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Regardless of the consequences.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

IT WAS GETTING DARK, more and more stars peppering the sky as it turned from blush pink to purple to midnight blue.

And Quinn just sat there in her car, in the middle of the dirt road that was supposed to take her back home to Sullivan’s Point.

Because she didn’t know how she was going to face Fia and Rory. Because she was sure that she looked changed. She felt changed.

It was a kiss. Just a kiss, but she had gotten the easement. And whether or not it was because of the kiss, she couldn’t rightly say.

She had been kissed.

Her first kiss.

By Levi Granger, the object of her fantasies since she was fourteen. The man she would’ve said that she didn’t like, except after tonight she felt like maybe she did.

And that was confusing and upsetting, and made her want to scream and shout.

Because she didn’t want to care about him.

She didn’t want to be entangled with him in any regard.

He was far too...too him.

He was...

He scares you.

Lord, how he did. Because he was unearthing old Quinn. Not angry Quinn, though he’d done that, too. But Quinn who felt it all. Who wanted it all.

She didn’t want to be involved with anybody.

But she was getting to know him, and she had whispered one of the more vulnerable things that she had never told anybody to him, just this morning. Had it been just this morning?

That he had taken her to his parents’ graves, that he had come to get her at her house.

That they’d had pizza and conversation, and another fight, and a kiss that had scorched her soul.

She let out a slow breath, jagged and shaky.

She was going back tomorrow.

Camilla would be gone.

Did he want...?

Did she?

She drove on toward the house, finally ready, because she at least got to tell them that she had secured the easement.

Now she just had to not screw it up. She didn’t worry, not even for a moment, that he was holding sex hostage for the easement. That just wasn’t him. He was hardheaded, and he was stubborn, proud.

But he would never manipulate her.

He was way too straightforward for that. It was why he had thrown her in a pond, and yelled at her when he had thought she interpreted his dyslexia as stupidity.

He was a man of deep feelings, and they were real.