Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Tate showed up with the newspaper before Jason finished the morning feed.
He didn’t say anything at first. He laid it on the workbench, front page up, and stood there with his thumbs in his belt loops while Jason read.
They’d put it above the fold. Developer’s daughter admits role in notice failure, asks council to redo process.
There was a photograph of the council chamber, a quote from the clerk confirming the statement would enter the minutes, and there in the third paragraph, was the account of what happened.
She’d cleared Kyle Sinclair as far as anybody could clear him.
She’d offered to pay for the printing out of her own pocket.
“Did you know she was going to do it?” Tate asked.
“No.”
“She didn’t tell you?”
“No.” Jason set the paper down. His hands weren’t quite steady, and he didn’t mind that. “If she’d told me first, it would’ve been half mine. She wanted to own it.”
Tate was quiet for a while. Down the aisle a horse worked at a hay net, and the sound filled up all the space the two of them weren’t using.
“I’ve had my whole life to practice saying hard things wrong,” Tate said at last. “So let me try to say this one right. What I brought you at the round pen was true, and I’d bring it again.
And what she did with it is a thing most people never manage once.
” He folded the paper and set it under Jason’s coffee cup for a coaster.
“Tell her the Dennisons don’t scare easy.
Rylee’s already planning something, and I’ve learned not to stand in front of that woman when she’s planning. ”
The lodge was quiet when Jason got there. Cece came down to meet him at the trail instead of letting him up, which told him plenty, and she had the look of a woman who hadn’t been sleeping and had decided to be composed about it anyway.
“You saw the paper,” she said.
“I did.”
“My father hasn’t spoken to me since I walked out of his suite. His lawyers have, though. Twice.” Her laugh had no floor under it. “It turns out I’m a liability in the technical sense now, not just the social one.”
“How do you feel?”
The question caught her sideways. She reached for the polished answer, and she set it back down. “Lighter,” she said. “Poorer. Scared.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “Like I handed this town a knife, and now I have to live here while it decides what to do with it.”
“Good,” Jason said. “Then you’ll want to be there when it decides.”
“Be where?”
“The rodeo.”
She stared at him as if he’d suggested a swim in the creek with ice coming in. “Jason. Half that grandstand thinks my last name is a swear word.”
“The other half read the paper.”
“You’re launching a business. The minute I sit down next to your family, every eye in that arena starts doing arithmetic. Your name. My name. What they add up to.”
“Then let them add,” he said. “I’m not any good at hiding, Cece.
Nobody in my family is, and every bad thing that’s happened around here lately started with somebody trying.
You hid those notices and it nearly buried you.
My brother hid behind a photograph once and it nearly cost him his wife.
I’m not building the rest of my life out of that material. ”
“Why are you doing this?” It came out cracked down the middle. “I cost you the Baileys. I cost you a town’s worth of goodwill before your name was even on a flyer. Any sensible man would let things cool off before being seen with me at the biggest gathering of the season.”
“Cece.” He took his hat off and held it against his chest, old-fashioned as a photograph. “I don’t say things I don’t mean. And I would never ask for anything I didn’t want.”
The fight went out of her shoulders by degrees, as a horse decides to trust a hand.
“What does a person even wear to a rodeo?” she whispered.
“Boots,” he said. “You’ve already got the right ones.”