by Anthology
***
To say nothing of the final rush toward Jenny’s big show of a wedding on Saturday, and all the events she was expected to be a part of leading up to it as Jenny’s Maid of Honor. Maids of Honor didn’t share their niggling concerns unless asked directly, she told herself sternly over and over again that week—and no one had asked her a thing.
So she kept her mouth shut and she lost herself in the wonder of Jasper’s touch, his voice, his mouth on hers, his powerful body above her and below her, inside her, until she felt cracked wide open. Changed. New.
“Did you ever want to live somewhere else?” he asked that Friday. Jenny’s rehearsal dinner had been earlier that night, and Chelsea had been unable to wait to slip away from the strange tension between bride and groom to be, unable to wait to run here, to Jasper, like he was some kind of homing beacon.
They were wrapped around each other in his bed now, and she could still hear his heart pounding in his chest below her ear. She smoothed her palm over it like she was trying to catch it, like fireflies in the summer.
“Of course,” she said. “I wanted to live anywhere else. Madrid. Sydney. Bora-Bora. I used to sit in the travel section of the bookstore and lose myself in daydreams for hours. I wanted to see everything.”
“What happened?”
His voice was that low rumble she loved more every time she heard it, and his fingers moved in her hair, toying with it like he couldn’t get enough of touching her. Like he wanted her that much. As much as she wanted him.
“Every time I had the opportunity, I didn’t want to go,” she confessed. She waited for some negative reaction along the lines of the pitying looks her sister Margot always sent her way, the exasperated sighs her brother Nicky always let escape him when he came back home and saw all the things Chelsea still loved, like it was all beneath him now. “Maybe I was too afraid. Isn’t that what keeps people close to home? Fear?”
His hand tightened on the back of her head, and he shifted, until she had no choice but to shift with him and look him in the face. Knowing how easily he could read her, she thought she’d never felt more naked than she did then.
“You don’t strike me as afraid of much, Chelsea, or you wouldn’t be here with me. Would you?”
She laughed, but it felt rusty, and she knew she should be worried about the heat she could feel pooling in the back of her eyes, making her feel glazed and precarious. Making her worry he was the only thing tethering her to the world.
“That’s where you’re wrong,” she said, her voice so much more ragged than she’d wanted it to be, sharing too much. “I can’t think of a single thing I’m not afraid of. I’ve been a coward all my life. I’ve hidden myself away here so I didn’t have to face it. But that’s the truth about me, Jasper. I’m sorry.”
He looked at her for a long time, then he tucked her back against her shoulder, and it seemed like he rocked her a little bit, just slightly, like he was trying to soothe away the sting of her words.
But Chelsea knew better. She knew they burned in her, that if he looked close enough, the truth of them was all he’d see. The idea of that was unbearable.
“I’ve spent my whole life looking for a place worth hiding away in,” he said after a while. “My daddy was a broken, bitter man. He used religion the way some men use alcohol, beating his form of humility into us. He used to pack my brother and me into his car and drive us on a tour of Dallas and all the things we’d never have. It took me years to realize it was what he couldn’t have.”
She leaned forward and pressed a kiss against the smooth skin of his shoulder.
“My brother Jonah and I decided we might as well show the old man the error of his ways.” His voice was so cheerful. That lazy drawl and the suggestion that this was all just a colorful story, with no ominous currents beneath to tear into him. But she knew better, somehow. So she held him in the dark, like this golden, beautiful man was as damaged as she sometimes feared she was, and she listened. “So we did. We did whatever the hell we could to make money, and it turned out, we were good at it. I found myself a trophy wife, bought myself a house to match. I have planes, cars. Motorcycles. I’ve been everywhere, Chelsea. I’ve seen everything I ever wanted to see, and then some.” He blew out a breath. “And about a year ago I was riding my bike through a part of the country I’d never seen before, and I stopped high up on a mountain road and looked out over this valley of yours, and I thought it looked perfect. It felt perfect.” He wrote something incomprehensible against the smooth line of her spine, shapes and letters, hieroglyphs. “I decided I didn’t want to be anywhere but here. So I don’t know. Are you hiding? Or is this just where you belong?”
***
Chelsea held on to that the next day, when she stood in the cool church that stood haughtily in the best part of town, filled to the brim with all of Marietta’s best and brightest. She held on to that hard as her all best friend’s dreams came to a screeching halt when Charles Monmouth III called off the wedding and then left, like something out of a nightmare, leaving Jenny to stand up on that relic of an altar and announce, in a bloodless voice, that the wedding was off.
It was good to belong to a place like Marietta, she thought, where even Mama could set aside whatever petty snobberies she used to while away her days in the face of a real, honest-to-goodness crisis. Where the people who knew and loved Jenny simply took charge of things so she could quietly disappear after making her announcement, taking responsibility for making the calls and relaying the appropriate excuses.
Where no one questioned the fact that Jenny’s Maid of Honor, who wished fervently she’d said something, had to sit by herself with her face in her hands for a little while, as if what had happened in that church had happened to her, too. Because everyone knew that she and Jenny had grown up in each other’s pockets, and that Jenny’s heartbreak meant Chelsea’s, too.
