5. Jessica
Jessica
Dottie's was already starting to feel like mine.
Same booth by the window. Same coffee — black, no sugar — waiting before I sat down because Dottie had clocked my order yesterday and apparently that was all it took to become a regular in this town.
I had the events calendar spread across the table like a battle plan when the door opened and Hunter walked in.
He moved through the diner the way he moved through everything — unhurried, steady.
Jeans that sat low on his hips. Boots that had seen actual work.
A flannel shirt rolled to the elbows and forearms that — Jesus Christ. I hadn't noticed his forearms when we were seventeen, but I was noticing them now.
The corded muscle, the tan line where the sleeve sat, the way the tendons moved when he lifted his hand to push his hair off his forehead.
His jet black hair was damp at the edges, which meant he'd showered recently, which was information my brain supplied without my consent.
He was broad in a way he hadn't been as a kid.
Filled out. The kind of build that came from actual work — not a gym, not a program, just years of lifting and hauling and fixing things until his body became the tool.
His jaw was sharper. His eyes were the same — calm, quiet, seeing everything and commenting on nothing — but the face they sat in had become something that was fundamentally, objectively, unfairly attractive.
I needed him to stop walking toward me immediately because my brain was short-circuiting, and my mouth, I was pretty sure, was hanging open.
I had managed billion-dollar events. I had negotiated with men in three-thousand-dollar suits without blinking.
I had once talked a fire marshal out of shutting down a rooftop gala mid-service using nothing but eye contact and the sheer force of my personality.
And Hunter Blackwood in a flannel shirt was dismantling me in a diner before nine in the morning, and he wasn't even trying.
He wasn't even aware. That was the worst part.
He had no idea he looked like that. He walked through the world like a man who thought he was average, and the complete absence of vanity was somehow making him ten times hotter.
Get it together, Jessica. He's your best friend. Stop staring at his forearms. Stop it. Stop it right now.
I stared at his forearms.
Fuck. He's gorgeous. When the hell did that happen?
He reached the booth. Looked down at me. And the corner of his mouth pulled — just the corner, just a fraction, the tiniest smirk I had ever seen on a human face. He leaned down and put one finger under my chin and pushed my jaw closed.
"Morning, Jess."
The smirk. The finger. The low voice. The absolute audacity of this man to walk into a diner looking like that and then have the nerve to be amused about it.
"Smug bastard." I swatted his hand away.
My face was on fire. My neck was on fire.
I was fairly sure my ears were glowing. I waved my hand up and down the length of him — the boots, the jeans, the flannel, the shoulders, the jaw, all of it.
"When did you get all... this? When did this happen?
I left a skinny kid who fixed sprinklers, and I came back to — " I waved my hand again because words had abandoned me and gestures were all I had left. "This."
He shook his head. Slid into the booth across from me. Nodded at the waitress. "Coffee, black."
He wasn't going to acknowledge it. He was going to sit there and drink his coffee and pretend I hadn't just short-circuited in front of him, and the smirk was still there — faint, barely visible, tucked into the corner of his mouth like a secret he was keeping from the rest of his face.
"Morning to you too, sunshine," I said, my voice coming out steadier than my pulse deserved credit for. "You're welcome for the free breakfast, by the way. Most people start with thank you."
"Thank you," he said. Deadpan. Like the words cost him something.
"That was painful. I could see it hurt. We'll work on it." I’m sure I was grinning like a loon. But I was just so happy to be sitting across from him again after all this time. And not with a million Blackwoods surrounding us.
The coffee arrived. He wrapped both hands around it and drank, and just like that, we were back.
Like the decade hadn't happened. I talked, he listened.
He talked, I listened. The rhythm we'd always had — requiring no tuning, no warming up, just two people who'd always fit together like a key in a lock.
"So," I said, leaning back and tucking one leg underneath me. "Let me tell you about my first meeting with the county events committee."
He looked at me. I had his full attention — both eyes, the slight lean, the quality of listening that made you feel like the only person on the planet with a mouth.
"So I walk in, and there are eight of them around a conference table.
And look — I knew this wasn't going to be like negotiating a boardroom in Manhattan where everybody speaks in buzzwords and you can bullshit your way through half the deck before anyone notices.
