Chapter Three
Everything? No, she didn’t share everything. And her heart clenched, because again, that pang of need, to grab hold of something that felt good, to escape with him, was assailing her, and, dammit, she knew better than to fall for a sweet-talking cowboy in a country band!
Her phone buzzed in her skirt pocket.
She yanked it out, panic jolting her. God, if it was bad news…
“Somethin’ on fire?” McClintock said, arching a brow at her alarm.
Heart: “Whoa … U okay? Do I need 2 come kick his ass?”
Her hackles relaxed. She smiled wistfully. Heart had just read her message from earlier.
Charlie: “I think for now … he’s good.” She watched McClintock circumvent the hood in the bar’s porch lights. “We’re headed to my place. I’ll keep you posted. He might be fun.”
Heart: “Fun??? Get it, girl! Try 2 relax about Daisy and actually HAVE fun! He seems so into u! I think he’s in luv lol.”
Charlie snorted as he climbed behind the wheel, his farm-honed muscles torquing and the soft sound of his breathing steady and sure, the thick column of his neck contoured and kissable. He stretched his arm behind the bench seat and craned around to reverse when … he eyed her phone curiously.
Charlie: “Pretty sure he only cares if a girl has a pulse and puts out.”
Heart: “Lol. Those 1s are the most fun! So why are YOU with him?”
Good question. Why was she? A dropout who threw his entire self into chasing both tail and a dream that was never going to become reality? Every red flag she’d sworn to avoid.
Heart: “Just don’t 4get our pact: sisters before misters. If he’s a creep, text me.”
“You plannin’ your escape?” he teased.
But there was something uncertain in his question as once more his eyes dipped to her phone, his words softening like they had when he’d brought up his family’s farm.
Something genuine beneath his grin and cocky swagger. “You don’t, uh, gotta be out with me if you don’t want.”
He thought she was … planning an emergency text.
She glanced at McClintock again, hope hesitant on his brow.
Perhaps it was a sign from the universe.
Try to have fun and relax. He’d be fun for something unexpected.
It wasn’t as if she were signing her life away again—she’d learned that lesson.
It had been so long since a man had looked at her and thought she was pretty.
If he could do it for a night, so could she.
Somehow, as they drove, their fingers ended up woven with each other’s, tension brimming with unknowns, with something contemplative and unspoken, as they rolled through pastureland, to the old clapboard farmhouse she’d spent a lifetime trying to escape, all the while the ache in his voice over his admission about a family farm swirling in her head.
Something he’d wanted but hadn’t been deemed good enough for.
A legacy. Roots in the ground. Purpose. This talented guy did odd jobs tinkering with engines and working as farm labor for the farm he’d hoped to inherit?
Jason had never had such a normal ambition before.
Wind whipping her hair around her face; their lone set of headlights flashed through the East Texas hollers, until coming upon a single glowing porch light.
“We’re here,” she said, pointing to her driveway.
He rumbled onto the gravel.
She returned her phone to her pocket as he popped the stick out of gear and cranking the parking brake, killing the engine.
He hopped out while she set aside his guitar, and as she opened the passenger door, he was already there, taking her hand like a Southern gentleman to help her down.
Silence. Nighttime symphony of insects. Dark silhouettes of hills in the distance against the midnight sky beneath the full moon’s glow.
Her shaggy, Great Pyrenees mix leapt up from her porch overflowing with potted flowers, where he’d been flopped in the summer heat, and barked, trotting down the front walk to inspect the newcomer.
“Oh, don’t be alarmed. He’s huge, but he’d never…
” Charlie’s words trailed off as McClintock, anything but scared, held his hand out to her dog to sniff, scratching behind his shaggy ears and scuffing his neck.
“Meet Artex,” Charlie said. “And whoa … he’s usually a lot more guarded at first, but he seems to like you. ”
“What’s not to like?” McClintock teased with that swagger that had earned him some flashed tits at the show.
He squatted down, chuckling as she shook her head, and gave the dog scratches up and down his neck.
“Nah, he knows a dog person when he meets ’em. Hey, big fella.”
“He’s got the scent equivalent of a photographic memory. He’ll never forget you now.”
“I’m unforgettable.” He grinned, and yet, as she fished her key out of her pocket, thought she heard him murmur, “Kinda nice to know someone won’t.”
McClintock pushed to standing as she took his hand, linking her fingers in his, and led him around the side of the house to a tall, boarded fence. She unlocked the padlock on the gate.
“You sneaking me into a secret lab or something?” He waggled his brows, but was he … hesitating?
An easy laugh caught her off guard. “I am, actually.”
“I thought this was your house.”
“It is, was, well…”
She ushered him through the gate, but he held it open and instead, gestured for her to go first. Ah, the Texas gentleman charm. She indulged him, then shut the gate as Artex slipped through and trotted around the backyard, sniffing and searching for hazards as he’d been trained to do.
