by Linda Seed
It was the best she could do.
Chapter Sixteen
“Why the hell haven’t you gotten off your ass and asked that woman out?” Sandra demanded of Ryan one morning at breakfast.
“Well, good morning to you too, Mom,” Ryan said mildly.
“Don’t change the subject.” She slammed his bowl of whole grain cereal down on the kitchen table. “If you’re too big an idiot to notice that the Porter girl is crazy about you, then I didn’t raise you right.”
Ryan blinked. He didn’t know what had brought on this scolding, what spark had been added to what accelerant to set off this particular explosion. He knew only that he was unfortunate enough to be in its path.
“You raised me fine,” he assured her. “What’s this about?”
“What the hell are you waiting for?” she barked at him, slamming down a bowl of fresh-cut fruit.
“I haven’t even had my coffee yet,” he said, scrubbing at his face with his hands.
“Good God, Ryan. Just ask Gen out,” Breanna said as she came into the room wearing her getting-the-kids-ready-for-school uniform of sweatpants, socks, and a T-shirt. “So we don’t have to hear about it anymore.” She rolled her eyes and gestured toward their mother.
Ryan poured himself a cup of coffee, added sugar, leaned against the kitchen counter, and turned toward his mother. “Mom? You mind telling me how this is any of your business?”
“It’s my business because that poor thing is so desperate to see you that she keeps coming around here asking for things she doesn’t really need, taking up all of my precious time because she thinks she might run into you. I’m a busy woman, Ryan! I don’t have the luxury of entertaining your would-be girlfriend!”
“I thought you liked talking to Gen,” Breanna said to her mother. “I see you two in here having tea, laughing like teenagers.”
“You mind your own business,” Sandra told Breanna.
“She should mind her own business?” Ryan said.
This was the first Ryan had heard of Gen and his mother having tea and laughing. What were they talking about? Were they talking about him? What were they saying that was so damned funny? He found the whole idea disturbing.
“What the hell is wrong with Gen Porter, anyway?” Sandra went on. “You think you can do better?” She grunted. “That’ll be the day. She’s not Tara, you know. You think she is, but she’s goddamned well not.”
“I don’t even know what’s happening here,” Ryan said. His head was starting to hurt. “It’s like I came in here in the middle of an argument I didn’t know we were having. Puts me at kind of a disadvantage, don’t you think?”
Orin came into the room, pulling on the light jacket he wore every day during the spring months. “What argument are we in the middle of that Ryan didn’t know we were having?” he inquired.
“We’re not arguing about a damned thing,” Sandra said. “I’m just pointing out that your son’s an idiot.”
“Oh,” Orin said. He sat down at his place at the table and Sandra put a plate of eggs and bacon in front of him. “Ryan, right?”
“Of course, Ryan.” She shot Orin a dirty look.
“Son,” Orin said, stabbing a piece of bacon with his fork, “you’re probably better off just doing whatever your mother’s telling you to do.”
“Goddamned right,” Sandra said, plunking a carton of milk down on the table.
“Is Uncle Ryan in trouble?” Lucas said, running into the room with his brother close behind him.
“No, I’m not in trouble,” Ryan told him.
“Yes, you are,” Breanna said. She turned to her son. “He is.” Then she chuckled under her breath and started on her breakfast. “Better him than me.”
The thing was, Ryan wasn’t entirely sure why he hadn’t asked Gen out yet. He knew it was kind of an asshole move to kiss her and then fail to make any kind of follow-up. And he knew she wasn’t Tara. He’d never thought she was. The fact that his mother had even brought her up baffled him. What did that have to do with this?
Ryan thought about it as he rode Annie out to the northeast pasture to check out how the new calves and their mothers were doing. The sun was warm, with a hint of a breeze off the ocean. Annie huffed and picked along the trail, in no hurry. Neither was he. He had a lot on his mind, and being alone out here gave him time to let it all roll around in his brain, changing shape until—one would hope—it eventually made sense.
Ryan had met Tara when he was about twenty-six. He was out of college and back here working the ranch, and she’d come down here with her parents, a couple of upper-middle-class suburbanites who, amid their midlife crises, had decided to try their hands at winemaking. They’d bought a winery near Paso Robles and opened a tasting room in Cambria, and Tara had run the storefront for them until a fungus on the wine grapes had ruined their crop. Then they’d decided that maybe winemaking wasn’t as easy as they’d thought it would be.
Tara had asked Ryan to bail them out. With his trust fund, he could have done it easily enough. He might have given them the loan they wanted if they’d been a different sort of people, but Tara’s parents were the kind who blew through money carelessly. In the time they’d owned the winery and tasting room, they’d learned little about wine, grapes, or how to run a business. It was just a lark for them, something to tell their friends about on their next Caribbean cruise. So Ryan had said no, and they’d closed the shop, packed up their crap, and moved back to the suburbs.
For some reason, it had never occurred to him that she would go with them. He’d thought he loved her. He’d thought she had loved him. He’d been having visions of building a new house on the ranch property, of kids running around in the yard, of Tara waiting for him when he came home all dirty and exhausted, smelling like hay and horse. But when he’d refused to give her parents the money, things had changed between them. Money always changed things.
