Chapter 3
I have to write down these stories, because I have no one to tell them to. Ma is dead now, and the girls all have sad stories—mine isn’t any worse or better. None of the men want to talk at all.
When Jessie Jane woke up the next morning and looked up at the unfamiliar ceiling, she was more than a little bit confused. She didn’t do unfamiliar ceilings. She didn’t do beds that weren’t her own.
She really didn’t do walks of shame or anything even close.
And she didn’t …
Well, for heaven’s sake, if she finally had, she would remember.
But no, there were no memories of anything sultry. Of course, then the real memories came back. Her leaving The Watering Hole with Flynn.
An immediate shiver went through her entire body.
Flynn Wilder.
What a problem.
But he had agreed to help her. And she had gone home with him. For the express purpose of starting some rumors.
She got out of bed, still dressed from the night before, because the idea of taking her clothes off in Flynn’s house had been unthinkable.
In fact, walking out of the bedroom felt a little bit impossible too. But she managed to do it anyway. Because that was what she did. She didn’t do shame; she didn’t do embarrassment. She did the hard things, the kick-ass things, the things other people were too afraid to do.
Because she was Jessie Jane Hancock, dammit. Descendent of Butch Hancock the Traitor.
Yippy-ki-yay.
“Morning,” she called out. “I don’t want to go catching you in a state of undress.”
“No worries.”
The voice that came up the stairs was still gravelly from sleep, and she shivered just slightly. It was so weird to see him in this totally different context. To be alone with him. No, she wasn’t going to think of it that way. They were business partners. That was the thing.
“Should I pay you for this?”
She spoke as she was going down the stairs, and when the words exited her mouth, Flynn stepped in front of the landing.
He was wearing blue jeans and a tight black T-shirt, and she almost would have preferred if he were in a state of undress, because then she could have at least been annoyed.
Instead, he just had bare feet. And for some reason that was …
intimate in a way she didn’t want to think about.
“Excuse me?” He sounded like a scandalized maiden.
“I just realized that maybe vengeance isn’t appropriate compensation,” she said.
“Oh no,” he said, smiling slowly. “It is. I’ve had time to think about it.”
“Have you?”
“I sure as hell didn’t sleep. Not pondering the implications of all of this. Come and grab some coffee.”
“I thought we were going to have coffee in town.”
“I need a pre-coffee before we get to the performative coffee.”
She shrugged. But she stayed where she was in the middle of the staircase.
“I’m not going to bite you,” he said, crossing his arms over his broad chest.
She blinked. “I know that.”
Then she began to make her way down the stairs, careful to skirt him like a particularly skittish cat as she walked into the room that he had just come out of.
The kitchen was nice. Natural stone and raw wood cabinets. It was very upscale, but very Flynn all at the same time.
“Wow,” she said.
“You like it?”
“Yes. It’s … beautiful.”
“Thanks. I did most of the work myself.” He paused for a second. “My brother Carson helped with a lot of it. He’s great at woodworking and things like that.”
“You’re obviously not too bad at it either.”
“Not too bad. I try to make myself useful where I can.”
“You don’t really give off that vibe. Useful.”
He shrugged. “I like to have fun. But you know, most of my life I was having fun at other people’s expense.”
“Explain that.”
He turned away from her and opened one of the cabinets, taking out a gray stoneware mug and setting it heavily on the counter. He poured a cup of coffee from a stainless steel carafe and slid the mug toward her. “Cream?”
“Please,” she said.
“Anyway. You know reputation is such an important thing to Danielle, to Michael. To … Mom. And so I always took a lot of joy in not caring about it. The things that always bothered my oldest brother … they’ve never bothered me.”
“Well, it may surprise you to learn that my family has never cared about our outlaw reputation.”
“You’ve built an entire business off it.”
“Damn straight.”
“But it seems sort of out of step with your wanting to be mayor.”
He could have slapped her and it would’ve been less painful. How did he manage to hit her insecurities right on target? She couldn’t quite understand that. His intuition was unerring in so many ways.
“What I don’t like is a lack of fairness.”
“I wouldn’t think an outlaw would care about fairness.”
“That’s not true. Anyway, I’m not an outlaw. To be clear.”
“I get that. But I just meant … You’re sort of like a Western carnie.”
