Page 25 of Her Cowboy Baby Daddy
“I’m not going to pass out. I might not like confrontation, but I don’t avoid it.” Not in most cases, anyway. “Some battles need to be fought.”
Andie help up a palm, which Hayley touched with her own. “Amen.”
“How’d that all start, anyway?”
“He received the notification that I applied for unemployment benefits. There were no witnesses to my firing, so he can contest it.” Andie ducked under the rear of the canopy and took a seat while Hayley rearranged her seedlings to fill in the spots left from purchases. “He just wanted me to know that it would be easier if I let the matter slide. No hearing and all that. Like I mind telling my side to a judge.”
“As if,” Hayley agreed. She couldn’t see Andie being hesitant to explain anything to anyone. She was envious. Yes, she had come out of her shell, but she always felt as if she were only one cutting comment away from disappearing back inside again.
But you aren’t.
“Nice of Spence to back us up,” Andie observed, and before Hayley could agree, she added, “Do you know the other guy? The quiet one?”
“I kind of recognized him from some local events, but I don’t know anything about him.”
“I think we had a class together at Montana State. Big lecture hall thing, but yeah. I think he was there.” She gave Hayley a sideways look. “Kind of invisibly there.”
“I know what that’s like.”
“I’m not surprised.”
Hayley gave a short laugh as she took her seat beside Andie, who in turn gave Hayley a look. “Too blunt?”
Hayley shook her head before smiling at a pair of women who stopped to look at the broccoli and cauliflower starts.
After the ladies paid for their purchases and headed back to their cars with the plants, Andie said, “All I meant was that you’re nice. Diplomatic. I can see where you might keep quiet and see how things played out before intervening. But I loved the way you fired up when Mr. Hunt got in your face.” She wrinkled her nose. “Nice work.”
“Thank you. And yes, I try for diplomacy, but I’m not letting people walk on me. I didn’t do it back when I was too shy to talk to people, and I won’t now.”
“You were too shy to talk to people?” Andie ran a hand down one long braid.
“Thus, the invisible years.”
“Huh.” Andie looked as if she had no idea what it would be like to be invisible. “Did you find that the red hair kind of worked against you?”
Hayley laughed and pushed said red hair over her shoulders with both hands. “Redheads are supposed to be quiet geeks or raucous rebels. I was the geek variety. Braids. Glasses. All I was missing was the tin grin—not that people saw my teeth, because I rarely spoke.”
“What changed?”
“Long story,” Hayley said, stretching her legs out in front of her. The crowd had thinned as the horse sale progressed, and she had a feeling that the big rush was over. She could relax.
“I have time,” Andie said, before biting her lip. “Unless that’s too pushy.”
Hayley generally didn’t tell her story, because... who cared? But Andie continued to regard her with open curiosity, so Hayley said, “My mom is kind of a serial bride. She marries... I don’t know why she marries, but I had four stepdads before I reached eighteen. That’s why I chose to live with my real dad on the Lone Tree when I was eleven. I could just be me.” She inhaled, watching a mother kneel down to replace a shoe her toddler had walked out of. “But I had a hard time being me in public, so I got some counseling when I started college, and lucked out and got someone I could work with and confronted my issues.”
When she glanced over at Andie, the girl was staring at her with open admiration. “Good for you. I have a cousin who’s shy, and I think he’s still in his parents’ basement. He’s thirty-five.”
Hayley gave a soft laugh. “I could do all this stuff on the ranch, which told me I was competent and confident in the right environment. I wanted to live all of my life that way. So I started doing things that made me uncomfortable and lived to tell the tale.”
“How about him?” Andie said, lifting her chin. Hayley looked up to see Spence approaching the booth.
Hayley’s heart gave a guilty jump. “What about him?” she asked, startled at the sudden change in topic—or maybe startled by the appearance of the topic himself.
“I think he likes you.”
Another heart jolt as she recalled the comforting feel of his hands on her shoulders and that gentle squeeze saying that he had her back. It might be because they were facing a joint adversary or... he might like her. She could deal with him liking her, knowing that he was likely to take off to who knew where at a moment’s notice.
“He owes me. Or he did. We’re even now.” Hayley shot Andie a quick look and abandoned diplomacy. “No big deal, but nothing I want to talk about.”
