Page 10 of Charming the Cowboy
“Do what exactly?”
“I’ve never known anyone quite like you,” he said. “It seems to me that everything you touch unfolds exactly the way you say it will.”
She waved a hand, laughing. “I told you. I have a knowing.”
“But you’re not psychic.”
“No.”
“What’s the difference?”
She shrugged. “I don’t really believe that psychics are real.”
He lifted a brow. “That’s your hard line? Psychics?”
“I don’t mean… maybe that’s not really a fair thing to say. I think some people are very… gifted in their insight and intuition. I just think it’s not the psychic hotline, you know? I don’t think you can just call up the universe and demand it give you the information that you want so that you can tell someone their fortune and get paid.”
“Didn’t your grandma tell fortunes for money at one time?”
“I didn’t say that my grandmotherwasn’tdefrauding people. I think she probably embellished what was actually justintuitive. Grandma, Mom, me, we all have that intuition. It runs in the family.”
“And why doesn’t Marcus have the deep knowing?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe testicles block the reception to the other side.”
She was looking at him with a level of sincerity that made him wonder if she actually meant that. But then she smiled. Right then, their server came and set their drinks down between them. And she grabbed hold of hers, taking a long sip.
“Well, he does seem to have a knack for things going his way.” For a while, anyway. Marcus could start something, and it rarely finished. But then, he had always attributed that to his friend’s short attention span. Marcus was the kind of guy who had a lot of ideas. Then wanted to try to execute all of them.
Which just wasn’t possible. He had started and crashed several businesses already, and they were only just now thirty. Eliana was definitely steadier within her eccentricities. But there wasn’t a single person in their family who wasn’t eccentric.
Maybe that was something that he liked about them, honestly. His family wasn’t eccentric. They were… stoic.
His friend had always been emotional. Dynamic. His dad had died a few years after Cooper’s, and when they’d all come to town, it had been a fresh grief. Marcus had been able to cry about it. In front of Cooper, even.
Cooper had never managed to do that.
He wanted to cry for his dad, but whenever he thought about it, it got stuck in the center of his chest. A big ball of emotion that he couldn’t shift.
He had just learned to live with it.
But he doubted anyone in the Sanderson family had ever held onto an emotion that they didn’t express.
It was terrifying and fascinating all at once.
The food arrived, and Eliana began painstakingly explaining her plans.
“How exactly did you get roped into all this, anyway?” he asked.
“Oh. Well, because I do have the witchy store. And I get so much traffic this time of year. And I think they just figured I would kind of instinctively know how to appeal to the crowd.”
“Is that offensive to you? I mean…”
She laughed. “No. I play into it. It’s good for business. People get into that spooky season vibe, and even though I don’t consider my store spooky at all, it definitely helps drive interest in October.”
She sat there for a moment. “We do need to work on decorations for the wagon.”
“Excuse me?”