Everybody needed to have one great heartbreak in their lives, and that was his. When she’d left, he’d felt raw and fragile for a long time, so long that the rest of his family had looked at him with concern when they thought he wouldn’t notice.
Eventually, he’d just had to get on with his life.
Eventually, he’d healed.
And Gen wasn’t Tara.
Tara had been cool sweetness, and Gen was all fiery heat. Tara was peace; Gen was vibrant life. He could just see her out there in New York, charging up Fifth Avenue in her towering heels and her clingy black dresses, confident and purposeful. The thought made him smile.
She’d own the place.
New York.
Ah, Jesus.
It hit him so suddenly that he stopped, climbed off of Annie, and paced around in the grass, his head down, his hands planted on his hips.
Shit.
Was he really this dense? Gen wasn’t Tara, no. But Gen was talking about leaving town, just like Tara had.
That had been fine when they’d just been flirting, when he’d just thought of her as a sexy woman he liked, someone he could spend some time with.
But then there was the kiss, and the kiss had mystery and promise and longing in it, things he hadn’t felt since …
… since Tara had ripped his heart out and stomped on it.
He was an idiot.
His mother had seen what was happening, but he hadn’t. He shook his head at the thought that he was just another stereotypical male, so out of touch with his feelings that he couldn’t even see what was happening in his own mind until a woman pointed it out to him.
The breeze ruffled his hair, and Annie made a chuffing noise as Ryan stood there and looked out at the ocean. He mounted up again, turned Annie around, and headed back home.
Ryan marched into the house, looked around for his mother, didn’t find her, and then finally tracked her down in her garden, where she was weeding rows of peas. She was down on her knees on a foam mat, gloves on her hands, one fist full of prickly weeds, when he stormed up to her.
“I have feelings for Gen Porter, and I’m afraid I’m going to fall for her and she’s going to leave for New York,” he said without introduction.
Sandra peered up at him with a half smile on her face, using her free hand to shade her eyes from the sun.
“I guess the penny finally dropped,” she said with a hint of triumph.
“Well,” he said.
“Get down here and help me with these weeds.” She tossed a spare pair of gardening gloves his way. Obediently, he got down there and started plucking weeds from among the peas.
“I’m not wrong,” he said after they had worked side by side for a while. “She told me herself she wants to move back to New York. If I start seeing her, and we hit it off, and she leaves …” He left it open, because the rest was understood. If she left, he’d be moping and brooding for months in the wake of her departure, just like he had with Tara. The other thing he didn’t say was that he suspected this time would be even worse, that the blow to his hopeful heart would be dire enough that he wouldn’t recover as easily. He wasn’t sure how he knew that, since he and Gen had only been on one date. But his instinct told him that once the idea of her settled into him like the smell of the grass or the feel of the sun on his skin, she would persist in his heart in ways he wasn’t sure he could handle.
“Ry,” his mother said in a tone that was uncharacteristically patient, “you can’t be afraid of things because you don’t know if they’ll work out. How are you ever going to find what you’re looking for that way?”
“I don’t know that I’m looking for anything.”
“Of course you are. I see how you are with Lucas and Michael. You want kids, you want a family of your own. That’s obvious. What’s also obvious is that you’re never going to get it if you’re so scared of being hurt that you don’t take any risks.”
It irritated him that she was right, and he felt that irritation like a burr under his skin.
“That Lacy Jordan was never going to be the one,” Sandra went on.
Ryan looked up from the peas in surprise—first at the very mention of Lacy, since she’d been absent from his thoughts for weeks now, and second at the fact that his mother knew about the crush he’d harbored. A crush that seemed silly and distant now.
Sandra chuckled. “You thought I didn’t know about that torch you were carrying for Lacy Jordan?” She waved him off. “Of course I knew. And I’ll tell you what else I know: The biggest attraction for you—aside from the fact that she’s pretty—is that she’s lived here her whole life, same as you. You were playing it safe, but that’s just stupid, because she and you aren’t a match. The two of you …” She shook her head. “It’d never be right.”
He plucked at the weeds and wondered whether she was right. Had he been interested in Lacy just because she was as anchored in Cambria as he was? Maybe, he had to concede. But it was more than that. He’d thought of Lacy as a safe bet not only because she wasn’t likely to move away, but also because she wasn’t interested in him and never had been.
It was hard to crash and burn when things never got off the ground in the first place.
I’m a wuss, he thought. Then he said it out loud: “I’m a wuss. Aren’t I?” He didn’t look up from his work with the weeds, and in a way, his reluctance to meet his mother’s gaze further proved his wussiness.
“You sure are, son,” she said, chuckling.
Ryan wondered why she couldn’t just be comforting and reassuring like other mothers.
Chapter Seventeen
Gen was about to give up on Ryan. She’d put herself in his path so many times he was lucky he hadn’t tripped over her, and still—nothing. No phone call, no invitation to dinner, no suggestion that they take a sunset walk on the beach. It hurt, no question. There was no sense pretending she wasn’t disappointed, after longing for him and then, finally, kissing him, and finding that kiss to be everything she’d imagined.
