Chapter Seventeen #2
Beau understood what wasn’t said. Adam might be stone cold, but he wasn’t heartless, and he hadn’t felt like sticking around the lodge spying once Shanda showed up. Despite the black eye, Beau felt sorry for him. He knew what it was like to have feelings for a woman who’d never be his.
This wasn’t about to become a bonding moment between them, however. Beau still had the black eye from the last time he’d touched on a sore subject. A change of subject was in order to keep things from becoming too personal.
“Who fixes the town’s potholes?” he asked.
*
Belle
Someone knocked on Belle’s door.
She’d been watching the raid from her kitchen window, although other than moving shadows as Dave and his friends crept around between houses, there wasn’t a whole lot to see.
She’d locked her door because she wasn’t about to be kidnapped now that a precedent for script changes on the fly had been set, but if Dave had a kidnapping planned, he wouldn’t knock.
She opened the door, expecting to find Beau.
Instead, she found Jayce.
“Can I come in?” he asked.
“Of course.”
She could hardly leave him outside. Dave’s friends were enthusiastic when it came to shooting arrows, but honestly, they should practice more often. Friendly fire was a legitimate concern.
She closed the door behind him but didn’t bother to lock it this time. A kidnapping wasn’t about to happen with Jayce here as a witness. They’d have to kill him off or kidnap him, too, and he was needed later on in the script.
“I came to check on you, to make sure you’re okay,” he said.
“I’m fine. This isn’t my first raid.”
They’d had another one last winter, when the snow was several feet deep. The guest, a Russian, had thrown snowballs at the attackers with a great deal of accuracy and a lot of enjoyment. They’d all gone sledding together afterward.
The tips of Jayce’s ears had turned as red as his shirt. Sweaty palms and a knot in her stomach said that the day Beau had been pushing for had finally arrived. Hopefully she could get this over with fast and without any hard feelings. Jayce was a good person, but he wasn’t for her.
He got straight to the point. “Between Beau Jones turning your head, and finding out about Shanda, Mavis, and Benny, you’ve got to be pretty confused.
Things have gotten complicated between us, but I wanted to make sure you know that I understand.
Once Beau is gone and the dust settles, and you get things sorted out with your family, I’ll be waiting for you.
We can pick up where we left off. No hard feelings. ”
“Beau didn’t turn my head.” She was mildly offended. That made her sound like some weak-kneed damsel with no common sense. “And while my relationship with Mavis and Benny is going to take some getting used to, I’m not confused about them.”
Shanda was another story entirely.
Belle wasn’t confused about her at all, and sorting things out with her was not going to happen. “There’s no need to wait for me. If anything was going to happen between you and me, it would have happened by now.”
But Jayce could be stubborn once his mind was made up. “I know I took things slow, but I believe in courting a woman and treating her right.”
“We don’t really live in the Old West.” She’d love for him to find the right woman, but if he didn’t rejoin the twenty-first century, it wasn’t likely to happen. “Nobody says things like that anymore.”
“Maybe they should. Maybe that’s what the world needs. Maybe I like having old-fashioned values.”
“It’s fine if you do,” she said. “But not everyone is going to feel the same way.”
By everyone, she meant women. The nineteenth century didn’t have a whole lot recommending it to them. The clothes were uncomfortable, women carried more than their fair share of the workload, and the laws were not on their side.
“I suppose.” He sounded as if he didn’t believe her. “But you deserve the best I have to offer. You’re beautiful, and kind, and smart, and everything a man could ever want in a wife.”
If a man wanted boring.
“You’ve put a lot of thought into this,” she said, because there wasn’t much else she could say that he’d understand.
He didn’t know her. Where was the excitement she was supposed to feel? The passion? She couldn’t even get worked up enough to be offended that he sounded as if he were buying a horse.
“I’m not very good at romantic talk,” he continued, blundering onward and proving his point. “But when a man finds the right woman, there’s a lot of things for him to consider. Genetics, for example. You know. In case there are children.”
Had he considered that Shanda would be his children’s grandmother? Those genes should be cause for concern.
“What about chemistry?” she asked. She might not put much faith in romance, but she’d discovered firsthand that pheromones had their appeal.
He looked blank. “What about what?”
