She eyed him for a moment, shifting the band of her bag higher on her shoulder.
“I think that specific cat leapt from that particular bag when I jumped on your motorcycle last night right there on Main Street in front of the entire town,” she said, and then looked surprised when he laughed.
“I’m sorry.” He wasn’t, really, but she was the prettiest thing he’d ever seen and talking to her was the most exquisite torture he’d ever suffered. He wanted to be deep inside her again. He wanted to see if he’d ever conquer this craving for her that seemed to gnaw at him from deep in his own gut. “Do people really care what you do? Is this that whole small town thing? I thought that was a myth.”
She smiled, and he loved it.
“The prevailing wisdom is that you’re taking advantage of me, as a matter of fact,” she said, leaning in closer as if imparting a deep, dark secret, and he could smell that almond scent on her hair. It made him hard, that easily. “What with your worldly, wealthy ways. I’m nothing but a small town girl, you know. Easily led astray.”
“Am I the big, bad wolf in this scenario?”
“Of course.” Her smile was very nearly wicked, and he wanted to lick it.
“Despite the fact that was you lounging around outside my house yesterday morning, tempting me to stray from the path of the righteousness? If anyone’s the wolf, Triple C, it’s you.”
She liked the sound of that. He saw it in that flush of pleasure that moved over her, lighting up her eyes and her whole face, then down into the v-shaped neck of her dress. The dress he admired deeply and couldn’t wait to peel right off that delicious body of hers.
“What about my virtue?” he asked lazily. “Why doesn’t anyone care about that?”
“That’s not how the story goes, I’m afraid,” she told him with a happy sigh. “You don’t get to change the role you’ve been assigned. Besides, I had the misfortune to date an idiot, and since I caught him cheating on me a few months ago, I must be broken hearted. That’s the story, so that’s the truth.”
But she sounded amused by that, he noted.
“I caught my wife cheating on me,” Jasper drawled. “Do you know what I am?” He waited until her brows edged up. “Divorced.”
Her eyes crinkled in the corners, and he thought he could watch that forever.
“I’ll confess to you that I liked the idea of him more than I liked him,” she went on, cheerfully. “And realizing I couldn’t live with myself if I ignored the cheating was actually a bit of a relief. But that’s not an interesting story. So, obviously, I must be acting out my feelings in inappropriate ways. That’s where you come in.” She shook her head. “Tempting me into letting my hair down. Literally.”
“I had no idea,” he said, and then he couldn’t take it anymore, he had to touch her. He reached over and took her hand, threading his fingers through hers. “I usually prefer to cause a commotion on purpose.”
“You did that by moving here, especially into the Crawford Rail Depot, which everyone has heard my mother rant on and on about for years,” she said, but she was staring at their linked fingers in a kind of wonder, and he didn’t know what it was that clamored inside of him then, like church bells on a long Sunday morning. And he didn’t care.
“FlintWorks Brewery,” he corrected her, and grinned when she frowned at him. “That’s what I’m calling it. But if you want, I can name a beer after you. Triple C has a nice ring to it. Or maybe Black Bart Ale?”
She kept frowning, and then she cleared her throat, and he went still like that was foreshadowing to an attack.
“I assumed last night was a one night stand,” she said, matter-of-factly, and for once he couldn’t read her expression even when she continued to stand there and hold his gaze so directly.
“I don’t recall setting any restrictions.”
“So… An affair, then?”
“Do we need a label?”
It didn’t escape his notice that neither label she’d chosen suggested much in the way of longevity, but he only filed that away. For now.
“Sometimes,” she said quietly, “labels can be helpful. They set out expectations ahead of time. They prevent confusion.”
“If I plan to take advantage of you,” he replied in the same tone, “I’ll let you know, without any confusion at all. Like tonight, Chelsea, I plan to take extended advantage of you. Just as soon as I can get you naked. Do you need more than that?”
