He never expected her to say yes.
He never expected her to agree to go to his house, where his parents were out, of course. Not just because it was New Year’s Eve, but because they went out all the time. He was usually alone when he was home. For once, he was glad of it.
When he took Lindsay in his arms, he never expected her to kiss him back. He’d imagined it, of course-so many times that the sensation of her lips beneath his almost seemed familiar.
There she was, just like he had dreamed: running her hands over his bare shoulders beneath his T-shirt, wantonly pressing her soft flesh against his hard angles, throwing her head back when he kissed her neck, kissed her collarbone, found his way to her bare breast.
At first he thought she might have forgotten that it was him, and not Jake.
But he looked up to find her gazing at him, staring tenderly into his eyes, and that was all the encouragement he needed. He dared to keep going, further and further, lost in the familiar, overwhelming throes of teenaged passion.
But that night, in his boyhood bedroom, he found himself venturing into uncharted territory.
Lindsay Farrell was different from the other girls he’d had. She made him feel different. She made him feel, period.
It wasn’t his first time. Far from it.
But it was his first time with emotion-real emotion, as powerful as physical sensation, and then some.
When his body joined with hers, their eyes locked, he nearly cried at the intensity of it.
But of course, he held back.
Boys didn’t cry. His father had reminded him of that fact often enough through the years.
You have to toughen up, his father used to say when he was very young, at the mercy of Shane and Devin, his two bullying older brothers. Toughen up, son, or the world will eat you alive.
Boys didn’t cry.
Men didn’t cry, either.
Looking back at that New Year’s Eve, he always knew that was the night he became a man. The night he first fell in love.
January 1 was the day he realized that some things weren’t meant to be.
She left in the wee hours of the new year, whispering that she had to get home. She didn’t look at him when she said it.
In fact…
She never looked at him again.
It was as though she was ashamed of what had happened between them. As though she had remembered he wasn’t good enough for someone like her.
He never got the chance to tell her that he had been infatuated with her from afar for a long time, from the first time he spotted her at a Western Catholic dance-on Jake Marcott’s arm, of course.
Yes, he had been infatuated, but now he really loved her. Only her.
It didn’t matter. He was who he was, he couldn’t change his reputation or his financial and social status. Not then, anyway.
He and Lindsay Farrell weren’t meant to be. She left, and he wanted to cry, but he didn’t.
He soon heard, through the grapevine, that she was still in love with Jake, that Jake was still in love with her. That Jake, in fact, was dating one of her best friends, Kristen Daniels, just to make her jealous-and it was working.
That alone was enough to make him back off. He didn’t compete for girls. They had always been drawn to him, drawn to his dark hair and eyes, his lean, lanky build, his quick grin.
Ironically, one of the girls who popped up on his radar in Lindsay’s wake had been Bella Marcott, Jake’s sister. He’d told himself he’d have been attracted to her even if she didn’t go to St. Elizabeth’s. Even if she weren’t a good friend of Lindsay’s. She was cute and quick-witted-the kind of girl who always had a sharp comeback. He liked that. He liked her-but of course, he didn’t love her.
He loved Lindsay.
And when he was with Bella, Lindsay was usually in the vicinity. He could sneak glances at her when she wasn’t looking. Bella caught him a few times, though. She seemed to shrug it off. Most girls did.
Everyone knew he wasn’t the steady boyfriend type; there were plenty of girls in his life back then. Always had been.
Still were.
And now another one bites the dust, he thought, watching Allison disappear into the bedroom without a backward glance.
Easy come, easy go.
Yeah, and his life had become a series of bad cliches.
Become? It always was.
With a sigh, he tossed aside the knife he’d been using to chop the onions for the omelet and lifted the phone to his ear.
“Yeah, hello?”
Stunned, he listened to the response-and heard the voice he’d been longing to hear for twenty years.
Her voice. Uttering his name.
“Is this Wyatt Goddard?”
Wyatt Goddard?
She frowned in surprise at what she had just overheard. Why on earth would Lindsay Farrell be contacting him after all these years?
After all these years?
Come on. Why would she contact him ever?
It was hard to imagine that someone like her had ever crossed paths with someone like him.
He wasn’t from the wrong side of the tracks, exactly…but pretty darned close.
He had been kicked out of two Catholic schools-once for smoking, and once for truancy-and his parents were both alcoholics. Not that those things made him an instant loser.
Far from it, actually. Wyatt Goddard was popular well beyond the boundaries of Washington High. He always had more girlfriends than Oregon had bridges…and Lindsay Farrell always had a boyfriend.
Well, she did until a few months before Jake died, anyway.
As for Wyatt, yes, he was popular-but a little scary, too, as far as the girls of St. Elizabeth’s were concerned.
There was something intriguing, enigmatic, even, about him-a series of contradictions.
He was athletic, a track star-as well as a pack-a-day smoker.
He had a reputation as a loner-still, there he was at every party, with girls hanging all over him.
He had been kicked out of two Catholic schools, but he got decent grades-and he continued to dutifully attend Sunday Mass, usually solo.
His family was lower middle class, if anything-yet he drove a BMW convertible.
He always wore the same clothes: well-worn blue jeans, plain T-shirts, and low-heeled boots…even though his mother was a clerk in the young men’s department at Nordstrom and his father worked at Nike. Sunglasses, too, most of the time-even on cloudy days.
He occasionally revealed a sharply honed sense of humor, but he rarely smiled. When he did, it was there and gone, like a flash of summer lightning that came out of nowhere and left you wondering if it was ever there at all…
The smile…
That’s it!
She knew it seemed familiar.
Leo Cellamino-who looked nothing like his supposed father, Jake Marcott-happened to have precisely the same smile as Wyatt Goddard.
She hadn’t been able to put her finger on who he reminded her of at the time, but now she knew.
Hmm.
Meanwhile, here was the esteemed Lindsay Farrell, placing a call to Wyatt out of the blue, never stopping to consider that her telephone might be tapped…even after Kristen’s warning.
Hmm.
This, she realized, listening intently for whatever was to come, should be interesting.
An unexpected bonus, if her hunch was correct.
“It’s Lindsay,” she managed to say, sounding deceptively levelheaded when her brain felt as though it were about to explode.
“Lindsay Farrell. From Portland. St. Elizabeth’s,” she prodded when the man on the other end of the line didn’t react.
“I know.” She heard him exhale loudly, as though he were puffing the air through his cheeks. “I know who you are.”
No, you don’t, she found herself thinking. You know who I was…not who I am now.
And I never knew you at all.
“You’re in Connecticut now, huh?” she asked, still marveling at the coincidence that Wyatt was living right here on the East Coast, in Fairfield County, less than fifty miles away.