by Megan Crane
“I can see you’re not dead, Grandma.” Devyn smiled as she straightened. “Because I don’t think heaven looks anything like Jackson Hole. Certainly not with all this snow.”
Elly eyed her. Devyn braced herself.
“Men don’t like funny girls,” Ellie told her, matter-of-factly. Boom, Devyn thought. Bomb dropped. “They like to be the funny one in the relationship. No wonder you’re always single.”
Devyn laughed, good-naturedly enough. “All the men I’ve dated find me hilarious, actually.”
“Is that why none of them stuck around?” was her grandmother’s tart rejoinder. “No one wants to marry a stand-up routine, Devyn.”
“Now, Elly,” came the low, always gruff voice of Devyn’s grandfather as he walked in from the other room. It was like a warm hug, even before he pulled her into one. Between the two of them, Grandpa was the warm blanket and Grandma was the inevitable itch. And somehow, Devyn found them both delightful. Grandma’s claws and Grandpa’s hugs alike. Did that make her perverse? Or just...their grandchild? “The girl doesn’t need you messing around in her affairs.”
“Forgive me for noting that she’s a little long in the tooth to be cracking jokes all the time,” Grandma said with a sniff. “It’s not a good look on her mother, either.”
“It’s okay, Grandma,” Devyn said, grinning at her. “We’re all cursed, remember? I don’t expect I’ll ever find a man. Dying alone is all I have to look forward to.”
“Well,” her grandmother said, eyeing her. “I expect you’ll have your jokes to keep you warm, then.”
“Ouch,” Luce said from her position across the room. “Does that mean you’ll freeze to death?”
Which was a mistake on her part, Devyn thought, because it directed Grandma’s attention onto her. She grinned at her cousin as Luce fended off the usual dark comments about her fatherless boys. And her insistence on raising them by herself.
“I insisted that Hal stop cheating on me,” Luce replied, a little edgily.
“Vows are vows,” Grandma retorted. She glared from Luce to Grandpa, who, as ever, appeared genial and unconcerned about all the vows he was rumored to have broken in his day—not that anyone dared discuss that directly. “Marriages aren’t supposed to be disposable.”
Devyn sat with her grandparents after Luce ushered her boys out, supposedly because it was time to clean them up a little bit and then shove some food into them. But really, Devyn could tell from her cousin’s face, because she’d gotten Grandma-ed.
“Where’s Uncle Jason?” she asked after Luce had gone and all the attention was on her again. “I thought he was coming down with you guys.”
“He and two of his girls are coming in later tonight,” Grandpa said. “I think he’s anxious about leaving the bar.”
“That saloon has survived over a hundred years of blizzards and fires, outlaws and whatnot. It can survive one Christmas without Jason Grey scowling down the place.” Grandma sniffed. “Might do him good if it burned down.”
“Nobody wants Grey’s to burn down,” Grandpa said, shaking his head. “What a thing to say about our family’s history.”
“We’re Greys whether we’re in that saloon or not,” Grandma retorted. “It doesn’t wash off if you cut the cord and step away from Marietta. You know that full well.”
It was funny, but Devyn felt the same pull to Grey’s Saloon and Marietta even though neither had ever figured hugely in her day-to-day life. She wasn’t even properly a Grey by name, though that had never mattered much to her, because she knew she was a Grey anyway.
There had been all those summers, wandering around in a pack of her cousins with no parental supervision—because no one needed it in a town filled with so many watchful eyes, out there where there was nowhere to go but up into the mountains. There had been all those hot days on the streets of pretty little western Marietta with her family’s name emblazoned across the oldest building in town, and etched deep into her heart. So deep that all these years later, she could feel Marietta and that saloon every time it beat.
Does that mean Chicago is where you just pretend to be above all this? a voice inside of her that sounded a lot like Vaughn’s demanded. Because it sounds like what you love is this circus, after all.
Devyn shoved that aside. And she stayed for dinner, which was one of Grandma’s funny little attempts at resistance. She’d packed cheese and crackers all the way from Montana, because, she said darkly when asked, there would be more than enough foolishness to suffer through with dinners here and there as suited Melody’s high-flying lifestyle. But that didn’t mean she had to condone it.
“How is having a real dinner condoning anything?” Devyn asked.
“If you would like to excuse yourself, Devyn, go right ahead,” Grandma replied.
Though knowing Grandma, it was more of a dare.
Chapter Ten
Devyn did not excuse herself. She sat cross-legged on the floor while her grandparents talked back at their news programs, eating cheese and crackers her grandmother had imported from Montana by hand.
Grandma made time during the commercial breaks to say the kinds of things she always said. Grandpa responded to all attacks and asides the way he always did.
And it wasn’t until Devyn was swaddled in her winter clothes once again and headed back out into the snow that she realized she finally—finally—felt filled with the Christmas spirit.
Apparently, all it took was her grandmother’s caustic tongue and a meal she never would have eaten if left to her own devices.
