But all the same, I slid my palm against his and gripped tightly while I took the two stairs down.
I glanced up at him. "Thank you."
Again, I noticed a slight flush to his cheeks and wondered at it. "My pleasure."
We kept walking, and for just a few moments longer, I curled my fingers in, trying to capture the warmth that his hand had left behind.
Chapter 14
Grady
Thirteen hours after I picked her up, we were back in the car, exhausted, overwhelmed, excited, loaded down with useless swag and a billion business cards, and it was—without a freaking doubt—the best day I'd ever spent with another human being of the female variety.
After those thirteen hours, I was certain that Magnolia MacIntyre could take over the world if she wanted to. There hadn't been much time for us to talk in-depth at the convention because the space was big and loud and packed to the gills. More than once, I found myself leaning down so that I could hear her more clearly, and she'd look up at me with those eyes, and I could've sworn I saw something there. Something ... something new that hadn't been in her eyes before.
Curiosity, maybe.
Interest, possibly.
As we walked back to where the car was parked, a large group passed us, the lanyards around their necks proclaimed them as convention-goers. The men were either oblivious or assholes because they didn't move aside to make room for Magnolia and me to pass. I set my hand on her shoulder and gently guided her in front of me so the guy on the end didn't knock her over.
He held my stare as he passed, and it took every-fucking-thing in me not to shoulder check him when he did.
I was easily four inches taller, but on the flip side, I wasn't stupid, given he was walking with six of his buddies.
"Dick," I muttered, once they were out of earshot. Magnolia gave me a tiny smile as she moved back next to me.
"The world is full of them, unfortunately," she said.
I unlocked the car and then opened the back so we could set our bags inside.
"Doesn't make it right, though." I turned the key in the ignition once we both had our seat belts on. A bit over three hours in the car with her was all I had left. No interruptions from townspeople or twin sisters or ex-boyfriends.
"No," she agreed slowly. "But I'd rather be someone who knows how to pick their battles instead of just taking a baseball bat to the entire world. Because I'd exhaust myself if all I did was spend my time taking on each one."
I thought about that as I drove the car through Nashville and brought us a little bit closer to home.
"Sounds like you're speaking from experience there."
She smiled. It was a tired smile. "If I'd been walking with my daddy, he would've stopped the entire group and demanded that man apologize to me."
My eyebrows lifted briefly, but I couldn't even really pretend I was surprised. From what I knew of J.T., that was pretty on par.
"Should I have done that?" I looked over at her. "Just now."
"No." Her answer was firm and quick. "My daddy is a hothead of the worst order, so absolutely never take lessons from him on how to interact with ... anyone."
I couldn't help but smile. "He must do some stuff right."
She turned in her seat so she could face me. "What makes you say that? You don't really know him."
"He's successful and not just in business, right? From everything I've heard, he might be a bit ... abrasive, but he's got a wife who's smart and successful in her own right, whom he supports, and they have a marriage that's as solid as all those mountains that I look at every day." I kept my eyes forward on the road and decided to just ... not overthink what I was going to say or how I was going to say it. If this was the best thirteen hours I'd ever spent with a woman, and I'd hardly touched her, how badly could I screw this up? "He's got a daughter who's also smart and successful. I mean, I just watched you charm the hell out of every person we spoke to, and half of 'em didn't even realize what you were doing. If he can end each day knowing he's got a wife who loves him and a daughter who he's got to be proud as hell of, then that's a man who's done something right in his life." I smiled a little. "Even if he needs anger management therapy."
When Magnolia didn't respond right away, I risked a glance at her. She was staring out the windshield with a thoughtful look on her face.
"You know," she said quietly, "I've never really thought about it that way before."
"I am incredibly intuitive."
My gravely spoken answer had her cracking a smile.
"When Tucker broke up with me, I was so embarrassed," she admitted quietly. So quietly, that my heart sank like a rock.
Not because I couldn't handle hearing her say his name because I knew she didn't have feelings for him anymore. But I wanted to soak up all her hurt, absorb it into my skin so that she didn't have to feel it.
"How come?" I asked.
I'd never met anyone who'd ever made me want to do that before. Every relationship I’d had prior to laying eyes on Magnolia was light and easy and fun. Not frequent but about as deep as a cookie sheet. And in that car, knowing she was willing to confide this side of herself with me, I wanted nothing more than to pull those feelings away from her, even if it meant sitting in them alone.
She closed her eyes for a moment, just breathing. When they opened, I tightened my hand on the steering wheel so that I didn't reach for hers.
"When you have parents like mine, it's hard to face the fact that you were wrong about such an important thing." She glanced at me. "Love. Who you're supposed to be with. What your life is supposed to look like. And because I never saw it coming, my pride wasn't even bruised. I was just ... mortified."
My thumb tapped on the steering wheel as I tried to follow how we'd switched to this gear. What it meant for me and for her. For us. I wasn't blind to the change in her eyes during the previous thirteen hours.
