Page 1 of The Hometown Legend

CHAPTER ONE

RORYSULLIVANWASBORING—HISTORICALLY.

So when she looked up from where she was seated beneath a tall pine tree, in her most sacred spot on Four Corners Ranch, to see a man who might have been conjured straight from the pages of one of her favorite novels—or from the pages of her diary—she blinked twice.

Especially because in her notebook she had just written:Get a kiss (kiss from a stranger?).

And then he was there.

A man.

A stranger.

She was working on her list.

The Summer of Rory.

The list that she badly needed to get her life in order. Because everything was changing at Sullivan’s Point. Everything was changing with her sisters, and their lives, and she was happy for them. Thrilled. But it had underscored some deep and hard truths about herself that she had been trying to ignore.

She wasn’t living. Not really. She was cocooned in the safe existence of her family home, protecting herself from potentially difficult social situations. Protecting herself from life.

And she had been going over the list of things that she had failed at for all of these years.

Entry one.

Climb the damn mountain.

Get a makeover.

A more shallow entry, but one that resonated nonetheless.

And then she’d written entry three:

Get a kiss.

That was right where she was at whenheappeared.

Broad-shouldered, standing a good distance in the thicket of trees. He had on a black cowboy hat, a tight black T-shirt. He had a beard and long shaggy hair, ink running down both of his arms in complex patterns.

She would have said she didn’t find any of those things appealing, but in that moment, he stole her breath.

Golden sunlight filtered through the trees and made everything feel like it was under some kind of magic spell. Likeshewas.

She had never looked at a man and had a reaction quite like this before. Visceral. Deep. Raw.

Rory was untouched. That was part of the problem. She was leaving Pyrite Falls in just under a month to go start her new job in Boston, and she had never even been on a date.

The stark truth was that she couldn’t go to Boston a virgin. If she went to Boston a virgin she was going to be a virgin until she died. Because how was she going to explain to a guy in the dissolute city that she had never seen a penis?

She had never even kissed a man. You weren’t allowed to be a virgin and a legend unless you were a nun. And even then, you had to do some pretty intense stuff to reach legendary status, and considering she wasn’t selling all worldly possessions and devoting her life to the poor, maybe she was going to have to see a penis.

She wasn’t writing that out on her list. She was going to start small.

Oh. No. She didn’t want to start small with penises.

Her whole face went hot and she looked from her notebook, back to the stranger again.

He was still there. He wasn’t a hallucination.

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