8. Jessica
Jessica
Garrett caught me after the committee meeting on a Thursday, falling into step beside me in the parking lot with easy confidence.
"Hey — quick question." He tilted his head. Smiled. "Any chance I can take you to dinner this week? There's a place in Millbrook I think you'd love."
I shifted my bag on my shoulder. The committee members were still filtering out of the community hall behind us, and I could feel Dorothy Sullivan's eyes tracking me from the front steps like a sniper scope.
"Garrett, I appreciate it, but I'm not dating right now.
I've got a twelve-month contract and a calendar that's trying to kill me, and I don't have the bandwidth for anything that isn't professional.
" I kept my voice warm. Direct. The same tone I'd used to decline a hundred similar invitations in New York — clear enough to land, gracious enough to leave no bruises.
His smile didn't falter. If anything, it widened — the corners pulling up in a way that said he'd heard every word and filed them under things she'll change her mind about.
"Totally professional," he said. "Just dinner. Two colleagues. I know the restaurant owners — they're potential vendors for the Gala. I can make the introduction."
Smooth. He'd wrapped the date in business so cleanly I'd have to unwrap it to refuse, and unwrapping it would mean naming what he was doing, and naming what he was doing would make me the one who'd made it awkward.
I recognized the architecture. I'd watched men build it in New York conference rooms for a decade.
"Fine," I said. "As professionals."
"Great. I'll pick you up at —"
"I'll meet you there. I've got a site visit in Millbrook that afternoon anyway."
I didn't have a site visit in Millbrook. He didn't need to know that. What I needed was my own car, my own keys, and my own ability to leave at a time of my choosing without being trapped in the passenger seat of a man I hadn't decided to trust.
"Sure." The smirk was still there — tucked into the corner of his mouth, settled in, comfortable. The smirk of a man who believed he already knew how this story ended and was being patient about the middle. "I'll text you the details."
He walked to his car. I stood in the parking lot with my bag on my shoulder and Hunter's words from Dottie's sitting in my chest where they'd been living for two weeks.
Just be careful with that one.
I stood in front of my bathroom mirror at six o'clock on a Friday evening, applying lipstick I didn't want to be applying, wearing a black blouse and good jeans, and earrings that said I made an effort but not that kind of effort.
My hair was down. My phone was on the counter with the restaurant address pulled up. My car keys were in my hand.
The face in the mirror looked like a woman who had the situation under control. Polished. Professional. One dinner. Get through it. Maintain the relationship with Penny's office. Come home.
The face in the mirror also had Hunter Blackwood's voice playing on a loop behind her eyes, and she couldn't figure out how to turn it off.
I grabbed my bag and walked out.
Garrett was already at the table when I arrived. He stood when he saw me — chair pulled out, wine already poured, the whole production choreographed with the precision of a man who had run this playbook before.
"Jessica." He waited until I sat. "You look incredible."
"Thank you, Garrett."
The restaurant was quiet — low lighting, white tablecloths, the kind of place that exists in every small Texas city for people who want to feel like they're somewhere else. He'd chosen well. The wine was good. I'd give him that.
"So tell me about the Gala," he said, leaning forward on his elbows. "Mom says you've got the whole county talking about it. January, right? Black tie?"
"First Saturday of January. Two hundred guests. I'm still fighting with the florist about centerpiece height, which is a sentence I never thought I'd say out loud, but here we are."
He laughed — warm, responsive, hitting its mark. "And the Spring Showcase? I heard you landed the Blackwood ranch as a venue."
"Maggie's horses are the main attraction. I'm just the woman arguing about tent placement."
"You're being modest."
"I'm never modest. Ask anyone."
His eyes crinkled. His body angled toward mine.
He asked about the vendor budget and whether I'd considered regional wine pairings for the Showcase, and whether the county board had signed off on the concert series yet.
Good questions. Well-timed. Delivered with eye contact that was steady and warm and just slightly too calibrated, like he was hitting marks on a script he'd written before I arrived.
And then minute thirteen showed up.
