by Linda Seed
“… the cabernet?” he said. She hadn’t heard the rest because she’d been fixating on the timbre of that voice rather than the content of what he’d been saying.
“Uh … sure,” she said. It must have been the right answer, because he nodded as though his thoughts had been validated.
They ordered their wine, and when it came, she lifted her glass in a toast. “Seriously, Ryan, thank you for the skylight. That was above and beyond. I’m glad you didn’t break your neck trying to install it.”
“I almost did,” he said mildly.
“You did?”
“I did.” Amusement made the corners of his eyes crinkle, and she wondered if he looked like that in the morning when he first woke up, all sleepy and warm. “At one point, I lost my balance and started plunging headlong toward the edge of the roof. I wouldn’t say my life flashed before my eyes, but I was thankful my insurance is paid up.”
Her eyes widened. “Oh crap. What happened? Why did you slip?”
“I was distracted.” He took a sip of his dark red wine and peered at her over the rim of the glass.
“By what?”
That look of amusement deepened, and he hesitated. Then he said, “Well, let’s just say it’s not a good idea to talk to a pretty girl when you’re thirty feet off the ground.”
Gen’s first thought was that Lacy must have been visiting the ranch while Ryan was on the roof. How had that happened? Then it hit: He was talking about her. A shot of adrenaline made her pulse spike. She let out a gasp and pressed her fingertips to her mouth to suppress a giggle. “Oh, jeez. Are you saying that I almost killed you?”
“Almost.” He grinned at her. “Will wouldn’t stop ribbing me about it.”
She could feel the blush rise to her cheeks, and she busied herself straightening the napkin in her lap and lining up her flatware in neat parallel lines so she could avoid his gaze.
“Well. It’s good that you’re not dead,” she said.
“My mother thinks so,” Ryan agreed.
The waitress, a pretty blond woman Gen knew from the book club she attended at Kate’s shop, came and took their order. Gen ordered the bacon-wrapped filet mignon, and Ryan chose the gnocchi with wild mushrooms. When the food came, Gen offered him a taste of her steak.
“This is fabulous,” she said. “Here, try it.”
“Nah, thanks.” He waved her off. “I don’t eat meat.”
At first, that seemed like a normal enough thing for someone to say. Then she remembered what he did for a living, and her eyebrows shot skyward. “You don’t eat meat?”
“Nope.”
“You’re a vegetarian,” she stated again, just to be sure.
“Six years now.”
“But …”
He lowered his fork, and the look he gave her told her he’d had this conversation many times, with many people, and his explanation remained the same.
He pointed at Gen’s steak. “That fillet you’re eating?”
“Yeah?”
“I probably knew her.”
“Oh.” She looked at her plate, feeling uneasy. “I never thought of that.”
“My parents think I’m nuts,” he went on. “Especially my mom. She thinks every time I eat a bite of tofu I’m passing moral judgment on her.”
“But you’re not?” Gen ventured.
He waved a hand to dismiss the notion. “Ah, hell no. I mean, where would my family be if people stopped eating meat? But for me …” He shook his head. “I raised ‘em. I probably was there when they were born.”
When she hesitated to resume her meal, he laughed. “I don’t mind if you eat that,” he reassured her. “If I were bothered by other people eating meat, I’d have to get a new line of work.”
“I guess you would,” she said. She considered that for a moment. “But it bothers you enough that you don’t do it. So how is it that you can do what you do when you feel that way?”
He paused long enough that she believed he was trying to give her a real answer, one that wasn’t easy or glib. Finally, he said, “We—my family—have been ranchers for generations. It’s what we do. More than that, it’s who we are. It’s a connection to my grandfather, and his father, and his father before that. It’s what makes me a Delaney.”
She wondered what it would be like to feel that kind of connection to family, that kind of meaning, that sense of belonging.
“My mother and father are divorced,” she said. “My father is an accountant. My mother is a professional bride. She’s on her fifth husband. I haven’t even met the most recent one. They live in Palm Springs.” She wasn’t sure why she’d blurted all of that out. She felt the quick sting of tears in her eyes and blinked them away.