She wished she could explain what it was like to want to tear off a man’s clothes, even when she was furious with him, for no better reason than that he drove her to it.
How it was possible to get so caught up in the moment that nothing else mattered but intimate physical connection.
Why were these conversations so easy with Beau but such torture with Jayce?
“Doesn’t it bother you that we aren’t physically attracted to each other?” she asked.
“Whatever gave you the idea that I’m not attracted to you?” Jayce looked bewildered, then frowned as if he’d bitten into something unpleasant. “Beau told you that, didn’t he?”
She couldn’t blame that one on Beau. Before she could launch into an explanation of the various hypotheses behind chemistry and pheromones in humans, however, Jayce seized her by the shoulders and kissed her.
It was by far the best kiss he’d ever delivered, proving he was capable of good things when he tried, and once she got over her surprise, she let it go on for longer than she should because she had to be sure.
But a few seconds were all that she needed to be convinced she’d been right. She felt nothing. No chemistry.
The front door burst open. Belle and Jayce sprang apart.
“Hey,” Beau said. His gaze flashed between them, then settled on Jayce. “What’s going on?”
“It’s not what it looks like,” Belle said, which sounded so ridiculous that her cheeks burned with embarrassment, more for saying something so lame than from what she’d been caught doing.
But Beau had been cheated on by his ex-wife, and this did not look good.
With two good-sized men who weren’t all that fond of each other now crowding the entry, conditions were close. She tried to position herself between them, just in case things got ugly, but Beau nudged her aside.
“All set for our card game?” he asked Jayce, his tone friendly, which couldn’t be right. “You looking forward to it as much as I am?”
Belle tried to wrap her head around what was happening.
He’d found her kissing another man and his response was to make light conversation with said other man.
Was it too much to ask for him to be a little bit jealous?
Maybe she should rethink her situation. Maybe boring really did offer a better payoff in the long run.
Maybe the attraction between them wasn’t as strong for Beau as it was for her.
“The hanging will be the real highlight for me,” Jayce said.
He took Belle’s hand. His grip was warm and rough and strong. And it stirred absolutely nothing in her. She tried to imagine him doing a striptease to a country song for her the way Beau had last night and failed.
The light of hope in Jayce’s eyes flickered and faded. He gave her fingers a squeeze and released them. “I’ll always be here for you if you need me,” he said.
The front door opened and closed.
Sympathy softened Beau’s eyes, heating her insides in a way that only he managed. How could she want him so much after what had just happened? Why couldn’t she want Jayce this same way instead?
“That had to happen sooner or later,” Beau said.
“It did not have to happen. He would have figured it out for himself if it wasn’t for you.” Which yes, sounded spineless. But she didn’t care.
“I disagree. If it wasn’t for me, you two would be married by this time next year, and you’d be miserable for the rest of your lives because you’d both be too polite to ask for a divorce.”
“Maybe I wouldn’t want a divorce,” she said, mostly to provoke him. “Maybe he and I do suit each other, and I’m the one who hasn’t figured it out. Maybe I just made a huge mistake by letting him go.”
Beau, however, proved annoyingly hard to provoke. “Fair,” he conceded. “Do you want me to see if I can catch up with him and bring him back?”
He knew full well that she didn’t. She didn’t want a man who stirred nothing in her. She wanted Beau, even if most of the time the emotion he stirred was annoyance.
But she couldn’t have him. He had to return to his music. Meanwhile, she had tick bites to treat for at least four more years. She wasn’t entirely sure how being family would affect the terms of her contract but doubted it would work in her favor.
“No thank you. You’ve done enough. I’ll have to sort things out with Jayce myself,” she said.
“As you’ve pointed out, there is a serious shortage of available men in this town, and someone’s going to have to take care of my needs until my four years are up.
” She tapped her upper lip with her finger while she studied a skinny crack in the plastered ceiling and watched Beau from the corner of her eye. “He’s a great kisser.”
“He is, is he?”
The risorius muscle next to Beau’s mouth flexed, although it happened so fast that it was hard for her to say what emotion he’d stifled. Whatever it was, she got mean pleasure from it.
“Absolutely,” she said, enjoying herself—just a little. Sparring with him was better than plinking for lifting her mood. She was never bored when Beau was around. “So you see, I might not have put enough effort into getting to know him. I’ll have four years to fix that.”