Page 52 of Say the Words
His usual mischievousness fell away, replaced by a tender look of concern. “Are you sure? Might do you good to get out a little.”
I nodded. “I’m sure.”
He watched me another minute but seemed to think better of pushing for a deeper answer.
“That’s probably better for me, anyway,” he said with a fresh grin. “You’d just be dead weight with the ladies.”
Pop smacked him on the arm. “Be a gentleman.”
Jed put one hand over his heart. “I wouldn’t dream of being anything else.”
He gave another grin that probably worked wonders on the women of Magnolia Ridge and disappeared out the front door.
Pop turned to me, shaking his head. “I hope he works through this soon.”
“Works through what?”
“That.” He nodded toward the door, like Jed’s ghost still stood there. “His loneliness.”
I snort-laughed at that. “I wouldn’t say Jed’s very lonely.”
He mostly spared me the details, but let’s just say Jed’s social calendar didn’t have many blank spaces.
“He could spend every night with a different woman and still be lonely. Your brother’s hurting, he just doesn’t want to see it.” Pop leveled a more serious look at me. “It can be hard for a man to be alone.”
Pretty sure he wasn’t talking about Jed anymore. Either way, I wasn’t in the mood for a conversation about lonely men right now. I stretched my arms wide and faked a huge yawn. “I think I’d better get to bed.”
He seemed to store away whatever he wanted to say. “Get on up there, then.”
“Goodnight, Pop.” I gave him a quick hug and darted up the stairs.
With the echo of Ty’s kiss still burning on my lips and my blood pulsing with stifled hopes, I couldn’t bear the idea of talking about Ty with my pop. Whatever he wanted to ask me could wait for another day. Maybe by then, I would have an answer.
SEVENTEEN
june
The morning’s dismal,gray light suited my bleak mood just fine. I set up shop at my pop’s kitchen table, arranging virtual rooms on my laptop and sending off designs to clients I would never meet, wind whistling against the house. After so many days of mucking around at Ty’s ranch, staying home felt like playing hooky from my duties. I reminded myself that the quick designs and simple mock-ups my e-customers requestedweremy duties, but my thoughts kept drifting to the horses on the ranch.
Let’s be real. I mostly thought about the rancher, the source of my bleak mood.
The memory of that kiss we’d shared sent a never-ending waterfall of shivers tumbling down my spine. I wasn’t sure I’d ever been kissed like that before, like I meant everything in the world to a man. He’d held me like I was precious to him, like the kiss meant something.
Showed how much I knew, since Ty had also said the kiss had been a mistake. I’d already been down that road with one Hardy. I wasn’t sure I could handle it a second time.
Ty wasn’t Bret, I knew that. But if he was so sure he would wind up hurting me in the long run, I shouldn’t let myself get carried away just because we’d shared one amazing kiss. But, oh, the ghost of that kiss haunted me, echoing in the back of my mind until I could hardly think straight.
Nope. That was the way of France. I’d told myself to be a robot, and a robot would absolutely not get caught up in emotions over some surly rancher.
Pop walked into the dining room decked out in his orchard finest: Coveralls and work boots. “How goes the internet work?”
I moused over an image of a plush armchair and dragged it onto a picture of my client’s sparse bedroom. “I’m doing a room refresh for a newly-divorced woman in Vermont. She wants the feminine room of her dreams now that her jerk of a husband’s no longer around to tell her it’s too girly.”
His eyebrows lifted. “They usually give you that much information about their personal lives?”
“Not usually.” Most of the time, clients kept the information on their request form to facts about their tastes, interests, and vision for the room, but every once in a while, someone took the three-hundred-word limit as a challenge.
“You going over to Ty’s after you’re done?”