She showed up at Jasper’s while all the light was still pouring into the great windows that stood sentry all around his cavern of a loft, startling him. He started to speak but she shushed him, with her finger and then her mouth, hiking up the pastel Maid of Honor gown as she straddled him where he sat.
She didn’t ask, she took. She took. She set the pace, she let her head drop down and she bit into his shoulder like some kind of untamed thing, and she forgot. She forgot about broken hearts, about shattered dreams. About the promises men made, about the terrible things people could do to each other. She rode him hard until all of that faded, loss and fear and the rest, until there was nothing left in the whole world but that wildfire, that slick burn, that magical place they made between them.
Until she made them both cry out as they hurtled over the edge, together.
It was a long time later that Jasper stirred beneath her, his hazel eyes wise and kind as he cupped her face in his hands, gazing much too intently into her face.
“Do you want to tell me what that was all about?”
She looked at him, and felt jagged. Ripped into too many pieces to ever put herself back together. Like what had happened to Jenny today was foreshadowing. Like there was nothing to stop her from careening straight into that very same wall, and breaking just the same.
“No,” she said, and kissed him again, until he stopped asking questions that didn’t have answers, and took her to his bed instead.
And for the first time in her life, Chelsea found she wished the rodeo wasn’t coming to town that following week, because it meant that all the people she normally would have gone to for help or advice weren’t available. Jenny wasn’t an option, of course—but everyone else was too busy making sure Marietta was prepared for the influx of so many people, the participants as well as the audience, who would come from all over and expect the good old fashioned western rodeo the town had been putting on for seventy-five years. To say nothing of all the events surrounding it—the street dance and the parade, fundraising lunches and dinners, and the Saturday morning pancake breakfast that Crawfords had been flipp
ing pancakes at every one of those seventy-five years.
“I’m so disappointed about the depot,” Kira Blair, one of the Crawford Railway Depot Museum’s staunchest supporters, said when they saw each other on one of the roads outside of town that Monday, both stopping their cars to chat quickly before anyone else came along. “What was Tod thinking?”
“I’ve never been able to answer that question,” Chelsea said with a grin, making the other woman laugh. “If I had, the last couple of years of my life would have been very, very different.”
Kira looked as if she wanted to say something else, but one of the local ranchers drove up behind her in a big truck, and she only waved as she drove away.
So Chelsea pretended she was okay. Because she was okay, wasn’t she? This was what adventurous looked like. This was how it felt. Outsized and obvious, but still—better than what had gone before. Better than her whole, previous life.
Better than what had happened on Saturday to Jenny, certainly, even if she knew she was on her own kind of borrowed time.
“I don’t want to talk about the wedding,” Jenny said tightly when they met each other on Tuesday outside Copper Mountain Chocolate on Main Street. She forced a smile. “I know you have a thousand things to tell me. Let’s talk about that instead.”
“Of course.”
But Chelsea was more interested in taking Jenny inside and making sure she picked out appropriately medicinal chocolate. Jenny looked small and lost and unlike herself, staring fiercely through the display case at a selection of truffles, and Chelsea had no idea what to do.
“How is she?” Sage Carrigan, the owner of the chocolate shop and a friend, asked in an undertone from behind the counter.
“I don’t know,” Chelsea said softly. “How can she be?”
Sage had been a bridesmaid too, and they shared a look then, like they were both reliving those awful moments inside the church. Jenny’s brief disappearance and then her slow, horrible walk up the aisle in all that deafening silence, all in white and all alone.
“And what about you?” Sage asked, her dark look lightening as she looked from Jenny to Chelsea. “I’ve seen Jasper Flint. That man is hot.”
“We have very interesting discussions, Sage,” Chelsea said, pretending to be haughty. “I haven’t really noticed.”
Which made Jenny laugh, if only slightly, and that was what mattered. Not all the uncertain things that clamored inside of her, desperate to escape. This wasn’t the time for her worries. She knew that.
“How’s it going?” Jenny asked, and Chelsea wanted nothing more than to tell her. Everything. But that would be nothing but selfish. This wasn’t then time.
“It’s great,” she said. “Absolutely great.”
And then she smiled fiercely so neither Jenny nor Sage could see how desperate she was to talk to someone, anyone. How desperate she was to have her friends dismiss her terrible fear that it was the finest joke in Montana history that Chelsea Collier thought she could attract the attention of a man like Jasper Flint. To hear them instead staunchly insist that of course she was that beautiful woman she thought she saw reflected in his eyes on those long, heated nights in his loft, that only idiots could possibly think otherwise—
Idiots like Tod, apparently.
“Chels,” he said, coming up behind her while she was waiting for one of Mama’s prescriptions—because the enduring Silent Treatment didn’t mean Chelsea could forgo her usual chores and duties, it only meant they’d all be that much more unpleasant while she did them.
Chelsea started at the sound of his voice too close to her ear, dropping the cherry-flavored lip balm she’d been pretending to be so fascinated with while hiding out from Carol Bingley’s censorious gaze.
Some people, it went without saying, were less supportive.
