Page 29 of Charming the Cowboy
“What do I not know about you?”
“Don’t worry about it. Worry a lot more about doing something that I don’t know about. Little brother, you’ve gotten boring.”
“I’m not… What?”
“I love you. But, come on. You need to get your life together. And if Eliana Sanderson is into you, then maybe you should see where that goes.”
“I already told you–”
“Yeah. I know. Cooper, there’s always a million reasons not to do something, and oftentimes a tractor accident that you didn’t know was going to happen coming your way. So I think in the end, you have to decide… what kind of life do you want to live?”
“One where I’m not killed by a tractor.”
Hank chuckled. “All right. That’s fair enough. I’ll be honest with you, though, I don’t think you would be. You’re a good guy. A lot of women would be lucky to have you.”
“That’s almost nice, Hank, and a little unnerving.”
“I’m nice.”
Cooper shook his head, and got up into the truck. “I’ll see you later.”
He didn’t like that his attraction to Eliana was so obvious to Hank, but he had to hope that Hank was the only person it was obvious to. Of course, driving her necklace directly into town the minute he found it as an excuse to make contact with her after that awkward moment the other night didn’t really make a case against that attraction.
He did his best to keep his thoughts tightly collected while he drove down to town.
He parked his truck at the curb near the path to The Water Witch, then walked down the path and into the shop, where he heard Eliana talking enthusiastically to a customer.
It took him a second to realize that she was actually doing a tarot reading back in her fortune-telling room. “I know The Tower is a really confronting card, but a lot of times we get it when our life is filled with things that aren’t serving us. And sometimes it can feel really destabilizing, because we were living in The Tower, but nothing falls away that we were meant to keep.”
He could hear the stress in the other woman’s voice, and the relentless calm in Eliana’s. He wondered if she really believed that. Not just what she was saying about The Tower, and about things in your life falling away that you didn’t need, but if she really believed that the cards had something to tell her.
He looked around the room, at all the color-coordinated displays. Crystals and tarot decks, plants and bundles of herbs he couldn’t identify.
It was packed, but cheery. Maximalist and beautiful. Somehow very Eliana.
The women who had been in the reading walked out of the room, then out of the store, before Eliana popped out behind them and watched them leave. She had a surprised look on her face. “Oh. What are you doing here?”
“You left something at the ranch.”
“I did?”
“Yeah.” He was reaching into his pocket for the necklace as he continued speaking. “Didn’t sound like a very fun reading.”
“Eh. It wasn’t the cheeriest. I’ve gotten to the point where pulling big cards doesn’t really scare me, but then, I pull them a lot, so the thing about doing a daily draw is The Tower can mean your to-do list isn’t going to get done, you know? But whenyou’re doing sort of bigger questions, The Tower can have more intense implications.”
“And do you really believe in all that?”
“Generally speaking. Although I think the cards are about following your own intuition.”
“Not like communing with the spirit?”
“Me personally? No. I think it’s me tapping into a feeling about what’s happening in the universe. In the world around me. And that’s where that knowing comes in. And I can do it for other people, too. But it’s all infinite probabilities and possibilities, because somebody could make the decision to change their whole life tomorrow, and it wouldn’t necessarily be because I pulled The Tower card for them. Though it might be, it might be because it made them think about the things in their life that needed to fall away. You always have agency, that’s the thing.”
“Yeah. I guess so.”
“But, whenever somebody wants a reading to make them feel better – and doesn’t everybody want one for that reason? – I really hate having to navigate around sticky cards. Some people are ready for it. And some people really aren’t.”
“You said that only the things you don’t need fall away. Do you really believe that?”
