Chapter 5 #2
“Then I ran into him again,” I explained.
“And he asked if we could run together. So, we have been. A few days a week. I realized who he was”—Candace carefully avoided eye contact—“and that’s it.
The kid has been over a handful of times, too.
I had no idea they were connected until Ian showed up and carted him off. ”
I thought about the way Ian had looked earlier that afternoon.
The complete one-eighty from the cheerful, easygoing guy I’d gotten used to.
When he’d driven over the hill and spotted George, the relief on his face had been obvious.
Maybe I hadn’t registered it at the time, but Ian had been scared—worried about the kid—possibly his kid.
Then after, still unsmiling, he’d avoided my gaze, unwilling to address the elephant in the apple orchard. And it hadn’t been embarrassment at being found out. It had been something else. More than secretive. He’d looked at me like he didn’t trust me.
I didn’t know how I felt about that. I was private, too, so I understood. But the twinge of discomfort in my belly wasn’t anything I could explain.
The women surrounding me looked thoughtful.
Well, Becca looked entirely too pleased.
Her blue eyes were bright and manic with the possibility of a love story unfolding right across the highway.
She was so obvious, bless her heart. I didn’t have it in me to tell her that was the last thing that would ever happen between Ian and me, for a variety of reasons.
“Are you going to see him again?” Bonnie asked.
“Are you going to talk to him about the kid?” Mac spoke over her sister.
“Are you going to ask him out?” Becca added, and we all turned to look at her.
“What?” she said. “You’re all thinking it.”
Candace choked on yet another cheese straw.
I slapped my sister on the back and ignored the hopeful blond romantic at the end of the island.
“I don’t know when I’ll see him. His schedule is all over the place, but he usually joins me on my morning run, if he has the time.
If he wants to tell me about George, then he can. It’s none of my business.”
Mac frowned. “Ugh, why do you have to respect people’s boundaries and be such a shining example of maturity?”
“Well, I am the oldest person here.”
She threw another cheese cube at me, and I caught it in my mouth, smiling obnoxiously as I chewed.
“I don’t know how you Clarks didn’t already know about Ian,” I told Bonnie and Mac. “He’s renting your grandparents’ house for the duration of filming.”
“What?” the sisters practically shouted in unison.
“Maggie didn’t tell you? Junior and Nola are renting their house to Ian and his entourage.”
Mac was already typing on her phone, grumbling, “What if I’d gone over there to pick up something out of storage or grab my favorite spatula?
” Mac and Brady had been living together for a couple of months.
It wasn’t official or anything, but no one was surprised when all of Mac’s stuff had ended up at my brother’s apartment.
The phone buzzed in her hand a moment later.
“Grandma Nola said she signed an NDA, so she couldn’t tell us,” Mac announced, reading from her screen. Then she squawked in disbelief. “And she changed the locks, so I wouldn’t have been able to get my spatula, even if I wanted it.”
Bonnie rolled her eyes. “You can barely cook. You don’t have a favorite spatula. Brady makes all of your meals.”
“Well, I would have liked to have had the option,” Mac complained indignantly. “I can’t believe they rented the house out from under me.”
Junior and Nola Clark were snowbirds who usually only came back to Kirby Falls for the holidays and the summer months.
The phone buzzed again, and Mac recited in an even monotone, “‘Why do you care anyway, MacKenzie Eloise? You’re living in sin with that sweet Brady Judd. LOL.’”
The rest of us laughed.
Mac glared down at her phone. “Who taught her LOL anyway?”
Suddenly, she straightened, her perfectly lined eyes going wide and her affront forgotten. “Do you think Dorian Masters is staying in my room? Sleeping in my bed?” She seemed giddy at the prospect.
I shook my head at the display. “He is just a person, Mac. Just an overgrown man-baby who is bad at running.”
“But he’s a famous man-baby,” she argued.
“How can you be so lah-de-dah about all this? You’ve seen his face on a movie screen.
There are fan clubs dedicated to his abs.
He has a damn action figure and a car endorsement, cologne ads, and billboards in Times Square.