Her grandparents’ hotel was only a few blocks from Jackson’s center square, so Devyn decided to walk. The December night was thick and dark, with faint snow flurries here and there as she picked her way down the center of the snow-packed streets, only moving over to the side when the headlights of oncoming cars tracked over her every now and again.
It was quiet. Hushed save her breathing in the frigid night.
When she made her way out of the dark side streets and straight on into the center of Jackson Hole, the lights seemed to dance as she moved. Bright. Happy. Merry, the way they should be at this time of year. There were clumps of people making their way around the square, up on the wooden sidewalks and out in the snowy streets, just as she was. Laughing groups moved in and out of this restaurant or that bar.
Devyn could feel the cold on the part of her face that was left unprotected. And ice formed where she breathed into her scarf.
The iconic arches made entirely of antlers, with one that read Jackson Hole, WY in case she didn’t know where she was, shone out there in the December dark. And she felt entirely too many things deep inside of her. The pull of the circus, the sweet madness that was her family, that she pretended not to love when she was locked in her hermetically sealed Chicago life. Because she was the cousin who liked order. She was the one who insisted on control after a childhood of being buffeted here and there by Melody’s latest whims.
Or do you only think you like those things? that voice inside her asked. Because claiming them as integral to who you are is the only way you can prove you’re nothing like your mother?
She could see her breath, leaving her in a great cloud, out there on the dark streets lit up all around by the shops and restaurants. The streetlamps. All the happy, jolly people. She could see her breath, and she could feel it, as if she was releasing something she hadn’t known she’d been holding tightly to, deep inside.
Because the truth was, Devyn was as much Melody’s as she was anyone else’s. She was a Grey. Messy and imperfect through and through, no matter how much she pretended otherwise when she was off living her solitary life away from the rest of them.
Nights like this, she couldn’t remember why it was so important to her that she be different.
And maybe that was why she found herself walking another few blocks in the bitter cold over to Vaughn’s hotel. She pulled her hood up over her head and kept her face tilted down as she walked in, skirting around the
edge of the lobby as she headed directly into the stairwell in case anyone she knew was hanging around.
She waited there for a moment, listening to her own heart pound, because she knew that if any member of her family was around and had seen her, they’d either come right after her or text her. Immediately.
But her heart slowed from all its wild pounding and her phone stayed quiet.
Devyn ran up the stairs, afraid to let herself identify the things she could feel inside of her. Something about Melody and messes, her grandparents and Grey’s Saloon. All those Marietta memories. Christmas and the cold.
The choice she’d always thought she had to make between duty and disaster.
And a kind of anticipation, bubbling up like joy.
Devyn didn’t want to examine it. She didn’t want to think about it at all. She just...walked down Vaughn’s hallway and stood at his door. And she knocked on it before she could think better of it. Before she could even ask herself what her plan was—what she would do, for example, if the door opened and Vaughn’s father was standing there.
This is a mistake, she told herself.
But whether she was second-guessing herself or not, it was too late. She could hear the deadbolt, and assumed he’d looked through the spyhole to see who was out here. It was too late to run.
Then the door swung open, Vaughn was there, and running was the last thing on Devyn’s mind.
His hair looked as if he’d been raking his hands through it, possibly for hours. He was wearing a T-shirt and loose exercise pants. His feet were bare, which...did things to her while she stood there dressed for a blizzard. He looked grouchy and preoccupied and good.
God help her, but he looked so good.
“Did I order room service?” Vaughn asked.
He wasn’t smiling. There wasn’t even a hint of a curve on that mouth of his that had been so close all afternoon, yet completely out of bounds. But there was still something in that dark gaze of his that made her tremble, deep inside.
Then smile herself.
“I’m pretty sure you ordered a circus,” she said. “And here I am, ready and willing to deliver all three rings.”
“Maybe I don’t want a circus.” His gaze was challenging, a lot like his unsmiling mouth. “Maybe I want nothing more in my life then an orderly woman who knows how to clean up a mess or two.”
“What do you think a ringleader does?”
He still looked forbidding, but Devyn could feel the change in the air between them. That’s what she told herself, anyway, when she reached out and pushed on his chest, as if she was going to force her way inside.
She knew perfectly well he could have stopped her if he wanted to, without even trying very hard. He was so much bigger than her that she couldn’t have moved him in a million years if he didn’t let her.
“That’s the sort of abuse that get circuses shut down, by the way,” he said, looking down at her hand on his chest as if it was something else entirely. Like a whip.
“I think you can handle it,” Devyn said, her voice quieter than it should have been. Almost as if she was admitting all those things that wound around inside her and made her cheeks too hot.
Vaughn fell back and ushered her in beneath his arm, then closed the door behind them the way he had the other night.
“Were you followed?” he asked, an edge in his voice that made her feel off-balance. “Did you climb in a window? Maybe crawl in through the basement? Because heaven help us all if anybody saw you here with your stepbrother. What would they say?”
“Oh, don’t you worry your pretty head about that,” she said airily. “I have it all figured out.”
By which she meant, she had a hood.
“I’ve never been anyone’s dirty secret before.” Vaughn walked past her, not quite brushing against the sleeve of her coat as he moved from the foyer into his living room. “I don’t really know how I feel about it, to tell you the truth.”