I was mid-sentence — building a thought about the vendor layout, my hands moving the way they do when I'm working through a spatial problem — "So the issue with the east paddock is drainage, right? If we put the marquee tents —"
"What you want to do," he said, his voice arriving on top of mine like a truck merging without checking the lane, "is put the main stage facing west. The sunset does half the work for you. Trust me, I've been to enough events on that property —"
I closed my mouth. The end of my sentence — about the drainage gradient and the tent placement I'd been calculating for two weeks — dissolved in the air between us. He kept talking. He didn't register that I'd stopped.
It happened again two minutes later. I started telling him about the florist situation — "Clara Mae actually had a brilliant idea about —" and his voice was there again, landing, overriding, his thoughts replacing mine like a track being laid over one that was already down.
The waiter appeared. Garrett turned to him without looking at me. "She'll have the filet, medium rare, with the roasted vegetables. And I'll take the —"
"Actually." My voice was calm. The smile was the NYC one — the one that looks warm and feels like a closed door. "I'll have the salmon. Thank you."
Something moved behind Garrett's eyes. Quick.
Cold. A flicker of something underneath the polish — there and gone in the space between one blink and the next, the way a snake moves in tall grass.
You don't see it. You see the grass move.
Then the charm was back, the laugh, the easy apology, his hand landing on my arm.
"Sorry, sorry. Force of habit. My mom always says I take charge too much."
I moved my arm. He touched it again. I moved it again. He put his fingers on my forearm a third time, like my boundary was a suggestion he'd considered and declined.
The dessert arrived without my ordering it. A chocolate something, delivered with his smile and a "trust me, you'll love it" that assumed trust was a thing he'd already earned instead of a thing he hadn't come close to.
He leaned back. Stretched his arm along the back of the booth. Relaxed. The posture of a man measuring the evening by his own experience and finding it excellent.
"You know what I think?" he said. "I think you must be relieved to be back somewhere where people take care of their women."
He said it warmly. He said it like a gift — here, this is what we offer, men who take care of you.
My stomach dropped. Cold flooded my arms. I looked at him across the table.
Past the jacket and the manners and the Mayor's golden boy.
Past the smile that arrived a beat too fast and the charm that fit like a suit he'd been measured for.
Underneath all of it — underneath the polish, the compliments, the three touches on my arm — was a room he'd already furnished with his own expectations.
Their women. Like I was something that belonged to a place instead of something that chose it.
Like ten years of building myself into a woman who answered to nobody was a phase I'd outgrown, a fever that had broken, and now I was home where someone could take care of me the way a man takes care of something he considers his property.
The cold in my stomach turned to something harder. Something with edges. I set my wine glass down — carefully, precisely, the way I'd learned to set things down in New York when the alternative was throwing them.
I finished my wine. The chocolate dessert sat between us, untouched. Cooling the way everything about this evening was cooling — the conversation, the air, the last shred of benefit I'd been extending to the doubt.
"Thank you for dinner, Garrett." I was standing, bag on my shoulder, my voice hitting every note of pleasant-but-final. "I've got an early start tomorrow."
"Of course." He stood. Buttoned his jacket. "We should do this again."
"Have a good night."
He walked me to the door. His hand found the small of my back — warm, proprietary, settling into the curve of my spine like it planned to stay. I stepped sideways, and the hand fell away. I didn't look at his face because I didn't want to see what was on it.
"Let me walk you to your car."
"I'm fine. It's right there." I pointed. I smiled. I gave him nothing.
The parking lot air was cool on my bare arms. My heels clicked on the asphalt.
I got to my car, opened the door, sat down, and closed it.
The dome light faded. The lot went dark except for Garrett's SUV two spaces over, where he was taking his time — checking his phone, adjusting his mirror, performing the unhurried departure of a man who wanted me to know he was still there.
My hands were on the steering wheel. My knuckles had gone white.
My jaw was clenched so hard my back teeth ached.
The place on my lower back where his hand had been pulsed like a bruise — I could still feel the shape of his fingers through my blouse, the warmth of his palm, the casual ownership of the touch.
My skin crawled. The sensation was specific and visceral — not fear, not yet, but the bone-deep revulsion of a body that has been touched by someone it didn't invite.