She slapped the plates on the table, then stalked away.
Nevada looked at Charlie. They’d known Jo the longest. Charlie had shown up in Fool’s Gold about the same time Jo had.
“Not a clue,” Charlie said, reaching for a French fry. “Sounds like she’s dealing with something from the past.”
“We all are.” Annabelle gazed longingly at the dressing she’d ordered on the side, then ignored it as she speared a piece of lettuce. “Relationships with men are never easy. If I were to make a list of all the mistakes I’ve made and line them up, I could reach China.”
Heidi looked intrigued. “Any you want to share?”
Annabelle shook her head. “Let’s just say I wasn’t always the quiet librarian I am now. I used to be…different.”
“Men can be real bastards,” Heidi said with a sigh.
“You got that right,” Charlie muttered, taking another French fry.
Nevada thought about how her heart had been broken in a single night. While she would lay part of the blame at Tucker’s feet, she knew she had some culpability, too.
“Relationships are never easy,” she admitted.
“No, but your boss is yummy,” Heidi said with a grin. “Please tell me being around him makes you tingle. I can’t remember the last time I felt a tingle.”
“We work together.” Nevada knew she sounded prim but was afraid they would guess how he tempted her.
“You don’t have to grab the merchandise, but you have to be looking.” Heidi raised her eyebrows. “Have you seen his butt?”
“He does have a good butt,” Charlie told her. “I hate nearly all men and even I’ve noticed that.”
Annabelle nodded. “I agree. Your brother Ethan is pretty hot, too. I say that in a respectful way. He’s married and obviously crazy in love with his wife.” She sighed. “Despite everything, I find myself wanting to find the right guy. Still.”
“Not me,” Charlie grumbled. “There is no right guy.”
“You can’t really believe that,” Heidi told her. “While I’m not interested in someone for myself, I can understand the longing. I used to feel that way. Until I had my hopes and dreams crushed.” She speared some of her salad on her fork. “Now I live with my grandfather and raise goats. Who says life doesn’t have a sense of humor?”
“There are still great guys out there,” Nevada said. “Both my sisters are happy and in love.”
“True,” Heidi admitted.
“Annoying.” Charlie rolled her eyes. “Your sisters got lucky. I’ll admit that. There are—” She paused. “Is that your mom?”
Nevada turned and saw her mother standing in the center of the bar. When Denise spotted Nevada, she hurried over.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” she began.
Nevada was already on her feet. Her mother’s face was pale, her eyes red. It was obvious she was upset and had been crying.
Nevada grabbed her hand and pulled her away from the table. “What’s wrong? What happened? Is someone hurt?” A million possibilities, each one worse than the one before, passed through her mind.
“It’s not that.” Tears filled her mother’s eyes. “I wanted to let you know, I’m selling the house and moving out of town.”
Nevada stared at her. There was no way she’d heard that correctly. “What are you talking about? What are you saying?”
“I have to leave right away.”
“Why?”
“Max wants to marry me.”
“I SHOULD HAVE BEEN an orphan,” Nevada announced.
Tucker looked up from his computer, her words pulling him away from the schedule he’d been revising. “You love your family.”
“Most of the time, but every now and then I think it would be nice to go it alone.” She glanced at him. “My mother is threatening to sell the house and move.”
“Why?”
“She’s hysterical. Max wants to marry her. I’m guessing she doesn’t want to marry him, although getting her to talk in complete sentences that make sense is tough. All she keeps saying is that she has to leave Fool’s Gold and she’s never coming back. I’m meeting my sisters at the house later. We’re going to try to get this cleared up.”
Too much information, he thought, trying to figure out which problem he should address first.
“She doesn’t want to move,” he told her. “This is her town.” He frowned. “I thought she liked Max.”
“Me, too. They’re crazy about each other. We had that family dinner to meet him and we all thought he was great. Even me.”
He guessed the “even me” part was more about Nevada’s having seen the man naked and having sex than her being unwilling to accept her mother’s new boyfriend.
“I thought all women wanted to get married.”
“Cliché much?” she asked sharply, then slapped her hands on the desk. “Sorry. I’m snippy. This just isn’t like my mom and it’s weird to have her unsettled. Whenever something happened when we were kids, she was a rock. Dad died and she was crushed, but she kept moving forward. So to fall apart like this because Max declares his love and wants to marry her doesn’t make any sense.”
“You’re talking to her in the morning. You’ll get it straightened out then.”
“I hope so. Sometimes relationships are complicated.”
“Agreed.” The main reason he avoided them.
“Look at Jo and Will.”
“Do I have to?” he asked. “I work with Will and we don’t talk about personal stuff.”
“Such guys. Talking about it helps.”
“How?”
“You can work out your issues.”
“If you don’t get involved with anyone, you don’t have issues in the first place.”
She narrowed her gaze. “That’s like saying you’re never going to eat again because you don’t want to risk food poisoning. Or is it Cat you’re trying to avoid?”
“I don’t need to avoid Cat. She’s out of my life.”
Nevada wheeled her chair around so she was staring at him. “Are you saying you haven’t been in a serious relationship since Cat?”
