Page 103 of Then You Happened
She laughs and waves her free hand in the air in indifference. “Jack Sutton. Rancher. Seeker of helpless females he thinks need help.”
“You’re far from helpless,” I say as my phone vibrates, yet again, in my pocket. “You hungry?”
“Starving.”
“I need to run into town to get a few more things. How about you can ask me anything you want when I come back bearing food.”
“Food?” she asks, and I allow the rare treat of eating out to change the subject I’m not ready to broach. A few hours won’t change the inevitable that I’m not sure how I’m going to fucking deal with, though.
“Yep. Food. I’ll pick some up. What do you want?”
“Anything. Everything. And chocolate. Definitely chocolate,” she murmurs with a smile turning up the corners of her lips.
“Everything it is,” I say and give in to the temptation at my fingertips. Leaning over, I brush my lips against hers.
“No! I’m gross,” she says, pushing against my chest but then fists her hands in my shirt and kisses me back.
It takes every ounce of strength I have to pull away from her soft tongue and gentle sighs, but I have to take care of a few things before we can get to this.
“Food. You’re distracting me,” I murmur against her lips. “I need to go get food.”
“And chocolate,” she says, and I can feel her lips smile against mine.
“And chocolate.”
“LAUREN,” I say and groan internally as I lean my head back against the seat of my truck. I’m parked on the shoulder of the road about a mile away from the ranch so I can have this conversation in private, but the smell of the Italian food next to me is making me hungry, and I just want to get off the phone so I can get back to Tate. “I’ve got to get back to work.”
Tate is probably still busting her ass getting the bunkhouse ready while I’m out here trying to get my sister sorted out. My sister. My burden.
“Haven’t you been playing this long enough?” she gripes as my niece sings shrilly in the background. “At what point are you going to stop playing this game, Jack? You did what you said you were going to do. You can say you fulfilled the promise. Hand over the check. Don’t hand over the check. The only thing I care about is that you get your ass back home.” Where her tone starts out playful, it ends angrily.
“Fulfilling the promise is more complicated than I thought,” I murmur and wonder if that’s technically a lie.
“I’m ignoring that you said that. I’m pretending that I don’t hear the tone in your voice that, God knows, I’ve heard it before. You better not be—shit, Jack. There’s so much wrong with this. Don’t you know that?”
I do know it, and I don’t want to fucking talk about it.
“How was your meeting tonight?” I ask, playing on her need to be the center of attention.
“I didn’t have time to go. There—”
“Goddamn it, Lauren. Why the hell not? You promised me you’d go.”
If I could crawl through the phone and strangle her, I would. She wonders why I took off? Between our dad needing to control my every move and her sucking all of the oxygen out of every room, there wasn’t enough space or air for me to breathe.
“And you promised me you wouldn’t fall in love with her.”
“No, the promise I made you was that I’d be home in time for the calving season. My word is good. You know that.”
“And so is mine.”
“I love you madly, Lauren, but you also drive me up a wall,” I mutter as I start the truck and shift it into drive. “I need to go back to work, and you need to call your sponsor. I’ll be home when my contract here is up. Good night.”
The bunkhouse is lit up like Christmas when I walk into it. The space is nothing fancy, with four bedrooms that branch off the common area. The kitchen is in the middle with a large table where I have binders that detail the history of each of our forty horses laid out. Old-school rodeo posters are framed and hung on the walls, and a television sits on the far side in front of a worn couch.
The binders are a visual reminder of what lies ahead of us in this coming month. All the hard work we’ll have to put in and the schmoozing along with it to make someone believe in us enough to give us the contract.
I walk from room to room, looking for Tate. There’s mine with my stuff strewn about the small space. The beds in the others are still unmade, but the fresh sheets sit folded atop of them.
