Chapter Three
Tennessee did not appreciate disruptions to the strict way he ordered his life—not because, as had been suggested by his siblings on numerous occasions, he was a control freak. But because an ordered life worked like clockwork, and he preferred it that way.
His childhood had been a tightrope of anxiety and spontaneous combustion, to his mind, and he saw no reason to live that way now that he was an adult and could arrange things the way he liked.
The diner opened early every weekday and closed in the afternoon.
He only kept it open all day and into the evening on the weekends.
And his entire life revolved around the diner. He liked it that way.
The diner was a known entity. The same regulars showed up every morning.
He cooked the same things from the same menu that he had no intention of changing.
He kept the same schedule that they could all set their watches to, and he never varied it, unless it was summer—when they all were so busy soaking in all of that daylight that all bets were off.
His life was a smooth, well-oiled machine. Some called it a rut, but he didn’t care what his brother and sister thought. He was the one who remembered their childhood the clearest and he called it a relief.
Tennessee did not sleep much at all that night, which was definitely neither smooth nor well-oiled. And he blamed Matilda Stark as every wide-awake minute of the night ticked past.
It wasn’t as if the puppies weren’t adorable. Of course they were. That was their job.
He considered rounding them up and locking them away in a bathroom to see if he could get an hour or two of uninterrupted rest that way, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
They weren’t much more than babies and he couldn’t bring himself to let them feel scared.
He knew he wouldn’t be able to ignore it if they cried.
So instead, he stretched out with the three of them beside the fire, and soon enough, all three of the warm, snuggly little puppies were sound asleep. On him.
But Tennessee stayed awake, as amped as if he’d downed a pot of his own jet-fuel-like coffee, glaring at the ceiling.
He might not have had a puppy in a long while, not since he was more of a puppy himself, but it stood to reason that if he didn’t take them out pretty much every hour on the hour, they would relieve themselves inside the house.
One of them rolled off him, yawned adorably, and then popped a squat right there beside him.
Tennessee hadn’t actually known he could move that fast, jackknifing up to his feet and scooping the little girl dog up off the floor.
And then there was no pretending there was going to be any sleep, because there he was, shepherding three furry little babies into the cold at hourly intervals, cursing Matilda Stark’s name all the while.
He was still cursing her name later that morning when she came breezing into the diner as if she hadn’t consigned him to a miserable night. Against his will.
The row of locals who warmed the stools in front of his counter from opening to about 9:30 AM every morning went quiet—a rarity—and then started up again.
They had all been pretty chatty since they’d seen the makeshift pen that Tennessee had made for the puppies back by the cash register, since he couldn’t leave them alone in his house.
It was an oversized cardboard box with towels on the bottom, but the puppies kept jumping up on their hind legs and sticking their cute little noses over the side.
Even Shane Johnson, the cantankerous owner and chief bartender of the Copper Mine, went a little soft every time they did it.
“We already have homes for these puppies, by the way,” Tennessee told Matilda curtly as she came up to the counter and stood there, one hip jutted out against the Formica in a manner that he… should not have noticed at all. “Just waiting on that vet check you mentioned.”
“That’s amazing news,” Matilda said happily, as if she couldn’t hear the temper that he knew was laced through his voice. When he could hear it his own damn self just fine.
He had half a mind to tell her what the old men, his regulars, had said when he told them exactly where the puppies came from and why they were in his possession.
A pretty girl doesn’t show up at a man’s house in the middle of the night and leave him something unless she plans to swing back around again to pick it up, old Carter Redmond said.
Because he was filled with advice on his town days, when he was dropped off around 5:45 AM and stayed until his grumpy horse rancher grandson, Colton Dean, swung by again to pick him up and take him back to Lost River Ranch, out there in the far hills.
I think Matilda Stark has her eye on you, son.
All of his cronies had agreed, with a lot of gruff nods.
Tennessee almost told her that, because he thought she’d react badly to it, and that might have been entertaining.
