Chapter 5
five
Tarr shifted in his seat, the tension coming off Briar almost more than he could stomach. He wished she’d just be able to relax around him without the aid of a narcotic. He’d just glanced over to her when she opened her mouth.
“Thank you, Tarr,” she blurted out. “I’ve been so mean to you, but you never gave up on me, and you kept showing up, and I really do appreciate it.” She took a deep breath and looked over to him. “I’ve never said it, but…thank you. I’ve never met anyone like you, who….”
Just as quickly as she’d started blurting things out, she trailed off into silence. That adorable frown appeared between her eyes, and Tarr simply kept driving. He could barely comprehend that Briar had thanked him, because no, she’d never done that before.
Sure, he’d heard her be grateful to Tucker, to Ashton, the stable manager, to a random waiter who took her coffee order.
But him?
She’d never been grateful to or for him.
Warmth kindled in his stomach, and Tarr once again found himself shifting in his seat. “Who what?” he asked, wanting to hear the end of that sentence.
“Who didn’t do exactly what I yelled at them to do—who left.” She gave a cute little shrug, and Tarr’s heart tore and bled for her. Just a little bit. But her eyes looked bright like pure ocean waves when she dared to glance over to him again, and that only made Tarr’s hormones fire at him again.
“Tell me how you came to Deerfield,” he said.
Briar drew in a deep breath and blew it out. “I wanted somewhere with the small-town feel of Western Canada, but I needed to get out of Western Canada.”
He nodded, his memories returning—the ones of her slipping into a rodeo ambassador persona and talking about the Calgary Stampede. “Maybe you’ll tell me more about why.” He cleared his throat. “I came from Utah, from a rodeo there where I got injured.”
“But not a career-ending injury,” she said.
“No, I could’ve gone back.” Tarr glanced out the window, this topic of conversation not what he wanted to be doing. He knew a few things about Briar, and one of them was that she hated the rodeo.
Funny, considering she’d definitely been part of it at some point.
“I didn’t want to,” Tarr said simply. “Tuck was really disappointed. He loves the rodeo. He lives for the lights, the jokes, the events, the scent of dirt.” He chuckled.
“I’d had enough of the travel, of living in a trailer—which is funny, considering where I’m living right now—in a new city every weekend. ”
He glanced over to her. “Tuck brought me to his family farm after my surgery, so I could recover, and I don’t know. I’ve always loved the mountains, and I didn’t want to leave this place.”
She gave him a small smile. “Colorado is beautiful.”
He sighed. “Yeah, this Texas boy can’t quite understand the wintertime yet, but it’s only my second one, so I’m trying not to flee too quickly.”
She laughed lightly, and Tarr marveled at the sound of it. Briar didn’t laugh easily, that was for dang sure. “I love the winter.”
“Yeah? What do you like about it?”
“I don’t know,” she said, her voice a little too casual. That meant she did know. “There’s something…simple about its beauty. Without the leaves, the trees are just bare. Open. All their jagged branches and flaws exposed. It’s pretty.”
“I like it when it snows and all the branches are covered in the white.”
“Yeah, exactly that,” Briar said. “I like that something so pretty can be made out of white, brown, and blue. It’s…simple. A gorgeous kind of simple.”
Tarr could sum her up the same way, and he yearned to know more about her. No, to know everything about what made Briar Prescott into the woman riding in his passenger seat in that very moment.
Tarr noted at least three hotels on the way to Yolks Up, and he managed to find a parking spot despite the busyness of the Black Friday shopping crowd.
He congratulated himself as he hurried around the front of the truck to let Briar out that they’d managed to have a semi-decent conversation on the way here.
“Yeah, about the weather,” he muttered, but Tarr would take it, because having a casual conversation about the weather far exceeded fighting or arguing with Briar.
She joined him, and he once again tucked his hand in hers before facing the restaurant.
He wanted to ask her what she was doing for Christmas and why she never seemed to go anywhere for holidays.
He wanted to find out if Tuck had hired her on for another year or indefinitely.
And he wanted to know if she had any siblings and who her last boyfriend had been, why they’d broken up, and everything she knew about the rodeo.
He kept all of it tucked away and actually prayed that Briar would lead out in a topic of conversation.
As they approached the building, the front doors opened, and a cacophony of sound spilled out.