“How many times do I have to ask you to stop calling me that?” she mused aloud. She leaned down and scooped the tube of lip balm from the floor, then slapped it back on its shelf. “That’s not a rhetorical question. I’m honestly curious. Do you not hear me when I ask you to stop or do you think I’m kidding? I can’t figure it out.”
He was frowning at her when she stopped talking, his boyish looks not striking her as at all charming any longer. Not when she’d experienced what it was like to spend time with an actual, grown man. One who had yet to lie to her, about anything, because he claimed he liked her. A lot. It was astonishing how good that honesty made her feel, she realized then, no matter where this thing between them was or wasn’t going. No matter how temporary it was.
“You’re making a fool of yourself,” Tod informed her. In that friendly way of his she no longer believed was particularly friendly at all.
She stared at him. “By picking up a prescription? How do you figure?”
“Don’t play games with me.”
“That’s actually hilarious, coming from you.”
“Listen,” he said, magnanimously. “I know I was harsh with you the other day in the office. I know that must have hurt. I’m not proud of myself. You walked straight into this guy’s clutches, and I get it, I do. This is my fault.”
For the first time in months, Chelsea looked at Tod and realized she found him nothing but entertaining.
“I can’t stand watching you do this to yourself,” he said in the same ponderous tone, and she believed he meant that. The jerk.
“And by ‘this,’ you mean trading up?” she asked innocently.
Well. Kind of innocently.
“You’re Chelsea Collier,” he said flatly, once again voicing her fears. This time, she liked it even less. “You have a certain reputation in this town, and you know that. You can’t start dressing like a barfly and hanging all over the first single man to look in your direction without people talking. What did you think would happen?”
“Oh,” she said, aware she was adopting little bit of that lazy drawl Jasper used so well, but she couldn’t seem to help herself. “You know. Nothing. Like what happened to you when I caught you with Leona.”
“I knew you were still holding on to that.”
He was less entertaining when she wanted to punch him, she found.
“I wouldn’t say I was holding on so much as it’s burned into my memory forever whether I like it or not, in a post-traumatic stress sort of way.”
She pointed at herself, then swept her hand up and down, taking in what Tod apparently felt constituted a ‘barfly’ outfit. A pair of trousers she’d worn to work which, yes, fit her. And a long sleeved t-shirt that also fit her, not too tightly but not too loosely, either, beneath a pretty blue scarf. Hardly Mata Hari’s first choice of vamping attire.
“But this? Is called shopping from my own closet.” It was true; she hadn’t bought a single new item of clothing. She’d simply stopped hiding herself away in the ones she had. “And the rest is called moving on. I would have thought you, of all people, would be thrilled.”
“I care about you, Chelsea,” Tod said, and though he used that pompous tone, the fact he also actually used her name struck her as something of a victory. “I don’t like to see you sink down to this level.”
“I appreciate that,” she said. And she tried to, she really did.
But it was the first time in memory that she’d been relieved to hear nosy Carol Bingley call her name.
She paid for Mama’s pills and stood there pretending she didn’t notice the way Carol was staring at her, until the other woman let out one of her trademark sniffs.
“Your poor mother,” Carol said, her voice dripping with censure while Chelsea reminded herself that this was a lonely old woman, not a monster. That this was what sadness looked like unchecked. “To see the Crawford name come to this.”
“Are the shades of Pemberley to be thus polluted?” Chelsea quoted theatrically, carrying on with the theme—and could see by Carol’s frown that she was not up on her Jane Austen. Not a great surprise. Chelsea smiled instead, though it was starting to feel a lot more like a grimace. “My m
other is fine, thank you. I’ll tell her you said hello.”
And still, she found herself knocking on Jasper’s door as soon as she could make it back down into town after another painfully silent meal with her mother, and she left her car parked right there in front of the depot like the red flag it was, announcing her scandalous whereabouts to anyone who drove by.
“You look a little…” Jasper paused, standing in his open door in nothing but the kind of cargo pants that hung low on his narrow hips and still made it clear he was the richest man in town. “Intense.”
“You look clothed,” she retorted, and his hazel eyes went from that gleam of amusement to pure gold in a single hot instant.
“Easily remedied,” he muttered, reaching out and yanking her inside.
And this was what mattered, she told herself as they succumbed to that wildness again, to the soaring fire and the shattering passion, right there on the other side of the door, up against his wall. These moments of the purest happiness were what she collected and what she’d hold close to her heart, like treasures, when all of this madness burned itself out.
Because she wasn’t the naïve fool people idiots like Tod seemed to think. It didn’t matter what Jasper had said about labels or restrictions. She hadn’t had to look at those intrusive pictures of the house he’d owned in Dallas that were splashed all over the Internet—or the woman he’d shared it with and called his wife, trophy or not—to understand that they came from completely different worlds.
She knew that better than anyone. She was the one who tasted this man, lost herself in him, knew every last inch of his glorious body. She knew what it was to hold him and what it was to be held down by him. She knew that heartbreaking smile and she knew his roguish grin. That delicious drawl, still as thick and smooth as honey when he wanted it to be. That clever mouth, and that shrewd intelligence he hid behind his Texan routine. The way he could take her in his hands and make her mindlessly and entirely his, every time.