The One Who Loves You (Tickled Pink #1)(4)

She does. She has blue eyes, and they’re staring at me in horror. “Phoebe,” she croaks, “I think I just went to hell.”





Chapter 2


Teague Miller, aka a Man Who Has No Intention of Letting Anything about His Life Change

One month later . . .

Largemouth bass aren’t biting today.

At least, not on Deer Drop Lake.

Now, over on the bank?

Largemouth something might be biting there, where the newest wannabe citizens of Tickled Pink, Wisconsin, are gathered to watch my ex-wife negotiate with me on their behalf.

“You’re really not going to row over there and answer one simple question?” Shiloh asks. She’s in the town’s party pontoon, holding it steady six feet or so from my fishing boat as we rock here out in the middle of the lake, discussing a situation I don’t see any need to discuss. Her brown hair’s in its normal bob, and her white skin’s getting its usual summer sprinkling of freckles across her nose. No doubt she’ll be fussing over sunscreen for all of us as soon as she notices.

I shake my head. “Don’t trust rich people.”

“Teague. They’re here because they want to become better people, and they just saw the school. I wouldn’t live in that school. You wouldn’t live in that school. Maybe try to meet them halfway?”

I lift the brim of my fishing hat and pin her with a stare that didn’t work when we were married, hasn’t worked in the decade and a half since we got divorced, and probably won’t work now, but does that stop me from using it?

No, it doesn’t. “Know an angle when I see one. They’re working an angle. That Lightly lady’s here because she thinks re-creating a forty-year-old movie about heaven on earth will magically morph her into the type of person who can go to heaven for real. Won’t last. Not once the mosquitoes start biting and she realizes we don’t stock foie gras in the Pick-n-Shop. So I won’t help the cause of keeping them here.”

“You realize that having a family who’s always in the tabloids staying in Tickled Pink might be just the boost we need to get tourism back up, don’t you?”

I give her another hard stare. Don’t need nosy-ass rich people and tourists invading our little slice of heaven. We get by just fine without all the tourists. You ask me, it’s been nice that the crazies quit coming around trying to drink from the Fountain of Everlasting Eternity, which got torn down six years ago, by the way, since movie set props aren’t built to last forever.

Fewer people telling us we’re going to hell for preaching the wrong way to get into heaven.

Get by even better without all the tabloids.

Shiloh crosses her arms and gives me the same look that led to me keeping a herd of goats on my land.

I hate that look.

Especially since she was right about the goats.

“Didn’t say I won’t talk to the old lady’s family,” I tell Shiloh. “Just said I won’t row over there to do it. They want to talk, they can come to me.”

Her lips stay flat, but something flickers in her eyes, and I know I’ve got her.

“What’s that the old lady said she wanted?” I know what she said. She repeated herself sixty-five times while we were signing the paperwork for her to hand over a wad of cash to the town in exchange for buying the disaster of an old high school building. “Ah, right. You just said it yourself. The whole damn family wants to be better people. Maybe learning to row a boat would be a good start.”

“You are truly awful.”

“I’m truly right, and you’re welcome. How many other ex-husbands do you have who can milk thirty goats, go sit out on a lake, catch fish, sell falling-down old eyesores for cash, and do your mama proud by sticking up for what this town’s really about, all in less time than it takes one of those people over onshore to fix her makeup for the day?”

And there’s the lip twitch.

She’s amused, and she knows I’m right.

“If they crash their boat into yours and you all sink in the lake and I can only rescue one person, I’m not saving you, for the record,” Shiloh says. “I’ll probably save Tavi’s dog, actually. Pebbles is adorable, even if the rest of them . . . need work. Not that I have time for any of you today. I’m late for a meeting with the high school principal.”

I lift the brim of my hat again to look at her. Talking to your kid’s principal falls under the jurisdiction of things you do with your ex-wife.

Happily, for the record. We tend to get along well, except for when she’s telling me to accept a family of no-good socialites moving to town. “You need backup?”

“Not unless you want to help plan the back-to-school carnival.”

“It’s barely June, Shiloh. Haven’t even had this year’s end-of-school fish boil.”

“And yet we’re still behind.” She flashes the smile that hooked me sixteen years ago, the same one her mama used to hook a generation of superfans for Pink Gold, the movie that temporarily put Tickled Pink on the map decades before I moved here. “You know, I could just give one of them your phone number.”

“Don’t make me chuck my phone in this lake.”

“If you were going to chuck your phone in the lake, you would’ve done it the sixth time I called you from shore. But you win, Teague. You win. I’ll tell them to borrow a boat and come out and negotiate with you in person. Be nice. We need the tourism, or we’ll all be getting jobs over in Deer Drop.” She fires the engine back up on the pontoon, backs it away, and heads to shore.