Free Fall Into His Kiss by Jenny Schwartz

Chapter 1
     
    Rachel blinked rapidly as the cans of tuna in front of her shimmered a little. Just a little. She wasn’t really crying, not over tuna, but she couldn’t help remembering that only a month ago she’d been eating sushi in New York, and now, here she was, back in Bideer, Texas, shopping to make tuna casserole for her Gramps.
    Of course, her tuna casserole was famous and she loved her Gramps, but how had everything gone so wrong, so fast? She’d been on the fast track to success, a rising advertising executive—okay, maybe executive was stretching it, but she’d been respected and good at her job and…
    “Excuse me.” A long, tanned and muscular arm stretched past her and nabbed a can of tuna, hesitated, and then, calloused fingers added a second can. That was a mite ambitious. The cans were large. The first can tilted, wavered and hurtled down towards Rachel’s toes, bare in casual sandals.
    She jerked back. The other customer lunged sideways and, off balance, Rachel toppled.
    “Peachy. Can life get any better?” Here she was, lying on the floor of a small supermarket, the mushrooms she’d placed in her basket bouncing away. If only she wasn’t twenty years too old for a toddler tantrum, she’d start bawling. And her elbow hurt.
    “Um.”
    She looked up, and then, up some more. It had been a few years since she’d been home for more than flying visits. Once she left for college, life had been busy. Study, work, interning, more work. The point was, she didn’t recognize the stranger standing in front of her.
    He was tall and burly. Burly was a good word. Broad, solid and strong. His faded blue t-shirt stretched over wide shoulders and a massive chest.
    But once she looked above his shoulders, above the square line of his jaw and surprisingly sensitive mouth, she connected with his eyes.
    Gentle, deep brown and startled, his eyes tracked her sprawled disaster in horror and evident apology. He had to be a few years older than her, nearly thirty, but this was no swaggering he-man, despite his size. Dark brown hair fell over his eyes, needing a cut.
    “I’m sorry.” He reached out a hand to help her up.
    She stared at the large paw and delicately cleared her throat.
    “Oh!”
    They both studied his dilemma. He’d caught the delinquent can of tuna, and now had one in each hand. Slowly, he put both on a shelf.
    Meantime, she scrambled up. Even standing, he remained significantly taller than her. That was a novelty. She was a tall girl and had had to learn not to hunch over in an attempt to fit in.
    “Did I hurt you?”
    She rubbed at her elbow. “No.”
    He raised a skeptical eyebrow.
    “Nothing that matters,” she amended.
    “I really am sorry.” He crouched easily and gathered up her mushrooms, tumbling them into her basket.
    “It doesn’t matter.” She sighed. What did one more hit to her dignity matter? She picked a can of tuna off the shelf and departed to replace the bruised and abused mushrooms. As she turned the corner of the aisle, she saw he watched her, but she couldn’t summon a neighborly smile.
     
     
    Wyatt Allenjo stood in the canned foods aisle and mentally kicked himself. If he could have physically kicked himself, without alarming other shoppers, he’d have done so. “Way to go, man,” he muttered under his breath.
    The woman was gorgeous. He’d seen her in the vegetable department, selecting carrots and green onions, not to mention those mushrooms, and he’d over-filled his own bag of apples, watching. It had taken two aisles of surreptitious stalking for him to build up his nerve to speak to her, and even then, it was only because she’d stood for so long in front of the canned tuna that he’d dared to address her. And what had he said? “Excuse me.”
    So witty. So dashing and debonair. No wonder he was single. Something that hadn’t bothered him too much, until her.
    It was her red hair and that tall, lithe body, athletic and strong, in jeans and a casual