4. Haven
Chapter Four
Haven
I laugh again, because he’s very good at joking. But the way he grimly stares at me, I don’t think he said that to put me at ease.
It’s having the opposite effect, in fact. A weird worry starts to crawl up my spine. “What do you mean?”
“There are two options for making it clear to Jeb—and anyone else who wants to cause you trouble—that you’re not to be messed with. If you don’t mind being associated with me, I’d make it clear you’re under my protection.”
“I don’t want to cause any trouble.”
“You aren’t. If there’s trouble that’s needed, it’ll be me that causes it. But I saw how Meghan Pelley looked at you.”
I snort. “She didn’t look at me.”
“Is this what it’s like for you every day? Harassing emails, cold shoulder from frigid bitches?”
“Not every day,” I whisper, but there’s a lump in my throat, because it’s more common than I’d like to admit.
“Jesus, Haven.” He scrubs his hand over his face. “Okay, we’re going to do something about this. Have you talked to your uncle? Do you want me to talk to him?”
“You wouldn’t!”
He barks a cold laugh. “I’m not scared of him. Trust me, I can walk into his church without a second thought.”
I bite my lower lip, worrying it between my teeth.
He frowns. “You haven’t talked to him at all, have you?”
Shaking my head, I try to fight the wave of regret surging inside me. “I know I should, but—”
“Nope, I’m not saying you should do anything. If anyone had an obligation to reach out, that’s on him. Did he do that?”
The lump in my throat gets worse.
“Fuck,” he whispers before he tugs me in against his chest and wraps his arms around me, enveloping me in hard muscles and the scent of soap and skin.
His t-shirt is soft and clean, and as tears start to fall, I have the faint thought that my face is going to be blotchy, but he’s already seen me like that once today.
“I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry. You’ve been nice to me since I returned.”
“Who hasn’t been?” He squeezes my shoulders as he moves me away from his body.
I miss the big, hard strength of him more than I should.
He glares at me. “Tell me who’s been mean to you, Haven, and I’ll fuck their shit up.”
“Nobody,” I say, but my voice cracks and it’s an obvious lie.
Everybody is an exaggeration. It’s not the entire town, just a shocking percentage.
Everyone who thinks I’m a slut who seduced the youth pastor and then fled town.
“Nobody who deserves the attention. That’s what bullies want, right?
Attention? So I just hold my head up high and ignore them. ”
His face pulls tight, a deep groove notching between his eyebrows. “You keep doing that.”
“Please don’t do anything rash.”
“I don’t do that anymore, don’t worry. But there are some people in town who need to be reminded that there are consequences for cruelty. I can enforce—”
“I do not need a bodyguard.” I press my hands against his chest. His big, hard, unyielding chest. My fingers spread wide, as if in the middle of my protest, I could also maybe just grab a handful of him to keep for myself.
But instead of curling my grip in and holding on tight, I just pat him and step back.
“Thank you for the incredibly kind offer to protect me. I know you have encountered the worst of humanity, and I know all of this can be framed in a way that sounds very dramatic, but it’s just small-minded pettiness.
I’m a big girl. I can handle some cold shoulders. ”
“You need something.”
“Well it’s definitely not a bodyguard.” I laugh because the other option is crying, and I don’t want to do that. “Goodness, Cash, this is Dragonfly Creek.”
“A mad man just stalked a woman to my family’s ranch,” he points out darkly.
And his brother killed that man for trying to get to Hope.
I shiver. If anything, that’s a reason not to let Cash be any kind of protective bodyguard for me. I can’t be the reason he goes back to jail. And Zane Kincaid may have been cleared of any wrongdoing, but Cash won’t have the same luck with the sheriff’s department.
He didn’t seven years ago. And now he has a conviction on his record.
“What’s the other plan?” I say desperately. “You said there were two options to send a clear message to Jeb.”
“We can’t—” He cuts himself off. His gaze hardens, but as he sweeps it over my face, something shifts deep beneath his expression. Still tough as anything, but there’s a flash of wild recklessness. And then he softens all of that and gives me a tender smile. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Why not?”
“Because the other option is leaning into the kiss.” He says like he’s talking to a simpleton.
Or an innocent.
Heat races to my cheeks. “Well, we wouldn’t want to have to do that again.”
“I didn’t say—”
“It’s fine. Truly. I shouldn’t have— I don’t know what got into me— Anyway, let’s move on. Dinner?”
Cash stares at me for a long, confusing beat. Then he nods. “Dinner would be amazing.”