“Wow, they sound busy,” Briar said.
“Yeah, but I got us a reservation,” he said.
“Oh, honey, reservations don’t mean anything.” She grinned up at him, while Tarr’s heart beat a little faster.
“They don’t?”
She simply shook her head. “You’ve been a celebrity for far too long, Tarr.”
“I’m not a celebrity,” he said, and he tugged her through the fray of people to the hostess stand. “Tarr Olson,” he said. “I had a reservation for two at ten o’clock.”
“Mm–hm.” The woman hummed as she looked down at her tablet. “Yeah, I can get you guys back in about ten minutes.” She looked up, eyes hopeful. “Does that work?”
She lifted a buzzer from the stack, and Tarr didn’t really see what choice he had. “Sure,” he said, and he took the buzzer and towed Briar out of the way.
He managed to find a seat on the long, padded bench near the corner, and Briar squeezed in beside him. He lifted his arm around her shoulders, since his were too broad to share the space.
“I have a game I play with myself every day,” Briar said.
“Oh, yeah?” Tarr ducked his head so his cowboy hat created a little pocket for just the two of them to talk.
“Yep,” she said.
“Are you going to tell me what it is?”
“I guess it doesn’t really have a name,” she said. “Do you want to play it with me?” She blinked those oceanic eyes at him, and Tarr could only nod.
“I just try to tell myself one truth every day.”
“One truth,” Tarr repeated.
“Yeah,” she said. “Sometimes it’s the same truth every day, over and over, for weeks, and sometimes it changes.”
“What’s your truth for today?” he asked.
Briar stiffened at his side and crossed her legs. She pulled her crossbody bag up onto her lap and leaned into his chest. “Today, it’s that I can do hard things.”
“What hard things do you have to do today?” he asked.
“Go to breakfast with you,” she said, her voice almost a whisper.
“Be a good conversationalist. Accept and embrace my feelings.” She cleared her throat and tilted her head slightly to look at him, her courage re-entering her gaze.
“What about you? If you had to tell yourself the truth today, what would it be?”
Tarr’s mind blitzed, and he honestly didn’t know how to answer that question. After what felt like a long time of silence, but had probably only been several seconds, he said, “I think I need to face the reality that the RV is not going to sustain me through the winter.”
Briar turned fully toward him then, alarm crossing her face. “What’s wrong with the RV?”
“Everything?” He didn’t mean to put a question mark at the end of it, but he so did.
“I thought it had heat,” she said. “And running water.”
“Why would you think that?” Tarr asked, because he’d certainly never told her that.
“They’ve started the cabin, haven’t they?”
“Yeah,” he said. “But there’s no water or electricity on the property yet.”
Briar’s eyes widened and she searched his face. “How are you surviving there, then?”
“I installed a wood-burning stove last week,” Tarr said. “But, well, the truth is….” He ducked his head and kicked an embarrassed grin at her. “I don’t think I have the stovepipe exactly right, because I woke up in the night coughing, and the place was filled with smoke.”
“Tarr,” Briar said, plenty of chastisement in her tone. “That’s not safe. You could have died.” She exhibited the same fire and disdain for him that she always had and—oh—Tarr really liked it.
“Yeah, but God woke me up,” he said. “I put the fire out, aired out the place, and crawled back under my down blankets and sleeping bags.”
“Plural?” She frowned at him, an expression Tarr was quite familiar with, thank you very much. “You cannot live in a place without heat in the Colorado winter.”
“Yeah, I was here last year,” Tarr said. “Thanks, Mom.”
Briar scoffed, but she didn’t release his gaze as she cocked her head. “You should move back in with Tuck.”
“I’m not moving back in with Tuck.” Tarr lifted his head and looked out into the restaurant. “Maybe if a certain someone would loan me Wiggins, he could keep me warm at night.”
“You are not taking Wiggins,” Briar said. “I don’t want you to call me in the morning and tell me my dog’s frozen to death.”
Tarr chuckled and shook his head. “Wiggins won’t freeze to death.” He sighed, completely unsure about what to do with his housing situation. Playing Briar’s game, the truth was, the RV, in its current condition, was not going to last him through the winter.
“I think I’m just going to get a hotel,” he said. “They have these long-term ones with kitchens and stuff, and it’s not like I can’t afford it.”
