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If even a stranger who didn’t know you, or that you were the biggest nerd at your school, could pick up on the same things the kids from your hometown already knew and turn you into the butt of a joke again, then how did you trust the problem wasn’t you?

It was all valid.

But she was tired of letting it control her. Tired of letting it make her weak and scared and too much the same.

She was letting them keep her in a box she didn’t want to be in.

And maybe part of this whole legend thing was showing them.

She didn’t want that to be the biggest part. But it was part of it.

She was twenty-seven and she’d never been kissed. That was ridiculous.

So she needed to get a kiss.

Anykiss.

She didn’t need to be romantic about it.

That seemed like a good goal. Because it was a particular sticking point for her and most especially kind of a hang-up.

Better still if she could come into Smokey’s bar looking wholly unlike herself and snag the best-looking man in the room...

Without even trying, a vision of just such a thing swam before her. But when she approached the man sitting on the barstool, he had shaggy dark hair and a beard...

She squinted her eyes shut.

No. She wasn’t going there. She wasn’t reverting.

She could only allow herself to be so pitiful. Not anymore.

She’d been publicly ridiculed once for daring to fantasize so far out of her league. She’d known him, and liking him, going to sleep dreaming of him, had felt special.

Until it had been used against her, like the cruelest weapon.

She understood why the kids at school had laughed at it.

Gideon was the best-looking guy in town, in several towns in the area in point of fact. He had been legendary in this neck of the woods.

And he had been whispered and giggled about by every girl around.

He could have anyone he wanted.

Everyone knew that would never be her.

She liked to think on some level she’d known it, too, but having a huge big secret fantasy had kept her going and she hated that her ability to think that way had—for a long while—been taken from her.

That experience had changed her.

When she had dreamed of going to college, it had been a lower-tier school in a place she thought seemed vaguely interesting. But it was something she knew she could have. She’d stopped believing she was going to aim for the heights.

When she had thought she was going to get a kiss at that party, it hadn’t been with the best-looking guy there. It had been with one that she’d really thought was probably in her league.

That was what had set her back so far.

She had never seen herself going for Gideon.

She felt she was too pragmatic for that. And yet she had still managed to get herself into a situation where the whole thing had been a joke. Because she was a joke.