One Reckless Summer by Toni Blake

wasn’t the first time she’d heard that. “When did she die?”
    “When I was thirteen.”
    To her surprise, he flinched.
    “What?” she asked.
    He shook his head lightly. “I guess I just…figured it was more recent.”
    Because of the shrine, she presumed. “That’s why I want to take the picture down. Dad doesn’t seem quite able to get over it, even though it’s been eighteen years.”
    “Wow,” Mick murmured, still studying the portrait, and looking shockingly…reverent. “That’s something. A guy that crazy about his wife.”
    She couldn’t help being reminded of the “domestic calls” out to the Brody cabin when she was younger and bit her lip. “I guess it’s pretty rare,” she mused, thinking, too, about her own marriage.
    So she was relieved when Mick’s gaze drifted from the shrine to some other old pictures on the wall—until she realized they were of her , in her teenage years. In one, she hugged Snowball to her chest. “I remember your cat,” he said.
    Why did that please her? Probably the same reason it pleased her that he’d remembered calling her “pussycat”—it meant he remembered that day as well as she did. Still, she tried to act annoyed. “ I remember your friend trying to get her drunk.”
    He shrugged, as if she’d over-reacted to that and was still over-reacting, and she supposed a guy like him couldn’t really grasp how protective a girl could be of her cat. “Whatever happened to that cat anyway?” he asked.
    Jenny cringed at the unpleasant memory. “She got hit by a car.” God, it still stung. It had happened the weekend before she’d left for college. She’d had Snowy since her kittenhood , when Jenny was nine, so it had been a blow.
    “Sorry,” he said, sounding like he actually meant it—and as usual, she knew she wasn’t camouflaging her pain very well. Then he took another drink of his iced tea and shifted his gaze slightly down the wall to a photo of her in her cheerleading uniform, holding her pompoms overhead while doing the splits. “I used to see you,” he ventured. “Cheerleading.”
    Her chest tightened. To think Mick Brody had been watching her then, aware of her then—when she’d been aware of him, too. Only vaguely before that day at the dock—but even then she’d been drawn to study him across a parking lot or the gymnasium, drawn to his lean, lanky boy’s body, his dark looks. And after the dock encounter, she’d sometimes found herself actively keeping an eye out for him on trips to town, especially in summer when people were out and about more.
    She didn’t know what to say, so she just bit her lip, then drew her gaze down, afraid he would see the sex in her eyes.
    “What’s that one?” he asked, pointing to a photo of her in a formal gown, standing next to Adam Becker—they both wore crowns on their heads. Then he lowered his chin, casting another slightly accusing grin. “Don’t tell me you were the prom queen?”
    She tilted her head to one side, thinking how silly something like that must seem to tough Mick Brody. “Guilty as charged.”
    He laughed softly.
    And she couldn’t help saying, “What? What’s so funny?”
    He pinned her in place with those blue eyes of his, even from across the room. “Let’s just say…you’re my first prom queen.”
    Heat climbed her face—and it also invaded down below, in her panties. In her mind, she saw harsh, dark images of them writhing together on the ground.
    He chuckled a little more then. “Hell, I’ve never even been to a dance.”
    “Really?” She wasn’t sure why it caught her off guard, but it was just one more reminder of how different they were, how different their lives had been.
    Instead of answering directly, he tilted his head slightly and said, “What’s that like, pussycat? To do all that high school stuff—the sports, the dances, everything else?”
    She thought back, tried to encapsulate it in a way he would understand. “It’s not for