“No. Would you want to be with anyone after her?”
“But she wasn’t a regular person. She was more like a…” She paused, as if searching for the word.
“Drug,” he said flatly. “She took over my head and tried to suck the life out of me. No way I want to do that again.”
At the risk of getting too in touch with his feminine side, with Cat he’d lost who he was. He’d been her slave — emotionally and physically, which proved love made people into idiots. He’d been lucky to escape.
“That wasn’t love, it was obsession,” Nevada told him. “There’s a difference.”
“Maybe, but I’m not willing to take the chance.”
“A mature relationship would be totally different.”
He shook his head. “Your mother was in a mature relationship and look what happened there. Max wants to marry her and she wants to move out of town. Trust me, friendship and sex. That’s plenty.” Now it was his turn to look at her. “Do you want more than that?”
“That’s not the point,” she told him. “To say you’re not interested in falling in love — that’s just sad.”
“I believe in love itself,” he told her. “People love each other. But romantically, there are more pitfalls than it’s worth.”
He was sharing his opinion, but he was also warning her. While he wanted her, the rules needed to be clear. If she was expecting more, he wasn’t the guy for her.
Something he hadn’t fully considered, he realized. Both her sisters were engaged. Dakota was pregnant, had a kid she’d adopted. Talk about the dream of the white picket fence.
“You’re like them,” he said slowly, still getting hold of the truth and not liking it. “Your sisters.”
“I don’t know what you mean, but of course I’m like them. We’re identical. We have the exact same DNA.”
He swore quietly. What had, until this seco
nd, been a game he’d wanted to win had just gotten a whole lot more serious.
“What?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”
Disappointed didn’t begin to describe the reality of knowing he could never have her. Nevada was all sass and temptation. Smart, funny and skilled with a backhoe. Did it get any better than that?
He’d imagined them in bed, naked, hungry. He’d wanted to know what it felt like to please her, to have her screaming his name. Sure, that was a lot of male ego, but he didn’t think wanting to please her was a hanging offense. But now, everything was different.
“I’m not that guy,” he said flatly.
She shrugged her shoulders. “What guy?”
“The white picket fence guy — Finn, Simon. I’m the guy who doesn’t get involved. I did that once and I’m not going back. It’s hell.”
She rolled her eyes. “You’re a little dramatic today. What you felt for Cat wasn’t love. It was…” Her eyes widened. “Oh. You’re not talking generalities. You’re talking about us. Not that there is an us.”
“There’s an us.”
“Okay.”
She shifted in her seat. “I wasn’t expecting you to marry me just because we slept together. Not that we’ve done that, either.”
“We were going to.”
Color flared on her cheeks. “I hadn’t decided.”
He had and he’d been confident in his ability to convince her it was a good idea. Not anymore, he thought grimly. He liked her and respected her enough not to play games.
“You were right to say our work relationship had to come first,” he told her. “That we shouldn’t get personally involved. I was wrong to push. This project is important to me and you’re a key member of my team. I won’t forget that again.”
An emotion chased across her face. He couldn’t read it, nor could he guess. Relief made the most sense. Assuming his disappointment was more about his own ego than it was about her.
“Okay, then,” she murmured, then glanced at her watch. “I’m supposed to meet my sisters to strategize about our meeting with Mom. I’ll pass on the coffee.”
“Sure.”
She collected her keys and purse, then left.
He watched her go, wondering if she really had to be somewhere or if she was trying to get away from him. In the end, he knew it didn’t matter. From time to time he might be a bastard, just like every other guy on the planet, but he was determined to do the right thing when it came to Nevada.
BY THE NEXT MORNING Nevada had nearly convinced herself that Tucker was smart to insist they return to a “business only” relationship. The decision was sensible and easier in the long run. If she was a tiny bit annoyed that he didn’t find her irresistible, well, that was something she would have to get over. If she was sad that there wouldn’t be any more amazing kisses, that was a fact she would deal with over time. It wasn’t as if she’d fallen for him or anything.
She walked up to the front porch of her mom’s house. The door opened before she reached it. Dakota and Montana were waiting for her.
“How is she?” Nevada asked.
“Still hysterical and insisting she’s moving.” Dakota sighed. “And we’ve only been here for about three minutes. This isn’t going to be a fun conversation.”
“None of us thought it would be.”
Nevada followed her sisters into the kitchen, where they found their mother frantically scrubbing an already clean sink.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Denise announced when she turned toward them, her sponge dripping on the floor. “You can’t change my mind. I’m not marrying Max.”
The sisters looked at each other, then back at her.
Dakota spoke first. “It’s okay, Mom. None of us were telling you to marry Max.”
Denise returned her attention to the sink. After rinsing it, she attacked the counters. “Good, because I’m not going to. I was married to your father. He was my husband, and that’s not going to change.”
“I don’t understand,” Nevada admitted. “Why are you acting as if we’re all insisting you accept Max’s proposal? Why does anything have to change?”
“He won’t understand,” Denise said, moving to the cooktop and removing burners. “He’ll be upset.”
“Max?” Montana asked.
