copy of a music magazine with her smiling face on the cover. It ran the week her first single hit the top twenty before beginning its slow descent back down the charts.

  “Van.” The softly spoken word startled her, and she turned. Levi stood in the gloominess, coffee cup in hand. He wore his usual jeans and T-shirt, his dark-skinned arms looking like the trunks of a couple of the trees she’d passed on the highway. He still kept his hair cropped close to his head, and even in the darkness, she thought his deep brown eyes had just a hint of amber.

  It was the same amber her eyes had. When they were kids, she liked to make up stories about how she’d been adopted by her birth family, and the people who’d had her before had been her kidnappers.

  Of course, that had only been wishful thinking. The Walters family was wonderful, but they weren’t hers. Her family had left her on the steps of a police station in Springfield with a note pinned to her chest.

  Name: Savannah

  Birthday in May

  Seven years old

  Eight freaking words on a note she couldn’t erase from her memory.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Did he know? Levi always seemed to know when she was in trouble. She willed her thundering heart to slow. There was no way he could know what had happened this time. She’d been listening to the radio all day, and if the story had broken, she knew the DJs would be talking about it nonstop. So far, it seemed Genevieve was sticking to her word and keeping the whole sordid thing a secret. He couldn’t know, she told herself.

  “I, uh, needed a break from the tour,” she said, deciding that was the safest answer. No one knew she’d been offered an extended touring gig with Genevieve’s crew. An offer that had been summarily revoked later that night when Genevieve had ended the set early and found Savannah exiting her tour bus. “And I haven’t been back here since the finale eighteen months ago.”

  Levi nodded. “You look good,” he said. “Mama and Dad would have waited up if they’d known you were coming.”

  “I’ll just surprise them at breakfast,” she said. “What are you doing here, anyway? Shouldn’t you have a house of your own by now?”

  “I do. Used the foundation of the cabin,” he said, motioning to the general area where the first Walters cabin had stood more than one hundred years before. Her father had torn down the walls when she was eleven, after she’d nearly been struck by a falling rafter inside. “They’re finishing up the plumbing and then the floors, and I’ll move in.”

  “You always loved that old place.” She reached for something more to say but wasn’t sure where to start. She never talked to Levi about why he’d walked away from his professional football contract. Everyone knew about the injury, but from what she’d seen on those Sunday-morning sports talk shows, he could have made a comeback. She didn’t ask then, and it seemed almost too late to ask now. Besides, he’d never asked why she was so hell-bent on a reality talent show when, before leaving Slippery Rock, she’d been petrified of singing in the Christmas pageant at church.

  Levi watched her and she wondered what he saw. Wondered how she could make sure he and the rest of her family never saw how truly bad she could be. She would figure out how to live with the shame of sleeping with a married man, but she didn’t want any of that shame to fall on them.

  “The porch light’s still on.” She grabbed at the only conversation starter she could think of. “You expecting someone?”

  Levi glanced over his shoulder and a small smile played over his wide mouth. “That light’s not for me. It’s been on since you left for the talent show. I turned it off once and the next morning Mama just about stripped me bare with her words. I didn’t know she even knew that kind of language.” He sipped from the mug in his hands.

  Savannah blinked. The light was on...for her? After all this time? Emotion clogged her throat. To keep her threatening tears from falling, she focused on breathing.

  “You want coffee? Something to eat?”

  She shook her head, unable to talk as she stared at the thick, mahogany door and the glimmer of porch light she could see through the side windows. The light was still on, more than two years after she’d left, for her? She drew in an unsteady breath.

  “Well, I was headed up for the night. We’re planting alfalfa in the western field before dawn, and I still have some computer work to do before I turn in. You remember the way upstairs?”

  If anyone else had said the words, the emotions she was feeling would have dried up in an angry burst. But this was Levi, and those were the same five words he’d been saying to her since that night twenty years before when Hazel and Bennett had brought her home to Walters Ranch.

  “I remember,” she said, but the words were barely a whisper.

  Levi nodded and turned toward the staircase. He paused at the door. “Last one in, remember?” he asked, and Savannah could only nod.

  In a moment, he’d disappeared up the stairs, and she was alone in the familiar living room with Mama Hazel’s rocker and the porch light shining through the windows.

  Slowly, Savannah made her way to the front door. She looked out, seeing vague shapes in the darkness beyond the porch. It was barely nine o’clock at night, and if she were in Nashville, she would just be going out for the night. But this was small-town Missouri, where farmers hit the fields before dawn and went to bed soon after sundown. Her fingers rested lightly on the porch light switch.

  The emotion she’d held back when Levi was still in the room tore through her like a planter tore the ground during spring seeding. Her fingers shook and she tried to blink back the tears.

  They’d left the porch light on for more than two years. For her.

  Savannah depressed the switch, and the light flicked off in an instant.

  Maybe this time, she really was home.

  CHAPTER TWO

  COLLIN GLANCED AT the clock on the dash as he accelerated the truck on the highway. He should have kept driving when he realized it was Savannah Walters on the side of the road playing at being a damsel in distress. Ignoring the red
check-engine light. Running her car out of gas.

  He didn’t need her kind of drama right now.

  Although why she was still driving that old beater of a car when she had a fat record deal in Nashville was curious.

  Curiosity—and a penchant for drama, he’d always been certain—killed the cat. And he had no intention of going down just now.

  Collin pulled into a parking spot on main drag of town, just a couple of blocks from the marina and the lake. He’d left his window rolled down and could hear a few gulls calling out in the evening air.

  James Calhoun, one of his best friends and a deputy sheriff, waited on the steps to the sheriff’s office. He wore the county uniform of khaki pants and shirt, the dark utility belt holding his gun and other cop paraphernalia around his waist, and he’d pushed his aviator sunglasses to the top of his head.

  Seeing Collin, he started down the walk.

  “She’s inside. A little scared, I think, but she’s hiding the scared pretty far under the usual teenage attitude.”

  Collin stepped out of the truck and met James on the sidewalk. “Damages?”

  “She swears she wasn’t in on it, and I tend to believe her. From what I’ve been able to get from the others, she was walking by when the fire started in the parking lot, and ran over to try to help put it out.”

  Well, that was a new one. Usually when the sheriff’s department called about his little sister, the call was to come bail her out for some minor offence or another. At least this time she’d been trying to do the right thing.

  “Thanks for calling my cell instead of the house. The last thing Gran needs is more Amanda worries.” He grabbed the bill of his ball cap from his back pocket and shoved it over his head.

  “No worries. How’s Gladys doing?”

  “Physical therapy three times a week, simple exercises every day to build up her strength. The doctor says she’ll be getting around without the walker before long.” Collin wasn’t so sure. He’d seen his grandmother’s post–hip replacement progress for himself, but there was something not quite right about her. He’d caught her staring into the distance a few times as if she didn’t quite understand what she was seeing, and he’d had to remind her of dates and events several times over the past few weeks.