Page 1 of The Score We Never Settled

1

LAYLA

Blue bracelets.

Powder blue, actually, if we’re being technical.

And, technically, I made bracelets just like them, specifically for someone…someone I can’t seem to fully get away from.

They’re currently wrapped around a tan wrist attached to fingers wrapped around my dropped cornstarch.

My heart skips several beats before crashing down to the pit of my stomach. I almost had a similar feeling today when my missing truckload of supplies didn’t show up as planned and won’t be arriving for another three to four days, but this is so much worse.

I would’ve preferred the latter any day of the week.

Because the previous option—the one now holding my cornstarch and being meticulously still—is dangerous, smothered in bad boy, and served with a dish of me doing dirty things with him…on some days.

Others, I’ve fantasized about.

“When you gonna look up at me, Layla Jean? I know you know it’s me.”

I don’t breathe for several seconds because my mind and body are flooded with memories.

Good.

Hopeless.

Lustful and heated memories.

A soft brush along the underside of my chin has my focus fumbling for clarity. I fall upon a black sweatshirt that says Tennessee Tornadoes in burgundy, and that’s all the confirmation I need.

It’shimbefore I connect with a chiseled jaw adorned in dark stubble and hair, the faint scar on his left cheek from his daddy’s tractor when the fan belt snapped one summer and got him.

Perfect lips, straight nose—that I have no idea how he kept straight because all he did and does is fight—and those green eyes.

Pine green.

My favorite-colored eyes in the whole world.

Briggs Kerrigan.

Myonlychildhood crush.

I wasn’t boy crazy like a lot of the girls I went to school with. They would trade crushes left and right, change their mind on a whim or a word, but Briggs Kerrigan was a constant in my diary.

In my life.

So much so that everyone in town sensed my little infatuation, but thankfully, they were merciful enough to keep it to themselves because of my so-called boyfriend at the time.

“Briggs…”

And that’s all I’ve got in a nutshell.

I can not believe he’s hunched down in front of me at the moment. That he’s staring back at me, amused, not in shock, andhere.

In Magnolia Ridge.

A place he has not entered for years.