What I actually wanted was a six-foot-three, sandy-haired, golden god of a cowboy who worked for my brother, was Harmony’s brother, and had hands that had practically given me an orgasm with one touch of my thigh. Whose name started with T and ended in E. But there was no way that was going to happen so, I’d decided to go with the exact opposite.
“You mean you don’t want them to know that you had…” Destiny started, but her voice trailed off.
“Had cancer?” I finished, trying to push down the irritation that was attempting to butt into our conversation.
I knew that it was hard for people in my life to know the right thing to say. From the time I’d received my devastating diagnosis, people had spoken in incomplete sentences or code when they discussed it…or even whispered and used hushed voices around me, like I couldn’t hear them.
Even now that I’d been labeled as “cancer-free,” it was like people were scared to say the word for fear it would show up again. Like the Boogeyman or Bloody Mary. As much as I appreciated everyone’s sensitivity, it was also frustrating. But I felt like a brat for being frustrated.
My family and my friends had been such a huge support. I couldn’t have survived the last decade without them. In my sophomore year, I wasn’t able to go to the talent show because of my white blood cell count, and the entire town put it on in my front yard. I’d watched from the picture window in my front room. I’d been so touched by what my community had done.
“You don’t want them to know that you were sick?” Destiny’s brow furrowed.
“No. I mean, obviously they’re going to know.” I pointed to my port scar. “I don’t want it to be something they saw me going through. I want to take a page from Harmony’s little black book and date people outside the small community of Wishing Well.”
Both of my friends nodded as they exchanged a look.
“Figuratively. Not literally. I don’t actually want to date people you have.” I rushed to clarify. I heard myself babbling. I knew I was doing it. Stopping, though? That was beyond my capabilities at the moment.
“No. I know what you mean. You want a clean slate,” Harmony assured me.
“Yes.”
Destiny scribbled something on her notepad and then looked up. “Okay, so no prior history. What else?”
“What do you mean?” I wasn’t sure what else there was.
“Age range. Height requirements. Occupation. Hair color. Eye color. Body type. Personality.” Destiny ticked off them off like they were the ABCs.
Which maybe they were the ABCs of dating. My limited—or, more accurately, nonexistent—pool of knowledge made me the least qualified person to judge that.
“Oh, um, I guess not too old…” It’s not that I had anything against dating someone older. But I wasn’t sure what we’d have in common. “Or not too young…” Since I was about to be twenty-three, the thought of dating someone just out of high school didn’t sit well with me.
“Wow.” Harmony’s green eyes widened. “You are really bad at this.”
“Be nice.” Destiny threw a crumpled-up napkin at her.
“No, she’s right,” I said, defending our friend. “I am bad at this.”
“No, you’re not,” Destiny insisted as she looked at the paper she was holding. “Let’s just take this one at a time. So far, we have someone that hasn’t known you your whole life and is around your age. I’m putting good kisser, because believe me, that is imperative.”
“Yes. It. Is,” Harmony agreed.
Destiny tucked her legs beneath her, getting comfortable. “All right. So, do you like taller guys, shorter guys? Or does that matter?”
I thought about how great it felt whenever Trace hugged me or we danced. Basically, any time his arms were around me, I was a happy girl. My head fit perfectly against his chest and I felt so…safe.
“Tall,” I answered.
Destiny’s eyes lit up. “Okay, good. Tall. Now, as far as a job, are you a man in uniform or a white- or blue-collar gal?”
“I’m sorry?” It wasn’t that I didn’t know what “a man in uniform” or “white or blue collar” implied, I just wasn’t sure what that had to do with whether or not I liked someone.
Harmony leaned forward, more than eager to explain. “Do you like policemen, firemen, and military men? Doctors or lawyers? Or does a construction worker, mechanic, or cowboy float your boat?”
Trace baling hay while shirtless popped into my mind.
Cowboy. Definitely a cowboy.
