Famous in a Small Town
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Kristina Knight
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Chapter One
DECISION TIME.
Savannah Walters sat staring at the faded red stop sign at a crossroads—one would lead her into complete anonymity and the other back to a place where everyone knew who she was.
Anonymity beckoned, slick and sweet. A simple left-hand turn onto the southbound lane of a rural highway in southwestern Missouri. She would roll the windows down in her old Honda, smell the freshly mowed highway grass and maybe pass a tractor or twelve before she hit the next town, a town with a bigger road leading to an interstate that would lead her...anywhere.
She hit the turn signal even though there were no other cars on this stretch of blacktop and listened to the click-click-click of it for a long moment. All she had to do was make the turn. This was her chance. A bigger chance than the one she’d taken when she’d elected to go to Nashville. A bigger chance than the one she’d taken to get onto the reality talent show that had made the Nashville move possible. No one would ever have to know she was that Savannah Walters again.
Hell, if she wanted, she could change her name completely and maybe cut off the signature micro-braids she’d spent three days installing, then no one would even make a tiny connection between her and about-to-fall-from-grace, one-hit-wonder Savannah Walters. She could be anything and anyone she wanted. The thought made her giddy. If she could, she would choose to be smart, strong and capable, rather than the dumb, weak and dependent person she’d been since she’d landed in Slippery Rock, Missouri, at the age of seven.
Her second-chance self would have a name like Nancy Smith because there had to be a million Nancy Smiths in the world. Nancy Smith would only sing in the shower or in the car with her windows rolled up. She would work as a bank teller and wear normal clothes without a single rhinestone, and maybe once she was settled she’d go to dental hygienist school. She would eventually buy a small house in a quiet neighborhood, and maybe she would meet a nice guy—not in a bar—and have a real relationship for the first time in her twenty-seven years.
Savannah’s heart a beat a little faster. Nancy Smith wouldn’t care what people thought of her. She would be stronger than that. Stronger than Savannah Walters, who had been afraid of what people thought of her for...most of her life.
Nancy Smith would not be afraid, but she also wouldn’t be reckless. There would be no judgmental dinner conversations, no too-high expectations and no comparisons to a brother who always did the right thing. She would be the opposite of Savanna Walters of Slippery Rock.
There would also be no midnight walks along the lakeshore with that boy—man, now—who couldn’t help being practically perfect; it was simply his way. No whispered conversations through their bedroom windows on hot summer nights. No smell of Mama Hazel’s coffee cake on lazy Sunday mornings and no comforting hugs or encouraging words from the only father she had ever known.
No disappointed looks when the three people who had saved her so very long ago learned that she, once again, had made every possible wrong decision.
God, she wanted to turn left. Take the easy road. They wouldn’t really miss her. It might even be easier for them if she just kept driving out of their lives. Choosing to adopt her didn’t mean they had to be stuck with her screwed-up self for the rest of their lives.
The turn signal kept clicking. Savannah checked the rearview, but there were still no other vehicles on the narrow country road, and so she continued to weigh her options. This might be the last chance she had to make a right decision, and it needed to be right not only for her but also for the people around her.
She hadn’t had a choice about coming to Slippery Rock before, but it was her choice whether or not she returned now.
Maybe if she stopped running away from Savannah Walters she would finally stop mucking up this life she’d been given. Savannah clicked off the turn signal and rested her forehead against the steering wheel. Maybe it was time to stop being afraid of who she might have been, and time to start figuring out who she wanted to be now. She couldn’t do that by running away.
It was worth a shot.
Before she could talk herself out of it, Savannah turned right. She rolled the window down and caught the faint scent of new grass. Tall trees lined both sides of the road. Maybe oak; she’d never bothered to learn the names of trees or the grasses along the road, or the vegetables whose baby stems were just beginning to show through the pencil-straight rows of tilled soil. Naming everything from the crops to the trees seemed too personal. She’d been waiting for her new family to send her away, to decide they didn’t want her, either. Now she wished she’d paid at least a little attention to Bennett and Levi, her adoptive father and brother, while they’d talked at all those family dinners.
The city limits sign, with its welcome message from the local chapters of fraternal organizations, churches and veteran’s groups came into view just as the engine coughed once, twice, and the car rolled to a stop.
Savannah clicked the key to the off position and then back on. Pressed the gas a couple of times and tried again. Nothing. Not even the clicking sound of a dead battery. She glared at the illuminated red check-engine light that had been on since she’d bought the car with her tip money from the Slope, where she’d chosen to clean up and wait tables instead of take a scholarship at a nearby college. Because she convinced herself she wasn’t good enough for college. Of course, if she’d done the college thing, she’d have never tried the talent show and wouldn’t have had a song on country radio.
Wouldn’t be running from scandal now.
The blinking engine light she’d ignored for nearly four years mocked her. One more checkmark in the Savannah the Screwup column.
If she’d only turned left, the stupid car would have run without so much as a twinge, she was positive about that. Lord, sometimes doing the right thing just sucked.
Anyone else would arrive back in her hometown driving an Escalade and find a parade in her honor. Savannah had a broken-down Honda with more than two hundred thousand miles on it. And she’d have to call her parents just to make it into town.