“You know …” He tilted his head to look at her. “There’s more than one way to form a family. You can have your own. You can join somebody else’s. Or you can make one out of spare parts. That’s what you’ve done with your friends. The four of you—you’re family.”
How could he understand that so fully when he was looking in from the outside? How could he know? But he did know. Somehow, he did.
“Yeah. They’re my family. Kate, and Rose, and Lacy … and even Jackson now, too. I’m lucky to have them.”
He reached out and put a hand over hers on the table, and a gentle flurry of wings fluttered in her belly. Right then, there was no longer any doubt about what kind of date this was.
They talked about Ryan’s family, and their childhoods—his on the Delaney Ranch, hers in a series of different schools as her mother moved from one husband to another—and his nephews, and the things he wanted to do to improve the operation of the ranch. By the time they finished dessert, it felt at once as though they’d been talking forever, and that no time had passed.
When the bill came, he tried to pay, and she playfully smacked his hand away and reminded him that it was a thank-you dinner for the skylight that had almost killed him. If a skylight had almost killed her, well, then he’d be welcome to pick up the check.
He walked her out to her car, and she didn’t want to get into it and drive away. She wanted to stay with him, even if they were doing nothing. Even if he were going to the post office or the DMV, even if he were planning to clean out the rain gutters. She just wanted to be with him.
“It’s still early,” he said. “Do you want to take a walk?”
“Sure.”
He reached out to her, and she put her hand in his. They walked down Burton Drive and then, because the full moon lit up the night well enough that they could easily see their way, they climbed the stairs that led up a woodsy, fern-covered hill to the Cambria Pines Lodge. They opened a little white gate and entered the lodge’s gardens, a fantasy world of manicured hedges, heirloom rose bushes, stone fountains, and delicate little flowers in a riot of colors.
They sat on a bench beneath a trellis covered in flowering vines. The moonlight bathed everything with a silvery glow that made the garden look enchanted, as though a tiny troupe of elves might dance by at any moment.
Ryan was holding her hand again, and she felt the delicious tension hovering between them like the memory of joy, like a miracle.
When he kissed her, she melted, and everything inside of her dissolved into him with the sweetness of warm honey.
They parted, and she sighed his name. His earthy, manly smell mixed with the scent of flowers and lush greenery. He tasted like comfort—like the sanctuary of home.
She slowly opened her eyes. “I haven’t kissed anybody in a long time,” she said.
“Why not?”
She shook her head and didn’t answer.
“You should kiss people. You should always kiss people.” He put a hand on her face and slowly ran a thumb over her cheek.
If he’d taken her home, she would have asked him in. She wouldn’t have been able to stop herself. But they’d met at the restaurant, so he walked her to where her car was parked at the curb in front of Neptune.
“Ryan …” Sh
e started to say something, but then she didn’t know what to say. There was so much going on inside her head. She wanted to kiss him again. She wanted to tell him not to toy with her if the one he really wanted was Lacy. Most of all, she wanted to tell him not to hurt her, to be careful with her heart. She didn’t have the words, though, and so she just looked up at him and stayed silent so he wouldn’t hear the catch in her throat.
“Thank you for dinner,” he said. He took her hand in his and kissed her, just briefly, before opening the car door for her and seeing her safely inside.
She shut the door, rolled down the driver’s side window, and leaned out toward him. “I had a really good time,” she said.
“I did, too. Will you be coming to the ranch tomorrow?”
She gave him a wry grin. “I’ll have to. Now that Kendrick’s got his skylight, he’s damned well going to use it.”
He nodded and smiled, and gave the hood of her car a friendly tap before walking down Main Street toward his truck.
Chapter Fifteen
“So, you and Gen Porter, huh?” Jackson was throwing darts over at Ted’s, and he’d hit two out of three bull’s eyes, making Ryan glad they weren’t playing for money.
“We had a date,” Ryan said. He wasn’t sure he wanted to admit to anything further, at least not yet.
