Down Home Cowboy

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Down Home Cowboy Page 25

by Maisey Yates


  She couldn’t get lost in the moment. His steady, solid presence beside her. Anticipating sex later. Feeling not quite so...alone. It would be far too easy. And she knew better than that.

  The brewery was already crowded, the tables inside full, the tall chairs at the bar occupied. But she didn’t mind, because even though it was windy she was happy to take a seat out on the deck that overlooked the harbor.

  Except the view blurred when she looked across the rough-hewn table at the man sitting opposite her. But he... Well, he was in distressingly sharp focus.

  His dark brown hair ruffled in the wind, the lines around his mouth looking especially deep at the moment as he looked past her and out at the water. There was something sexy about those lines on his face. Lines he had earned, she knew.

  There were smile lines around his eyes, grooves between his brows that showed he had spent a good deal of time frowning too. He had probably smiled on his wedding day. And then again when Violet was born. Had probably frowned a lot after his wife had left, and then over the past few years doing his best to raise a daughter on his own.

  Absently, she reached up and brushed her fingertips from the corner of her eye down to the edge of her lips. Trying to see, she supposed, if the events of her life—good, painful and egregious—were written as clearly on her face as they were on his.

  And if they were, would he look? Would he wonder? He had asked about her marriage. And she had told him. Had told him more than she had ever told anyone else.

  Their waiter appeared suddenly with two menus in hand and the sort of demeanor that told her—before a single word was spoken—that if she dared ask about any of the craft beers on the menu she would be treated to a treatise on the subject. His hair—pulled back into a small bun—only confirmed this suspicion.

  He was handsome, in that skinny jeans and band T-shirt kind of way. But Alison had discovered that she was more a Wranglers and cowboy hat kind of girl.

  She laughed when Cain made the grave error of inquiring about one of the beers on tap. Which earned him a long-winded explanation that included the words hoppy and notes of pine.

  Cain selected one that Alison noted had not been compared to a tree, and when their waiter was out of earshot he pulled a face. “You know, half the point of drinking beer is because you don’t have to get into all that crap involved in wine drinking. Why is a good and simple thing being ruined?”

  “Many people would argue that it’s being refined,” she said.

  “I prefer my beer to be sold by a frog or Clydesdale. That’s as fancy as I need it to be.”

  “All the beer is local, or mostly. And a lot of it is made by our very own Ace Thompson. He owns the bar too.”

  “I didn’t figure there was more than one guy named Ace in town.”

  She smiled. “What are you going to eat?”

  “I was hoping you would recommend something, since you’re a local.”

  She laughed. “Are you expecting there to be some kind of local delicacy?”

  “Sure. Why not? In Texas we have barbecue. You have...?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Kale? Quinoa?”

  “I’m sorry, are you listing foods or are you sneezing?”

  She laughed, a strange giddy feeling racing through her. “You would consider these adjacent to a sneeze, I’m pretty sure. But, since we’re coastal, I can confidently recommend anything that comes from the sea. Or any burger on the menu made with Garrett beef or steak from the Dodge Ranch.”

  “What they need on this menu is cheese from the Laughing Irish.” He frowned. “And pie from you.”

  “That would be cool,” she said. “But I’m only human. I can only bake so many pies.”

  “I guess it would require a little bit of expansion on your part.”

  “Someday,” she said. “Someday that might be nice. For now, working with Grassroots on special events is going well.”

  “Violet really enjoyed helping you with the wedding. At least, I think that’s what her grunted responses to my questions meant.”

  “I’m glad you were asking questions.”

  Their waiter returned with drinks and took their dinner orders. She got salmon, and unsurprisingly Cain opted for steak and potatoes. She chose to take that as a sign that keeping things casual was good. Because Cain would probably always want steak and potatoes. He seemed like that kind of guy. Sometimes Alison wanted a salmon. And she didn’t need a man in her life to tell her she couldn’t have salmon.

  Not that anything more serious was on the table, and this was just a dinner date. Really, the only thing that was on the table was the salmon and steak the waiter placed before them.

  “Good?” he asked as she took her first bite.

  “Yes,” she responded.

  He was looking at her while she took a bite of her vegetables. Just looking. She took another bite, then set her fork down. “Is there something interesting about the way that I chew?”

  He picked up his own fork and took his first bite of dinner. “I like looking at you.”

  As compliments went, it wasn’t particularly florid, but she liked it all the better for that. “Thank you. Though it makes me wish that I’d brushed up on my table manners a little more.”

  “I like your table manners too.”

  She smiled, her fork poised in midair. “This has taken an odd turn.”

  “I like you. That’s what I’m saying. Is that weird?”

  “I don’t know.” She supposed it wouldn’t have been if they were teenagers. Instead of a couple of damaged adults playing at having moments of happiness.

  “I’m not good at conversation,” he said, finally. “At least, not when I care about how the conversation goes. It’s fine when I don’t care. When I don’t worry about whether or not I’m saying the wrong thing or being offensive, or whatever.”

