Chapter 22
Fitz
Our next “friend date” is supposed to be in LA, but Tessa had a last-minute meeting with her architect at Loveland Ranch, so she’s driving up on a Friday afternoon, and I’m planning something here.
I don’t love the idea of Tessa making the long trip here every other weekend, pregnant or not, but I’m excited to show her a few things I’ve set up at the ranch. Her ranch.
She pulls up in her Jeep with a pile of drawings and idea boards her designer sister loaded her up with, and I carry them all into the house.
“We’re almost ready to start construction on a new wing that will have a suite for me to stay in with the baby when we’re here,” she says, pointing at the plans.
I heft her overnight bag, which weighs about three tons. “Does this giant bag mean you’ll be spending the next month here with me?”
She rolls her eyes, but I’m completely serious, hopeful that she wants to be here more. I really like having her here even though I know it’s not realistic with her job.
“Nope, I just brought some stuff I want to leave here.” Tessa shakes her hair free of the rubber band that had pulled it back, and the sunlight plays among the subtle highlights.
“If we have a girl and she’s gorgeous like her mama, I’m going to be chasing away every boy who thinks he can get within ten yards of our daughter until she’s twenty-one,” I say.
“She’s not going to like that very much.”
“You’re right. Twenty-one is too young. I meant twenty-five.”
She laughs, face sun-kissed, cheeks pink, lips full. “You look good. Healthy and relaxed.” I take in her figure, which is a little more curvy with a baby bump starting to show. It’s the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen, and I can’t help staring longer than I should.
“That’s the effect of time on the open road, leaving the stresses of work and the city behind.” She twirls like a schoolgirl.
“Kind of makes a person question why you live in a stressful city.”
“That person should take me out on our friend date and stop questioning my life choices.”
“Noted. Well, this is your friend date.” I spread my arms open wide. “You’re on it.”
She looks around for something other than her own ranch house in front of us. She’s been here dozens of times, meeting with contractors, so she knows the place better than I do.
“What am I missing?” she asks.
“Come.” Tipping my head, I gesture for her to follow me inside. I dump the plans and her bag on the table in the middle of the room. She follows me out to the back, where I’ve built six raised beds for growing vegetables and herbs.
It’s taken some long hours after my workday ends to get it all done, but it’s worth it for the expression of wonderment on her face.
Her eyes are rounder than I’ve ever seen them, and her smile stretches wider once she takes everything in.
It reminds me of how she looked when we took the horses up the hill, and she saw the view of the valley for the first time.
It also reminds me of other things I should not be feeling—how much I want to touch her skin, the memory of how she tastes—all of the things that make it harder to push her away and remind myself that I can’t get attached.
She throws her arms around my neck and jumps into my arms, challenging the strength of my carefully built walls. “Are you kidding? I have a garden?”
“You have a garden. I wanted you to have something beautiful to look at from the back porch. And since I know you have well water, there’s no excuse for killing any of the stuff we plant.”
“We?” she asks, leaning back to smile into my face. The way her eyes shine makes all the time I spent worth it.
“Yes.” I point at the bags of soil and compost and the flats of seedlings which should take to the fresh soil in no time.
“Some of them can be in the hydroponic grower. And there are worms and compost to keep the beds healthy.” I show her a water-and-soil contraption that will recycle the waste from the fish swimming below to make the plant system self-sustaining.
She stays in my arms and kisses me on the cheek. “Thank you. You are going to be the best dad ever. Compost and worms? What could possibly be better in the eyes of a little kid?”
As she slides down my front side to the ground, I feel the swell of her baby bump against my stomach. I pull her back and reach out to feel it. “Wait, come here. What’s happening under there?”
She lifts her denim shirt to show me her growing little bulge, which causes an unexpected swell of emotion. I’ve been seeing her slowly get bigger, but today it hits me harder that we’re having a baby together. That I’m going to be a dad.
“I know. Can you believe I’m almost halfway? But you’re being silly. I’m no bigger than when we video chatted two days ago.”
“Doesn’t matter. It’s…fucking amazing. There’s a person in there. Our person.”
“And our person just started kicking me a little bit. I’m sure you’ll feel it while we’re together.”
Hearing her talk about “our” anything shouldn’t make me as happy as it does.
