by Nicole Helm
She tried to bolt for her car the second her feet hit the ground, but he reached out and rested his hand on her elbow.
She stopped on a dime, and he tried not to grin at that.
“Bye, Rose,” his friends chorused, already focused on unloading the truck and getting back to ranch work.
“Bye,” Rose muttered, then shook her head as if disgusted at something. “Thanks for the picnic, Becca.”
“No problem. You’re invited anytime.”
He could tell Rose was trying to smile, but it was more of a grimace. Then her gaze moved to his hand on her elbow, and he wasn’t sure he understood what it was in her expression. He knew she wanted it to be irritation, but there was something else. Something closer to panic or fear than I will kill you with one of my many weapons.
Rose flicked a glance to the dispersing group, but Alex, Becca, and Gabe were heading toward the house with the picnic supplies, and Monica and Colin had headed for the stables. There was no one around for her to make excuses for.
“I do have my own life, Jack.”
“Of course you do.”
She sighed gustily, but he noted she didn’t even try to pull her elbow out of his grasp.
“We should go out.”
Her eyes widened, and then she stepped back and away, pulling her arm out of his grasp harder than necessary considering he hadn’t really been holding on to it. Just resting his fingers there.
“Jack, don’t—”
“A trial run. Not a real date,” he amended, trying for innocent.
“What was this?” she asked, waving her arm to encompass the ranch, which he supposed meant the picnic and the ride beforehand. Maybe there was something wrong with him that he enjoyed the way he made her panic a little, but if she panicked, that meant he got to her. If she’d had no investment, she would have eradicated him already.
“This was getting to know each other and giving you a riding lesson. It was something, but we need a little more. My sister is super nosy, and she’s going to ask about our first date. It can’t be a picnic with my friends. So we’ll have one. Then we won’t have to make one up and remember details because it’ll be real. Fake real.” He smiled.
She scowled. “I don’t have time.”
“What about breakfast?”
“Breakfast is not a date.”
“Sure it is. My sister would eat that up with a spoon. She’d call it unique or some hipster word that wouldn’t make any sense to me.”
“She’d think we had sex is what she’d think,” Rose said firmly.
Jack winced at the thought of his sister thinking about anything related to sex, but then he rubbed his jaw, considering sex and Rose. He let his gaze move over her, then he flashed a grin. “I mean, we could work that out too, if you were willing to compromise on your whole no-strings-attached deal.”
She scowled deeper, crossing her arms across her chest. “I am not.”
He shrugged. “Okay, name the day and time before Thursday we could have a date.”
“A fake date.”
“Sure.”
She let out a hefty sigh. “Fine. But it is fake, and just so we have something to tell your jerk of an ex.”
“Of course.”
She rolled her eyes at his overly officious tone. “Tomorrow. Seven. Pick me up at the bar.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She shook her head and muttered something that sounded an awful lot like, “why am I such an idiot,” before stalking toward her car.
Jack watched her go, more than pleased with himself.
* * *
Rose looked at herself in the mirror and told herself for approximately the millionth time she was an idiot.
“The biggest idiot ever,” she muttered to her empty apartment.
She had promised herself she wouldn’t dress up. So she hadn’t. Well, mostly. She had worn her nicest, most form-fitting jeans and had replaced her usual T-shirt with something more blousy, that had a bit of a V neck she wouldn’t be caught dead in behind her bar.
She was pretty sure she’d never worn it. She wasn’t even sure how it was in her closet.
She was about to rip it off and exchange it for some kind of big, lumpy sweater no matter the temperature, but her phone buzzed.
She glared at the message on her screen. From Jack.
Outside.
What was she doing?
She took a deep breath. She was having a fake date so they had a common story to tell Jack’s parents. It wasn’t that big of a deal if she didn’t make it one.
Jack couldn’t force it to be anything more than that, and the fact that she was afraid, down to her bones, showed her just how important it was to do this dumb thing and prove to both him and herself that she could handle heart-tripping smiles and polite gestures and endearing compassion under a gruff exterior and…
She wrenched her door open and huffed out a breath. She wasn’t afraid of anything. Not anymore. And Jack couldn’t make her afraid.
She stepped outside into the warm night, and pretty much every admonition she’d given to herself over the past few hours turned to ash and floated away.
Jack was standing next to his truck looking at his phone. The sun was beginning to set in a delicate pink on the horizon, and he was in nice jeans and a button-down short-sleeved shirt and that cowboy hat that shouldn’t look so perfect on him. But of course it did.
He glanced up and smiled. That smile that said I think I’m sneaky.
Which was absolutely one hundred percent not at all cute.
“Hey,” he offered casually.
“Hey.”
“You look nice.”
She sauntered toward him, trying to find Rose under all this weird uncertainty inside her. “Baby, I look spectacular.”
He grinned full-on at that, and she couldn’t help but grin back. He moved around to the passenger side of the truck and opened the door. “You ready?” he asked.