These people have been running this town's events for decades, and they know their shit, and I respect that.
" I took a sip of coffee. "But I am four slides in when one of them looks at me over his bifocals and says, and I quote: 'That's not how we do things here, sweetheart. '"
Hunter's eyebrow moved. Barely. "Jerry Henderson."
"I'm not confirming or denying." I put on my thickest drawl, tipped an imaginary hat, and dropped my voice two octaves.
"'Now listen here, little lady. We been doin' the Founders Day Festival since before you were a twinkle in Ed Williams's eye, and we don't need some city girl comin' in here with her fancy slides. '"
Hunter's mouth twitched.
"And the sweetheart thing — I forgot how things work down here.
I've been gone too long. In New York, the last man who called me sweetheart in a meeting got his ass handed to him so fast he needed a chiropractor.
I actually saw the light leave his eyes, Hunt.
But this isn't that. This is Copper Creek.
These people have known me since I was stealing pecans off Tom Morrison's tree, and they're gonna call me sweetheart and darlin' until I'm eighty, and that's just how it fucking is.
" I sighed. "So I smiled. Thanked him for his input.
Moved to the next slide. And I silently promised myself I'd earn that room by month two. "
"Jerry Henderson has been saying 'That's not how we do things here' since 1987."
"Well, Jerry Henderson is about to find out that the future has a spreadsheet and a southern accent that still knows how to say, Yes, sir, while meaning fuck you very much."
He chuckled. Well…almost. The sound didn't quite make it out, but I could see it moving behind his face — gathering, building, not ready to break.
I stole a piece of his bacon. He watched me do it. He didn't say a word, which I filed away as significant because I remembered from years of sharing food with this man that Hunter Blackwood didn't give up bacon without an internal negotiation that bordered on grief.
The breakfast stretched. Neither of us noticed.
I leaned forward on my elbows and propped my chin on my fists. "Right. Ten years. You owe me a decade of Blackwood updates. Go."
He looked at me like I'd asked him to give a speech at a conference. Then he took a breath, and he did it — in his way, which meant short sentences and long pauses and the important things dropped in like afterthoughts.
"Wyatt and Ivy are solid. It took them a minute when she came back home, but he got his shit together, and it’s like they never stopped. Ranch genetics program is expanding. Ivy handles the business side now."
"Liam?"
"Still a Ranger. Stephanie's recording again." He turned his cup on the table. "He still looks at her like he won the lottery. Because he did."
“What’s the story with Maggie and Jack? Where did he come from?”
“Montana. Showed up with his dog on a recommendation from Golden Circle in Wild Creek. They started working horses. Maggie runs the breeding operation. Jack pretends he has a vote. He doesn't. Sully’s under the table at every dinner."
"I noticed. He was eyeing my steak like a man with a plan."
"Sully has been working that angle forever. He's very committed.” I chuckled and took a sip of my coffee.
"And Clay?"
Something shifted in his face. The jaw softened.
The eyes warmed in a way that cracked the surface of the quiet and let something tender through.
"Clay's good. He's real good, Jess. Retired from bull riding, runs the quarter horse program.
Callie keeps him honest." He shook his head — a small, private movement. "And Maisie is something else."
"She's six going on twenty-five."
"She sits on the floor of the workshop in her pink cowboy boots and hands me sockets and talks nonstop.
" His mouth softened — a real, unguarded warmth that changed his whole face.
"Reminds me of someone, actually. Girl I used to know.
Used to sit on my workbench and talk until the sun went down while I pretended I wasn't hanging on every word. "
He said it easy. Light. Like it was a throwaway line and not a grenade he'd just rolled across the table. My throat caught. I picked up my coffee to cover it.
"She knows the difference between a Phillips head and a flathead, and she considers this information essential to her personal brand."
I grinned. "She’s so smart.”
He started telling me a story about Maisie, Clay, and Callie that had turned into a whole ordeal the whole family was now in on.
Something about bear safety and Maisie being pissed that no one would teach her how to fight a bear.
By the end of it, his whole body was shaking, the laugh trapped behind his teeth.