"My parents broke every rule, every convention that they'd been raised in, by being together. Not even just when they got married, but they were in a relationship for years in a time when that was not accepted in polite society. And when you're wealthy"—she exhaled loudly—"polite society is where you find yourself."
She turned again, like she had earlier that morning, so her shoulder was braced against the seat, and I could see her face better.
"They weren't cowed by anyone, Grady. They refused to bow to pressure from their families who wanted them to be with someone else. They created a life outside of what anyone would dictate for them, and just like you've said, that's doing something right in life. It's building a foundation on the things that really matter. And then there's me." Her voice trailed off. "The product of that union, who only thrived in the structure that someone else built, who couldn't see just how much I was limiting myself, and limiting this man who I used to love, because I valued the safety of that structure over honesty."
I rubbed the back of my neck as I struggled to find the right words to say. There was no self-pity in her words, just naked vulnerability. The weight of that gift from this woman was not lost on me. It wasn't the time for a joke, which would be my default with just about anyone else.
"I think it's amazing, what your parents did," I said. "But everyone has a different path. And you're still on yours. Just because you're building your foundation in a different way doesn't mean it's wrong."
"No." She sighed. "But every time I see Tucker and see how happy he and your sister are, how perfect they are for each other ... it's a reminder of just how badly I could have messed up my life, and his, had she not shown up. My dad might be a hothead ..." Her voice wavered, and so help me, if she started crying, I'd have to stop the car and pull her into my arms and that was all there was to it. "He might piss off half the people who've met him, but he can look back at the choices he made and know he got this one big thing exactly right. All I see is how wrong, how miserable Tucker and I would've been."
It was a good thing that I had the task of driving. It was a
good thing that for the next three hours, I had something to do. Because the truth of what she was saying hit me like the entire city of Nashville just got dumped on my head.
How was I ever supposed to expect Magnolia to be happy if she was with me?
Being with me—no matter how right I felt we were for each other—was asking her to face her greatest failure, her greatest embarrassment, day after day. It was asking her to sit in a room over holidays and birthdays with the first man she loved. With the woman he'd moved on with.
Occasional run-ins at work were one thing.
Living her life, asking her to place that relationship front and center, was entirely different.
And I couldn't ask that of her.
Maybe that was the worst part of this stupid curse. The part no one wanted to talk about. I was hammered over the head—almost instantly—with my feelings for Magnolia. Someone might dismiss it as lust at first sight, something shallow and unbelievable, but it wasn't shallow. It was—simply put—certainty.
A sense of rightness that I'd never experienced.
But along with that came an unwavering instinct to put her happiness before mine.
It was why my cousin Levi had been able to set aside his feeling for Joss for five years.
It was why Grace did her best to stay away from Tucker when she knew he had a girlfriend.
And it was why, as I drove us back to Green Valley, I knew that unless Magnolia told me that I was the man she wanted, I had to step back.
Rightness and certainty only went so far, because if you didn't factor in the other person—their fears and doubts and whatever they were dealing with—it turned into something selfish and ugly.
The desire to wrap her in my arms and hold her, hold this person who I thought was precious and rare and incredible, who I thought was sexy as hell and beautiful and sweet and smart and funny, should never overpower my ability to place her wants and desires first.
If she noticed my silence, she didn't say anything. Which was good because I had to take a minute to mourn how good I'd felt with her for the previous thirteen hours. The first handful of days of working together.
It wasn't about being a martyr for my feelings for Magnolia, it was that certainty again. The certainty that she was more important than what I was feeling.
"I'm sorry," she said. "Listen to me, dumping my problems on you."
"Don't apologize," I assured her. I cleared my throat. "I'm not ... I don't always feel equipped to give relationship advice. Just making sure whatever I say doesn't make things worse."
She watched me carefully.
"You and Tucker were together for a very long time." I shook my head. "And I can't imagine how hard it must be ... to try to move on from that kind of relationship. Especially when you live in a small town."
"He seemed to do all right," she said wryly. Then her eyes widened. "Oh, that was insensitive, I'm sorry. Your sister really does seem like a kind woman. I"—she shrugged her shoulders—"I actually liked her when we met. She was nice when she didn’t have to be. And I don't mean to sound disrespectful."
"It's okay, really. I know what you meant."
She nodded. "Good."
Magnolia had no idea that what I said next felt like broken glass coming up my throat. That I could practically feel the damage done to my insides as I said them. "Maybe ... maybe that healing just takes time, you know? To realize that coming to the end of a relationship like that will look different for you than it did for him, and that's okay. Eventually, you'll know why it all happened the way it did, but you can trust that the embarrassment you feel now won't always be there."
Her eyes were serious when I glanced over. "You think so?"
I nodded. And as I did, I wondered if she could see what it cost me. "Yeah. Don't rush trying to feel okay with it. You don't need to compare yourself to your parents or Tucker and Grace, or anyone else."
"Just be myself," she said carefully. Still watching. Still studying.
