Chapter 2 – Tag #3
We couldn’t beg Sunshine to come home. We couldn’t use family guilt to get her to come home. She certainly wasn’t going to do it for a town that had shunned her for the first fifteen years of her life.
No, the only way she was going to do this, was if she thought the town believed she couldn’t.
Smart money said she would succeed, if only to prove them wrong.
“I’ll think about it,” she offered. “Maybe. Potentially. Possibly. I mean, there are things I have to consider.”
“Of course,” I said, and did a little fist pump under the table.
“This all seems so outrageous. I wouldn’t have thought Mr. McGraw even knew my name.”
“He knew the names of all the Calloways,” I said, between bites of steak. “Especially the ones who look like your mother.”
“My mother is a red-headed knockout,” She shook her head, rejecting that statement. “I do not look like my mother.”
Was she saying she wasn’t beautiful? Or wasn’t a redhead?
My gut said both. She wasn’t grasping for a compliment. That wasn’t false modesty, it was the real thing. She didn’t think she looked like her ma because the small world she’d grown up in had long ago convinced her she didn’t. Because she didn’t have red hair.
So, it didn’t matter that the woman sitting across from me – who was a smokeshow if I’d ever seen one – had remade herself and her image in the big city. I knew the truth.
The ugly duckling was still inside of that beautiful swan.
“I wish I could say this was fun,” she said, as I opened the door to the restaurant and the sounds of the city came flooding back in. My time was up. I held the door and she brushed by me and pulled her hair from her overcoat. I caught a hint of her scent.
Expensive. Smoky and sweet. She smelled like satin sheets and good bourbon.
A woman on the street was shouting at a man for letting his dog shit on the sidewalk, and a teenager with earbuds walked by smoking a joint. He stepped in the shit.
“I wasn’t fun?” I asked.
She blinked. “I just meant…this wasn’t…you were here with an agenda.”
“Did I sway you?”
“Over dinner? Seems ambitious,” she smiled. The neon lights from the bar next door flickered red and blue over her perfect skin. She looked so city it almost hurt. “Look, why can’t I just reach out to Carter? He’s the oldest McGraw, I assume he’s now in charge of the Swinging D?”
“He is.”
“Fine. Then we can schedule a Zoom meeting and he can walk me through the finances. I’ll even waive my consulting fee.”
“Not good enough, Sun. The mission was to bring you home.”
“Mission,” she said, and rolled her eyes, like I was pouring it on thick.
Oh honey, you don’t know the half of it.
She stepped to the edge of the sidewalk and raised her finger in the air.
“Well, shit,” I said, putting my hat back on my head. “Does that really work? I’ve seen it in movies like a thousand times, but I never thought…”
My voice trailed off as a beat up yellow cab pulled over directly in front of her.
“Damn. They just see you there with your finger in the air and stop on a dime?”
“I’m uptown,” she said, like I should know what that meant. “But you should be able to walk to your hotel.”
“Yup,” I said, and opened the back door of the cab. She got in and I followed, pushing her across the seat with my hip as I got in with her.
“What are you doing? I’m going in the opposite direction.”
“I’m taking you home, Sunshine. I don’t care where that is.”
She huffed. “You know, I’ve been living in this city on my own for nearly fifteen years.”
“Yeah, but I’m here now and I’m taking you home.”
She rattled off her address to the driver, and I told myself, having done the cab thing from the airport, to not look out the window. I was a control freak by nature, so not driving tested my limits.
This whole city tested my limits .
After what felt like hours, to go no more than fifteen blocks, the driver turned down an unusually quiet street without traffic. The trees were big on this street and the big buildings all had doormen out front.
“You can take this cab back to your hotel,” she told me, as the driver pulled up to an open space along the sidewalk.
While she wasn’t looking, I slid a credit card out of my pocket. I’d barely managed to snag the dinner bill in time, so I knew I had to have the card at the ready. I tapped my card to the reader pad and she shot me an exasperated look.
I knew she probably had way more money than I did, but when I went out with a woman, I paid. For everything. Including the fucking shaved truffles!
“Tag! What are you doing?” she exclaimed, when I followed her out of the cab and the driver pulled away. “You’re going to lose the cab.”
“Walking you to your door, Sunshine. I’ll get another one. You showed me how easy it is.”
She crossed her arms over her chest. “You’re such an anachronism.”
“Don’t know what that means. Gentleman?”
She shook her head and walked up the sidewalk, and her doorman opened the big glass door to her apartment building.
“That’s Frank, my doorman,” she tossed out over her shoulder. “He makes sure I get inside safely and no unsavory characters follow me inside. That’s you, by the way.”
“This man causing you trouble, Ms. Calloway?” Frank asked her.
Frank was maybe a hundred years old, but he watched me like Sunshine was his girl in a bar back home and I was about to ask her to dance.
“I’m not causing her trouble,” I told the old man .
“I asked the lady,” Frank said.
Sunshine made me twist in the wind as she took her sweet time answering.
“He’s fine, Frank,” she said.
Frank let me go through the door, eyeballing me the whole way.
“Thank you for looking after the folks in this building,” I said to him. and he begrudgingly nodded.
The building door closed behind us and her heels snapped against the tile of the floor as she walked over to the wall of elevators. She pushed the button on the panel to go up.
“Now, let’s talk about tomorrow,” I said.
“There is no tomorrow, Tag. You should just go home to Wyoming. I promise I’ll reach out to Carter.”
I shook my head. “How about you show me some more of this city?”
“I don’t have time to play host. Tomorrow is Saturday. I have a spa appointment in the morning, and then I’m heading back into the office for the rest of the day.”
“Fine, I’ll join you for your appointment.”
Her jaw dropped. “You can’t just invite yourself to my spa appointment.”
“Think I just did,” I pointed out. “Text me the time and address.”
“This isn’t going to work,” she insisted. “You’re never going to convince me to go back to Last Hope Gulch.”
“Understood. However, I find that my pores are clogged. A good spa treatment might be just the thing I need.”
Her smirk made me smile. “You’re impossible.”
“Well, I know what that means.” I gave her a two fingered salute. “Text me a time and place, and no messing with me, Sunshine. Because I will find you.”
The elevator binged and the doors opened. She stepped inside and faced me. I was struck all over again by the beautiful woman she’d turned into. The long legs. The thin waist. High tits. That hair and those dark eyes. She made me lose my train of thought.
“My name is Kaitlyn!” she said with a saucy grin, just as the doors closed.
She got the last word.