A crack of laughter escaped her lips. “You’re actually not the first person to say that.”
She ignored the fact that the description made her skin feel too tight. She just laughed. Because what she had learned was as long as she could laugh at herself, and her family, at their exploits, then no one could hurt her.
Not even Flynn Wilder.
But for the first time, she wondered how hard he had taken words like that. Because she knew what it was like to have the town look down on her while the Hancocks rallied together as a family, them against the world. Flynn was looked down on by his own family. And that seemed … altogether unfair.
“How old were you when your mom left?”
“Oh. Not quite two?” He shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t remember being emotionally scarred by it. I had my dad. I had Austin, Carson. It was good. We were able to run around and do whatever we wanted.”
“Did you always visit your mom?”
“Yeah. Pretty much. Holidays and birthdays. She wasn’t single very long. Even though my dad never talked about it, and I’ve definitely never had the discussion with my mom, my assumption has always been that she left him for Don.”
“You don’t seem very bothered by it.” But what Jessie knew for sure was that just because somebody pretended not to be bothered by something, that did not mean they were actually unbothered.
“What’s the point of being bothered by it? Like I said: I want to have fun. And I would rather be me than my insurance salesman brother, I’ll tell you that right now.”
“Right.”
“Anyway,” he continued, “they’re just … Last time I was over there, you know, Danielle was talking about how Rustler Mountain is too rough and she wants to deemphasize the Western element. She wants it to be more like Bend.”
“She didn’t say that!” Jessie shrieked.
“She did. She wants it to be cuter. She wants it to be a tourist attraction for the right kind of people, who want to do wine tastings and go on curated hikes.”
“I have no issue with wine tastings but like … we’re Rustler Mountain. We’re the Wild West. We’re not curated, and I fear half the people in town are the wrong kind of people as far as she’s concerned.”
“Why do you care so much about that?”
“There’s just a point where you just can’t let the mean girls win anymore.” And that was as deep as she was getting. “I don’t need you to understand me. I just need you to be my arm candy.”
He raised his brows. “Arm candy. Tell me truly, Jessie, did you really choose me because you think I’m hot?”
She did her best not to stare at his green eyes, perfectly formed jawline dusted with golden stubble, or aquiline nose.
She’d read that adjective in a romance novel once and had looked it up.
Aquiline could be kind of an unflattering term, she supposed, but it perfectly described his strong, straight nose, which balanced perfectly with his sculpted cheekbones and …
She cleared her throat.
“Sure, you’re hot,” she did her very best not to react at all as she said that. “But what I really like is how obnoxious you are.”
She took a sip of her coffee and looked over the rim of the mug, realizing too late that was a grave error. Because when their eyes met, she felt as if she’d been struck by a bolt of lightning.
“Do you have any business in town today?” she asked, trying not to choke on her coffee.
“None other than delivering you back to your truck.”
“Great. That’s … fine.”
They finished their coffee in silence. “Let’s go down to Scallywags,” he said.
“Sure.”
It was her favorite coffee place in town. There were three of them, but Scallywag’s had baked goods, and she did like baked goods. Not that she often got herself a little treat, but when she did, she preferred it to be from there.
They regarded each other for a moment in the silence of the kitchen. She made the first move toward the front door.
“Hang on a minute,” he said, and she heard the sound of his keys scraping across the counter as he followed her out of the kitchen and toward the door.
She was already getting into the truck by the time he closed the distance between them. She didn’t like that feeling of tension in her chest. That feeling of tension in his kitchen. And she wanted to get as far away from it as possible.
Because there was no call for anything like that. None whatsoever.
She was buckling her seat belt by the time he got in and started the engine.
“Thanks for the coffee,” she said as they began to back out of his driveway.
“You’re welcome,” he said. “You know you’re going to have to act less like you want to claw my eyes out when I get near you if you think that we’re actually going to pull this off.”
She winced. She didn’t think she had been that obvious. Anyway, she didn’t want to claw his eyes out. That was the trouble. She had never really known what she wanted from Flynn.
Well, realistically, she knew she was attracted to him.
It was a problem. He made her feel all small and delicate, and even though she wasn’t very tall, she never felt delicate. But he was just so big and so muscular and so god damn manly.
She didn’t have to live in that space, though.