Chapter 7
When we arrived at the house, he introduced me to the children and showed me to my room. We had not discussed this—how do you speak to a man of intimacy in letters? But it is clear he doesn’t expect me to be anything other than his governess.
P erry stewed the entire way to Medford. But by the time they got there, she felt she was experiencing a moment of clarity. An odd thing to feel as one pulled into a storage locker facility, but there it was.
It was a good thing he’d suggested the dating apps, because he was pushing her further and further away from him, and closer to her goal.
Carson had decided he wanted to fuck his grief out of his system, apparently. Good for him.
Good for him.
He was making changes. Honestly, she couldn’t say that wasn’t good.
She recognized that stagnation was a bad thing for him.
It was just … she hadn’t imagined that he was going to get back into all this stuff quite so quickly.
She had thought that maybe he would take on one challenge at a time.
But no. Apparently he was going to be restoring old houses and picking up women, impressing them with his knowledge of historic homes.
How good. How great.
But she had already decided that she wanted to do some dating too, so she would start tonight.
Maybe she would meet an eligible bachelor out at … Rocky Tonk. It was possible.
While Carson started to unload the heaviest furniture and move it into the unit, Perry stood leaning against the truck, downloading different apps.
It was signing up and making a profile that was the hard part. But she looked cute today, if she said so herself, and she took a few selfies to use as her profile pictures.
She wasn’t sure quite what to say in the write-up. That she was hoping to start a new life and looking for serious candidates who wanted to have children and get married?
Probably not.
Quickly enough, she had one profile completed, and she started looking through her potential matches.
A lot of men in polos. A lot of men in real estate.
But that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. That was the kind of man she should be looking for. A professional. One who matched her energy. And stuff.
“What are you doing?” Carson asked, swiping his forearm across his brow. And she realized that she had taken no hand at all in moving her own furniture.
“Oh, I was signing up for the dating apps.”
“The dating apps? Which ones?”
“All of them. Pretty much.”
“Well. I wouldn’t want you to break a nail, but maybe you could help out.”
“Maybe,” she said.
She went to the horse trailer and picked up a small box, then carted it down into the already full shed. “Ta-da.”
“Adorable, Perry.”
“I am adorable,” she said.
“Austin texted,” Carson said.
Perry turned to look at him, her heart pounding. She didn’t know why this announcement felt emotional. Significant. She cared about Austin. She really liked Millie. She was so glad that they had found each other. But there was something about their pregnancy that felt … this was what she wanted.
A shared life. Love.
She wanted a family.
She wasn’t going to be able to have a family exactly the way she wanted. But she didn’t want to become one of those people who let her dreams be sidelined because she was too specific about how they were realized.
“Well,” she said. “What is it?”
“A girl,” he said, looking a bit in awe. “I kind of love it. I mean, we had Cassidy growing up, but she came late. And you know, none of our mothers stuck around. It will be nice. To have another girl in the family.”
She couldn’t be envious, then. She could only be happy. It was such a gift. For Austin to know love like this.
“I’m going to have to buy them something pink.”
She realized that she would be moving around the time the baby was born. And that made her feel sad. But it was part of the change she needed. She wouldn’t be around these people all the time. That was the point. She had to start having her own life. She had to.
“All right,” Carson said, clearing his throat. “What app should I download?”
She cleared the cobwebs out of her mind. “Try these three.”
He pulled his phone out and scowled at it. If he was in charge of downloading the apps, this was never going to get done.
“Let me do it for you,” she said, grabbing hold of the phone. She went to his apps and started to download the same ones she had selected for herself.
“You have to create profiles, you know,” Perry said.
“God. How am I supposed to do that?” He looked mortified, and it was actually kind of funny.
“I mean, say you’re a widower, for a start.”
“Why?”
“Because women think that’s hot.”
“Why?” he asked again, narrowing his eyes.
“Because you’re sad and lonely. It will make them want to touch you.”
Her own jealousy was trying to strangle her and she did her best to shove the beast away. No. She was making positive moves away from this man. She didn’t need to …
She didn’t need to do this.
He looked appalled. “I don’t want pity sex.”
“What does it matter? You don’t want to seriously date anybody. Why not use pity?”