“What do you mean by that?”
She sighed as she relocked the gate. “I sold it to the university. Had a debt I had to pay, and the university needed land for my project, which has to be on university property. But I get to rent it now at a discount so long as I stay on as the property caretaker and, of course, they gave me this space for my experiment.”
“You sound thrilled by that.” He chuckled.
She shook her head and laughed, too, weaving her fingers with his offered hand as the moths fluttering around the porch light, leading him toward a darkened monstrosity as a filtration fan droned louder and louder.
“I tried to get away from this place.” She laughed wryly. “Just my luck I end up stuck with it forever, like some cosmic joke.”
They padded through the damp grass, through a chain-link gate. Up to her galvanized steel tunnel.
“Damn, Flower Girl. You got a Weeds operation growin’ back here you don’t want anyone to see?”
She laughed again. It was so … easy to laugh with him. Don’t be fooled.
“Nope. Worse. Formerly extinct angiosperms. And they’re just beginning to blossom.” Then she hedged, biting her lip, “You wanna see around?”
He looked to the door as if looking into another world, then back at the gate, as if he wanted to bolt.
Notched his chin at her. “A real-life science experiment? Extinct, like some Jurassic Park stuff?”
“You chickenin’ out and changing your mind?”
“No.”
She unlocked the door, heart racing to be sharing this world with a perfect stranger when she’d never brought anyone in here before except Heart and the occasional university inspector, and swung it open, the filtration fan rushing their ears.
She motioned him to follow as she flipped on the lights, pointing to the hooks along the metal frame. “Suit up.”
He stepped over the threshold. Into her hidden paradise, where Jason couldn’t harm her. The future she’d made for herself when the past had left so much egg on her face and bruises on her skin.
He picked up a sterile jumpsuit off the hook, holding it out to inspect it up and down.
“Man, this is E.T. style,” he teased, but as his eyes connected with hers, that cryptic look of contemplation burned. “You one of them geniuses?”
She shook her head, cheeks flaming, and bit her lip. “Just resourceful, I suppose.”
He was still eying the next door, as if unsure what lay beyond.
Glancing back again as if ready to leave, as if the night had gotten too weird. “Gotta say, I wasn’t expecting this when I took you out tonight.”
Was she freaking him out? She had become so awkward. Heat suffused her cheeks.
She looked away, fiddling with the zipper on her suit. “You can, uh, it’s okay if you wanna go instead. I’m kinda, you know…”
Lame, Charlie! You’re lame! Who gives a shit about this stuff except you!
Silence, as memories wisped like an umbra through her thoughts. She fiddled harder, when a callused finger touched her chin. Turned her face back to his.
“Kinda what?” he gruffed.
She swallowed and stared up into his sparkling blues. “Lame,” she breathed, then laughed it off. “You shoulda’ picked a different girl tonight. You’d’ve had more fun.”
He inspected her a moment longer, murmuring, “Naw, I think I picked right.”
Embarrassment exploded on her skin. Raced through her veins. Then he eased his legs into the baggy jumpsuit and zipped it up. He was staying?
“Hair net.” She pointed as he arched a brow.
He took off his Stetson and plucked a blue, bouffant cap from a box bracketed to the metal frame of the greenhouse and stretched the surgical-grade disposable bonnet over his head. “Do I look like the school lunch lady yet?”
She smiled as she, too, zipped up a suit over her body, twice as baggy on her as it was him, which thankfully made room for her skirt wedging up to her hips, and kicked aside her boots, slipping her feet into sterile rubber boots instead.
“I don’t have boots big enough for you. But you can use those booties.
Cross my heart, it’s nothing weird in there. ”
He leveled a knowing smirk at her and gestured at his getup.
She laughed again. She’d been laughing a lot with him. “Just a fragile ecosystem that can’t get contaminated nor can any pollen escape or else I’m gonna have boatloads of paperwork to complete, a decontam unit will have to swoop in … So much paperwork.”
He stretched the disposable shoe covers around his boots, maxing out their length and pulling on the seams.
Then reached for the gloves before she had a chance to tell him. “Yeah, yeah, gloves.”
“Okay, no touching,” she said as he slipped his arms around her waist and bent for a kiss.
He froze. Then lifted his hands up in surrender again—
She laughed. “I meant, the plants. You can touch … uh … me…”
He leaned into her ear. “Careful what you wish for, Flower Girl,” he whispered, then planted a kiss to her earlobe instead. “You might get it.”
Energy crackled. Her body, a livewire at his taunt as she opened the door into the greenhouse and ushered him in, because it had been so long since she’d felt this rush, that lust.
She turned on red lights that glowed dark and murky around them.
“Welcome to my happy place.”
He stepped into the hidden world she’d created.