She stood and stared for a good thirty seconds. “You don’t really open car doors for every woman?”
“Not every woman—my grandmother, my mother, and my date, and jeez, that sounds warped.”
She laughed, couldn’t help it. “I don’t want to know what you got up to on that farm of yours,” she said, purposefully brushing against him as she got up into the passenger seat.
“I believe it was called manners,” he returned, leaning close and handing her the seat belt she very well could have reached for herself. “Watch your feet,” he murmured as if he was whispering sweet nothings into her ear, and then he shut the door.
She fastened her seat belt and reminded herself she had the upper hand. She always had the upper hand. Just because his ridiculous little gestures and whispers made her edgy and needy didn’t mean she wasn’t the one in control.
He’d been with one woman. She knew way more about maneuvering men than he’d ever know about maneuvering a woman. The end.
He climbed into the driver’s side and tipped his hat back a little on his head. He started the ignition and pulled out of the bar’s gravel lot. They headed west down Main, the sunset morphing slowly from those pale pastels to streaks of fire.
“Does the sun set like that in Iowa?”
“I assume you mean Indiana?”
“Sure. Whatever I-state you’re from.”
“It does indeed, Rose. The sun sets that way everywhere. Montana, Indiana, Afghanistan. It never fails to amaze me.”
Why did he have to be sweet? Touch something deep and vulnerable inside her that she thought she’d eradicated a long time ago.
When they got close to Georgia’s, he didn’t slow down and he didn’t stop. “Where are we going?”
“Bozeman.”
“Bozeman?”
He glanced at her for a brief second before re
turning his gaze to the road leading out of Blue Valley. “We could eat at Georgia’s, but I don’t think my family would be impressed by it as a first-date place. Besides, people know us there. You’d get all sorts of questions.”
“Right.” And she didn’t want questions. At all. Certainly not when this was as fake as it got.
Silence, aside from the low strains of the radio, settled into the cab of the truck. Jack grimaced as a new song came on.
“This isn’t country. He’s talking.”
“I like it,” Rose returned. “Regardless of what it is.”
“It’s hard to listen to,” he said, reaching for the dial.
She slapped his hand away. “I like it,” she repeated.
“Women,” he muttered, which turned into a heated debate about country music, only finding common ground in Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. When they reached the restaurant some thirty minutes later, Jack once again opened her door for her.
She wrinkled her nose at him as he held out his hand to help her down. “I do not know what to do with this, Jack.”
“Go with the flow,” he returned as if it were simple as that.
Maybe it was. She let him hold her hand as she stepped down from the truck and followed him into a nice restaurant that she wasn’t sure any man she’d ever dated would have even known existed, let alone taken her to.
They were escorted to a table, and Rose slid into the booth across from Jack. It was one of those places that kept the lights so low, you could barely see anything, but that faint, warm light only accentuated the sharp features of Jack’s face and the way even more of that hollowness he’d shown up to Blue Valley with had filled out, even in just the past few weeks.
Her chest felt all jittery, and it wasn’t the same as before the date. It wasn’t fear or worry that she didn’t have control of the situation. It was so much worse than that. She was nervous.
She never got nervous during a date. She always knew where something was going. And she had no idea at all where this was going.
It’s going nowhere. It’s fake.
“Have you been here before?” he asked casually, studying the menu.
Rose stifled a snort. “Ah, no. This is not my style.”
He glanced up at her over his menu. “Did you want to go somewhere else?”
He didn’t ask it in that manipulative way that would have made sense to her. He asked it like he cared. Like he’d get up and walk out if she said yes.
“No, I…I just…” Good God, she was stuttering. She looked down at her menu. “It’s nice,” she grumbled.
They ordered, and Jack chatted on about something to do with cattle and beef and steak, and Rose didn’t know why it seemed so interesting when Jack talked about all that, but it was.
“Are you going to tell your sister we talked about cows on our date?” she asked, desperate to feel like she had some kind of handle on this whole thing instead of sitting across from him and hanging on every word.
“Maybe. She’s very into the whole slow-food thing.”
“This is the non-med-school sister.”
His mouth quirked. “You do pay attention.”
“I’m supposed to, right? They’ve got to think we’ve been dating for, like, months.” They were supposed to show up and believe she and Jack loved each other. Her stomach turned on one nauseated roll.
“That would be ideal.”
A mouthwatering steak was placed in front of her, and still her stomach roiled. She needed non-love type topics. Topics that would remind her she did not belong anywhere near Jack’s orbit and this performance for his family wouldn’t just be about pretending to be someone involved with Jack, but pretending to be someone Jack’s family would approve of and think was better than Madison. “Tell me about your mom,” she blurted. Whatever woman had raised Jack would be the kind of woman who would find Rose abhorrent, she was sure.
“She’s a mom. A force.” He smiled fondly. “She had four kids and helped run the farm with my dad and just always made us feel like we could do whatever we wanted—as long as we went to church every Sunday and had a real job, that is.”