She thunked her head against the steering wheel a few times, but that didn’t make the check-engine light flicker off or the car miraculously start back up. The last thing she wanted to do was to call her parents. Maybe some of that car talk—Bennett helped Levi build his first car from parts found at the local salvage yard—at the dinner table had sunk in by osmosis or something.
Heaving out a sigh, Savannah popped the hood of her car and then stepped onto the pavement. The light wind was brisk—she should have remembered early May in Missouri was touch-and-go weather-wise—so she grabbed her neon-yellow hoodie from the passenger seat and shoved her arms through the sleeves.
At the front of the car, she pulled on the cherry-red hood but it didn’t budge. She tugged on it again and then bent to see the hook still caught in the hood latch. She hit the hood, trying to jar the hook loose, but no matter what she did the hook remained safely in the latch. There must be a mechanism in there somewhere that released it. Savannah bent to look between the narrow spaces of the grille, but didn’t see anything that looked like it might release the latch.
Crap, crap, crap.
Turning, she crossed her arms over her chest and leaned against the hood.
There were two options: walk the five or so miles to her childhood home or call the house so someone could come pick her up.
A responsible person would probably walk it, but Savannah had already done the responsible thing by not turning left and look where that had gotten her: stranded on the side of the road at six thirty in the evening. She sighed.
Call home. Like she’d done a hundred times in the past. Well, better now than in the middle of the night.
She grabbed her phone from her bag on the passenger seat and scrolled until she found the word home, clicked the button and stopped. The sound of an engine caught her ear. Maybe she wouldn’t have to make that call, after all.
A dusty, blue truck rolled to a stop behind the old Honda and a broad-shouldered man sat behind the wheel, looking at her for a long minute. Savannah stiffened under his scrutiny. It was unlikely she had ever spoken to whoever was behind the wheel. When she’d lived in Slippery Rock she’d only had a handful of friends, and most of them had hung out with her just hoping to get to her brother. She tilted her head to the side, still studying the big truck. Not a single one of them would be caught dead in a big farm truck like the one taking up space behind her little car.
Dread crept down her spine.
It was likely, however, that whoever was behind the wheel knew her brother. Or her father. For all she knew, he was now making the call she should’ve swallowed her pride to make as soon as the engine gave out, instead of pretending she knew anything about general car repair. Or maintenance. Her knowledge of the car began and ended with how to put gas in the tank.
Well, this wasn’t going to get better if she didn’t get the man out of the truck. Savannah swallowed and offered a halfhearted wave.
“Hey,” she began as the man opened the door of his truck and stepped down to the pavement.
Dusty boots to match the dusty truck, along with the frayed end of a pair of faded jeans appeared below the open door. Then he slammed it shut and the rest of him came into view.
Well-worn jeans covered a pair of nicely shaped legs. A red T-shirt with a grease stain near the hem hinted at a nice set of abs, and the tight sleeves highlighted a set of biceps that made her mouth go a little dry. Which was just silly. Savannah didn’t go for athletes.
She liked gangly guys who knew how to work their instruments, and not the double-entendre instrument. Their guitars or drums or, a couple of times, keyboards.
He started toward her and it was as if her body went on point. Savannah stood a little straighter, every muscle seemed to clench and a warm heat sizzled to life deep in her belly.
Apparently gangly musician wasn’t her only type.
Finally her gaze arrived at the man’s face and her mouth went from dry to Sahara. This wasn’t a stranger. And he wasn’t a friend.
“Savannah Walters. I heard you were living it up in Nashville.” Collin Tyler, her brother’s best friend, shook his head at her. His voice was deeper than she remembered, and she thought he might even be taller. He was definitely rangier, and there was no way his arms had been that built in high school.
Not that she was looking, now or then.
Savannah ordered her gaze to fix on the truck behind Collin.
“Collin Tyler,” she said, thankful that her voice was working despite her raging thirst. “Still a Good Samaritan, I see.”
He shrugged, and the motion brought her focus right back to his body. Damn it.
“What seems to be the problem?” he asked, walking over to the car. His hands slipped between the hood and the grille and before she could warn him it was stuck, he had it unlatched and resting on the thin rod that held the hood aloft. Collin put his hands on the grille and leaned in as if he might spot the problem. Probably, he could. He fiddled with a couple of wires. “What are you doing driving this old thing still? Figured you have traded up by now.”
“I love this car.”
Collin shook his head and scoffed. “Nobody loves a 1997 Honda hatchback, Van,” he said, using the nickname that Levi had christened her within five minutes of her arrival at Walters Ranch.
“I worked hard for this car. I love this car,” Savannah said, probably a little too stridently. But she did love the car. Even if she wanted something newer and trendier and...road-worthy. This car had taken her out of Missouri to Los Angeles then Nashville. And back again.
“Slinging beers at the Slope isn’t exactly working hard.” He fiddled with a few more wires but, to Savannah, everything looked fine.
“And watching apple trees grow is hard work?” Savannah knew there was more to Collin’s family orchard than watching trees grow, but she couldn’t just stand there while he insulted her car. She might know it was decrepit, but allowing someone to disparage it just felt wrong. They’d been down a lot of roads together.
“Actually it’s apples and pears and peaches now. And in addition to watching them grow I like to prune from time to time, fertilize, and every now and again we actually pick the fruit, too.” He motioned her to the driver’s seat. “Why don’t you try turning it over now?”
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.