Briar leaned back into him again. “Yeah,” she said. “But then you’d have to drive onto the ranch, and sometimes that’s really hard to do when it snows a lot. They close the roads here sometimes, Tarr.”
“Yes,” Tarr murmured.
And with Tuck, Bobbie Jo, and Rosie all going to Vegas for the NPR event, someone had to be there to maintain the farm, feed the animals, and keep things running.
“Maybe a hotel won’t work,” he said. “Maybe I could just stay in the house while Tuck’s gone.”
“I don’t get why you can’t stay there all winter,” she said. “It’s a seven bedroom house. It’s practically like having your own apartment.”
“Yeah, I don’t know either,” Tarr said. “There’s just something telling me it’s not a good idea.”
His buzzer went off, and he lifted it so Briar could see the flashing blue lights. She stood first, and he followed her to an intimate table that he hoped would be able to hold their cups of coffee and a little pitcher of cream, let alone their breakfasts.
The conversation moved on, and Briar actually shared a little bit about her wood crafts, and mentioned that she’d signed up for a watercolor class starting in January.
By the time Tarr turned off the highway and back onto the farm, he had self-congratulations running through his head for a great breakfast date.
“Take me by the RV,” Briar said, no sign of a question mark in sight.
He eased his foot off the gas pedal. “What? Why?”
“I want to see the extent of the smoke damage.” She looked at him out of the corner of her eye, and it sure felt calculating.
“Briar, it’s fine,” he said.
“Then let me see it.” She turned fully toward him then, and she cocked one eyebrow at him in challenge.
“You’re a real pill,” he said, but he turned his truck to the left instead of the right when he reached the fork in the road.
“You should meet yourself,” she shot back.
Tarr chose not to respond, and he caught the flap of the clear plastic sheeting that had been secured over his poured foundation as the wind picked it up and tried to rip it away. He went past that to the run-down RV, now thinking he simply needed a better one of these.
Water and electricity will still be a problem, he thought, the words hissing through his head.
He pulled off the road, as he didn’t really have a driveway here. “All right,” he drawled, bringing out his Texan accent. “Go check it, then.” He nodded toward her side of the truck, where the RV now waited for her “expert inspection.”
Briar glared at him, then turned to open her door. She sucked in a breath and recoiled away from the door. “What is that?”
Tarr leaned forward and tried to see past her. “What?”
“It’s a porcupine.” She gasped again and swung around to look at him. “Tarr, the door to your RV is swinging open, and I swear that porcupine just came out from inside it….”
“No,” he said, immediately dismissing the idea. Then he saw the way the door slammed against the side of the RV. His pulse dropped to the soles of his cowboy boots. “Stay here.” He unbuckled his seat belt and left the truck running to go check on his temporary dwelling.
You can’t stay here, ran through his mind in a multitude of voices. His. Tucker’s. Briar’s. His momma’s. God’s.
He saw the dark brown animal as it ducked around the front corner of the RV. Tarr came to a complete stop, his heartbeat hammering up in his ears now. The last of the quills on the chunky porcupine disappeared, and Tarr didn’t dare take another step.
The door to the RV was open, and he didn’t know how that had happened. Porcupines didn’t have hands that he knew of.
“Come back,” Briar called, her voice joining the whipping wind swirling around Tarr, through his head, down into his soul. “Tarr, come back to the truck. It’s starting to snow.”
That got him to look up into the sky, where yes, Mother Nature had started sending down white stuff through the gray sky.
He turned and went back to the truck, catapulting himself up and into the cab. He slammed the door and reached for his phone just as Briar said, “You should come stay with me tonight.”
Tarr froze again, though his mind still moved a million miles a minute.
Briar reached over and gently extracted his phone from his hands. “Take me home, and I’ll start getting my second bedroom ready for you. Then you can come back here, pack a bag, and then….”
She shrugged and didn’t finish the sentence. But then again, she didn’t need to. Tarr couldn’t stay in the RV if wild animals were coming and going at will, if there was smoke damage, if he couldn’t stay warm, and if he couldn’t eat or bathe or anything.
“Fine,” he grumbled, and he had to turn on his windshield wipers before he could back away from this spot of land that seemed to be betraying him at every turn.