Page 3 of Sweet Home Louisiana

They were twelve years older.When they’d been together, they’d been kids, newly in love, newly having sex.Then her mom had died and her dad had gone to jail trying to avenge her mom’s death.

That had been a lot.A lot.

But it had been a long time ago.Maddie was a sophisticated city girl now and he was a laid-back bayou boy.They both knew that you couldn’t go around setting shit on fire just because someone pissed you off.You also couldn’t dangle people off a bridge or throw people through plate-glass windows.

He and Maddie were past all of that.They knew better now.And they didn’t feel that way about each other anymore.

It took a lot of heat, hormones, and more than a little bit of stupidity to act the way they had back then.His hormones were now under control, thank you.He was a lot smarter.Okay, a little smarter at least.And heat?Yeah, he hadn’t felt heat like that in years.That had been first love stuff.No matter what his grandfather said.

The Landrys were well-known for falling hard and fast and having big, crazy love stories.But Owen was…skeptical.That was the best way to say it.He was skeptical about the level of in-love crazy that truly ran through the family tree.His mom sure hadn’t found true love in spite of having Landry blood flowing through her veins.She’d raised Owen on her own—at least as alone as someone with an involved-in-everything family could be—and not once had there been even a maybe-a-soul-mate in her life.Not even when Owen, from ages seven to nineteen, had tried everything he could to find her one.Now, after all these years, she was finally dating a nice guy who treated her well.But she’d met Paul at Home Depot when buying a new toilet.No one fell madly in love over toilets.

“I think I need a shot or two before I walk into the bar across the street,” Maddie said with a small, sardonic smile.

Owen looked at her closely.Past the red lips and the silky blonde hair and the California tan and into her eyes.She was nervous.Well, hell.

Okay, so he felt aniggleof protectiveness at that.But she looked vulnerable, and she was here because her brother had died, and Owen was a good guy.He felt bad for her.She’d come to Autre for Tommy’s funeral, but she’d shown up at the last minute and had high-tailed it back out of town before he’d spoken even a word to her.She’d talked briefly with Sawyer and she’d hugged Cora.Then she’d gotten in an Uber—that she’d paid to wait for her—and headed back to the West Coast.So if he felta littlelike hugging her and atinybit like putting his fist through a wall because he couldn’t fix this for her, well, that was just because he wasnice.He gave a shit about other people.That was all.

There was nothing special about Madison Allain.

He couldn’t fix that her brother was dead and that she owned thirty-five percent of a business she didn’t want, but he could dosomething.He could get her tipsy.

“Come on.”He felt himself start to reach for her hand, but he balled his hand into a fist and stepped back, gesturing toward the office.

She started in that direction, and he noted that she had a big red purse hanging from one hand.She looked every bit the sophisticated city girl and it poked at him.She was gorgeous this way, of course.She looked a lot like tourists they got down here on a regular basis.He always got a kick out of the girls who had clearly never been on a boat and were wearing their expensive dresses and impractical shoes down here.Those were the girls who were most likely to get splashed with swamp water at some point.He put them right up front.

But on Maddie it made him itchy.It wasn’t right.She wasn’t a city girl.

Except she was.She’d lived in San Francisco for the past twelve years.Through her teens and early twenties.She’d been dressing herself for a long time.Just because she’dbeena bayou girl, wearing cutoff blue jeans and running barefoot, didn’t mean that’s who she was now.

Though he remembered a particular pair of cutoff blue jeans when she’d been sixteen that had ended up on the floor of his truck…

He cleared his throat as he pushed the door to the office open to let her in.He even resisted putting a hand on her lower back.He couldn’t, however, escape the scent of her filling his lungs as she brushed past him.

She even smelled sophisticated.Her perfume was probably expensive and couldn’t be found within forty miles of Autre.

He remembered when she’d smelled like sunshine and peaches.

She’d tasted like peaches, too.

Maddie paused just inside the door and looked around.She let out a soft sigh.

“You okay?”he asked, crossing to the file cabinet near the windows.

“This place is exactly the same.”She went to the chair behind one of the two big wooden desks.It had been her grandfather’s chair.

It was nothing fancy.Never had been.But it was as much a part of the office as the windows and exposed wooden beams overhead.

The desks were piled high with stacks of papers, and boxes of everything from fishing lures to engine parts sat all over the floor.The guys didn’t really use the office for, well, office work.It was more of a storage area.All of the guys, Tommy included, had always preferred to spend their time on the docks and the bayou itself.They only did what paperwork was absolutely required, and even most of that fell to Sawyer and Josh’s little sister, Kennedy.She bitched about them all on a daily basis, but she also didn’t trust any of them to do the book work or scheduling.

Owen glanced over to find Maddie sitting in her grandpa’s chair, looking around the office with a slightly dazed expression.Yeah, he imagined it was a little like going back in time.The invoices and lures might be new, but the desks and chairs and file cabinets were original.Even some of the dust had probably been there since the first days.

Oh, who was he kidding?He pulled a glass milk bottle from the bottom drawer.Some of those lures and the invoices on the bottoms of the piles had probably been there since their grandfathers had owned the place, and the dust wasdefinitelyoriginal.Kennedy drew the line at cleaning.Anything.

He held the bottle up.“This okay?”

“Is it at least 90 proof?”

He laughed.“Doesn’t make it through that door if it’s not.”He set the bottle on the nearest desk.The onehisgrandfather had used.The bottle hadn’t held milk in years, but it had been refilled several times with the moonshine Mitch made with Kenny Allain’s recipe.Owen reached for a coffee cup sitting on the desk, looked inside, saw it was empty and dry—not necessarily clean, but the moonshine would kill any germs—blew into it to dislodge any possible dust, and poured two fingers’ worth.He handed it over to her.

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