Trying not to let the fact that I was imagining her brother’s rippling muscles show on my face, I took a deep breath like I was really giving the question a lot of thought. “I guess it really doesn’t matter, as long as they have a job.”
“Must be employed.” Destiny nodded as she wrote. “All right. Now for the good stuff. What’s your type? Are you more of a Channing Tatum, Ian Somerhalder, or any of the Chrises?”
“The Chrises?” I asked.
“Pine, Pratt, or Hemsworth.” Destiny explained.
Harmony’s hand flew up. “Hemsworth.”
It was common knowledge that Harmony had a thing for the Hemsworth brothers. One that was not limited to Chris, as she was equally as infatuated with Liam.
I thought they were all cute, but none of them held a candle to Jax. “Um…as far as celebrity crushes, I guess I have to go with Charlie Hunnam.”
“Yes!” Harmony pointed at me.
“Aww, I miss Jax Teller!” Destiny swooned.
The girls and I had spent quite a few low-key evenings binge-watching Sons of Anarchy, and we were all a little bit in love with Jax Teller.
“Great, so I think that answers my next question.” Destiny’s hand was flying across the page.
“What?” I wasn’t sure how my celebrity crush had answered anything but just that.
“About personality.” Destiny looked up from her list. “You want a charismatic, sexy bad boy with a heart of gold.”
“Don’t we all,” Harmony murmured.
“Okay, so all we have to do is find a tall, employed, early-to-mid-twenties, Charlie-Hunnum-Jax-Teller-esque, sexy and charismatic bad boy with a heart of gold.” Destiny clapped her hands together before adding, “Oh, and one that hasn’t known you your whole life.”
“Wow. If it weren’t for that one, I would have had the perfect person.” Harmony sounded disbelieving.
“You would?” I thought my list was a little vague and slightly unattainable. The fact that Harmony had someone in mind was shocking.
“Yeah. Trace!” She confidently declared.
I was glad that I hadn’t already started eating one of Destiny’s cookies because I would have choked on it.
Harmony shook her head. “I can’t believe I never thought of it before. He’s everything on that list.”
My heart felt like it had stopped pumping. And my face was heating with embarrassment, which I prayed that the girls didn’t notice.
“That’s crazy. He really does.” Destiny also looked stunned as she turned to me. “Doesn’t he!?”
Oh boy. Act natural. How would I have felt if they’d just suggested one of Harmony’s other brothers, one I didn’t have nightly fantasies about?
Pretending they were talking about Beau or Travis or Cooper, I nodded as if it were occurring to me now. “That is so weird. I guess he really does.”
Thankfully, my voice sounded strong and not shaky, which it tended to do when I got nervous.
“Too bad you’ve known him your whole life,” Harmony commented, dropping the entire Trace-equals-my-dream-man realization as fast as she’d picked it up. “Man. It’s too bad this isn’t Weird Science and we can’t just create our own perfect man.”
Destiny and Harmony started reminiscing about all of the great ’80s movies we used to watch while growing up, like Dirty Dancing, Can’t Buy Me Love (the Patrick Dempsey version), Space Camp, and Girls Just Want to Have Fun.
I quietly thought about how there was no need for a
Weird Science computer program because my perfect man already existed. Anyone else I dated, even if he had all the qualities I’d specified, would just be an imitation of the real thing, and there was nothing I could do about it.
It wasn’t exactly the sunny outlook I wanted to have while embarking on this new chapter in my life, but right now it was all I had. My best bet was to put him out of my mind. I owed it to myself to give this, whatever it ended up being, a fair shot. And I might not have known much about relationships, but I did know there was no way I could do that if I was hanging on to my crush on Trace. I needed to put my feelings for him exactly where they belonged: in the past.
Chapter 4
Trace
“Sounds like you’re whistlin’ upwind.”
~ Dolly Briggs
As much as I loved Sunday dinners with my family, I was more than a little relieved when the last piece of pie had been served. During the entire meal, I’d been feeling so restless that I’d barely made it past the salad. Every story that was told and every new topic that was brought up had made the dinner last longer, which made me feel like I was about to come out of my skin.
