Page 17 of The Devil in Blue Jeans
She slid her warm gaze to him. “What’s that?”
He winked. “A pretty woman with this view behind her.”
She snorted, flicking her hair over her shoulder, and rolled her eyes. “Does that line really work for you?”
Normally it did. He shrugged, shoving his hands in his pockets. “I don’t know you tell me. Did it work?”
She laughed, her expression softening in a way he hadn’t seen yet. “No, it definitely did not.” But as she glanced back out to the horses in the pasture, he caught the pinkish hue in her cheeks and felt a spark of hope.
He’d never met a woman that made him work this hard. He liked it. Perhaps there was still a chance that he could make an impression on her after all. “Take a seat and get comfortable and I’ll go grab dinner,” he said. Before he entered the house, he asked, “Want a drink? Beer, water, sweet tea?”
“Beer sounds great,” she said.
Considering she didn’t stock beer at the bar, he was surprised she drank it. He gave her a nod and then hurried inside entering his small galley kitchen. He took out the chicken wings on the pan that was being warmed in the oven and switched off the stove, taking everything and placing it all on the serving plate. Before heading back outside, he grabbed the beers from the fridge.
When he found her sitting against the pillows staring out into the pasture with a little smile, he grew even more curious about her. She was a walking contradiction. One minute ready to fight. The next, sweet and soft. “I’m sorry this isn’t a homemade meal like I promised, but I didn’t have the time. Today was a long day.” He put the hot pan down on the wire rack and placed the other pan next to it, setting out the chicken wings, spinach dip, tortillas, and fried pickles—all his favorite things for snacking.
“Where did you order this from?” she asked. “It looks really great.”
He cracked a beer and handed it to her. “There’s a tiny little place when you come into town, Sparrow Catching. It’s got some of the best food in town.”
She smiled. “The girls and I go for breakfast every day. We’ve grown close to Jenna.”
“Nice,” he said, returning the smile. “Jenna took over the restaurant from her grandmother. It’s been around for a very long time.”
“I guess a lot of the places in town have been here awhile, huh?”
He waited for her to dip her tortilla chip in the dip before he dug into the food too. “Most, yes, but not all.” He ate the chip then added, “Especially since you and your friends have brought in a whole lot of big city into our little town.”
“Is that what makes the locals so grumpy?”
He shrugged. “People around here don’t like change,” he said, dipping another chip into the dip. “Just takes some time for them to get used to something different.” While he wanted to continue that line of conversation to put a little country back into their bar, he figured he needed to get to know her better. “Can I ask why you three moved to Timber Falls?”
She finished her bite and smirked. “Not many new people move here?”
“They visit,” he said. “As you’ve already seen I’m sure, we get tons of tourists, but new residents are rare, especially pretty ones.”
His compliment brushed right off her. “It’s actually a wild story.”
“That’s all right,” he said. “Lay it on me.”
She took a long sip of her beer before she spoke again. “Willow, Aubrey and I grew up together. We all met in kindergarten and kind of stuck together like glue. When we were thirteen, we came up with this drawing of our dream place. After college, we took a backpacking trip to Yellowstone, because I found this place and it looked exactly like our drawing. When we came, we made a pact, that if at twenty-eight our lives weren’t what we hoped they’d be, we’d move here together and start over.”
He began to understand their fierceness. This wasn’t just three best friends moving to a new town. This was three best friends that had felt like failures in their lives, and this was one last shot to prove they could make it out alive. He grabbed a chicken wing. “Are you twenty-eight now?”
She nodded. “Our lives weren’t what we hoped for, so about ten weeks ago, we decided to fulfill the pact.”
“Wow, that’s quite the story, and brave of you all. It couldn’t have been easy picking up and just walking away from your life,” he said.
She grabbed another tortilla and scooped up some of the spinach dip before she took a bite. “Oh, it’s not too hard when you find your fiancé with the head bartender screwing on the bar you own together.”
“Ouch,” he said, licking the sauce from his fingers, suddenly understanding her intensity toward the opposite sex. He’d hate men too. “Well, that’s a valid reason to walk away.”
She chewed a minute and then said, “Yeah, it wasn’t hard. Willow and Aubrey were looking for a change too, so we jumped ship and here we are.”
He’d never cheated on someone or been cheated on, but he could only imagine how the betrayal would burn. “Do you still talk to him?”
She slowly shook her head. “Doing my best not too. Hopefully he’ll get that hint soon enough.”