“Is dirty a bad thing, suddenly?”
“This isn’t the good kind of dirty, darlin’.”
But he didn’t expand on that. Or even look at her while he said it. He went and sat on one of the couches, picking up the acoustic guitar he’d obviously set aside when he’d gotten up to answer his door. He ran his fingers over the strings, plucking out a little tune she didn’t recognize.
“Yes or no question,” she said from her place in the foyer. “Are there troubadours in Nashville?”
“It’s a city built on music and filled with people who sing it and play it. What do you mean when you say troubadour, exactly?”
“You know. Someone who sings on the streets.”
“I like to call those people musicians, myself.”
“Or buskers, right? Isn’t that a word?”
“I think you’re trying to ask me if I sing for pocket change on street corners,” Vaughn said, his drawl a little deeper and a little darker than before. “And the answer is yes, I’ve done it. But no, that’s not how I make my living. I’m sorry if that ruins your fantasies of me as the little match girl.”
“It kind of does, actually. Christmas is destroyed now.”
He laughed, but she had the sense that he hadn’t wanted to. Or that it surprised him, anyway.
She realized she was still standing in the foyer, and this wasn’t going exactly how she’d imagined it might. Which was to say, he wasn’t taking charge the way he had the other night. The lights were all on. No one was throwing back whiskey.
Which meant, of course, that if she wanted something, she was going to have to go get it.
Knowing the man the way she did—or had, long ago—she wouldn’t be at all surprised if he planned to sit over there across the room until the sun rose, to wait and see if she would chicken out and run back out into the safe, almost-stepbrother-less life she’d plotted out with such precision.
But Devyn had no intention of doing that.
She unzipped her parka. She stuffed her mittens in the pockets, then shrugged out of it. She unwound her thick, wide scarf and crammed it into one of the sleeves, then threw the whole mass of her winter coat over the nearest chair. She perched herself on the edge of the chair so she could unlace her boots. Then she toed them off, one and then the other. That left her in her polka dotted socks featuring llamas, the black pants she’d pulled on over her long johns, and the wool V-neck sweater in a Fair Isle pattern she’d worn over the top of her base layer.
And realized that she was going to overheat and die in this hotel room, where Vaughn had clearly jacked up the heat.
So she pulled off her socks, baring her feet, too. And then she rolled off the pants, because her long johns were black and looked close enough to leggings. Then she set about removing her upper base layer without actually taking off her sweater.
“Are we in the seventh grade?” Vaughn asked from across the room. “You remember that I’ve actually seen your breasts, right? Seen them. Felt them. Sucked on them—”
“Thank you. I remember.”
But she finished the delicate little operation anyway, aware that she probably flashed him the better part of her abdomen while doing it. Then again, that had kind of been the goal. Because when she started over toward the couch, Vaughn wasn’t paying attention to his guitar the way he had been before. He was watching her instead.
And she might not know what went on in his head, but she knew that look.
She felt it. Everywhere.
She settled on the couch cushion next to his, folding her legs beneath her as she sat.
“What are you doing?” she asked. Very casually, as if they weren’t sitting, all alone, in the hotel room where they’d had sex.
“Writing a song.”
There was something about the way he looked at her when he said that. Another challenge, if she wasn’t mistaken.
“A good song?”
“I prefer to write bad songs, of course. The worse the better. People only think they want good songs, but they don’t. Not really
.”
Devyn smiled. “Sing it for me.”
She had been teasing him. Poking at him, anyway. Doing whatever that thing was she couldn’t seem to stop doing when she was around him. As if there were storms upon storms charging around inside of her, and she had no idea how to get them out.
Sitting next to Vaughn was exactly where she wanted to be. And yet it still wasn’t enough. Her skin felt as if she’d put it on inside out. She wanted to touch him, crawl over him, lose herself in him.
Again and again.
But at the same time, there was something about the way he sat there, hunched over that guitar, his fingers moving in a nimble kind of magic across its neck. He was coaxing out a tune of low, mellow notes that she wasn’t sure she’d be able to hear from five feet away.
And yet they filled her.
They poured into her, like some kind of waterfall, and she had no idea until now how thirsty she’d been all this time.
Her whole life.
“It doesn’t have any words yet,” Vaughn told her. “Some songs come from words. Others come from melodies. This one is just a little tune at the moment, no more, no less. It could go either way.”
“Do you write a lot of songs?”
“It’s more accurate to say that there’s music in my head and sometimes, if I’m lucky, I convince it to come on out.”
He didn’t look up at her as he said that. He kept his attention on the guitar, and Devyn felt the strangest sensation move through her. It was as if she was watching something else entirely. As if every time he moved those fingers, he was strumming his way into her.
Maybe the cold had made her silly. But she was sure she’d never seen anything as sexy or as devastating in all her life as Vaughn with that guitar.
“How did I live in the same house as you and not know you played music?” she asked after what felt like a long while, filled with this song of his that he was making right there in front of her. “I feel like that’s something that would have come up.”