Rose couldn’t help but laugh at that, even though it was completely foreign to her. Church and mothers who were forces as much as the rest. “So she’ll be super thrilled about a girl who’s never stepped foot in church, runs a bar, and is covered in tattoos.”
“You aren’t covered.” His mouth quirked at something.
“What?”
“I still haven’t told her I have a tattoo.” He rubbed a hand over his chin. “And I’m going to have to shave my beard or she’ll express severe disappointment.”
“Such a good son.”
“I try to be.”
She should have something sharp or nasty to say to that, but how could she? He was good. Dutiful. “I was not such a good daughter.”
“From what little you’ve told me about your parents, I’d say they didn’t deserve a good daughter.”
“No, I suppose they didn’t.”
“Do you have siblings?”
Everything inside her turned to ice. “I don’t want to talk about my family. This is about your family.”
She could tell he didn’t like that. “They’ll want to know about you too, not just what you know about me.”
“I don’t want to talk about my family with anyone.”
She let him think that was because of what she’d told him about her father, and maybe, in part, it was. She was embarrassed of who and what her parents were, and Jack knew she had sisters, but aside from that, if he knew their names, if he ran into Delia in town and knew who she was… It would all get too complicated and twisted. She had to keep them separate.
“Tell me about your sister in med school,” she said instead, and he did, telling stories about both his sisters with the kind of awe and protectiveness Rose understood.
They ordered dessert and lingered there, him asking her about running a bar until she finally told him how she’d won Pioneer Spirit in a poker game. She didn’t know how he’d maneuvered that story out of her, considering it reminded her of where she’d learned her poker skills. Something Jack also knew, because she couldn’t keep her big mouth shut around him.
When it was finally time to go, Jack once again opened all doors for her, and she didn’t fight it, because what was there to fight? This decent, good guy wanted to open doors and say please and thank you, and somehow, he thought her worthy of that kind of attention.
This wasn’t fear or nerves anymore, it was outright confusion. Didn’t he get it? Who and what she was? Didn’t she wear that pretty clearly?
He pulled his truck into the bar parking lot, and he turned off the ignition and got out of the truck and not because he thought he was going to talk his way into her bed. He was probably going to walk her to her door like this was some movie about wholesome teenagers.
He rounded the truck, and she sat in her seat until he opened the door, and then she furrowed her eyebrows at him. “Are you for real?”
He cocked his head as if he couldn’t quite figure out what her confusion was. “Far as I can tell.”
She shook her head and let him hold her hand as she got down from the truck again. Then he did, indeed, walk her to her door.
He stood there in the faint parking lot light, so close that she wanted to fling herself at him, but she was stronger than that. This was fake, and she couldn’t let him make it real.
“I guess I shouldn’t kiss you,” he murmured, leaning closer and closer until she could practically feel the faint whisper of his whiskers. “You might get the wrong idea.”
She laughed, though God help her, she didn’t know why. None of this was funny.
“Of course,” he continued, his voice low and sensual, a very lustful promise all wrapped up in those syllables, “you could admit
this was a real date and we could go inside.”
That scared her more than anything. She couldn’t feel soft about him and have sex with him. She’d ruin him and everything before his family even showed up. “No. No, we can’t do that.” But she wanted him. His hands, his mouth, that good heart.
You can’t want that, Rose.
Which irritated the hell out of her. That he could work her up like this and not take the simple, good thing she’d offered him.
“Why won’t you take an offer of no-strings sex?” she demanded.
“Because I want more than sex from you, Rose.” He leaned forward, brushed his mouth chastely across her cheek, and then turned and walked toward his truck. “Good night.”
It wouldn’t be though, because once again, she’d spend it tossing and turning, yearning for Jack. Damn him.
Chapter 14
Jack stood in front of the mirror in the bunkhouse bathroom and tried to keep his mind blank as he ran the razor over his beard. He’d gone into Bozeman yesterday and gotten a quick buzz at the cheap barbershop there, and now every time he caught sight of himself, it was like seeing a ghost. The reflection showed him the man he’d been a few years ago, a needling reminder that his family would be descending soon.
Today.
Any minute, really.
Which was fine. Great. He hadn’t seen his parents or Vivian since they’d visited him in the rehab center last Christmas. He missed them. Mike and Madison and kid were a bitter pill to swallow, but it was a small price to pay for the rest.
He set down the razor and gripped the sink. It was a giant price to pay, and he hated it. It felt like a poison, seeping in to ruin the past week. It had actually been really good—a combination of hard work and fun that hadn’t existed in his life for a very long time. And Rose, whether on the periphery or smack dab in the middle of it all, had become a bright light of hope.
So much hope he’d almost been afraid to touch it, really touch it, for fear she would simply disappear in a puff of smoke. Their fake date had been, well, the opposite of fake, and he wanted to revel in all that instead of the pain and confusion.
