Page 19 of Home Coming

Josie shrugged. “I don’t know. Some…things went down in the city. She just needs a place to lay low for a while.”

Some thingswent downand she needed tolay low? What the hell? Was his sister harboring a criminal? A fugitive?

He opened his mouth to get to the bottom of this as Josie let out a huff. “Look, Quinn. I reached out to ask if she was going to the reunion and told her she could stay here if she wanted. She said yes. And then when she got here, we had a long talk about all that’s been happening in her life andIsuggested that she should hang around town for a while after the reunion. She didn’t ask. It was all me, so chill with the third degree.”

“So you just invite random people to move in for an undisclosed amount of time?”

“She’s not random people. She practically lived here when we were younger.” She scowled at him.

“I just would like to know why a girl you haven’t seen in years is suddenly hiding out in our parents’—”

“Hey! You look great!” Josie said loudly.

She shifted a wide-eyed glare between Quinn and, he assumed, Bailey standing behind him in the doorway. They’d have to continue this conversation later.

“So, we ready to go?” Josie asked in an overly animated approximation of a normal person.

Quinn let out a groan at the impending reunion as Bailey agreed with a less than enthusiastic, “I guess.”

“You two, I swear.” Josie shook her head. “Just come on. You’re both going to have a great time. You’ll see.”

“We’ll see, all right,” Quinn grumbled, earning him a shy smile from Bailey.

What was her story? If he did nothing else tonight, he intended to find that out.

CHAPTEREIGHT

The reunion was as bad as Bailey expected it to be—and she’d just walked in the door.

On the up side, she didn’t have to face it alone. She, Josie and Quinn walked in together, but that had led directly to the down side of arriving with the Baldwin siblings—the overwhelming female attention directed immediately at Quinn Baldwin, the elusive Navy SEAL.

Quinn was barely in the door when he was whisked away by alumni members of the football team plus a few former cheerleaders.

Although is anyone really aformercheerleader?

It seemed like that identity clung to them like the oh-so-tight shirts used to cling to their bouncy boobs on game day. Just astheater geekclung to Bailey. And the name she couldn’t seem to shake no matter how hard she tried.

Jane.

“Here you go, Jane. Have a great time!”

Bailey stared down at the preprinted name tag the helpful, cheerful and oh so young recent grad manning the table just inside the door of the bar had just handed her.

Jane Knowleswas printed in a big bold font. And lucky her, the name tag even had her high school yearbook photo next to her name.

Lovely.

During that period of her life, her hair had been too short, which made it also too curly, or more accurately frizzy since she had yet to discover the necessary hair products to tame her mane. The whole effect gave her head a round, unmoving dandelion appearance. More Brillo thanBreck Girl, an old timey term her grandmother always used to use when she talked about someone with pretty hair for some reason.

And of course that photo had been before she got contact lenses in college, and prior to her recent laser eye surgery. The Jane in the photo stared back at her through the least expensive—and least fashionable—prescription glasses her single mother could afford, front and center on her face.

Josie retrieved her name tag, pinning it on while looking around. “This place is packed.”

“Of course, it is. Isn’t it every graduating class since like forever?” Bailey asked while shoving the name tag into her purse.

“That’s what’s going to make it fun! All the upper class men we used to drool over will be here.”

Bailey didn’t need to come here to drool over her high school crush. She’d been doing that since Quinn had walked through the door of Josie’s house.

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