Chapter 1

The amount of alcohol they'd consumed that night was staggering.

She'd been sitting at the trendy Hollywood bar, drinking a glass of white wine and trying to forget a bad audition when he strolled up to her. She couldn't remember now what his pick up line had been, but she remembered that he said it with a southern drawl. He was handsome in an All-American sort of way – he was tall and muscular and had a great tan, blond hair and seductive blue eyes that sparkled when he smiled.

She wasn't interested in a relationship with anyone, especially not a law student. She had bigger things planned for herself: fame, stardom, a movie career, a glamorous life far away from dull Pine Valley. Still, there was something about the man sitting beside her at the bar. Chris Jackson, he told her that was his name. He'd left home – he glossed over his reasons for doing so – and struck out on his own, working his way through college and now law school. He made it sound very entertaining, but she suspected there was something more there.

She didn't push for more information. After all, she wasn't very forthcoming with him either. She hadn't even given him her real name. When he'd asked, she'd introduced herself as Cara Tyler. Yes, that worked. Cara was close enough to Erica to be easy to remember, and Tyler… well, her mother had just married a Dr. Tyler, so that was easy enough. You never knew who you might meet at a bar in LA – that man offering to buy you a drink could be a movie producer, or he could be just another smarmy man wanting to hook up with a hopeful, pretty starlet. Erica sized him up right away and knew that the blond man wasn't in the entertainment business, so there was no need to give him her real name. Cara worked just fine. It wasn't like she was looking for a relationship, after all.

She wasn't sure how it happened, but at some point during the evening, the law student by her side with his sexy southern drawl convinced her to try the bourbon he was drinking. He said it reminded him of the color of her eyes. The bartender brought her a glass of her own, and the next thing she knew, it was burning her throat and making her eyes water as she gulped it down.

After the first bourbon, the rest went down easier. She didn't dare try to match his pace – God, the man could drink. She didn't count drinks either, but she knew they'd had a lot to drink, and that they were both absurdly drunk by last call.

Later she'd use the alcohol as an excuse for what happened – they both had too much to drink, and they weren't thinking – but the truth was that she'd been lost to him from the moment she gazed into his gorgeous blue eyes, and she had to have him.

Years later, she really couldn't remember many of the details from their conversation at the bar. But what happened next, that she remembered in exquisite detail: The two of them in the hotel across the street from the bar, his lips on hers as he leaned into her, pushing her gently against the wall of the elevator. Then, in the hotel room…clothes drifting to the floor, his hands and lips on her, moving slowly and sensuously across her body. The feel of him on top of her as they moved together in a perfect rhythm - it was like nothing she'd ever experienced before. She never wanted it to stop.

She woke up the next morning with one hell of a hangover. He was already gone.

Erica put him out of her mind after that. There were only a few times after that one night when she thought about him. Until he showed up in Pine Valley. Until she walked down the stairs of her home and saw the handsome blond man with the twinkling blue eyes smiling at her.

It was him: the same man from the bar in LA almost a decade ago. She recognized him right away. He smiled at her as he introduced himself. Chris Jackson was really Jackson Montgomery. Travis's brother. Oh God, he was Travis's brother! She shook his hand, smiled and tried to pretend they'd never met, all the while wondering if he knew. Did he remember her? Did he know she was the same woman he'd made love to all night?

She never knew if he remembered her, because she never dared to bring it up in conversation, and he never mentioned it to her either. She was dying to know what he thought about that night, if he thought about it at all, hell if he even remembered it, but she couldn't do that. It would open too many old wounds, bring up subjects that she never wanted to discuss again. Some things were best left unsaid. Sometimes the past needed to stay buried.