“That’s what I heard. Lindsey at Neptune said you two came in, had dinner. She was the bacon-wrapped fillet, you were the wild mushroom gnocchi.” His turn over, he stepped aside and handed the darts to Ryan.
“It’s so interesting being identified as a menu item,” Ryan said. He stood at the line taped on the bar’s matted-down carpeting, lined up his shot, and threw. He missed the center circle by a mile.
“So? What’s going on with you two?” Jackson prompted him. “I figure I have a right to know. She’s practically my sister-in-law.”
Ryan wanted to protest the point, but found he couldn’t. Gen and Kate were sisters in spirit, if not by birth, as he himself had pointed out to Gen during dinner. And Kate and Jackson, if not married, were certainly headed in that direction. So, yeah, he guessed Gen was practically Jackson’s sister-in-law.
He aimed and took another shot, this one two inches closer to the bull’s eye than the last one had been. Progress.
“I don’t really know what’s going on yet,” Ryan said after thinking about it a little. “We had a date. It was a really good date.” His third shot went high and to the left for five points. “Shit.”
“You going to ask her out again?” Jackson said.
“I didn’t ask her out the first time. She asked me.”
Jackson glared at him. “You’re avoiding the question.”
“You noticed.”
With the dart game over, they got two fresh mugs of beer from the bar, made their way to a small, round table in the center of the room, and sat down. It was past midnight—Jackson got off work at the restaurant late on Friday nights. After Ryan had taken Gen back to her car, he’d called Jackson and asked if he wanted to meet up. Ryan had felt restless—at loose ends—and he wasn’t ready to go home.
The bar was busy, with a clientele of mostly locals drinking, playing pool, and listening to the loud music being pumped through the speaker system. The crowd at Ted’s was generally loud, generally obnoxious, but also generally harmless. The place smelled like beer and sweat, and Jackson had to raise his voice to be heard over the commotion.
“So, back to the question,” he said.
Ryan didn’t want to answer it, but he didn’t know why. It wasn’t that he didn’t know the answer. He knew. He wanted to see Gen again, and again after that. But something about the subject made him feel raw and exposed, and he wasn’t willing to let Jackson get near it just yet. He didn’t quite know how to approach it himself.
“Is it okay if we don’t talk about this?” he asked.
“Why not?”
“Because we’re not girls, that’s why not.” He was aware that the answer was stupid and childish. As though men didn’t have feelings, or weren’t in touch with those feelings. As though women were somehow silly and frivolous for knowing how they felt and being unabashed about it. It occurred to him that he was being an ass.
“Look,” Ryan tried again. “There’s something there. Between me and Gen, I mean. But I’m not … I guess I just don’t know what it is yet, so I don’t know how to talk about it.”
Jackson nodded. “Fair enough.”
A minute or two later, Lacy Jordan came into the bar with a guy—some stiff who taught English at the high school. They went to the bar and the stiff said something to the bartender. Ryan glanced at them briefly—only briefly—and then turned back to Jackson. “Gen is … I don’t know. I’m not good at talking about this stuff. But I definitely need to see her again.”
Jackson looked at Ryan with interest, then looked at Lacy and the high school teacher. Then he raised his eyebrows at Ryan and grinned.
“What?” Ryan said.
“Lacy’s here.”
“What? Oh … yeah.” Ryan shrugged.
Jackson laughed and shook his head.
“What?” Ryan said again.
“Welcome to the club, man.” Jackson looked deeply amused.
“What are you talking about? What club?”
“The hopelessly in love with one of the four sisters club. The dues are high, but it’s worth it.” He reached out with his beer mug and clinked it against Ryan’s.
“I still don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Ryan insisted.
“Dude. You just saw Lacy Jordan with another guy, and you couldn’t have cared less. This thing with Gen? If she decides she wants you, it’s a done deal. Might as well just go with it.”
Ryan thought about that, and he felt a little stunned.
“Well, shit,” he said.
