Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
He’d said yes to the little apartment. But he hadn’t been sure about it, and he still hadn’t trusted that she didn’t have something else up her sleeve. Greer hated herself this morning because he was right. She’d set up this entire competition because of him and what she wanted from him.
But what she wanted would benefit him too, so maybe Alex wouldn’t be too pissed when he discovered he’d been partially right. That meant she had to get him as excited about the artisan village as she was.
He needed to be invested. The best way to do that was to get his hands dirty in the project. But first, she had to talk with her brother.
She knocked on the door of Cal’s tidy little farmhouse, and he called out, “It’s open!”
When she walked inside the cozy house, she could smell fresh coffee, so she hit the kitchen for a cup before finding Cal sitting at the small dining table with Delaney snugged in his lap.
Greer grinned at the picture of her big brother so happy, so content in this domestic cocoon. “If y’all aren’t careful,” she teased, “we’ll have a posse of Maddox ankle-biters running around before you know it.”
Cal’s hand immediately covered Delaney’s lower belly.
Greer’s right wrist went limp, and coffee splashed to the floor. “You’re…? No…no way.”
“We aren’t telling anyone yet,” Cal said, his hand protectively wrapped around what Greer could now see was Delaney’s subtle baby bump.
Greer hitched her chin in their direction. “Then you’d better stop with the hand over the secret thing.”
“Shit.” But he didn’t move his hand a millimeter.
“How far along?” Greer asked, grabbing a paper towel and wiping up the mess.
“Not quite twelve weeks.” Delaney patted Cal’s hand, pressed a kiss to his cheek, then stood.
“And?” Greer said.
“And what?”
“How are you feeling?”
“Scared out of my mind. Like I have no idea what I’m doing.” Delaney chuckled as she said it but then dropped back to an empty chair, thunking her coffee cup to the table and bowing her head. “Cal, what were we thinking?”
Quickly, he crouched down in front of Delaney’s chair and lifted her face. “We were thinking we love each other. We were thinking it might be better to do this sooner rather than later.”
Her cheeks pale, Delaney looked over his shoulder at Greer. “We were thinking we’d better pee or get off the pot. Otherwise, I might chicken out and never do it.”
Greer couldn’t help but laugh. Between Alex’s not-shitting-where-he-eats comment, and now this, romance was taking on a whole different meaning.
But that pee-pot expression had been one of her dad’s favorites, and her heart hurt with the knowledge that he’d never hold his first grandbaby.
I will be the best aunt to this kid, Daddy.
I will tell him or her all about his wonderful grandmother and his grizzly, grumpy granddaddy. “Does anyone else know?”
Cal hit her with an I-know-six-bazillion-ways-to-blow-up-shit stare. “You weren’t supposed to know yet.”
“I’m the aunt. Besides, I can keep a secret.
” And she would. But oh God, the way her brother was now cradling Delaney’s face in his hands, whispering something to her that was talking down the panicked look in her eyes…
That. That was love. And something more.
That was a look that said he would do whatever it took to keep her happy, to keep her safe, to keep her sane.
Had Alex Villanueva ever made that kind of promise to a woman? And why were Greer’s ovaries clenching at the thought?
Biology. It was all just attraction, nothing more.
Because she couldn’t afford to fall for a man who didn’t believe in prophecy boots and wasn’t interested in sticking around.
But she just couldn’t shake the feeling that Alex’s arrival on the day she received her own boots meant something. Something very important.
“Delaney?” Her voice was trembling, but she couldn’t help it. “Have you made the second pair of boots?”
Delaney looked away from Cal, her face now flushed and a tiny smile on her mouth. “What?”
“The boots for my soul mate. Do you know who they’re for?”
“I…ah…well…”
Cal jumped to his feet and turned a glare on her that was hotter than her furnace and sharper than one of Delaney’s skiving knives. “Greer, what the hell? Why would you ask her that?”
“Because I want to know.”
“Well, so did I,” he said, “but when I brought my boots to you asking you to read them, you wouldn’t tell me a damn thing.”
“This is different.”
“How?”
Because…because Alex wasn’t a good bet in the soul mate department. In fact, he’d scoffed at the whole concept.
But Cal had a point. No one was supposed to know when the boots were coming, when the second pair would show up, or who they would be handed to.
“Cal—” Delaney’s voice was quiet and completely calm, “—this is between Greer and me.”
He looked between them, gave a nod then headed toward their bedroom.
