Page 30 of Whiskey Moon

My heart races at the thought of seeing her again tomorrow.

Chances are, I’ll see her every day this week—but only because I can’t tell her a damn thing and she’s too persistent for her own good.

15

Blaire

* * *

“I have an idea.” I zip myself into a pair of Renata’s floral coveralls Tuesday morning before climbing into the cab of Wyatt’s idling truck.

“And what’s that?” He takes a sip of coffee from an oversized Stanley tumbler.

“Let’s play a game,” I say. “I’ll say one thing about myself that you don’t know, and then you do the same, and we’ll just go back and forth.”

“That sounds like a terrible game.”

“I’ll go first. I took an abstract painting class in college and the professor ripped my work to shreds in front of the entire class. He said his four-year-old could paint better than me. I thought he was joking, so I laughed—then I realized he was being serious. I dropped the class immediately because it was an elective. Six months later, he showed up at the restaurant where I worked, got plastered at the bar, and tried to ask for my phone number. I don’t think he realized I was the same girl. Anyway, I gave him the number of this spammer who had just called me … once you call those places, they put your number into a database and they sell it a hundred times over.”

“Vicious,” he says, a hint of sarcasm in his tone.

Maybe it was a silly little story, but it’s the kind of thing I would’ve rushed home to tell him about after a long day of classes. I want him to know what he missed out on—big or small.

“Your turn,” I say.

“Nah, I’m good.”

I give his arm a playful punch. “Try again.”

He sips his coffee once more, buying time I suppose. And he squints over his dash.

“Waiting …” I rap my fingers against my thigh.

Clearing his throat, he finally begins. “Few years back, I answered the door to this young woman holding a baby on her hip. I thought maybe her car broke down, or she was lost and saw a house and decided to ask for directions. But then she asked for Cash. Turns out, Cash had a kid he didn’t know about. He knocked up some girl over in Greenspout. She tried to pass the kid off as her boyfriend’s, but somehow he pieced a few things together and figured out it couldn’t have been his.”

I clap my hand over my mouth.

“So that’s the story of how Cash became a daddy at eighteen,” he says.

“Where’s the mom?”

“They switch him off every other week,” he says. “They’ve made it work, though it hasn’t always been easy.”

“Interesting,” I say. “But that story was about Cash … I wanted one about you.”

“None of mine are half that exciting.”

“Let me be the judge of that.”

“All right. Fine.” He adjusts his posture as we fly over a hill. My stomach somersaults on the decline. “Caught a man a few years back trying to steal some of our horses. I couldn’t sleep one night, so I went out to drive the range … saw this dark truck pull up along the side of one of our horse pastures—realized there was a trailer on back. I killed my lights, shifted into neutral, and coasted down to the bottom of the hill before grabbing my gun and heading their way. They almost had the first one loaded when they looked up and saw the end of my shotgun.”

“Oh my god,” I gasp.

That’s … hot.

“Told them to turn the horse back and there’d be no problems,” he continues. “For a minute, I thought I might meet some resistance, since it was two against one, but they backed off. Never saw them again after that.”

“That sounds terrifying … would you have actually shot them?”

“If it came down to them or me, I’d have done what I needed to do.”

I swear I heard Ambrose use that line once.

“I’m glad no one got hurt,” I say.

“Would’ve served them right, trying to take something that doesn’t belong to them,” Wyatt says with a shrug.

“Okay … I guess it’s my turn now … um, when I was twenty-one, my friends took me to this bar in TriBeCa, and long story short, someone stole my wallet and racked up almost eight thousand dollars in credit card advances. My father spent a half a year fighting with the banks trying to get those reversed.”

“Did you ever catch the guy?”

I shake my head. “It was a woman. And no. All we had was some grainy security camera footage of her at various ATMs in Hell’s Kitchen.”

Wyatt pulls into a field with a metal gate and a “No Trespassing” sign. In the distance is a herd of cattle, clustered together around a well. He checks the water tank and does a head count.

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