Chapter 9
Apparently, Girls’ Night Out in Bridlewood came with pink bikini martinis, unsolicited life advice, and Colter Callahan leaning against the bar in a black cowboy hat looking so unfairly good Sutton nearly forgot to breathe.
Which was unfortunate, really, because she’d been in town less than two weeks and already the man had developed a habit of showing up everywhere she went.
Grocery store.
Clinic.
Café.
Now the bar.
At this rate he was either stalking her or the universe had a very specific sense of humor.
It took two days to convince herself to come tonight because leaving Lynlee with a sitter was both foreign and terrifying.
But her neighbor, Ms. Tutty—grandmother to seven and veteran of approximately four hundred bedtime negotiations—had offered to take Lynlee for the evening, and Sutton had accepted with slight hesitation.
"How's work?" Vivi asked.
"It seems to follow me wherever I go," Sutton mumbled, looking back over her shoulder, casually so as not to attract attention.
Translation: absolutely not casually. She may as well have stood on the bar and rang a bell. But, hot damn, the way her body reacted was anything but casual. She blamed it on long-dormant hormones flickering to life and reminding her they were there. Nothing else.
Oh, who was she kidding, it wasn’t just a flicker, it was a Duraflame log exploding into a blue flame.
It wasn’t just the cowboy hat. He had on dark jeans molded to long, hard thighs, and a black snap-button shirt with white stitching curling across the shoulders and chest in some fancy western pattern that made him look less small-town rancher and more like a country song women ruined their lives over.
She was five days sober from a five-year dry spell and her body had picked now, in a bar, in front of witnesses, to remember it had a pulse.
“Based on all that lash batting going on, you don’t seem to mind it as much as you’re telling us,” Jo said.
Sutton snapped around in her chair to face her friends. “What lash batting?”
“Oh, you know, the ‘come fuck me’ flutters,” Jo went on, twirling a toothpick between her teeth.
“There was no fluttering,” Sutton argued.
“You might want to reconcile that with your face.”
Sutton held Jo’s gaze so long her eyes began to water. “See. No fluttering.”
“Mm-hmm,” Jo said into her margarita, which was tequila sans the Cointreau and lime juice. “You look very calm, very unaffected and very one-martini-away from climbing that man like a decorative barn ladder.”
“I am not climbing anyone.”
Vivi snorted. “Sweetheart, your pupils dilated the second you noticed him at the other end of the bar. I’m surprised you’re not pregnant just from the way you’re looking at him.”
Betrayed by her own eyeballs. Add it to the list.
Sutton grabbed her drink and took a long sip that did nothing to cool her burning cheeks. “Can we not do this?”
“We could,” Vivi said. “But where’s the fun in that?”
“I’m serious.”
“Fine, how is work going?” Vivi asked.
“Good, I think. It’s hard to tell if he likes me or not.
I mean, if he likes my work or not,” she added hastily.
“He hasn’t talked about firing me, even though I let a llama loose in the clinic and it spit on several clients before Colter caught him, but he also hasn’t said a word about how to improve. ”
“Accidents happen,” Vivi said, all friend-forward and supportive words.
“We were at a house call to a breeder and before we left, I accidentally put a male guinea pig in the same cage as the females. All thirty-five fell pregnant. He is now appropriately named Randy.”
“Fella must be the big pig on the block now,” Jo said without even a quirk of the lips. “The other guys must give him fist bumps when he struts through the farm.”
“It was a disaster. Now I have thirty-five guinea pigs to rehome. Do you want a new pet?”
Vivi’s eyes went wide with horror. “Don’t even let those words leave your lips. We have thousands of cows, a cranky bull, a litter of barn cats and two cattle dogs. Now they want to breed horses. We are animaled out at the ranch.”
"Thirty-five, Sutton," Jo said. "That's not a rehoming problem. That's a hostile guinea pig takeover. You're basically running a cult now."
“See, I work for him and I had no idea he was starting a breeding program. It makes it hard to get to know him.” Not just because he was her boss or because proximity blurred lines—though God knew both of those were doing plenty of heavy lifting—she needed to stay on alert to survive.
