Chapter 19 #2
“Wyatt.” June’s attention lands on me with the precision of a woman who’s been waiting for exactly this opening. “Seven o’clock. Don’t be late. Daisy knows the plan.”
“It’s not a plan, June. It’s dinner.”
“It’s whatever you need it to be, honey.” She folds the grocery bags into neat squares. “But if you show up in the shirt you wore last Tuesday to move cattle, I will personally burn it in the yard.”
* * *
I shower and trim the beard back to something that looks deliberate instead of neglected. And then I stand in my bedroom with a towel around my waist, staring at the closet like it’s asked a question I don’t know how to answer.
A man puts on a clean shirt because he’s going to a restaurant and that’s what people do. Doesn’t mean a thing. Doesn’t especially mean a thing that I’m standing here considering three options when I normally pull the first thing off a hanger and get on with my life.
The blue chambray. It’s clean, fits, and Maggie told me once it does something for my eyes, which is the kind of information a man files away and pretends he didn’t.
I pull it on and roll the cuffs to the elbow the way I always do because anything past the forearm makes me feel like I’m being interviewed for a bank loan.
The hat goes on. Comes off. Goes back on. Then off, and I leave it on the hook and tell myself the decision is made.
In the mirror I look like a man going to dinner. A working dinner. The kind a rancher has with a journalist who wrote an article about his ranch, where they discuss the piece and make polite conversation and he has her home by nine.
Professional. Controlled.
The man in the mirror doesn’t believe a word of it, but I’ve been lying to him for six years, so he’s used to it by now.
I can hear them in the kitchen as I come down the stairs.
Colt’s voice, Maggie’s laugh, June giving instructions nobody asked for.
I grab the truck keys off the hook by the door, move past the kitchen before any of them can look up, and I’m through the front door and off the porch before a single Hartley gets the chance to make it a thing.
The sun’s still high, the way it is this time of year when twilight lingers till after nine. The yard is warm and golden and a meadowlark is making noise somewhere in the fence line.
I could walk to the cabin. Instead I pull the truck around and park outside her door. Then I kill the engine, get out, and knock before I can talk myself into driving straight past and heading for the county line.
The door opens, and every wall I’ve ever built comes under immediate and catastrophic threat.
She’s in black. A simple dress with thin straps.
It fits close to her body in a way that makes my mouth go dry, and against the black, her skin is warm and golden, freckled across the collarbone and shoulders and every other place I have no business looking.
Her hair is down, honey-gold against all that black, and she’s looking up at me from five feet of nothing with an expression that is cautious and careful and entirely too close to the one she wore in the orchard before everything went to hell.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey.” My voice comes out level. Minor miracle. “You ready?”
“Ready.” She pulls the door shut behind her, and as she steps past, her scent hits me in the narrow space between the cabin and the truck.
The same warmth that was on my pillow this morning.
On my sheets. The scent I woke up grinding into the mattress to at five in the morning, and now the source of it is standing eighteen inches away in a black dress and I need to move before my body makes a decision my brain hasn’t approved.
I open the passenger door for her because it gives me something to do with my hands that isn’t reaching for her. She climbs in, and I close the door, walk around to the driver’s side, and rest both palms flat on the roof of the truck for one long breath before I get in.
The cab is small. It has always been this size, but it has never been this small, because Daisy Monroe has never been in it wearing that dress with her hair down and her scent filling every inch of air between us.
I start the engine and pull down the drive, and neither of us speaks for the first two minutes.
“How was the fence line?” she asks, and her voice is careful in a way that tells me she’s holding something back too.
“Held. Mostly. Three posts above the creek need replacing come fall, but it’ll see us through summer.”
“Good.”
“Yeah.”
Silence fills the truck. The county road unspools ahead of us, and in the distance, the mountains are catching the lowering sunlight.
“June tells me there’s a mechanical bull,” she says, and there’s a dry edge underneath that almost gets me.
“Apparently.”
“And a lasso station.”
“So I’m told.”
“And the Gazette wants action shots.”
“That is the information I have, yes.”
She turns toward the window and I catch the ghost of a smile in the glass. There and gone. The cab shrinks another six inches.
“It’s just dinner.”
She doesn’t answer that. I don’t look over to see her face, because I already know what I’d find, and because the road ahead requires my full attention, and because if I look at her right now the last wall I’ve got is going to come down before we reach the parking lot.
The Blackstone Inn appears around the final bend, lit up warm against the valley. Through the wide front windows, I can see the dining room dressed in white linen and candlelight with the kind of careful detail that has June Hartley’s fingerprints on every surface.
Around the side, the terrace is strung with lights and littered with hay bales. The unmistakable silhouette of a mechanical bull is ringed with padded mats. And a photographer from the Gazette is already setting up, testing his flash against the angles.
I pull in, kill the engine, and for a second, neither of us moves. The truck ticks as it cools. Inside the Inn, a burst of laughter carries out through the open windows on the warm evening air.
Daisy reaches for her door handle, and I’m out and around to her side before she can open it. Because if I’m going to do this, I’m going to do it right, even if right means holding the door for a woman I can barely look at without every thought in my head falling apart.
She steps down, and for a moment we’re standing closer than the occasion calls for.
Close enough that I can see the amber flecks in her brown eyes and the scatter of freckles across the bridge of her nose that I’ve spent six years pretending I haven’t memorized.
Near enough that the warmth from her bare shoulders reaches me across the inches between us.
I step back and gesture toward the entrance.
“After you.”
She holds my gaze for one beat longer than is safe for either of us. Then she turns, and we walk toward the Blackstone Inn side by side, and I have the length of a parking lot to get my head right.
Working dinner.
Tom’s daughter.
Home by nine.
The poker face holds. It has always held. Thirty-five years of practice and not once has it cracked when it mattered.
I pull the door open for her and follow her inside.
It’ll hold. It has to.