My thoughts were consumed with one thing and one thing only: Cara McCord. I’d always spent a good deal of time thinking about her. In fact, I couldn’t remember a day that she hadn’t been front and center in my mind. But, lately, it had gotten out of hand. Basically, since the day she’d gotten her good news from the doctors and I’d taken a very inebriated, very talkative, very affectionate Cara home, I’d played the conversations we’d had that night over and over in my head.
And, since I’d found out last week that she didn’t have any memory of divulging as much as she had, I was even more obsessed with replaying every word. For…something. Some clue as to how to move forward and get out of the friend zone I’d put myself in. It was all I thought about, and I still wasn’t any closer to coming up with a plan.
It was driving me crazier than an outhouse rat.
“Thanks for dinner, Mama. It was amazing, as always.” I kissed my mom on the cheek and gave her a quick hug while she did her puzzles.
Sunday evenings after family dinners, Dolly Briggs put jigsaw puzzles together. When we were little, she used to say that it was her reward for making it through the week and keeping all nine of us alive.
“Dishes are in the washer,” I said. “I’m gonna head out.”
Every week, my siblings and I rotated dishes duty. We’d been doing it since I could remember. There are pictures of each one of us on stools at the sink when we weren’t tall enough to reach the water.
My mom lifted her head, still holding two small puzzle pieces in her hand. “I figured you had somewhere to be. You had ants in your pants from the second you sat down.”
I grinned. “Wow. I haven’t been accused of that since I was a kid.”
When I was a kid, I’d always had a tough time sitting still. Church and school were the hardest, but sometimes, even sitting through a meal was difficult. I’d never understood how other people didn’t get bored as easily as I did. I’d always had an excessive amount of energy. My parents had already had seven boys by the time I came along, and they said nothing could’a prepared them for me. My dad liked to say that the only hell my mama raised was me. It was even a running joke that God gave them Harmony as an apology for what I’d put ’em through.
Thankfully, I’d also grown up on a farm with seven brothers. Most of the time, I had been up before dawn to do chores. Then I’d had school and sports. When I got home, it was supper, homework, chores, and then bed, just to do the same thing the next day. The only time it got bad anymore was when I had something I needed to be doing or somewhere else to be.
Not that either of those things were true tonight. As much as I wished I had somewhere to be or someone to do, I didn’t.
“I don’t have anywhere to be. Just a lot on my mind.”
My mom’s left eyebrow lifted. I knew she wasn’t going to let me leave without following up on the statement I’d just made. “Really? Who is she?”
“She’s no one,” I shot back. The second the words left my mouth, I realized my misstep. It was a rookie mistake, I shouldn’t have made. If there really was no one, as I’d claimed, then I wouldn’t have said, “She’s no one.”
“You still seeing the Talbot girl? Lori?” she asked casually.
I knew her game and I wasn’t playing. “I only went out with her once, months ago.”
As she searched for a place to put the piece that she held between her thumb and forefinger, she nodded and oh-so-innocently commented, “Oh, that’s right.”
There was no way I was buying that she was confused over whether or not Lori and I were still dating. Dolly Briggs had the well-deserved reputation of knowing all and seeing all. We’d even joked that she was omnipotent, which she’d quickly put a stop to because she’d felt we were walkin’ the fine line of blasphemy.
“So, is it Clare Green’s girl? I know she’s been dying to get the two of you together since Lizzy graduated and came back home.”
“I’m not seeing Lizzy.”
Again, this was not a newsflash to the matriarch of the Briggs family. And, because this could go on for hours, I decided to play my bluff.
“I’m not seeing anyone. It’s not a girl.”
“All right, then.” She grinned a grin that told me she knew I was full of it. “Well, whoever she is, I’m glad to see that she’s giving you a run for your money.”
Thanks, Mom.