Every instinct in her body had been honed to measure men by what they could take from her, not what they could offer.
Getting to know him meant letting him get closer to a life she had spent three years fortifying.
One wrong read, one misplaced trust, and it wouldn’t just be her heart on the line, it would be Lynlee’s sense of safety, her world, and her certainty that adults stayed.
“What’s he like?” She kept her tone light, like she was asking about a coworker’s coffee order and not a man who held potential leverage over her personal and professional life—not to mention her child’s happiness.
Vivi smiled. “He’s smart, strong, and knows his way around anything with four legs—or two, for that matter. Then again, he is a Callahan.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means be careful, he’s a charmer,” Vivi answered. “I know there’s more to him and I still haven’t figured out why he is so gun-shy about serious relationships, but the capacity is there.”
“Gun-shy?” Jo snorted. “Viv, he’s a total playboy. Dates everyone, commitment is optional. He hasn’t been on a second date in almost a year.”
“We’re working on that,” Vivi said proudly.
Sutton decided, right then, that she liked Vivi entirely too much to tell her she was dating-app-matchmaking the father of Sutton's daughter like he was a normal, unclaimed bachelor.
“We redid his profile to encourage more long-term connections,” Vivi added.
Jo’s laugh echoed so loud half the bar turned their way. “Long term? He’s a Callahan, so long term means they look at you once across a crowded room and wink before winking at the next woman in a three-foot radius.”
“I’m engaged to a Callahan,” Vivi said defensively.
“And Boone spent the first six weeks of knowing you acting like dating was a government conspiracy,” Jo said as if she were the expert on all things Callahan. She looked at Sutton. “Colter is a panty-whisperer, so your degree of difficulty is significantly higher than hers.”
Panty-whisperer. Great. Add that to the file too, right under charmer, gun-shy, and protects what's his. Sutton was building quite the dossier tonight, and none of it was helping.
She hadn’t planned on dissecting her boss’s love life over martinis and nachos, but that was exactly what grown-up girls’ nights were good for.
“I am not interested, and I mean not interested. I just wanted to know what kind of man I’m working for. I moved all the way from San Francisco for this internship. I want to be sure I didn’t make a mistake.”
“Charmer aside, he’s a good guy,” Vivi said. “All the Callahans are. He’s honest to a fault and trustworthy.”
“I’d trust a Callahan with my life,” Jo said. “Not my heart, but my life. Plus, Colter’s a protector and protects what’s his.”
Of course he would.
Life loved stacking the odds against Sutton. Before she could stop, her mind went somewhere dangerous—toward sticky fingers and bedtime stories and a little girl with Colter’s eyes he didn’t even know was his.
Would that protection extend to a four-year-old he’d never asked for? Or would finding out feel less like gaining something and more like being trapped by it?
“In the third grade, I accidentally launched a ball into the lunch lady’s cart,” Jo went on as if Sutton’s entire world wasn’t under siege.
“How do you accidentally launch a ball into a cart?” Sutton asked.
“I was aiming for Eli, who tried to dodge it but ended up getting hit in the shoulder and it rebounded making direct contact. Colter dragged us both away before the principal saw, and we spent the rest of picture day with tomato soup stains on our shirts like battle scars.”
“Colter’s the mediator of the family,” Vivi added. “The easy-going one. Well, from what I hear, he was before the accident.”
“Accident?”
Vivi didn’t answer right away, and Sutton felt that familiar squeeze in her chest—the one that came when someone treated her like she didn’t belong. Maybe talking about Colter’s family was like stepping across an invisible line she wasn’t sure she could come back from.
Vivi put deliberate space between them as if debating if Sutton’s trustworthiness was enough for such a private matter.
“A little over two years ago, their parents died in a car crash,” Jo said.
“Oh my God. That’s horrible.” Sutton’s stomach knotted.
Losing his parents like that—suddenly and violently—had to have changed everything.
She knew what it was like to lose parents.
She never knew her biological dad and when she was five her mom dropped her off at a fire station and never came back.
Growing up without parents had been painful, but to have them suddenly taken must have been devastating.
