Chapter 20
Sunday
I quickly pad across the hallway, my baby pink towel wrapped tight around my chest, not wanting to spill shower droplets on the upper story carpet before I manage to curl back up on the bed.
It’s just after midday on Friday so Jason is still out at work, but I close the guest room door behind me anyway, just in case he comes back early while I’m nude.
I drop the towel beside me on the quilt and get changed into my favourite baby blue thermals, glancing at my reflection in the mirror and feeling relieved that my skin is finally back to normal. Golden and flushed due to the winter chill, rather than shockingly pink because I caught my nephew’s temperature.
I’m still a little sleepy and probably won’t be fully recovered until tomorrow, but I’m feeling a million times better than I did when Jason first found me at the start of the week.
And seeing as Haven also caught a temperature, we’ve spent the week sending each other cute little selfies, as well as hourly prompts to rehydrate.
I left my hair dryer back at Casey’s so I towel-dry my hair and then turn on the room’s mini heater, hoping that the boost of warmth will help my curls fluff up into their usual pouf.
I jog back to the bathroom so that I can hang up my towel and then I’m back on the guest room bed, waiting in front of my laptop for Casey’s scheduled call.
I’ve been talking to mom every day, and she’s sent me the most gorgeous winter photos from Montana, but Casey is a lot harder to get a hold of while he’s deployed.
He emails me as much as he can but it’s not the same as getting to see his surly face.
And the second that the videocall connects I’m instantly the happiest girl in the State.
“Hey, soldier,” I say softly, laughing as he reclines in his chair, his hands clasped at the back of his neck in an end-of-the-day kind of stretch.
He sighs and drops his arms, his body shifting in a way that tells me he’s probably kicking out his long legs.
“Hey, Sunday,” he starts, but then his rumble halts as he glances at his screen.
His brow furrows slightly and his eyes flash to meet mine.
He inhales a steady breath. “Whose bed is that?”
It takes all of my little-sister restraint not to taunt his overprotective ass off. “It’s not like that,” I tell him, laughing at his murderous expression. “The power in your place went down last weekend–”
“Last weekend?” he growls.
“And then, even though Jason got it fixed–”
He cracks his knuckles. “Coleson?”
I roll my eyes in amusement as I say, “One and the same. The power went out at the cabin and Jason got it fixed, but then I caught a winter temperature from your sweet little angel. So Jason said that I could crash at his place until it was out of my system, so that I wouldn’t be on my own if it got exacerbated for some reason.”
Casey ignores all of that. “Tell me you’re staying in a guest room.”
I throw my head back against Jason’s soft pillows, my chest shaking with laughter.
“Casey, you’re so annoying. Of course I’m staying in his freaking guest room! Do you really think that any guy would want to shack up with a woman while she’s got a fever?”
Casey stares at me blankly. “Sunday, he’s a guy.”
Apparently that’s the extent of his argument.
I bypass the fact that it was also my time of the month because it’s not a necessary detail to share with my brother. Instead, we talk about how Haven and Tuck are doing.
“We had a call two days ago,” Casey says softly, and I already know everything because Haven and I text all the time. But I snuggle down and listen, because I’m always grateful to hear Casey’s voice. “Tuck was doing real good. And Haven was almost a hundred-percent, too.”
“You missing them?” I ask gently.
His chest heaves. “All the time.”
Then come home , I want to tell him, but we’ve had this conversation before. I know my brother will only retire when he’s good and ready. When our step-father passed, Casey felt even stronger about continuing his legacy, and, now that I think about it, I guess I did, too.
Only, unlike my moving to Nashville, Casey’s duty is unbearably risky.
“How about you? You recovering?” he asks.
I nod, cuddling a pillow against my chest. “Yeah, I’m almost fully recovered.”
“And Jace… he’s looking after you?”
I have to smile at that. Now that Casey knows that Jason and I didn’t hook up while I was staying here, he’s been promoted back to ‘Jace’, rather than ‘Coleson’.
“Yeah,” I admit, my voice rasping a little. “He’s been way too good to me,” I add, wincing at the memory of last night.
I mean, it was freaking Valentine’s Day, and Jason still came back to take care of me – cooking me dinner and making me drinks when he probably wished he was on a date.
I have to admit, Jason did come home a lot later last night, making me think that maybe he had actually been on a date. Plus, when he came home, he went up to his room for a hot minute, and his body language was a little tense when he came to see me before going to bed.
I don’t know if it’s because he was bummed about us missing the Valentine’s screening, or if he had a steamy date in town that he had to cut short, but either way I could tell that Jason was on edge – and honestly I’ve felt a little guilty about that all morning.
And I can’t help but blurt it all out as Casey watches me with his steady gaze.
“I think he might have had a date last night,” I say hoarsely, feeling a pang of envy. I mean, Jason is a totally gorgeous single guy in his thirties – of course he had a date on Valentine’s Day!
Casey’s frown deepens. “Jace?” he asks sceptically.
I peek up at him warily. “Why’re you saying it like that?”
Casey clasps his fist in his hand, watching it as he carefully chooses his words. “A date on Valentine’s Day is a pretty intense thing to do,” he says cautiously.
I drop my head to the pillow and groan. “Oh God, that’s exactly what I thought, too,” I whimper.
