Page 17 of Opposites (Never) Attract
Even though I knew the ranch was named the Swinging D because Duncan McGraw, the original owner, hanged the first man who tried to steal some of his land, and that man’s name happened to start with a D.
However, given the name also sounded slightly pornographic, it made me that much more stubborn.
And second, no one in that family ever took a minute to know me. I was just the oldest Calloway girl. The oddball. Smarty Sunshine. Why in the world would I go back and help them now?
Because Ethan McGraw is your brother in-law now and you love your sister?
Stupid guilty conscience.
Fine, but nobody needed me to go back home. If the McGraw family wanted to ask for some outside financial consulting, I could do that from New York. Which I would be doing for my mother and sisters.
But mostly, I’d be doing it for Harmony.
Harmony, who texted me daily after I left for college. Harmony, who, in so many ways, tried to make me feel normal when my default setting was…different.
I couldn’t say my other sisters, Bliss and Amity, and even my brother, Boone, hadn’t tried too. But they were years younger than me and so young when I left home, that we really had nothing in common.
But talking to Carter and giving him some advice was literally the least I could do for my family. I just needed Tag to understand it would be via Zoom because I wasn’t stepping foot in that town again.
I spotted his hat first. The only un-ironic cowboy hat inManhattan, and he was a head taller than everyone around him. I watched as a group of teenage girls filmed him on their phones as he walked by.
The cowboy hat and aviators were just frosting on the cowboy cake.
He’d invited himself to my spa appointment, and because I was a little evil, I hadn’t put up a fight. This wasn’t a facial and pedicure kind of spa appointment. No. I liked things a little more…intense.
“Sunshine,” he said, with that up ticked corner of his mouth. I could see my reflection in his aviators and I schooled my smile into something a little more reserved.
“Kaitlyn,” I corrected him.
He looked up at the name over the door of the salon.
Rejuvenation Athletaspa.
“That doesn’t sound relaxing,” he said.
“It’s not.”
I could not see what he was thinking behind those glasses, and I wanted to take them off of him. “How about we go do breakfast first? Get one of those bagels everyone says are so good here.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” I said. “Breakfast is included with my treatments.”
“What kind of breakfast?” he asked. “A bacon and egg breakfast or a berries and sludge breakfast?”
“I think you know the answer to that.”
“Am I really going to get a facial?” he asked, looking at the tinted windows and the thin elegant men and women coming out of the doors wearing big glasses and careful expressions.
“You did say you had clogged pores, but, no. There are any number of treatments you can select. But remember, you invited yourself to this, so you have to be a good sport.”
“I’m always a good sport.”
“Then we shouldn’t have a problem.”
“I’ll just do what you do,” he said.
Oh, the fool. My treatments were…painful.
For me, time was money. So I needed the most effective treatments in the least amount of time. Which called for extreme measures.
