Rowdy(15)

CHAPTER 4

Salem

HEY, WILL YOU PLEASE call me back? This is the fourth message I’ve left you in two weeks, Poppy. I’m starting to get a little bit worried.”

I scowled at the phone and shoved it back in my purse as I jumped around a puddle the afternoon rain was leaving on the sidewalk. Denver got hot in the summer, not desert hot or Texas hot, but it was still nice and warm, so I was surprised that when the sky opened up like it seemed prone to do midafternoons, the raindrops that fell were freezing cold and the size of quarters. The weather in this state had a serious identity crisis but I guess that was okay because if you hated what was happening weatherwise it would change five minutes later.

I shivered since I was wearing cute black shorts with big silver sailor buttons and a flouncy off-the-shoulder shirt this morning, and now I was freezing as I walked to the coffee shop at the end of the block to grab something to warm me up before I headed back to the shop from my lunch break. I didn’t even want to think about what the rain had done to my hair and the heavy eye makeup I usually wore, so instead I focused on how irritated I was at my baby sister.

Poppy and I had always been very different. Where I was resigned to the fact that Loveless and my parents’ home were not places I was ever going to thrive in and find happiness, she was still there and still the apple of my stern father’s eye. I had prayed that after she went away to college and saw more to the world, she would branch out, live a little, and realize there was more to life than being a perfect daughter. Much to my annoyance she had returned home right after graduation and had fallen quickly into all her old patterns even when I pleaded with her to come and stay with me. A marriage to a man that was far too similar to my father for my liking had quickly followed and so had Poppy’s distancing herself from me. A choice I was sure wasn’t entirely her own.

Even though my parents and her husband didn’t love that Poppy still stayed in touch with me, it was her one act of defiance and we talked whenever she could get away with it. I had questions—a lot of them. I wanted answers and it was impossible to get them from Rowdy, considering he was about as welcoming as a concrete wall. There was more to their falling-out than the simple “he wanted different things than I did and it meant we couldn’t even be friends anymore” that Poppy had initially given to me when everything broke loose all those years ago. Something major must have occurred for Rowdy to be so adamant that he didn’t even want the slightest info on my sister. She was supposedly his first love and Poppy normally told me everything there was to tell, so all the subterfuge between the two of them had me extra curious.

My sister was not what one would call lucky in love. She was too eager to please, both the men in her life and my father. That led to her dating and ending up in relationships with some real gems. I don’t think she would know the real deal in love if it bit her on the nose, and that was one of the reasons I tried to keep tabs on her and was worried she hadn’t called me back. Her husband was a real piece of work. Oliver Martinez was a bossy and menacing carbon copy of my dad and that made me really nervous. Poppy wasn’t strong enough to walk away or willful enough to stand up for herself if a man in her life was trying to control her.

I ordered a floofy coffee drink and a brownie because they looked good, and tried to wring some water out of my long hair. I was shuffling back to the door, my eyes down as I put the brownie in my purse, and I didn’t see the woman I almost plowed down until it was too late. I barely caught her around her wrist as she bounced off of me and the collision sent her phone flying to the floor.

We both gasped and I stammered out an apology because even though my coffee hadn’t spilled everywhere it still sloshed a little from the violence of the impact and got on the back of both of our hands.

The woman waved me off and bent to retrieve her phone as I rushed to apologize again and again. I was even more apologetic when I noticed it was the same elegant, blond woman from the other day in the shop.

She was wearing another sharp suit and her hair was pulled up in a tight bun on the top of her head. Her eyes were wide as she recognized me.

“Sorry. I was reading e-mail on my phone and not paying any attention.”

I snorted a little and flicked my hand to shake the cooling liquid off the back of it.

“I was juggling a hundred things and my mind was a million miles away. I have a few minutes before I have to head back to the shop; let me buy you your coffee to apologize.”

She shook her head. “Oh no, you don’t have to do that, really. I should have been paying attention.”