Page 15 of Christmas Music
There was no answer from behind me, and I didn’t look back to see whether she’d heard me.
I didn’t want to see the look on her face as I ran from what had almost happened between us.
* * *
My mother was waiting outside of the barn.
“What’s going on in there?” she asked quietly, taking in my flushed face and tightly held mouth.
“Nothing. Getting hay down out of the loft.”
Her eyes traveled over my face and then glanced behind me to where I knew she’d see Olivia, and her brow furrowed. “With her?”
“Mom, she was just helping.”
Now she looked at me with concern and something that looked a lot like... understanding. “Is she going to come help again tomorrow?”
It was a question within a question, and as much as I loved my mother—as much as I wanted to be able to answer her—I wasn’t sure I wanted to look at the answer to the question she’d just asked.
Because I wasn’t here to fall in love with a girl I’d just barely started getting over, and my mom and I both knew it. I was here to take care of the ranch. Entering the contest would be taking time away from the ranch, and I couldn’t afford any other distractions.
Even if they came in the form of Olivia Johns.
“No idea,” I said, brushing past my mom and heading for the tractor.
And doing my absolute best to put Olivia Johns and the way she’d been looking at me up in the loft out of my mind and force my body to forget what it had been like to hold her close.
CHAPTER8
Olivia
“Okay, go through it one more time,” Parker said, her voice so close to my ear that I jumped.
I glanced at her, took a marked step away, and sighed. “Is there a reason you need to hear it again?”
She gave me the look she reserved for times when she thought I was being particularly dense. “You want me to fix the problem for you? Then I need to know what the problem is.”
I didn’t want her to fix the problem for me. I definitely hadn’t even suggested it. But Parker was one of those people who saw a problem and immediately thought it was hers to solve. Even when it belonged to someone else. I’d learned early on not to argue with her when she thought she wanted to solve something that actually belonged to me.
But I also hadn’t given her the real version of the story. I’d kept that for myself.
“I haven’t heard from him,” I said simply. “We did a lot of good writing and came up with a really, really good song. And only one. I haven’t heard from him ever since.”
I could feel the frown coming from Parker’s general direction. “Only one song?”
“Only one song. Why do I feel like I’ve already been through this?”
“Aren’t you both entering the contest, though?”
Sometimes I wondered if she actually doubted my intelligence. “Yes, Parker. We are both entering the contest.”
“How do you think you’re going to do that with only one song?”
That was, indeed, the question. Though it was only one of the questions, if I was being honest. The others: Where the hell had he disappeared to? What about his offer for me to use the studio? How was I going to finish anything without the use of that studio? I had less than a week left before the contest, and with Connor having gone dark on me, I was starting to get pretty nervous. I was good and I could write in a hurry, but there was a limit to even my talents, and we’d already lost two days.
What was he playing at? Was this some sort of trick? Had he set me up, made me think he was going to help me, only to let me fall on my face?
Questions upon questions, and I hadn’t even touched the one that felt most important, yet.