“Sunday, what I mean is… Jace wouldn’t do that. Whenever we were in town at the same time from our deployment breaks… he wasn’t settling down. He had no intentions of starting anything, not when he knew he’d be back on base a month later.”
“Casey, Jason isn’t in the Army anymore,” I remind him.
“I know that, Sunday. But I just don’t think it’s something that he’d do.”
“And why exactly is that?”
“Because he’d only do that with you.”
I blink at him for a couple of moments, the only sound in the room coming from my little heater. The world outside the window is sparkling white and snow-silent.
“No way,” I say finally. “And you were just getting all growly about the idea of him being with me, anyway!”
“If y’all were just hooking up,” Casey rumbles. “But you’re talking about dating, Sunday. And that’s something that Jason would only wanna do with you.”
“Why on earth would he want to do that with me?”
“Because he never got over you.”
“Casey,” I rasp, because even though Jason and I have fallen into an easy friendship, I’m pretty sure the never got over you part is a one-sided thing.
As in, my side.
Because I never got over him.
Seeing as it’s nighttime where Casey is, we talk for ten more minutes and then say goodnight.
I spend the rest of the afternoon catching up on a weeks’ worth of missed emails from Riley’s management, happily surprised to see that his manager contacted the Observer and fed them an alternative story – something about his new album’s ‘alternative’ writing process, so that they’ll pull the articles that they’ve been spinning about me. She even sent me the new articles that they’ve been posting, and I sigh with relief when I finally read them.
It’s so freaking good to see that I’m no longer in the headlines that I immediately email her back, sending her all of my gratitude and appreciation. Then I go online and find a Nashville florists, ordering the biggest bunch that I can find to get mailed to her office on Monday.
The relief of knowing that there will be no more ridiculous articles written about me is almost distraction enough to make me forget what’s been going on – about what Casey said this morning, and how tense Jason was last night, and the realisation that if I’m no longer a wanted woman in Nashville, because the bar-goers realise that I’m not making out with their favourite country singer, then I’m technically free to look into the huge offer that I was propositioned over a month ago.
I have until late March to let them know if I’m interested in the role of Manager, but the only reason I ever went to Nashville was to run the specific bar that Cash was in love with.
I continued his legacy and now I have a chance to do something new.
So I’m not sure if going back is something that I want to do.
I stare at the offer for a minute and then close my laptop, well and truly done with all of my Nashville work for the day.
I mean, I’m supposed to be on vacation, after all – it’s time that I start acting like it.
I’m just walking over to the refrigerator when the sound of a truck pulls up through the clearing. And half a minute later Jason is opening the front door, his dimples flashing the second that he sees me, and then he’s dropping his gear and lumbering over.
He strips off his jacket as he joins me in the kitchen, and it genuinely makes me laugh when he has to hunch way down to hug me.
“You laughing at me?” he mumbles, which only spurs me on to laugh even harder.
He smiles against my cheek and then pulls back up so that he can look down at me.
“You look good,” he says gruffly, and I try not to blush, because I know that he only means you don’t look sick anymore .
Then he surprises me by asking, “Got any plans tonight?”
My lips part, wanting to tell him that I wish I had plans tonight, but I’m way too shy to tell him how I feel about him.
Instead, I say softly, “I guess I should be heading back to Casey’s cabin.”
He watches me for a moment. Then he says, “I’ll take that as a no.”
I almost want to argue with that, but I’m too intrigued to see where he’s going.
“I was thinking we could hang out,” he finishes, his deep voice reverberating against the wooden cabinets. Then he folds his forearms over his chest and adds, “If you want.”
I laugh in confusion. “Isn’t that what we’ve been doing every night?”
He rakes his hand through his hair and says, “It’s not the same when you’re ill.”
I frown slightly and remind him, “I probably am still a little bit sick, you know.”
“Yeah,” he says. “I know. I didn’t mean that we’d do anything, like…” His neck flushes slightly as he trails off his sentence. “I just… there’s something that I thought we could do. If you want to hang out before heading back to Casey’s, I mean.”
I watch him in silence before slowly nodding up at him, and his broad chest swells with relief as he tries to hide his grin.
“Okay, perfect,” he says, his eyes raking slowly down my outfit. When his eyes flash back to mine, he says, “Back in the thermals again, huh?”
I laugh at that. Over the past week I’ve been switching between too-cold-to-leave-my-bed and too-hot-to-wear-my-pants, so it’s probably a relief for him to finally see me in his kitchen wearing something other than my pyjama booty shorts.
“Yeah, I think I’m good,” I admit.
“Good,” he rumbles, smiling. “I’m gonna be in the yard for maybe half an hour, and then I’ll make us dinner. We’ll eat in here, and then I’ll show you the… you know…”
He trails off with a nervous chuckle and I can’t help but giggle, too.
“What?” I ask immediately, excited and intrigued. I also cannot get over the fact that he refers to the literal forest as his yard.
“Just give me half an hour,” he says, that gruff voice trying to be gentle. And the idea of that, of him trying to be sweet just for me, makes warmth flood through my chest as I nod up at his handsome face.
“Okay,” I rasp, biting back my smile. “I’ll meet you down here in half an hour.”