Once he was out of the room, Greer turned to Delaney. “I’m sorry. I don’t think I even said congratulations about the baby.”
Delaney stared up at Greer. “You’re worried, aren’t you?”
“Of course not,” Greer protested. “You’ll make a fabulous mom. And can you imagine how Raylene will spoil—”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.” When Greer tried to take a step back, Delaney grabbed her hand. “You’re worried about when and who.”
“Wouldn’t you be?”
“That was Cal’s issue,” Delaney said. “Not mine. In some ways, the person with the second pair of boots has it way easier.”
“I never thought about it like that before. Maybe I just assumed I’d receive my boots and, bam, everything would fall into place.”
“It will.”
“But not on my timeframe.” Her dad had once told her a story about a couple—Ellen Harper and Wilson Callahan—who didn’t find their way to each other until seven years after Ellen had received her prophecy boots.
As of last November, the Callahans had been married thirty-five years, but the thought of being in limbo for that long made Greer’s hands and feet tingle in panic.
She had been doing just fine without a man in her life, but now she was having a hard time pushing it from her mind.
“Who do you want it to be?”
“That’s not the point. It doesn’t matter who I want. It only matters who I’m meant to be with.”
“Then why don’t you let it play out the way it’s supposed to?”
“Because I don’t know if I should get involved with Alex.” The words rushed out of Greer with an honesty that contradicted all the things she’d been telling herself about starting something with the man.
“Do you want to?”
God help her, she already was. Maybe more involved than she should if he wasn’t her soul mate. “Have you taken a good look at the man?”
“Maybe,” Delaney whispered, her attention keen on the hallway where Cal had disappeared. “But only from the corner of my eye.”
“You may be in love with my brother, but you haven’t had your hormones surgically removed.”
“Fine, he looks like he’d be two handfuls of skin-sweating, dirty-talking, heart-thumping sex. But Greer, there’s more to a relationship than sex.”
“But if he’s not the one, what does it matter?”
“What if he is the one?”
“The one what?” Cal said from behind them.
Dammit, the stealthy skills his Army years had taught him could be a real pain in Greer’s backside.
“Delaney needed a decent tooler, so why did you turn this into some big brouhaha? Why couldn’t you just let her give the guy a contract and then send him on his way? ”
“It’s not that simple and you know it,” Greer shot back.
“If he contracts for PBC, then he’ll be back from time to time.
That’s inevitable. Besides, a competition is a good opportunity to stir up chatter about the artisan village.
And—” she took a gulp of air and rushed out the next words, “—I decided I definitely want Alex to stay here as a resident artist, but I need to get him invested. That’s why I’m here this morning. I need your help.”
Cal pressed the heel of his palm between his eyes. “I’ve got a couple of jobs going, but I can squeeze in the barn as well. But knowing you, you want everything done on your timeframe, which means yesterday.”
“Actually, I want you to help by not working on the barn anymore.”
His arm fell away from his face, and oh, his expression—narrowed eyes and half-open mouth—tickled her funny bone. “What?”
“Here’s the deal,” she said. “I want to get Alex invested in Prophecy and in the village so that when I ask him to stay, he can’t possibly say no.
And the best way to do that is to get him involved with the project from the ground up.
” Because after his hotheaded rejection of the free barn apartment, she knew how important it was for him to pay his own way.
“So you want his help, not mine?”
Delaney snuggled against Cal’s side and wrapped an arm around his waist. “It’s not about you, Cal.”
“This is what I do for a living. I build things.”
“And this new artisan’s village is what your sister wants to do for a living,” Delaney told him. “You need to let her go at it her own way.”
He angled his chin toward Greer. “You don’t even know if the guy is any good with his hands.”
Completely inappropriate laughter backed up in Greer’s chest. Delaney stuck her bottom lip over her top. Didn’t matter, because they both lost it, with wheezing chuckles escaping them.
“Shit,” Cal said. “You know what I mean. And as for the other…” He closed his eyes and drew a breath in through his nose. “I don’t care how old you are, Greer, you’re still my baby sister. And a guy like that? He’s not ever what I imagined for you.”
This was the problem with an older brother. One second, you wanted to tear out your hair and his. The next, you wanted to curl up in his lap and give him a big hug.
“I’m not sure how everything will all play out,” she said, “but I do know that taking the risk on this village and on Alex is the most thrilling thing I’ve done in a long time.”