Who wouldn’t feel the sting of rejection?
She’d just about decided that he was a lost cause when she got a call at the gallery on a Monday morning and was surprised to hear his voice.
“How’s the artist like his skylight?” he asked without a greeting, and without preamble.
“Ryan?” she said.
“I was just wondering,” he went on. “It was my first skylight. I wanted to know if it was working out okay.”
And goddamn it if her heart didn’t speed up just hearing his dusky voice. Stop it. You are not going to get all moony over a guy who doesn’t want you. Screw that.
“It’s fine,” she said, keeping her voice as businesslike as possible. “The light in the barn is much better now. Thank you again.”
To her own ear, she sounded like a telemarketer, or maybe a pollster.
“Well, good,” he said. “You’re welcome.”
He didn’t say anything else for a while, and she stood behind her desk, wiping her clammy palms on her dress and scolding herself for her physical reaction to him. As though she could control it.
“Well. I’m expecting a client in a few minutes, so …” It was a lie, but she needed to get off the phone because, might as well admit it—it hurt to talk to him knowing that he didn’t want her.
“Ah. Okay. I won’t keep you,” he said. But he still didn’t hang up. After a few more seconds of awkward silence, he said, “Um, Gen. I … ah … I was just wondering if you’d like to go out again sometime.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Another dinner, maybe. Or we could go riding again—you were really good at it for a first-timer. Or … I don’t know. Whatever you’d like to do.”
Now she was the one who was silent for an awkwardly long stretch.
“What took you so long?” she demanded finally.
“What?”
She’d gone from cool and businesslike to confrontational in a heartbeat. She hadn’t planned it, but her emotions were seesawing.
“We went out,” she said. “We kissed. You kissed me. And I thought it was a very good kiss. And then … nothing. Do you know how many lame excuses I made to show up at your house, thinking that if you saw me, if I were right there in front of you, then you’d make a move? Jeez. What the hell was your problem?”
At first, she was horrified by the words coming out of her mouth. She’d intended to play the part of Cool Woman Who Couldn’t Care Less, but she’d ended up portraying Vulnerable Woman Carrying a Torch. Then she thought, screw it. This is who I am. This is how I’m feeling. He can take it or leave it.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Okay.”
“I should have called you.”
“You’re right. You should have.”
“But I’m calling now. I guess I just … I had to figure out where I was going with this, what I wanted to do.”
“And did you?” she demanded.
“Yeah. I figured out that I really want to see you.”
Still in offensive mode, lips pursed, one fist planted on her hip, Gen nodded. “Well, it’s about time. Pick me up tonight at seven.” She hung up on him before he could answer.
She looked at the phone in her hand and smacked it down onto the desk.
“Goddamn right,” she said.
Ryan didn’t pick Gen up at seven. He didn’t pick her up at all, though he wasn’t to blame. The blame lay squarely with someone else: Gordon Kendrick.
Gen was right in the middle of primping for her date—fluffing up her hair, choosing an outfit, picking out the right shade of lipstick to complement her skin tone—when Kendrick called her, panic forcing an edge into his voice.
“It’s all wrong!” Kendrick wailed into the phone, obviously already well into a bottle of whatever it was he was drinking these days. “I can’t do it. Not out here, in the middle of nowhere. It was a mistake to come here. I’m going home.”
“Wait. What?” Gen said in disbelief. “You can’t do what?”
“I can’t paint!”
“Of course you can,” Gen insis
ted. Her pulse started to pound. “I’ve done everything you’ve asked. I got you the yogurt you wanted. I got you the sheets. I even got you a damned skylight!”
“It’s not that,” Kendrick moaned. “It’s not … Yes. You’ve done everything I’ve asked. But it’s not working! Everything I do is shit! I can’t fucking paint!”
Gen held the phone to her ear and pressed a hand to her forehead to make sure her brain wasn’t going to come flying out. She’d busted her butt for this asshole, and this was what she got?
“Gordon,” she said in a tone that was deliberate, calm, and serious as hell. “You signed a contract. I promised you living quarters and a stipend, and you promised to produce art work. I’ve held up my end of the deal. I’ve more than held up my end. You are not going to … to have some kind of tantrum so you can renege on your contractual obligation.”
“Do you think I want to paint insipid crap? Do you think I want to lose every last ounce of my creative inspiration? Do you think this is all about you and your damned contract?”
She heard some ragged breathing and realized with horror that he’d started to cry.
“Gordon …”
“I want to go home,” he wailed like a kid at an ill-fated slumber party.
Gen looked at the clock on her bedside table. Ryan was scheduled to pick her up in less than twenty minutes.
“Gordon, just don’t do anything, okay? Just relax tonight, get some rest. And stop drinking. I’ll come over tomorrow and we’ll talk this out.”
“I want you to come get me,” he said. “I need …” She heard some rustling sounds.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m packing.”
“What?!”
“I need you to come get me and take me to the airport.”
Gen took some deep breaths and closed her eyes. “We can’t do anything tonight,” she tried again. “There won’t be any flights out this late.” She had no idea if that was true. “I can come over tomorrow, and we’ll talk.”