“Yes. I don’t want that.”
“You think he’ll be happier with you moving out of town?” Dakota asked softly.
Denise dropped the sponge and seemed to crumple in on herself. She returned to the sink, peeled off her purple gloves, then started to cry.
“I can’t do this,” she sobbed. “I’m too old to fall in love again. Or re-in love.”
Her daughters moved in and surrounded her. Nevada wasn’t sure if she was being especially stupid today, because she didn’t understand the crisis.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Denise said between wiping her face and blowing her nose on a tissue she’d pulled out of her jeans pocket. “That I’m not being a very good role model. That I always said to be strong and stand up to your problems. You think I don’t want to be like that? Sometimes it’s hard, but I had to say those things because that’s what mothers do.”
“Okay, you’ve moved from upset to talking crazy,” Nevada told her, taking her hand and leading her into the family room. She set her mother on the sofa, then settled next to her. Dakota took the other side, while Montana sat on the coffee table, facing her.
“Mom, you’re wrong,” Nevada told her. “You don’t have to move away from where you live because a man proposed.”
Denise’s eyes filled with more tears. “What am I supposed to say?”
“I’d start with the truth,” Dakota told her. “That you care about him but you don’t want to get married. You want to keep seeing him, right?”
Denise nodded.
“Say that. If he doesn’t appreciate your honesty, then let him move.”
“Hey,” Montana snapped. “My boss, my job.”
“Sorry.”
Nevada rubbed her mother’s arm. “Dakota’s right. Just because he proposes doesn’t mean you have to say yes. And refusing doesn’t mean everything is over. Maybe he thinks you’re the one who wants to be married. You do seem like the type.”
Denise sniffed. “Traditional? I always have been. But this is different. I do love Max, but I don’t want to get married again. I promised myself that when Ralph died. I love Ralph and I love Max. Max will always be my first love. I want Ralph to always be my husband.”
“So, tell him,” Montana said. “I know Max cares about you, Mom. He doesn’t want to upset you. What you’re describing is wonderful. You want each of the men you loved to have a special place. That’s great. I think Nevada’s right. He was proposing as much for you as for himself. Do you really think he would risk losing you over an engagement?”
“Maybe not,” Denise said slowly. “I just panicked.”
“Makes sense,” Dakota told her. “Talk to Max. Explain how you feel. I suspect what he wants is your love.”
“All right. You have a point. He’s never been especially interested in following the rules. Maybe that’s what surprised me so much.” She sniffed again, then smiled. “You are wonderful daughters. I don’t say that enough.”
“You could stitch something on a pillow,” Montana offered.
Denise laughed, then hugged each of them. “Thank you for rescuing me,” she said.
“You’ve rescued us each bunches of times,” Nevada reminded her. “We’re happy to help.”
“Thank you. All right. Enough of my crisis. I’ll talk to Max later and if he reacts badly, I’ll have another breakdown. But for now I’m fine.” She smiled. “I don’t suppose any of you wants to share something that will distract me from worrying.”
Dakota and Montana glanced at each other.
“We could talk about the wedding,” Dakota offered. “We’ve picked the date.”
Denise’s breath caught. “You have? When?”
/> “New Year’s Eve,” Montana said with a grin. “It’s a Saturday, which is perfect. I don’t know why, but the Gold Rush Ski Lodge and Resort had a recent cancellation on their main ballroom, so it’s available.”
Denise bounced on the sofa. “It is? Did you reserve it?”
Dakota and Montana both laughed.
“We did,” Dakota admitted. “Right away. It’s so perfect. We went to see it a couple of days ago and it’s beautiful. We’re thinking night with lots of twinkle lights.”
Nevada forced herself to smile and nod, as if she were thrilled with the news. Not that she wasn’t happy for her sisters. Of course she wanted them both to have the perfect wedding. But somehow knowing they were getting married on the same day made her feel kind of funny inside. As if somehow she’d missed out on something big.
Montana turned to her. “Are you okay with this?”
“Sure,” Nevada said. “It sounds perfect. You’re really lucky to have a cancellation only a few months out. You’ll be able to have a big dinner and dancing. It’s going to be so much fun.”
Dakota studied her for a second, as if making sure she was telling the truth. Nevada held her gaze, willing herself to look as normal and happy as possible.
“It’s fine,” she promised.
Dakota nodded, because when had Nevada ever lied to her sister before?
NEVADA RETURNED to the construction site in the early afternoon. She’d filed permits with the city, confirmed the blast dates and stopped by to see her nephew Reese and his exuberant dog, Fluffy, but nothing seemed to lift her mood. She wasn’t upset or sad or even confused. She was restless. It felt as if something important was about to happen. Or maybe that was wishful thinking on her part.
She was supposed to spend the afternoon doing paperwork, one of her least favorite things. Maybe she should put it off and go dig out tree stumps with big equipment. That always made her feel better.
She walked into the trailer, intent on grabbing her hard hat and heading out. Tucker was inside, pulling something from one of the file cabinets.
“Hey,” he said absently, paying more attention to the papers in his hand than her. “Everything okay with your mom?”
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