He wanted to point out that the fact these grizzled old men whose lives revolved around getting the exact same seat at his counter every morning thought she was hitting on him proved how ridiculous her behavior had been, but he couldn’t.
Because he kept getting stuck on the fact that she was so pretty.
Something Carter had treated like an objective, obvious fact.
This morning, probably because he hadn’t slept all night, that she was pretty was all he could see when he looked at her when normally, it was what she was wearing and how she was wearing it that drew the eye.
Today she was in a different pair of scrubs.
This morning they were a deep magenta color and she had that wild strawberry-blonde hair of hers in plump golden-red braids that she’d pinned to her head so she looked like she really belonged on a Viking ship.
Her gray eyes looked silver blue when she laughed, particularly if she did it in firelight, and he hated that he knew that.
He hated that his body appeared to remember it in real time, like it was happening now.
A truth Tennessee didn’t like to think about too much was that he’d always been perfectly aware that Matilda Stark was pretty.
It was just that he’d managed to avoid the grand mess of her for years.
During any odd conversations that he couldn’t avoid, he’d always focused on the disarray.
The wildly colored, ill-fitting clothes that made her look like she’d rolled out of someone’s attic, dressed in their rags.
The hair that was either in those braids or half out of them, sometimes for days.
All the animals, all the time. Her distinct oddness, in that she never seemed to care what she looked like or what folks said about her.
She only smiled at them and carried on doing as she liked.
Last night, when he’d actually looked at her—her whole body instead of just her truck from across the road or that insistent gray gaze of hers—he hadn’t much cared for his response.
That he had one at all, and that it was far more intense than it should have been.
Far more intense than he wanted to admit, especially because he did not do intensity of any kind. Intensity was just chaos, only more pointed. No, thank you.
But here he was, in the sacred space that was the kitchen of his diner, and she had barreled in with all her wildness again.
Making him feel like a mess when she looked like one. If not quite as messy this morning—it was more the sense of a gathering hurricane she carried with her, making all the hairs on his arm prickle like they wanted to stand on end.
Tennessee told himself it was just because he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a woman in his house he wasn’t related to in some fashion. That was all. He might have been the sort of man who prided himself on his discernment, but his body had a mind of its own.
Apparently.
There was no other reason that he should have found himself lying awake, little snoring animals crashed out all over him, remembering the shape of Matilda Stark.
Now he found himself angrily cooking up hot breakfasts for a pair of truckers in one of the booths while Matilda took down contact details for each of the patrons who’d claimed they wanted a puppy.
Shane Johnson and Carter Redmond among them.
He knew that she was making a list not because she didn’t know where they lived—as well as their names and probably their entire life histories—but because she was making it official.
So they wouldn’t back out and even if they did, she might just show up at their house with a hard-to-refuse cute puppy in tow.
Everyone knew Matilda’s guerrilla adoption tactics.
But Tennessee didn’t understand why he was paying attention to the things she was doing on a level like that, so he blamed that on sleep deprivation too. What else could it be?
“You little sweethearts are in luck,” Matilda was saying, and Tennessee didn’t realize she was talking in that soft, warm voice to the puppies until he turned to look at her in what he assured himself was horror—and found her circling back around the counter to look down at the cute little balls of fluff.
But she was. She wasn’t looking at him at all. It was like she’d forgotten that he existed, and he could admit that he… didn’t like it.
Just like he didn’t like it when she simply picked up a cardboard box and propped it on that hip of hers that he’d been better off not noticing. She grinned at him like they were in on this together, which they absolutely were not, which he’d been intending to make clear to her.
He opened his mouth to do that, but she was singsonging a farewell as she sailed back out the door of the diner, making the bell ring as she went.
And no matter how he tried to ask himself why he was so undone by a girl he’d known for her entire life, he couldn’t really come up with an answer. He, who always had all the answers, couldn’t come up with a thing.