The last thing I can afford to do is let in appropriate emotions cloud things.
I remind myself of how badly things went the one time I opened up too much, how exposed I felt, and how I wrecked everything after that.
I have too many burdens between this town and my own baggage, and then there’s Chad.
There’s never a way to keep romance alive when I get pulled into his drama, and there’s always drama.
Same problems, different day.
“If you’re game, we can get started right now,” I say, tamping down my feelings and walking over to the pile of tools and grabbing a long-handled shovel and a hoe.
She surveys the plants stretching their tiny green sprouts toward the sun and looks a little uneasy. Taking in the entirety of her fallow land, she shakes her head and scowls. “I’m just realizing how much work this is going to be. I don’t know how I’m going to tackle it all.”
I grab her hand and lead her over to the seedlings, unable to ignore the zing of heat where our hands touch. “One plant at a time, that’s how. It’s the only way. You’ve got this, Duchess, and I’ll be here to help.”
She looks at me, and I see a hint of the smile I love so much.
“One plant at a time.” Tessa takes the shovel from me and goes over to one of the raised beds, where I’ve already prepared the soil for planting. “This is amazing. What are we planting?”
I point out tomatoes, peppers, basil, mint, and several other herbs and root vegetables. “Some of these we’ll want to sprout from seed, but the little sprouts grow quicker and give you instant gratification. They’ll take to the soil well in the weather we’re having.”
Tessa bounces on her toes, eager to get started.
She’s wearing a loose-fitting pair of jeans and a white tee, looking like a teenager with her hair piled on top and sunglasses perched on her head.
I pop a cowboy hat on Tessa’s head to shield her from the sun and carry over a little stool so she doesn’t have to bend over.
“You think of everything, don’t you?” She kisses me on the cheek, and I turn away so she doesn’t see how it makes me smile.
“Can’t have you getting a sunburn,” I mutter, moving to the farthest raised bed and working on getting carrot and spring onion seeds spaced an inch apart.
We dig, plant, and fertilize in the warm sun until all the beds are finished.
Tessa and I stand and admire them like proud parents.
“These look so great,” she says. Her eyes sweep past the beds to the rest of the fallow land in the distance.
“But I can see now that I need to deal with the rest of this property. It doesn’t look so good in comparison. ”
“Little by little, Duchess. We’ll get there.” I shouldn’t be promising to be involved or even presuming she’d want me butting in, but this is my wheelhouse, and I feel a certain amount of pride in seeing things done right.
“You promise?” She leans against me, and I put an arm around her shoulders.
“I promise. Especially since you look so cute in my hat.”
I feel her inhale a deep breath, then let it out slowly.
“I’m kind of sad for this date to end. This has been so much fun.”
Turning her to face me, I wag a finger at her. “Who said it’s over? This was just part one. Follow me.”
An hour or so later, Tessa sits on a chaise lounge in my back garden. She’s still wearing the hat, which is unnecessary in the warm evening, but I like it and have no desire for her to take it off.
My grill tends to flame and sputter, so I have a chef’s apron over my denim shirt, sleeves rolled to my elbows.
The meat has browned nicely on one side, so I flip the sirloins and roll the ears of corn to char on the other side.
Closing the lid, I gaze at my baby mama, sitting there with a lemonade in one hand and a Sue Grafton mystery in the other.
I catch her stealing glances at me every so often, but for the most part, she’s obeyed my instructions to relax and enjoy the evening while I cook.
While the grill does its thing, I slide onto the chaise next to hers and take a sip of my lemonade. “How’s the book?”
“So good. Gosh, I can’t think of the last time I sat outside and read a book.”
“Duchess, for the life of me, I don’t understand you. Why not?”
“I dunno. I work a lot of weekends, and you know I’ve been driving up here and back, plus I take care of things for my sisters. Just doesn’t leave a lot of time for reading.”
There must be something about her sisters that I don’t know. Like maybe one of them has issues like Chad does, or someone’s impaired in some other way, because she seems to spend a lot of time worrying about them.
“I don’t know how to ask this without being blunt, so I’m just gonna say it. Is there something going on with your sisters, like mental health issues and such?”
Her head whips to the side, and she squints at me under the brim of the hat.