“Ryan kissed me,” Gen told Lacy on the phone just a few minutes after she got home from her date. Lacy passed the word on to Rose. Kate, who’d been Gen’s first stop moments after she’d parked her car, already knew.
The four decided to meet for breakfast on Saturday morning to deconstruct the events of the evening. They were sitting in a big wooden booth at the Redwood Café, big plates of eggs, pancakes, and bacon in front of Kate, Lacy, and Rose, and an egg white omelet with fresh fruit sitting mostly untouched at Gen’s place. She didn’t seem to have an appetite.
“So, the kiss,” Rose prompted Gen after they all were settled in with their food. “I need details. Setting first. Where were you?”
“We were in the gardens at the lodge. You know the bench with the big trellis over it? The one across from the stone fountain?”
“Oh, sweet,” Lacy said with a dreamy look on her face. “That’s a great spot for a first kiss.”
“It really was,” Gen agreed. “There was a lot of moonlight last night. Everything was all silvery and pretty, and there was the smell of flowers …”
“And the sound of the fountain,” Kate supplied.
“And Ryan looking the way Ryan looks,” Rose said.
“I know! Jeez,” Gen said. “It’s not fair for one guy to be that sexy. I mean, just for the sake of balance, there’s gotta be five guys out there with no sex appeal at all just to average him out.”
“I’ve dated those guys,” Rose said.
“We all have,” Lacy agreed.
“And then he just … kissed me,” Gen said. Just saying the words caused a rush of heat through her belly.
Rose held a forkful of pancakes aloft. “So, does he still like Lacy?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is he looking for a relationship?” Kate asked.
“I don’t know!” Gen picked up a forkful of omelet, looked at it, and put it back down.
“Maybe you should ask him,” Rose suggested.
“Ask him?” Gen said.
“Yes.”
“You mean, like, just ask him?”
Rose tilted her colorful head and peered at Gen. “W
ell, you could send him a message in code, but what if he deciphers it wrong?” She batted her eyelashes in a parody of innocent inquiry.
“You’re funny.” Gen’s tone suggested Rose was anything but.
“Look. You don’t have to have the answers right now,” Kate said, pointing her fork at Gen. “Just … see where it goes. Be open to whatever happens.”
Gen took a deep and shaky breath to steady herself, and then nodded. “Right.”
After the kiss, Gen started finding more and more reasons to drop by the ranch—especially the main house.
When Kendrick wanted to rearrange the furniture in the cottage—to improve the feng shui, he said—Gen dropped by the main house to ask whether anyone would mind if she and Kendrick put the sofa on a different wall and moved the dresser two feet to the left. When Kendrick clogged the toilet, Gen went to the house to ask if she could borrow a plunger.
She wasn’t even fully aware that she was doing it; she simply found herself going to the Delaneys’ front door more and more often, for more and more reasons. Sometimes Ryan was there, and sometimes he was busy out at the new barn, or checking fences in distant pastures, or keeping watch over a sickly calf.
When Sandra was there, she’d invite Gen inside and they’d chat for a while about this and that—the gallery, whatever was happening at the ranch, the minutia of Sandra’s day—before Gen got the information or the item she needed and went on her way. When Ryan was there, he gave her his slow, sexy smile and helped her with whatever it was that she’d come for.
The problem was, the thing she’d really come for was to see whether, given multiple opportunities, he would ask her out on a date that wasn’t shadowed by the thank-you specter, the way the last one was. It seemed like he might. She could feel the unasked question in the pauses before he spoke, in the quiet hesitation of his body in relation to hers.
But he didn’t ask.
The fact that he didn’t made her wonder whether she’d been the only one to feel the electricity in the kiss, whether she’d built a story in her head based on imagination and longing.
The hope of the kiss, followed by the letdown in its wake, left her feeling out of sorts whenever she saw him. But seeing him, even as a reminder of a desire left unconsummated, was better than not seeing him. The ache in her chest that came from wanting him was better than the emptiness that came from his absence. So she kept going to the ranch, and when Kendrick didn’t need anything, she invented things for him to need.