“Because it’s distasteful. To use my … my … my wife to get sex.”
She grimaced. “Okay. That’s fair. I really wasn’t thinking of it that way.”
Silence settled between them. “I’m bad at all this,” he said.
“You’re really not, though,” she said.
“Maybe I wasn’t, once upon a time. But … I never wanted to have to do it again.”
“I know,” she said, suddenly feeling contrite. She was upset about things that weren’t his fault. It was so easy for her to get mired in her own feelings, and that made it too easy to minimize his.
The truth was, there was part of her that was angry at him. For not loving her. She’d thought she was over it until the possibility that he might want her existed again.
She had struggled mightily with her conflict, especially in the last year. Because when he’d gotten married, she’d thought that she had let go of that hope forever.
Then genuine, actual tragedy struck that she would never have wished on him or Alyssa, or anybody, and it felt awful.
Alyssa’s death had also brought up all this … stuff. All these hopes and dreams and things that she had thought long buried. They were not that buried, it turned out.
“Do you really want to do this?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “I mean, it was my idea, mostly.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Mostly. But kinda Flynn’s.”
“Yeah. Kind of Flynn. And kind of you.”
“How me?”
“Because. You’re changing your life, and it makes me want to change mine. I know. Maybe we are too connected. Maybe everything is too much the two of us. But you’re inspiring me to do something better with myself, or at least something different.”
“Well. That’s good.” She cleared her throat and looked up at him. “Let me take your profile picture.”
“I probably have something already.”
“No. You can’t be trusted.”
She pulled up the camera app and centered him in the frame. He crossed his arms over his chest, and she knew that he was basically just giving her his most steely gaze, but he looked gorgeous. His jaw was sculpted, his shoulders broad, his blue eyes extra bright in the sunlight.
He was everything.
At least to her.
She snapped the photo and then turned the phone screen to face him. “Here,” she said. “What do you think?”
He looked uncomfortable. “I don’t know.”
“Well. Trust me. You look great.”
“Thanks.”
“Put that you’re a cowboy in your bio.”
“A cowboy. I’m not putting that in my bio.”
“You should . You’re going to have to trust me about what’s hot. That’s hot.”
He frowned. “Is it?”
“Yes.”
“It just sounds cheesy.”
“Fine. Rancher and veteran.”
“Okay. That I can do. Of course, then they’re going to think I want to talk about the military.”
“I thought the whole point of this was that you didn’t want to talk.”
She should be getting frustrated with him.
The situation felt fraught, and she felt sweaty.
This was not uncharted territory for her and Carson.
They had dated other people in each other’s vicinity before.
It was just that although she had declared she was going to date, she wasn’t really prepared to deal with it.
She certainly wasn’t prepared for him to start dating.
Selfishly, she realized that she was hoping to find a relationship, even have a baby before he got around to doing anything.
She was hoping to be settled in her new life so she wouldn’t have to witness him falling in love again.
Still, she looked his bio over when he was finished typing, and she clicked Save.
“There. Now we are ready to go.”
“I guess. So, like, we just go to a place, and we turn the app on, and theoretically we find somebody to match with?”
“I think we can do it from here,” she said.
They both opened their apps, and she watched as he stared at his phone intently.
“Who are you being matched with?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Come on, Carson.”
“Women.” He frowned. “Some of them look a little young.”
Perry scowled. “Well, then you should swipe away. Nobody likes a creepy old man.”
“I’m thirty-four, Perry.”
“Yeah. Well. It stands.”
“I should not swipe on this twenty-one-year-old.”
“Carson,” she said. “No.”
Then she really looked at his face and saw that he was absolutely trolling her.
“You seem upset, Periwinkle.”
“Not at all. Do you think I should swipe right on this twenty-one-year-old?” She flashed her phone toward him, because she was serious. There was a legitimate twenty-one-year-old in a backward baseball cap with a polo shirt who had matched with her. “Braden.”
“Oh, please no,” Carson said. “Is this what we’ve come to?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think it’s a bad thing. We have options. And none of this has to be serious.”
She did mean that. She had never been a big casual dater herself. But she had also never really been all the way into a relationship. For complicated reasons. Well. Many of them standing right before her.
“Fine.”
He turned his phone toward her. “She’s pretty.”