Page 20 of The Hot New Bachelor in Town

“Ugh,” Lottie cringes. “My nose.”

“My eye!” Tish groans.

“Sorry,” I say again.

“Did you see it?”

“See what? Your eye?” I ask in horror as I look at the floor.

“No!” Tish lowers her hand, her long lashes twitching. “Him!”

“Him?”

Lottie pinches the bridge of her nose, testing it for broken cartilage. “Yeah, him!” she says. “The bachelor.”

“What about him?”

They lower their hands and stare at me.

“Didn’t you see the way he looked at you?” Tish asks.

“No,” I say, prompting a wave of rolling eyes.

But that’s an outright lie.

I definitely saw the way Carter looked at me. But it’s nothing. It has to be nothing. He’s just a guy passing through town looking for a hook-up to pass the time and I’m just a Small Town girl with no time for that kind of thing, anyway. We’re the last people in Kiss County who should be falling in love.

Besides, a man like that would never fall for a girl like me.

It was nothing.

7

CARTER

Welcome to Kiss County.

Where people fall in love!

I didn’t understand that a day ago.

I still don’t today. But I’m starting to.

A strange feeling came over me last night, and it’s lingered in me since then. I don’t know if it was the charm of the town square or the pleasant silence after years of traveling from city-to-city or the beauty of the moon on the lake. All good things that make one think twice about dismissing a simple life in Small Town.

I suspect, however, that it was the company that brought me back again.

Mika Michaelson. She was here this whole time, tucked away in a bright and colorful corner of Kiss County, USA.

And, by some strange twist of fate, I found her.

Maybe your car was always meant to break down here.

That car is bulletproof. Not literally so, but I’ve driven that thing from coast-to-coast for years and it’s never broken down on me. I take it in for check-ups regularly and every mechanic always says how well the car is taken care of.

But I drove one mile into Kiss County, and it instantly stalled.

Coincidence. It had to be.

---