Chapter Ten
Kitty didn’t say anything. She couldn’t.
She stared at him, fully aware that her jaw was hanging open, but she was saved from actually having to respond to such lunacy by her sisters appearing, commandeering the pizza she’d put out, and bringing the clamor of the restaurant all around them back to her.
And she was far more grateful for that than she probably should have been.
But she could also tell that Finn wasn’t kidding and didn’t intend to drop it. He looked at her with that level blue gaze like a fire burning deep into her, into the places she refused to admit were there, and she felt certain that he intended to pick up this discussion as soon as she got off work.
So she went back into the kitchen and she did her best to express her feelings through her cooking.
When Flannery came in and did a double take at whatever expression was on her face—something feral, she was certain—she made herself give her sister a soft smile.
“I’m just thinking about whether or not we need to think about some more changes,” she said before Flannery could accuse her of…
anything. “You can tell that the Starks finally opened up the lodge, can’t you?
Suddenly we have a different class of person in here every night, don’t we?
Asking the kinds of things the locals never do. ”
Like where was the pepperoni sourced from and were there gluten-free and keto options and why weren’t there dairy alternatives and what about putting nutritional information on the menus to allow more informed consumer choices…
to which Kitty usually responded with a hearty welcome to Crawford County, Montana.
The this isn’t Los Angeles was implied.
Flannery laughed. She looked off as if she was looking into the distance, though Kitty knew she was looking in the approximate direction of where the old Cowboy Point Lodge sat up on the hill on the far end of the valley.
The Starks had been renting out the many cabins on that hill to individuals and businesses for a while, but the lodge actually—finally—opening had only happened at the start of summer.
Something Kitty might have paid more attention to had she not decided to shake up her own life so intensely at the same time.
Still, it had been impossible not to notice the difference in town, and therefore in the restaurant, too.
A fancy lodge in the middle of nowhere was always going to aim for a different sort of clientele, and Cowboy Point had been chasing its own glow up for quite a few years now—the new Crowded Table restaurant being a shining example of that.
Then again, Kitty and her sisters had been an integral part of it too.
“That’s the trouble, isn’t it?” Flannery said, and she would know, since the Farm & Craft Market had been little more than a few farmers with some cardboard boxes outside the General Store before she’d made it a much bigger part of summers here.
“Everyone who lives here wants to improve the town because they love it. Then when they do, all these other people flock to it, and sooner or later it turns into something you don’t recognize anymore.
” She sighed, but she was smiling. “Until winter, anyway. The winter will always be ours.”
Kitty made herself laugh at that, because she should have wanted to laugh at that. “Winters separate the residents from the regretful,” she agreed.
She knew she couldn’t let Flannery know that she didn’t particularly feel like laughing about anything tonight. She couldn’t let her sister see that inside, she could feel something that she was fairly sure was panic.
Sheer, unadulterated panic, because Finn was not supposed to want to stay.
That was not the plan. That was not what she’d outlined to him or what either of them had signed up for.
And yet she wasn’t at all surprised to find him waiting for her when she stormed out of the restaurant much later that night. She was the last to leave, as usual, and stopped short when she saw him.
Finn was standing out in front of the restaurant, one booted foot on the wall of the building, as if he’d been there for hours and could stay there forever, if necessary.
She did not like the way her heart thudded, hard, in her chest. She did not like how nervous this man made her.
“I’m tired,” Kitty blurted out. “I want to go to bed.” She rethought that immediately. “To sleep.”
“Don’t start this off by lying to me, Kitty,” Finn said, and even though his gaze was that same intense blue as before, he sounded amused.
“You might be tired and you might want to go to bed, but not because you want to sleep. Don’t forget you’ve been coming home to me every night this summer.
Would you call what happens every night restful? ”
She felt herself flush at that and couldn’t believe that this man had that effect on her. Still. Worse, it didn’t seem to be lessening the more time she spent with him. If anything, it was going in the opposite direction.
Her body, of course, knew exactly what they did every night and was already soft and ready for him.
“I’m not going to have this discussion on a street,” she said, very primly, as if what really mattered right here, in this moment, when there was no one around anyway was decorum.
“Of course not,” he replied, and as usual, she hated how calm he was. Though tonight, she was pretty sure that she could see a different sort of tension in him. It was there in the way he held his shoulders and that same intensity in his gaze. “I’m here to walk you home.”
It would be churlish if she broke into a run and left him behind here, and she did not want to make it clear to him that he was getting under her skin. That what he’d said earlier had thrown her. Not that she should have worried about that. They’d made a deal and he was talking about breaking it.
That was simple. That had nothing to do with any feelings she might have had. That was just a fact.
And the truth was, Kitty had already decided that she didn’t like feeling like this.
She didn’t like feeling so much. She didn’t like the way her whole heart jumped in her chest when she saw him, every single time she saw him.
She didn’t like that he made her feel silly, and that she flushed all the time, and that sometimes, instead of thinking about what new thing she could cook or new combinations of ingredients she could put together to surprise people, she found herself daydreaming about Finn instead.
About his hands, often. And always that mouth of his.
Not to mention those wildly blue eyes that made her shiver, just thinking about them.
They walked together in the warm summer night. The sun was going down a little earlier now, moving them closer to winter every night. They rounded the restaurant, then headed slowly up the dirt drive to the house.
Kitty kept waiting for him to say something. To mount some kind of argument to support what he’d already told her, but he didn’t. He just did what he always did. He met her at the end of the night and took her home.
And as she thought that, as she registered what he was doing, she felt her heart jolt inside her chest and a kind of terrifying warmth take her over. Not a flush. This was different.
This felt bone deep.
Worse than that, it felt inevitable, like her body had already come to a fateful decision without discussing it with the rest of her.
Kitty did not like this at all.
Finn walked into the house the way he always did, and it occurred to her to wonder how he’d managed to make it feel as if he’d always lived here. As if he was as much a part of this house and her family as any of them.
How had she missed that while it was happening? Why hadn’t she noticed how dangerous it was?
Though even if she had, she knew she wouldn’t have done anything about it. She would have rationalized it away because it sold the pretend marriage. It gave their sudden marriage legitimacy.
It was a nightmare.
They walked upstairs the way they always did. When they got up there, though they had lately taken to falling into bed together immediately as if they’d been apart for months, she muttered something about a kitchen mishap and threw herself into the shower.
She half expected him to come in after her, because he obviously could tell she was trying to avoid him, but he didn’t.
So she showered. And she stayed in there far too long, because her fingers were pickled all over again when she finally got out. She took an excessive amount of time getting into the pajama set he always took off her again in moments.
Then she finally had to force herself to leave the bathroom, only to find him the way she’d found him that first night, so long ago now. Lying on the bed, reading, looking completely relaxed while she was… fretting.
Kitty couldn’t cope.
“I need to talk to my sisters about something,” she said in a rush, and then bolted from the room before he could call her on it.
She padded downstairs and found her sisters on the cozy couch in the den, eating popcorn and watching television together. When she plopped herself down between them they shifted automatically, making room as if it was second nature. Because it was.
Because whatever else happened, they always had this. They always had and they always would.
Kitty didn’t understand why, tonight, it made her feel like crying.
She fought it, staring at the screen ferociously.
She barely saw whatever it was that her sisters were watching—something involving hockey players.
She was sure she’d seen it before, but it didn’t matter because she couldn’t see it now.
There were too many tears in her eyes when she never cried.
Never. She tried to blink them back but that made it worse.
They started to roll from her eyes, down her cheeks, and then soon enough she was just sitting there… weeping.