“People will talk,” she said, her voice no more than a whisper, but he saw all the heat and fire and need from last night in her blue eyes, and he grinned.
“Sounds like they already are,” he replied. “And there’s no point letting all that speculation go to waste, is there?”
September bled into October, the town started showing signs of the rodeo, the wind started to smell of the coming change of seasons all the time, and Chelsea simply surrendered to the delicious madness. To all of it.
There was her mother’s continued silence, which she couldn’t do a thing about, so she simply ignored it. There were whispers behind certain hands when she walked into the faculty lounge at school or particular shops in town, but there were far more open smiles of approval and even the occasional thumbs up from others.
“Have you seen those pictures of his house?” Tricia Larssen asked in the checkout line of the supermarket. “I mean, his old house.”
“He hasn’t sat me down with any photo albums, if that’s what you mean,” Chelsea had said, not sure where this was going. Tricia was older than Chelsea by some fifteen years, and was known to prefer her dogs to most people.
“It had three indoor pools. A fifteen car garage. A sauna and its own bowling alley.”
Chelsea had waited for the put down, the implication that she was too naïve or too small town to appreciate a man like Jasper. But Tricia Larssen had smiled.
“You go, girl,” she said in her three-pack a day smoker’s voice. “You go.”
And the truth was, Chelsea didn’t really have any time to analyze what was happening. Her life was always at a fever pitch this time of the year, and would have been crazy even without Jasper. There was school, Mama, and all the rodeo volunteer committees she always wished she hadn’t agreed to take part in before signing right up again the minute it was over.
To say nothing of the final rush toward Jenny’s big show of a wedding on Saturday, and all the events she was expected to be a part of leading up to it as Jenny’s Maid of Honor. Maids of Honor didn’t share their niggling concerns unless asked directly, she told herself sternly over and over again that week—and no one had asked her a thing.
So she kept her mouth shut and she lost herself in the wonder of Jasper’s touch, his voice, his mouth on hers, his powerful body above her and below her, inside her, until she felt cracked wide open. Changed. New.
“Did you ever want to live somewhere else?” he asked that Friday. Jenny’s rehearsal dinner had been earlier that night, and Chelsea had been unable to wait to slip away from the strange tension between bride and groom to be, unable to wait to run here, to Jasper, like he was some kind of homing beacon.
They were wrapped around each other in his bed now, and she could still hear his heart pounding in his chest below her ear. She smoothed her palm over it like she was trying to catch it, like fireflies in the summer.
“Of course,” she said. “I wanted to live anywhere else. Madrid. Sydney. Bora-Bora. I used to sit in the travel section of the bookstore and lose myself in daydreams for hours. I wanted to see everything.”
“What happened?”
His voice was that low rumble she loved more every time she heard it, and his fingers moved in her hair, toying with it like he couldn’t get enough of touching her. Like he wanted her that much. As much as she wanted him.
“Every time I had the opportunity, I didn’t want to go,” she confessed. She waited for some negative reaction along the lines of the pitying looks her sister Margot always sent her way, the exasperated sig
hs her brother Nicky always let escape him when he came back home and saw all the things Chelsea still loved, like it was all beneath him now. “Maybe I was too afraid. Isn’t that what keeps people close to home? Fear?”
His hand tightened on the back of her head, and he shifted, until she had no choice but to shift with him and look him in the face. Knowing how easily he could read her, she thought she’d never felt more naked than she did then.
“You don’t strike me as afraid of much, Chelsea, or you wouldn’t be here with me. Would you?”
She laughed, but it felt rusty, and she knew she should be worried about the heat she could feel pooling in the back of her eyes, making her feel glazed and precarious. Making her worry he was the only thing tethering her to the world.
“That’s where you’re wrong,” she said, her voice so much more ragged than she’d wanted it to be, sharing too much. “I can’t think of a single thing I’m not afraid of. I’ve been a coward all my life. I’ve hidden myself away here so I didn’t have to face it. But that’s the truth about me, Jasper. I’m sorry.”