  “I take it with your brothers you don’t care,” she said.

  “No. Maybe I should care more. It’s not like we have a relationship built on being raised together. It’s all blood. Which is kind of a strange thing when you think about it. It takes a lot more than that to make a family. Blood doesn’t cover everything. Hell, being with someone for years and years doesn’t cover everything. I’m kind of an expert on that. Still, my brothers seem to put up with me.”

  She was tempted then to ask him for more information. More information about how they had grown up. How he had grown up. What it had been like to know he had brothers out there, but not to be with them. She was an only child, so she didn’t really understand the sibling connection.

  It was clear to her, though, that the Donnelly brothers had a connection, even if it hadn’t been forged by a life spent together. Blood mattered. But she could also attest to the fact that blood wasn’t enough. Wasn’t the be-all and end-all. Family, love, was more complicated than all of those things.

  Blood wasn’t sufficient enough to make her parents love her, not really. Raising her wasn’t enough to make her parents love her. Marriage vows hadn’t been enough to make her husband love, honor and cherish her.

  Blood wasn’t enough to make things easy between Violet and Cain.

  “Nothing just happens,” she said absently.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I mean, love, family... You can’t just live in the same house, share the same DNA and expect for those things to create bonds. There’s a lot more doing involved than you might think.”

  “Sure as hell,” he said. “My father donated sperm to my conception and then went... God knows where. I saw him a handful of times when I was growing up. Mostly my connection to the Donnelly name comes down to it being written on my birth certificate, and to the fact that my grandfather wanted to know his grandchildren, even if his son didn’t want to know his boys. As for my mother...” He shook his
head.

  She waited for him to finish, but he didn’t.

  “I was never enough,” she said, wrapping her hand around her water cup and turning it absently, watching as droplets of condensation traced lines through the mist that had formed on the glass. “Just never good enough. Not even close. And like I already told you, I rebelled against that idea pretty hard. My house was so quiet, and everybody was so repressed. I remember looking at my father once, with that kind of brutal posture that he had and thinking that if I hugged him hard he might crack into pieces. I didn’t think about that much though. Since, you know, the appeal of hugging somebody who clearly doesn’t want you to hug them is pretty limited.”

  She swallowed hard. “Even when my mother was sick...it didn’t soften either of them. She died just short of my nineteenth birthday and I kept thinking...if I stayed and took care of her she’d realize that I mattered. That my dad would realize it. It didn’t happen. He didn’t even hug me at her funeral.”

  He shifted in his seat, and she sensed a strange recognition growing in the space between them. An intense kind of longing that seemed to rise and swell along with the waves out across the water.

  “That’s the problem with reaching out to people, isn’t it?” he asked, his gaze intense, the muscles in his hands, his neck, his jaw drawing tight. “They might pull away.”

  She sighed. “I guess I never really asked. I did the caregiving thing just after high school, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell my mother I wanted...that I wanted her to love me. Not even when she was dying. When I was younger, I threw myself headfirst into all the messy, intense, dramatic stuff I could find as a teenager. A group of friends who got drunk and stupid in the woods at every opportunity. Who laughed and shouted and hooked up with each other and kind of reveled in the fallout of those things. Because it felt real, and bright, and after spending so long feeling like I had to be quiet, like I had to be a little more dull, a little less loud in order to be acceptable, I just... I liked it. But then it backfired on me. And I found out that aiming straight for the opposite of what I had been raised with wasn’t necessarily the best choice.”

  He said nothing, he just placed his hands on the table, rubbed them together as he looked out at the ocean. Finally, he took another sip of his beer, and then he looked at her. The intensity in his gaze just about knocked her back. Hit something deep at the center of her heart that radiated downward, all the way to her fingertips. She didn’t know what it was. She just knew that she felt connected to him in a way that she had never felt connected to anyone before.

  “I tried,” he said, his voice rough. He lifted his hand, scrubbing his palm over his face. “My mother drank. Well, she still does. She drinks, she gambles, she does whatever she can to waste a few hours of her life, to make it all go as fast as possible. In my opinion, she’s waiting around for death to show up.”

  “That’s...grim.” Not unlike a point in her own life though. Where she had spent a good amount of time being comforted by the fact that her misery wouldn’t last forever, since she wouldn’t live forever.

  Things were different now, thank God.

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “Pretty damn grim. I asked her why once. I was a kid, I don’t know how old. But I came out of my room and she was getting drunk so she could go out. She did that. Went out after I went to bed every night. Nothing ever happened to me. She didn’t bring men back to the house, and I suppose that was her version of keeping me safe.” He shook his head, taking another sip of beer, interrupting his own story with a long pause. “Anyway. I asked her why she didn’t smile. I asked her why she was always so sad.” He looked down into his glass, the corner of his mouth twitching slightly. “She said it was because of me. Because she never wanted a kid, and because having one made everything so much harder. So much more expensive.” He lifted his glass, taking another drink. Then he set it back down with a click. “I don’t ask anymore. I just don’t. I never did, not after that. When something is wrong I never ask, because inevitably I feel like the answer is going to be me. Which is some narcissistic fuckery, I’m not going to lie. But you don’t forget your mother saying something like that to you.”

