His long bleached hair, his steel earrings, the skulls and other symbols he’d self-tattooed on his knuckles-she’d seemed amused by them. She was tolerant of him in every way except the cancer sticks. And because he hated upsetting her, during the weeks he spent at her house he would not only stop smoking but also try shedding his urban street image and begin fitting in with the Coronado sorta-suburban, sorta-surf-dude society-as well as anyone could, anyway, who had that scruffy hair, those steel earrings, the tattooed knuckles.

Then once Bailey Sullivan accepted him, the rest of the kids did too.

The name must have floated from his mind into Gram’s. “I thought I heard Bailey’s voice,” she said. “It was like old times.”

“It was her,” he admitted, turning his back to reach for his own coffee cup when a beer still sounded so much better. Or whiskey. “I guess she’s home for a visit too.”

“Imagine that.”

Yeah, imagine. He hadn’t even bothered to consider it when he’d moved in at Walnut Street a few days ago. Just as he’d never imagined on that first visit at Bad Ass thirteen that he’d get tangled up with super-insider, super-perfect, Coronado’s super It Girl Bailey Sullivan.

Teen tease. Ice princess. Girl next door. His first lover. His first love.

She been all these to him at one time or another.

Oh, yeah, and the first and only one to break his heart. But hell, what’s youth for, anyway?

He should have let go of it by now, don’t you think?

He’d never let go of it.

But that wasn’t true. He’d done a damn fine job of letting go of Bailey and all the immature dreams he’d had at twenty years old when he’d come to Coronado that last time, only to find her gone. He’d moved forward with his life and surprised the hell out of his parents by becoming a son they boasted about.