He looked at her for a long time, then he tucked her back against her shoulder, and it seemed like he rocked her a little bit, just slightly, like he was trying to soothe away the sting of her words.
But Chelsea knew better. She knew they burned in her, that if he looked close enough, the truth of them was all he’d see. The idea of that was unbearable.
“I’ve spent my whole life looking for a place worth hiding away in,” he said after a while. “My daddy was a broken, bitter man. He used religion the way some men use alcohol, beating his form of humility into us. He used to pack my brother and me into his car and drive us on a tour of Dallas and all the things we’d never have. It took me years to realize it was what he couldn’t have.”
She leaned forward and pressed a kiss against the smooth skin of his shoulder.
“My brother Jonah and I decided we might as well show the old man the error of his ways.” His voice was so cheerful. That lazy drawl and the suggestion that this was all just a colorful story, with no ominous currents beneath to tear into him. But she knew better, somehow. So she held him in the dark, like this golden, beautiful man was as damaged as she sometimes feared she was, and she listened. “So we did. We did whatever the hell we could to make money, and it turned out, we were good at it. I found myself a trophy wife, bought myself a house to match. I have planes, cars. Motorcycles. I’ve been everywhere, Chelsea. I’ve seen everything I ever wanted to see, and then some.” He blew out a breath. “And about a year ago I was riding my bike through a part of the country I’d never seen before, and I stopped high up on a mountain road and looked out over this valley of yours, and I thought it looked perfect. It felt perfect.” He wrote something incomprehensible against the smooth line of her spine, shapes and letters, hieroglyphs. “I decided I didn’t want to be anywhere but here. So I don’t know. Are you hiding? Or is this just where you belong?”
Chelsea held on to that the next day, when she stood in the cool church that stood haughtily in the best part of town, filled to the brim with all of Marietta’s best and brightest. She held on to that hard as her all best friend’s dreams came to a screeching halt when Charles Monmouth III called off the wedding and then left, like something out of a nightmare, leaving Jenny to stand up on that relic of an altar and announce, in a bloodless voice, that the wedding was off.
It was good to belong to a place like Marietta, she thought, where even Mama could set aside whatever petty snobberies she used to while away her days in the face of a real, honest-to-goodness crisis. Where the people who knew and loved Jenny simply took charge of things so she could quietly disappear after making her announcement, taking responsibility for making the calls and relaying the appropriate excuses.
Where no one questioned the fact that Jenny’s Maid of Honor, who wished fervently she’d said something, had to sit by herself with her face in her hands for a little while, as if what had happened in that church had happened to her, too. Because everyone knew that she and Jenny had grown up in each other’s pockets, and that Jenny’s heartbreak meant Chelsea’s, too.
She showed up at Jasper’s while all the light was still pouring into the great windows that stood sentry all around his cavern of a loft, startling him. He started to speak but she shushed him, with her finger and then her mouth, hiking up the pastel Maid of Honor gown as she straddled him where he sat.
She didn’t ask, she took. She took. She set the pace, she let her head drop down and she bit into his shoulder like some kind of untamed thing, and she forgot. She forgot about broken hearts, about shattered dreams. About the promises men made, about the terrible things people could do to each other. She rode him hard until all of that faded, loss and fear and the rest, until there was nothing left in the whole world but that wildfire, that slick burn, that magical place they made between them.
Until she made them both cry out as they hurtled over the edge, together.
It was a long time later that Jasper stirred beneath her, his hazel eyes wise and kind as he cupped her face in his hands, gazing much too intently into her face.
“Do you want to tell me what that was all about?”
She looked at him, and felt jagged. Ripped into too many pieces to ever put herself back together. Like what had happened to Jenny today was foreshadowing. Like there was nothing to stop her from careening straight into that very same wall, and breaking just the same.