  Her heart felt like it was unraveling, right at the center where she had felt that sharp stab of pain for him. Now it felt like so much more than just pain. It felt like everything was falling apart, like she was falling apart.

  She didn’t want it. Didn’t want to feel that, didn’t want to be disconnected. To be this bound to a man she couldn’t keep, didn’t want to keep, had no room for. It was different when she helped women at the bakery, when she heard their stories. When she heard about the men in their lives that had let them down, about the pain and abuse that they had endured. It hurt, but it didn’t destroy all the defenses that she had built inside of her. It didn’t reach her down in her most vulnerable places, places she had learned to protect out of necessity.

  She had walled off things inside of her long ago, things that she knew she had to protect from Jared, from her parents before him. And now she just felt... Open and bleeding, naked in a way, completely unable to blunt the impact of what he had just said to her.

  He had heard his mother say the things she had always feared might fall from her own parents’ lips. He had asked, and on the other side of that question had not been reassurance, but that dreaded confirmation that seemed to await a special few children who just weren’t loved by the people who had created them.

  She knew it. Because it was her. She felt it because it was him.

  “She feels the same way, doesn’t she?” he asked, his voice rough. “Violet. I make her feel that way. Like I might be miserable because of her.”

  “No,” she said, reaching across that space and putting her hand over top of his, the response coming easily, viscerally. “She doesn’t. Or maybe she does sometimes, I don’t know. Because being sixteen is hard, and it hurts. And you spend a lot of time dealing with worst-case scenarios and trying to hurt your own feelings before anyone else can. But that doesn’t mean she thinks that, not really.”

  “That’s the problem. That’s the damned problem. I never asked Kathleen what was wrong, I never tried to get to know her, because I was always afraid of what the answers would be. I’ve done the same with Violet. I did it because I never wanted... But that’s the thing. You protect yourself and you end up separating yourself. Separating yourself from the people who need you close.”

  She closed her eyes, trying to cut through the tangled-up thoughts that were slithering through her mind like eels. “No,” she said again, opening her eyes and meeting his gaze. “Because if she asked, you wouldn’t say what your mother said. I know you, Cain Donnelly. And Violet isn’t the reason that you’re miserable. She’s the reason you do everything. She’s the reason you breathe. If she asked you, that’s what you would tell her, and it would be the truth.” She meant that more than just about anything she had ever said before. And she was certain of it. Certain down to her bones.

  Down to that ratty, unraveling heart of hers that she hated to give any credit. That she really didn’t want to trust.

  “But she shouldn’t have to ask,” Cain said. “I need to tell her.”

  As quickly as the unraveling occurred, it stopped. A band wrapping up tight around all her insides now, as if her body was attempting a hasty repair. But it seemed to wrap around her throat too, almost strangling her.

  He was a good guy. A good father. He was just good. She had seen so many people who weren’t, they both had. She was...happy for Violet that she had him.

  She didn’t know happiness could hurt so much. Could make it hard to breathe. Could make it feel like something was stabbing through the base of her throat.

  “You should,” she said. “Tell her.” She swallowed hard, trying to break through that restricted feeling, but only succeeding in spreading it downward toward her chest.

&n
bsp; “I will,” he said nodding. Then his gaze lingered on her for a little bit longer than she could handle. She looked down at her salmon, which seemed somehow less essential than it had earlier. Less symbolic and more like just a piece of fish.

  Cain, on the other hand, seemed a lot more important.

  They attempted lighter conversation through the rest of the meal, though Alison still felt like there might be a weight sitting on top of her shoulders. He paid the check, which made her heart do fluttery things and irritated her.

  Her heart should be too shredded to flutter. And yet, there it went.

  She wondered if that ridiculous organ would ever learn.

  “I would like nothing more than to go home with you,” he said, when they arrived at the front of the bakery. “But I think I need to go talk to my daughter.”

  She nodded, feeling annoyed because part of her wished that he would come upstairs with her, even though she wanted him to go talk to Violet now. Annoyed about basically everything, because they were supposed to have a dinner date, and it was supposed to be fun. Fun like the sex they were having. Light and freeing, and not something that took possession of her.

  She ignored the voice inside of her that whispered that the sex had never been any of those things either. That it was far too big to be light. And far too life-altering to be fun.

  No. She wasn’t having that. Wasn’t listening.

  “You do,” she said, taking a step away from him.

  “You’re not getting off that easy.”

  He moved in close to her, wrapping his arm around her waist and drawing her up against him. He took hold of her chin, tilting her face up, the motion much more gentle than anything she had come to associate with Cain. He dipped his head, pressing his lips gently to hers. Featherlight. Maddening. She wanted the hard press of his mouth, the hard press of his whole body. Wanted to be consumed by him, possessed by him. Because this, this little tease just left her mouth feeling tingly and swollen and utterly unsatisfied.

 

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