With that she turned her attention back to the three-thousand-piece Noah’s Ark landscape that was this month’s project. Last month’s was Notre Dame Cathedral of Montreal, and the month before that was Manhattan Sunset. Every time she finished her puzzle, she’d take a Polaroid, and then she dismantled all of her hard work and donated the puzzle to the hospital over in Parish Creek, the church, or the senior’s home. On more than one occasion, my siblings and I had asked her why she’d work so hard on something just to destroy it. She’d always smile her wise, all-knowing smile and say, “The real reward of the puzzle is the same as life. It’s the things you learned along the way, not what you had when you finally got there.”
When I was younger, I had no idea what she was talking about. As an adult, I knew she was saying that it’s about the journey, not the destination. That happiness is found on the way, not at the end of the road, and all the other things people turned into memes to post on Instagram.
As I made my way out the back of my parents’ house, I still wasn’t sure I agreed with it, but I did know what she was talking about. The journey to me getting where I wanted to be with Cara was taking forever, and I sure as hell wasn’t enjoying it.
It had been a week since my encounter in the truck with Cara. And I wasn’t being paranoid when I said that she’d been avoiding me like I had the plague. This week it was as if just laying eyes on me would infect her with Ebola. Not only had she made herself so scarce around Circle M that I hadn’t even caught a glimpse of her, but she’d run—literally run—in the opposite direction when she’d seen me after service this morning.
I was walking down the aisle and she was in the foyer. When our eyes met, she spun around so fast that she knocked into the head deacon. That didn’t slow her down though. She took off at a sprint and almost tripped over a small child leaving the Sunday school room. In a move that would have made Jackie Joyner-Kersee proud, she leapt over the kid. He was only one of many obstacles in the real-life video game where she had to exit the church without talking to me. Unfortunately for me, she passed the level with flying colors. By the time I made my way out to the parking lot, there was neither hide nor hair of her.
Not even my sister knew where she’d run off to.
If it hadn’t been so comical, I might have actually taken it personally. Thankfully, the looks on the deacon’s and the little boy’s faces were enough to ease the blow to my healthy ego.
As I opened the back screen door, I heard hushed
voices. In a house with eight siblings, you learn at a very young age that, whenever someone’s whispering, you become quiet as a church mouse and get as close as you can to hear the conversation. It was practically in our Briggs DNA.
On instinct, instead of letting the screen door slam, I rested it against the doorjamb and took two ninja-like steps towards the end of the wraparound porch, where Harmony and Destiny were huddled together.
I could only hear every other word. But a few definitely caught my attention. Cara. Dates. Setup.
Just like the puzzle my mom was working on in the kitchen, pieces started falling into place. Flashes of what Cara had told me the night I’d brought her home from the Tipsy Cow. The conversation I’d eavesdropped on after church last Sunday. And now this. Cara was on a mission, and my sister and my new sister-in-law were assisting in the endeavor. I knew what was going on—now, I just needed details.
Who were they setting her up with?
When was she going on her date?
Where was she going?
Never before in my life had I wanted to know what someone was saying as much as I did right now, but I was as close as I could get without announcing my arrival. The only way I was going to find anything out was if I inserted myself in the conversation, so I rounded the corner.
“What are you two conspirin’ about?”
Both Harmony and Destiny jumped and spun around, clutching their hands to their chests.
“Don’t do that!” Harmony threw a small spiral notebook at me.
I grabbed it midair before it hit my forehead.
Shaking her head, Harmony took a step towards the railing I was standing on the other side of, holding her hand out, presumably to retrieve the object she’d just attempted to beam me with. “Why are you always sneaking up on people like some kind of ninja? I swear, one day, you’re going to give me a heart attack.”
“You’re a healthy woman in your early twenties. I don’t think you’re exactly high risk for a coronary,” I pointed out as I started to give her futile weapon back.
My hand had not quite reached hers when I noticed what the writing said. Snatching it back, I scanned the paper as Harmony protested, “Hey! Give me that!”
Convincing Cara (Wishing Well, Texas Book 2) Page 3