“Um, well, let’s see. Hannah is a hard-charging MBA finance perfectionist with a son, so she can be a lot.
Hazel is bookish and structured in everything she does.
And she’s a worrier. Dylan is a drama queen but super smart.
Works in interior design. And Callie is the baby. She’s fun. Has big dreams.”
I nod. “That all sounds pretty normal.”
She shrugs. “Sure. Normal for a bunch of sisters who are always in each other’s business.”
“So what are you taking care of, with respect to all of them? What’s the burden you carry around?”
“Oh. I’m just accustomed to handling things. I handle their finances and talk to Callie’s landlord if something happens at her apartment. I babysit Hannah’s son a couple of days a week. Right now, I’m dealing with the renovations out here—”
I hold up a hand. “Wait, you’re dealing with all the renovations even though Dylan is an interior designer.”
“Well, yeah. I’m dealing with building. The design stuff happens later.”
“And you deal with the finances even though Hannah has a degree in business.”
“Um, what’s your point?” She juts out her chin.
I can smell the meat cooking, and I don’t want it to burn, so I need to make my point quickly. “My point is that they all may have needed you to run their lives at some point, but could it be that they’re old enough to take things on themselves?”
She puts her hands on her hips, but then her body slumps and she blinks up at me. “I suppose.”
“And is it possible that you’re managing their lives because you like being the one everyone depends on and you don’t want to let go of that?”
She sighs. “Possibly. Probably. Does that make me a meddler?”
“No. It makes you thoughtful and responsible. And probably also exhausted.”
“I am a little bit exhausted.”
A tiny bird flits over and lands on a bird feeder in the garden.
It pecks at the seeds and takes off toward a distant tree.
I used to sit out here and watch the birds for hours, but that was before I felt laden with my own worries about how to wring the most income out of my land and convince the people in town to share what little water there is.
And then there’s Chad, always one drink away from hitting rock bottom, and that bottom seems to drop deeper each time he gets close.
But I don’t dare tell Tessa any of that. I want her to think of me as a strong partner and future father. I don’t want her to have any doubts about my ability to take on more challenges. I’ve done it for this long, adding whichever ones came down the path, and I’ll continue doing it.
“That smells amazing, by the way. And this has been such an incredible evening,” she says.
When her pale eyes land on me, I forget about the rest of my worries. I don’t understand how just looking at her makes me feel happy, but I can’t deny that it does.
The soft skin of her throat flutters as she swallows. Her lips part, and her tongue slips out to moisten them. I lean in another inch, taking in her delicate features. I could close the gap between us so easily. I want to kiss her so badly, but I don’t want to hook up. I want it to mean something.
I wonder if it would mean something to her.
She meets my gaze and doesn’t back away. We’re so close, and I lean closer. Her eyes drift shut in anticipation. I reach my hand to touch her cheek…but her eyes snap open, and she jerks back.
“Something’s burning.”
She’s right. The smoke from the grill has turned black, and I jump up to open the hood. A cloud of smoke billows out, and I shove the tongs at the steaks, flipping them over.
They’re charred but not ruined. More than I can say for the corn, which is black on one side. There are a couple more ears in the kitchen, and they’ll cook quickly. At least the meal isn’t ruined.
But the kiss…and the moment…those are gone.
And an hour later, after Tessa licks the last bit of juice from the corners of her mouth, she’s gone too. I try to convince her to spend the night at Loveland—but who am I kidding, I’d rather have her sleeping here. She says she needs to work at the law firm this weekend to catch up.
Leaving doesn’t seem to be as hard for her as it is for me. So I let her go.
Back to LA, back to her separate life. An hour later, my phone rings and Chad needs me to give him a ride home from the Hitching Post because he stopped off for beers after work and knows better than to get behind the wheel.
Tessa texts me soon after to say she made it back to LA with almost no traffic. I stare at the message for a second longer than I should before typing back.
Me:
So glad you’re home safe
Tessa:
That was the perfect afternoon and evening
Me:
Anything for you, Duchess
Tessa:
Aw, thank you, cowboy. Sleep tight
And our lives keep moving, separately. The way they’re supposed to. The way they always will.
Still…I’m starting to hate LA just a little bit more every time it steals her back.