“No,” she said, and kissed him again, until he stopped asking questions that didn’t have answers, and took her to his bed instead.
And for the first time in her life, Chelsea found she wished the rodeo wasn’t coming to town that following week, because it meant that all the people she normally would have gone to for help or advice weren’t available. Jenny wasn’t an option, of course—but everyone else was too busy making sure Marietta was prepared for the influx of so many people, the participants as well as the audience, who would come from all over and expect the good old fashioned western rodeo the town had been putting on for seventy-five years. To say nothing of all the events surrounding it—the street dance and the parade, fundraising lunches and dinners, and the Saturday morning pancake breakfast that Crawfords had been flipping pancakes at every one of those seventy-five years.
“I’m so disappointed about the depot,” Kira Blair, one of the Crawford Railway Depot Museum’s staunchest supporters, said when they saw each other on one of the roads outside of town that Monday, both stopping their cars to chat quickly before anyone else came along. “What was Tod thinking?”
“I’ve never been able to answer that question,” Chelsea said with a grin, making the other woman laugh. “If I had, the last couple of years of my life would have been very, very different.”
Kira looked as if she wanted to say something else, but one of the local ranchers drove up behind her in a big truck, and she only waved as she drove away.
So Chelsea pretended she was okay. Because she was okay, wasn’t she? This was what adventurous looked like. This was how it felt. Outsized and obvious, but still—better than what had gone before. Better than her whole, previous life.
Better than what had happened on Saturday to Jenny, certainly, even if she knew she was on her own kind of borrowed time.
“I don’t want to talk about the wedding,” Jenny said tightly when they met each other on Tuesday outside Copper Mountain Chocolate on Main Street. She forced a smile. “I know you have a thousand things to tell me. Let’s talk about that instead.”
“Of course.”
But Chelsea was more interested in taking Jenny inside and making sure she picked out appropriately medicinal chocolate. Jenny looked small and lost and unlike herself, staring fiercely through the display case at a selection of truffles, and Chelsea had no idea what to do.
“How is she?” Sage Carrigan, the owner of the chocolate shop and a friend, asked in an undertone from behind the counter.
“I don’t know,?
?? Chelsea said softly. “How can she be?”
Sage had been a bridesmaid too, and they shared a look then, like they were both reliving those awful moments inside the church. Jenny’s brief disappearance and then her slow, horrible walk up the aisle in all that deafening silence, all in white and all alone.
“And what about you?” Sage asked, her dark look lightening as she looked from Jenny to Chelsea. “I’ve seen Jasper Flint. That man is hot.”
“We have very interesting discussions, Sage,” Chelsea said, pretending to be haughty. “I haven’t really noticed.”
Which made Jenny laugh, if only slightly, and that was what mattered. Not all the uncertain things that clamored inside of her, desperate to escape. This wasn’t the time for her worries. She knew that.
“How’s it going?” Jenny asked, and Chelsea wanted nothing more than to tell her. Everything. But that would be nothing but selfish. This wasn’t then time.
“It’s great,” she said. “Absolutely great.”
And then she smiled fiercely so neither Jenny nor Sage could see how desperate she was to talk to someone, anyone. How desperate she was to have her friends dismiss her terrible fear that it was the finest joke in Montana history that Chelsea Collier thought she could attract the attention of a man like Jasper Flint. To hear them instead staunchly insist that of course she was that beautiful woman she thought she saw reflected in his eyes on those long, heated nights in his loft, that only idiots could possibly think otherwise—
Idiots like Tod, apparently.
“Chels,” he said, coming up behind her while she was waiting for one of Mama’s prescriptions—because the enduring Silent Treatment didn’t mean Chelsea could forgo her usual chores and duties, it only meant they’d all be that much more unpleasant while she did them.
Chelsea started at the sound of his voice too close to her ear, dropping the cherry-flavored lip balm she’d been pretending to be so fascinated with while hiding out from Carol Bingley’s censorious gaze.