This time, it was easy to give her a smile. "Yeah. Because you're Magnolia fucking MacIntyre, and that's more than enough."
"Such language," she tsked. But she couldn't hide her smile, slow and sweet and beautiful. "We've still got work to do with you, Grady. Good thing I'm a determined woman."
Certainty.
I felt it again, at the back of my head, that she was it for me.
I'd never been good at being patient. Never been great at sitting back and allowing life to unfold at its own pace. Setting the pace was more my style.
This, though, was different. She was different.
"Good thing," I murmured.
Chapter 15
Magnolia
The farther we drove, and the closer we got to home, the conversation turned back to "normal" stuff. As much as I valued everything we'd discussed, everything I felt safe enough to discuss with him, it was a relief. The elephants receded, and for a while, I felt like me. The Magnolia that didn't get to come out very often.
"What are you going to do with all that junk?" I teased.
"Marketing swag has a valuable place in this universe." He stuck his hand behind my seat and pulled out one of the fifteen travel mugs he was given. "Did you see this? I almost cried."
I laughed. "It better not find a place at the office because I have dreams about how well that place is organized right now."
Grady sped around a slow-moving vehicle, and the headlights briefly highlighted the strong bone structure in his face and the casual strength in his frame he carried with ease.
The longer I was around him, the more he reminded me of a mountain lion.
Not a regular lion, with a big roar and a solid block of muscle on a large frame. Grady was graceful in his strength. Underneath his unassuming clothes, underneath that charming exterior, he kept his strength contained until the right moment. One moment when you couldn't not see it.
With a smirk on his face, he leaned back again to set the cup back into the bag behind my seat, and I caught a whiff of him.
Even after the entire day walking around that massive convention center, he smelled good.
I tried to channel his very good advice and think about how I should just be myself for a while. But in the dark interior of the car, I wanted to do all sorts of things when that smell crossed whatever invisible barrier was between our seats.
None of them were proper.
None of them were polite.
I could feel my Southern ancestors blushing in the grave because of my thoughts, yet I couldn't bring myself to stop them. They rolled around in my head, gaining momentum. Thoughts of his teeth on my collarbone. My fingernails raking along his muscled abs and around to his back. Thoughts of him over me, thoughts of pulling, pushing, sweating, thrusting.
I waved a hand in front of my face, because if my hairline wasn't glistening with sweat, then I didn't know my own name. It was insanity.
Closing my eyes, I let out a slow, quiet exhale and brought up the one thing guaranteed to derail such a line of thinking.
"Speaking of Tucker and Grace," I said.
He glanced over at me. "Were we?"
"No."
Grady smiled.
"Do they know?" I hadn't wanted to ask. Because it was a reminder of how I'd started in this job in the first place. He had to smooth things over with them because of my choices.
His smile disappeared as he nodded. "They do."
"Do I want to know how it went?"
"They're both okay, I promise." Grady sighed. "Grace was fine. She kinda feels the same as you do. She liked you," he said with a tiny smile.
"Your sister is the instigator of one of the worst hangovers of my entire life."
He laughed. "She's horrible like that."
His voice was so warm, so full of love, that I forgot for a moment to think about Grace as Tucker's love and simply viewed her as Grady's twin sister.
"I don't believe you think she's horrible at all."
"You don't have any siblings, ri
ght?"
I shook my head. "It was one of the things Tucker and I had in common. All the parental aspirations fell squarely on our shoulders."
"Seems like you're both doing a pretty good job of not letting that tie you down anywhere."
"I suppose we are." Resting my head back against the seat, I stared at the dark, winding road and mentally calculated how long we had in the car. Less than ten minutes, probably. My thoughts weren't obscene anymore. They were sad. I felt like the best first date of my life was almost over, and instead of knowing I'd get a kiss at my front door at the end, I was going to wake up in my bed to the realization that it wasn't real.
"Tucker was surprised, but he trusts me. And he knows what kind of person you are," Grady said slowly. "The good thing for you is that they know how terribly I would've screwed this up on my own. If I didn't have someone like you to whip me into shape, Valley Adventures would've been nothing but a pipe dream."
"I'm going to ignore that because there's a time and a place for you to be unkind to yourself, and this isn't it."
He laughed.
"Tucker was really okay with this?" I asked. He hadn't really answered my question. Not in a way that felt dishonest but more like ... evasive. Like he didn't want to talk about it.
A muscle in Grady's jaw clenched. "He was."
"Good."
"I'm sorry I didn't tell you earlier." He looked over at me. "That I'd talked to them."
"Grady," I said on a laugh, "you don't have to apologize for anything."
The headlights from his car swept over the green and white sign that proclaimed the Green Valley city limits.
"Oh, I don't know about that," he murmured.
He slowed down a bit when a line of bikers roared past us. The line of Iron Wraiths was obnoxiously loud, and I sighed at the way they zipped around the yellow lines in the road. Every once in a while, I heard them go down the street just past my house.
Steal My Magnolia (Love at First Sight Book 3) Page 12