Everyone and their brother knows who he is, but you’re acting like he’s just some guy you ran into down at the feed store. ”
Candace finally stopped stress eating and came up for air. “I’m actually a little curious about this, too. Are you unimpressed with all celebrities, or is it just him specifically?”
I thought about it and decided on the easiest answer. “Once you’ve seen someone flat on their back after trying to run half a mile . . . I don’t know, some of the shine wears off.”
“Huh,” Mac mused. “You really are a robot.”
Everyone laughed—myself included—because it was funny and I knew Mac meant it lovingly.
But the joke also rubbed up against something I’d known my whole life.
I wasn’t as emotional or affected as everyone else, and when I did happen to be those things, I rarely showed it, even to the people who mattered.
I got home just after 8:00 p.m. It was cold and rainy, and as I stepped out of my car, my eyes immediately went to the property neighboring mine.
A decade ago, when I’d had this house built on Judd land, I’d been surrounded by forest on all sides. It had been peaceful, the perfect private sanctuary in the place I adored.
But then a few years ago, Buck Adams’s wife finally kicked his ass to the curb, and he’d purchased the acreage next to ours. A few buddies had helped him down enough trees so he could plop a mobile home in the overgrown field bordering my solitude.
There was a hundred yards between our back doors, but this time of year, the leaves were off the trees, so I could see and hear more than I ever wanted to out of that pain in the ass.
And right now, I could tell his truck wasn’t in the place he normally parked it. Even though he’d lost his license back in the spring for driving drunk and nearly killing my brother in a car accident.
Anger had my hand tightening on the doorknob as my gaze searched Buck’s backyard. There was the goat, huddled beside the trunk of the big pine tree it was tied to.
I’d checked the weather earlier in the day, so I knew it wouldn’t get cold enough to snow, but that didn’t stop the irritation I felt.
The goat occasionally chewed through its rope and ended up on my porch.
I usually took it back and tied it up without being noticed.
Talking to Buck didn’t help. He didn’t care about the thing.
He only kept it out of spite, knowing how desperately his ex-wife, Jolly, wanted it.
The yard was littered with car parts and trash piles that Buck burned on the weekends.
There were aluminum beer cans and amber bottles scattered from the back steps to the sheds and outbuildings where he stored his crap—all sorts of things that the goat tried to eat because it didn’t know any better.
The fact that the animal didn’t have shelter or regular feed made me mad enough to insert myself and try talking some sense into the old man, but it didn’t do a damn bit of good. He’d threatened to call the sheriff if he found me on his property.
Buck was content to make everyone around him miserable—just ask the man’s ex-wife, who’d suffered through forty years of living with an abusive drunk.
Sighing in disgust, I shook my head and went inside.
It was quiet. I’d left a small lamp burning on the kitchen counter, and it welcomed me with a circle of warm light. I took off my boots and hung my jacket on the back of a barstool to dry.
My coffee maker was scheduled for 5:04 a.m. I added a new filter and fresh grounds, then placed my favorite mug on the counter for the morning.
I was a creature of habit. My daily routine often stayed the same, with a few exceptions.
I had a book club meeting once per month, and bowling league every other Wednesday, with the occasional trivia night thrown in.
There were Sunday dinners with my parents and siblings over at the farmhouse, and various town activities and festivals to plan for.
But for the most part, I lived the same life day in and day out—the life of a farmer.
I went to bed early and ran in the mornings.
I spent time with my family and let my life revolve around the orchard. I liked it that way.
So it was easy enough to pinpoint why I was feeling restless.
Things were changing, and the film was a major distraction.
There were new people in my life for the first time in quite a while.
But that didn’t explain why I lay in bed that night, thinking about Dorian Masters and Ian Wells, one man but two very different people in my head.
I’d told my sister and my friends that he was just a man—a normal person like anyone else.
But that wasn’t quite the truth. The fame, the celebrity status, and the larger-than-life persona weren’t what made me uneasy.
It would have been better if that was all Ian was.
Just a social media presence, a walking hashtag, the glossy cover of a magazine.
But he’d been different today. More than the charm and sass I’d come to expect. What was keeping me up was the look on his face that afternoon when he’d spotted George in the field with me. The relief, the distrust, the vulnerability that had made him more real than any side of him I’d seen before.