Page 94 of Perfect Pursuit

She grabbed my hand. “It’s only the most relaxed day around this prissy town. Say you’ll come with me, Fallon.”

I grinned at the exuberant pixie and dragged her behind me as I shouted, “Mama? I’m going to Founder’s Day with a new friend.”

My mother came to the door. “Oh, hello. I’m Fallon’s mother.”

Austyn held out her hand and introduced herself. “It’s nice to meet you, Ms. Brookes. I’m Austyn Kensington.”

I sputtered, “Kensington? Like where we’re living?”

She shrugged. “It’s no big deal.”

If she didn’t want to make hay over the fact this celebration was about her family, I wasn’t about to. “Is that cool, Mama?”

“Sure, sweetheart. Just be home by supper.”

Austyn waved to my mother before pointing to a field at the end of the street. “If we go through there, we can cut through my Gramps’s yard. He won’t mind and it won’t take us long at all to get to the town center.”

“Cool.” Along the way, I found out Austyn’s mother was at work and this was the first summer she wasn’t “Tethered to one of her uncles’ hips.”

“What does your mama do?”

“Now? She’s a doctor.”

“She must be super smart.”

“She’s so much more than that.” A shadow flits across Austyn’s face before she stops walking and faces me, hands on her hips. “Listen, let me just get it out there. I’m bullied a lot.”

Anger boiling beneath my skin sets my cheeks flaming. “Why?”

“Because the ‘good’ people of this town think it’s an outrage that Dr. Paige Kensington had a baby when she was seventeen and wouldn’t name the father.” Austyn’s body language dares me to say a word about her mother but something inside me relaxes.

I blurt out the first thing that comes to my mind upon hearing Austyn’s tale of woe. “You don’t have a dad too?”

“Seriously, Fallon, I…wait. Too? What happened to yours?”

“Car accident.”

Austyn hooks her arm in mine and we resume walking. “How did you end up here?”

“Mama got a job in Austin...hey. Were you named after where you were born?”

She groans. “Can we save that story for another day?”

I grin. “Sure.” I’m about to say more when we approach an enormous barn. Coming to the side, my voice whispers, “Whoa.”

She winks, completely irreverent. “That’s what we say to the horses.”

“Austyn, do you have to check with someone before you’re friends with me?”

Her dark brows wing upward. “Fallon, I love people for who they are, not what they have nor what they do.”

Coming out of the memory, I find Austyn’s concerned face with her now infamous rainbow hued hair flopping forward. “What were you thinking about?”

“The day we became friends. The things you said to me.”

“Which part?”

“That you love people for who they are, not what they have nor what they do?”

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