“They were good people,” Jo said, her voice soft with sorrow.
“The whole town felt that loss. Colter was speaking at his alma mater in California. The funeral wasn’t even over when he and his brothers had to step into their father’s shoes—running a massive ranch and protecting everything their family had built. ”
And keeping his family together, Sutton thought.
That must have taken a kind of strength that didn’t need words to prove itself.
It made her chest tighten, because she understood that weight all too well, even if her own family had fallen apart differently.
Just like Colter would do whatever it took to protect what was his, so would she—no excuses and no looking back.
Lottie, the owner of the bar, waddled over in a magenta western shirt stretched over generous curves, rhinestone cowgirl boots, and enough chunky bangles to sink a fishing boat.
Her from-a-bottle platinum-blonde curls bounced with every step as she slid a fresh pink bikini martini in front of Sutton.
“What’s this?” Sutton asked. She hadn’t ordered another round.
Lottie steepled her fingertips together, tapping them to her chin like they held a secret of great magnitude. “A gift.”
“From who?”
“Me,” a familiar voice said and Sutton’s heart fell to her toes. She didn’t need to turn around to see who “Me” was. But when she did, her lungs stopped dead in her chest. It was like boom-boom then nothing.
He looked unfairly good leaning against the bar, all relaxed muscles and quiet heat—and the worst part was how her body reacted without permission, giving way to this sharp, traitorous zing that sat low in her belly and told her that this man was a problem long before her brain caught up.
“Are you stalking me?” she asked.
“This is a coincidence. I promise.”
“A good friend told me never to accept a promise from a man sipping from a martini glass.”
“Real men don’t give a shit about what kind of glass they use. It’s all about the promises they actually keep. But I’m glad you noticed what I’m drinking. Are you keeping tabs on me, Freckles?”
“You’re the one buying me the drink.”
“And with that, we’re going to go to the ladies’ room,” Vivi said.
“Are you kidding? This is just getting good,” Jo argued.
Vivi grabbed her friend’s arm and drug her away from the bar.
“Worst wing-girls ever,” Sutton called out but they had disappeared into the crowd, leaving her alone with a man who had no idea who she was or why she was really in Bridlewood.
Omissions aren't lies. Which was, technically, also a lie.
The honest answer—the one she'd never said out loud—was that she didn't have a plan.
Not a real one. She'd had a plan for getting here: the PI, the tech program, the twenty follow-up emails on her résumé.
She'd had a plan for surviving here: keep her head down, do good work, watch him from a safe professional distance until she understood what she was dealing with.
What she hadn't planned for was him being, well, him.
Funny in a way that snuck up on her, gentle with animals and children, and visibly terrible at accepting help.
Three qualities that, individually, were manageable.
Stacked on top of each other on a man who also looked like that in a snap-button shirt? They were a war crime.
He was the kind of man who bought a stranger a drink then stood there looking like he regretted it but, at the same time, wanted to do it again.
She'd told herself she was waiting for a sign.
Some clear, unmistakable proof that he was either safe enough to trust or terrible enough to walk away from.
Two weeks in Bridlewood and all she'd collected was evidence that complicated her case.
He hadn't done anything wrong, but he hadn't done anything right, either, in the convenient, dismissible way she'd been hoping for.
He'd just been—present. Real and increasingly difficult to reduce to a file or a DNA result.
Which meant she was still waiting. And the longer she waited, the more tangled the strings became.
For Sutton, lying was a way of life. It started when she was little and would make up elaborate stories about who her parents were and why she was in foster care.
Sometimes her mom was a famous actress, other times she was a surgeon who worked overseas saving lives.
It was better than admitting the truth—that Sutton wasn’t wanted.
Which was why she was willing to lie—do anything to keep her secrets—until she knew what kind of man she was dealing with. Not having a dad was better than having one bail. And she refused to let Lynlee know what that felt like.
“Why do you need a wing-girl?” he asked.
“Because I have a stalker.”
“I was here first. Which means you’re the one crashing my party.”
“I didn’t know you were here,” she said, executing lie number two of the evening.
“Would it have made a difference?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. And that was the cold, hard truth.