“I have pizza dough, and stuff for a salad? Or, um…”
“Pizza’s great. Can I help?”
I’d like that so much, but I need a minute to myself. So I give him an apologetic smile. “It’s a small kitchen.”
He nods. “Can I read your book while you prep, then?”
“Sure. Be my guest.”
As I pull the dough out of the fridge, he crosses to the couch and picks up the fantasy book I’m reading. But instead of sitting there, he brings it back into the kitchenette and folds himself onto one of the two chairs at the little table.
But he lets me focus on getting dinner ready, and by the time I’m pulling the pizza out of the oven an hour later, he’s probably read fifty pages or more.
“Is reading something you picked up in jail?”
“Yeah. And I like it more than TV now. I’ll watch a movie sometimes, but generally…books is what I turn to for entertainment.”
“Same.” I offer him the salad bowl. “Wouldn’t have thought we’d have that in common, all those years ago.”
He gives me a crooked, almost bittersweet half-smile. “Yeah. But here we are.”
“I’m glad, you know. It’s nice to have a friend in town. Even if you do have a flair for the melodramatic.”
He laughs out loud and rocks back in his chair. “Me? You’re the one who stomped across the street and plastered your mouth against mine!”
I giggle at the preposterous image.
And just like that, we’re both grinning, and he tucks into his dinner.
“This is good,” he mumbles around a bite.
“I’m glad I could feed you. Kept the ruse honest.” And I ignore the pulse of pleasure I have of seeing him devour a meal I made, in my kitchen. This isn’t going to happen again, and it’s not going to be anything like we pretended it was earlier.
But it still feels special all the same.
Cash doesn’t stay long after I feed him. And I don’t expect him to. He probably has plans later, and I don’t want to think about those, so after he leaves, I pick up the book he was reading, and I go back to the start. Turning the pages he turned, imagining where his fingers were.
A warm, weird, wonderful spiral of impossible feelings twist through me at the unexpected fantasy of sharing more meals with someone like Cash, someone who likes to read and eat and laugh.
Maybe without the tattoos and the growly insistence that trouble is around every corner.
I linger on a passage where the main character is bickering with her future love interest. At this point she thinks they’re enemies, and he’s happy for her to think that, too, tossing barbs back as quickly as she snarls at him.
I love this kind of tension in books, but in real life, I definitely prefer the idea of friends to lovers. Something more cozy. Sweet.
A sharp knock at my door makes me jump.
I have a side window that gives a good view of the porch, and I glance through that first, worried it might be Jeb. But it’s not—and it’s not Cash returning, either, and I shove down a little pulse of disappointment at that.
It’s Mercy Lane, who owns The Friendly Table.
She lives up to the name of her restaurant, and every time I go into the diner, she has a warm smile for me.
But we haven’t had a conversation before today, not really.
Technically we went to school together, but she’s a few years older than me, so our paths didn’t cross much.
And Mercy is not a New Harvest girl. Not now, not ever.
I open the door.
“Hi,” she says, a bright smile on her face. “Is this a bad time?”
“No, it’s fine. I was just reading.” Unnecessary information, Haven. “Do you want to come in?”
“I actually wanted to invite you to the town meeting with me.”
“The town meeting?” I repeat. “Sorry, I’m not following.”
“I guess it’s been a while,” Mercy says.
“Or maybe you were too young to appreciate just how entertaining a Dragonfly Creek town meeting can be. It’s what passes for a good time around here.
I thought I’d see if you wanted to sit next to me.
” She lifts a tote bag that looks like it’s groaning with supplies.
“And I’ve brought you some belated welcome back gifts. ”
“Oh—”
She keeps going as she steps inside. “Cookies, a six pack of hard cider, and a bottle of elderflower cordial in case you don’t drink alcohol.”
“I do.”
“Great.” She flashes a big smile at me as she closes the door. “Then we can have a little pre-game drink while we catch up.”
“Pre-game… for the town meeting? Did Cash put you up to this?”
She doesn’t have an ounce of shame as she nods happily.
“Sort of. But it’s truly all on me that I didn’t do this first.” She pauses, then exhales in a rush.
“Maybe I didn’t know what to think when you came back to Dragonfly Creek, but you’re lovely, and I always like to see you in the diner, and I know I should read more, but it’s just that I’m so busy and—”
“It’s fine.” I step back, welcoming my second guest of the day into my little space. “I’ll get some glasses and you can sell me on this idea some more, because I’m not sure I’m buying that this will actually be a good time.”