Sugar Daddy by Lisa Kleypas

balance wavering in the sudden absence of Hardy’s support. I scrubbed the heels of my hands over my eyes.
    “That won’t happen again,” he said gruffly, still facing away from me. “I mean it, Liberty.”
    “I know. I’m sorry.” I wasn’t, actually. And I must not have sounded too sorry, because Hardy threw a sardonic glance over his shoulder.
    “No more practicing,” he said.
    “You mean basketball practice or…what we just did?”
    “Both,” he snapped.
    “Are you mad at me?”
    “No, I’m mad as hell at myself.”
    “You shouldn’t be. You didn’t do anything wrong. I wanted you to kiss me. I was the one who—”
    “Liberty,” he interrupted, turning toward me. Suddenly he looked weary and frustrated. He rubbed his eyes the same way I had rubbed mine. “Shut up, honey. The more you talk, the worse I’ll feel. Just go home.”
    I absorbed his words, the inexorable set of his face. “Do you…do you want to walk me back?” I hated the thread of timidity in my own voice.
    He threw me a wretched glance. “No. I don’t trust myself with you.”
    Glumness settled over me, smothering the sparks of desire and elation. I wasn’t sure how to explain any of it, Hardy’s attraction to me, his unwillingness to pursue it, the intensity of my response…and the knowledge that I was never going to kiss Gill Mincey again.

Chapter 6
    Mama was about a week overdue when she finally went into labor in late May.
    Springtime in Southeast Texas is a mean season. There are some pretty sights, the dazzling fields of bluebonnets, the flowering of Mexican buckeyes and redbuds, the greening of dry meadows. But spring is also a time when fire ants begin to mound after lying idle all winter, and the gulf whips up storms that spit out hail and lightning and twisters. Our region was scored by tornadoes that would double back in surprise attacks, jigsawing across rivers and down main streets, and other places tornadoes weren’t supposed to go. We got white tornadoes too, a deadly rotating froth that occurred in sunlight well after people thought the storm was over.
    Tornadoes were always a threat to Bluebonnet Ranch because of a law of nature that says tornadoes are irresistibly attracted to trailer parks. Scientists say it’s a myth, tornadoes are no more drawn to trailer parks than anywhere else. But you couldn’t fool the residents of Welcome. Whenever a twister appeared in or around town, it headed either to Bluebonnet Ranch or another Welcome subdivision called Happy Hills. How Happy Hills got its name was a mystery, because the landscape was as flat as a tortilla and barely two feet over sea level.
    Anyway, Happy Hills was a neighborhood of new two-story residences referred to as “big hair houses” by everyone else in Welcome who had to make do with one-level ranch dwellings. The subdivision had undergone just as many tornado strikes as Bluebonnet Ranch, which some people cited as an example of how tornadoes would just as likely strike a wealthy neighborhood as a trailer park.
    But one Happy Hills resident, Mr. Clem Cottle, was so alarmed by a white tornado that cut right across his front yard that he did some research on the property and discovered a dirty secret: Happy Hills had been built on the remains of an old trailer park. It was a rotten trick in Clem’s opinion, because he would never have knowingly bought a house in a place where a trailer park once stood. It was an invitation to disaster. It was just as bad as building on an Indian graveyard.
    Stuck with residences that had been exposed as tornado magnets, the homeowners of Happy Hills made the best of the situation by pooling their resources to build a communal storm shelter. It was a concrete room that had been half-sunk in the ground and banked with soil on all sides, with the result that there was finally a hill in Happy Hills.
    Bluebonnet Ranch, however, didn’t have anything remotely resembling a storm shelter. If a tornado cut through the