Page 14 of Opposites (Never) Attract
“Kaitlyn.”
“It doesn’t matter what you call yourself,” I said. I put my napkin in my shirt and tucked into my steak. “This job is out of reach. Even for you. Old Man McGraw was looking for somecreativeideas. If he wanted to sell off the land, he could have done that himself. No, he wanted someone who could save the operation without doing the obvious. He thought it might be you, but I can see now he was wrong.”
I dumped all the little bowls on my potato and mixed it up.
Her eyes narrowed. Those high cheekbones crowding her eyes into slits.
“Are you using reverse psychology on me?”
“Babe, you’re looking at a man who herds steers for a living. Do you think I’m capable ofreverse psychology?”
I was hoping to God I was capable of reverse psychology, because that was the only way this was going to work.
We couldn’t beg Sunshine to come home. We couldn’t use family guilt to get her to come home. She certainly wasn’t going to do it for a town that had shunned her for the first fifteen years of her life.
No, the only way she was going to do this, was if she thought the town believed she couldn’t.
Smart money said she would succeed, if only to prove them wrong.
“I’ll think about it,” she offered. “Maybe. Potentially. Possibly. I mean, there are things I have to consider.”
“Of course,” I said, and did a little fist pump under the table.
“This all seems so outrageous. I wouldn’t have thought Mr. McGraw even knew my name.”
“He knew the names of all the Calloways,” I said, between bites of steak. “Especially the ones who look like your mother.”
“My mother is a red-headed knockout,” She shook her head, rejecting that statement. “I do not look like my mother.”
Was she saying she wasn’t beautiful? Or wasn’t a redhead?
My gut said both. She wasn’t grasping for a compliment. That wasn’t false modesty, it was the real thing. Shedidn’t think she looked like her ma because the small world she’d grown up in had long ago convinced her she didn’t. Because she didn’t have red hair.
So, it didn’t matter that the woman sitting across from me – who was a smokeshow if I’d ever seen one – had remade herself and her image in the big city. I knew the truth.
The ugly duckling was still inside of that beautiful swan.
“I wishI could say this was fun,” she said, as I opened the door to the restaurant and the sounds of the city came flooding back in. My time was up. I held the door and she brushed by me and pulled her hair from her overcoat. I caught a hint of her scent.
Expensive. Smoky and sweet. She smelled like satin sheets and good bourbon.
A woman on the street was shouting at a man for letting his dog shit on the sidewalk, and a teenager with earbuds walked by smoking a joint. He stepped in the shit.
“I wasn’t fun?” I asked.
She blinked. “I just meant…this wasn’t…you were here with an agenda.”
“Did I sway you?”
“Over dinner? Seems ambitious,” she smiled. The neon lights from the bar next door flickered red and blue over her perfect skin. She looked so city it almost hurt. “Look, why can’t I just reach out to Carter? He’s the oldest McGraw, I assume he’s now in charge of the Swinging D?”
“He is.”
“Fine. Then we can schedule a Zoom meeting and hecan walk me through the finances. I’ll even waive my consulting fee.”
“Not good enough, Sun. The mission was to bring you home.”
“Mission,” she said, and rolled her eyes, like I was pouring it on thick.
