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He nodded slowly. “Right. I’ll pitch your things in the dryer and have them all ready for you... You’re coming back tomorrow?”
She nodded. “Yeah. I said I would do the week. And now I’m committed to doing whatever... I don’t want you to give me the easement just because we had sex. Because you know that feels a bit like prostitution.”
He laughed, but not a rolling, roaring laugh, just a short chuckle, mostly because he hadn’t expected that. “First of all, I told you it was yours after we kissed.”
She sniffed. “I felt there was an expectation.”
“Right. Well. I would never give you the easement just because we had sex. But I do feel more like giving it to you, now that I am sitting back and being honest with myself. It isn’t you I don’t trust, Quinn. You didn’t do anything to me. You just showed up looking a lot like my issues. And I reacted badly to that. And yes, I don’t have a great well of love in my soul for Four Corners. I have some issues with that whole collective, and I’m not the only one in the community who does. But it has nothing to do with you and, really, has nothing to do with an easement on and off the property. I trust you.”
Her green eyes looked suddenly dewy. “You trust me?”
“Yes. I do. You’ve proved to me that you are honest, and that if you tell me to make sure it’s all okay, you are. I don’t believe that you would dig into a situation that feels untenable.”
“I wouldn’t,” she said.
“So it isn’t about kissing or sex or anything like that. Okay?”
She nodded. “Okay. I believe you.”
“Good.”
She stood up, still adorable in the too-big clothes. Her sisters were probably going to question that. But that, he figured, was something she would either be concerned about or not.
“I’ll see you tomorrow.”
He thought about leaning in and kissing her, but he didn’t know about that, either.
And she didn’t make a move toward him. She seemed suddenly a little bit skittish. And he didn’t think—he just reached out and put his hand on her cheek, stroked down the back of her hair. And she seemed to still.
“Good night, carrot,” he said softly.
“Good night.”
She turned and walked out of the house, and he felt like he shouldn’t let her go.
But what he did do was go to his room and collect her clothes, pick up her bra and drape it over the shower, because he wasn’t going to put it in the dryer, because he did know better from a particular disaster that had happened once when Jessie was in high school. But everything else went straight in with a dryer sheet that was going to make her clothes smell like his.
He stood there for a while pondering that.
He wasn’t quite sure just what in the hell he’d gotten himself into here. But he was into it.
So, there was nothing else to do but be in it.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
QUINN FELT LIKE CRYING. And like laughing. As she drove back home shaking inside, she was glad that he hadn’t asked her to stay. Part of her wanted to. Part of her wanted to climb into bed with him. But part of her needed the distance, and if he had asked her to stay, she wouldn’t have been able to tell him no. She needed to process what had just happened, and she was very aware that she was driving home without her shoes, wearing a very large pair of boot socks that were clearly not hers. And that it was late.
She really hoped—she really, really hoped—that her sisters had gone to bed.
She just wasn’t ready to talk about it. She wasn’t even really ready to deal with it in her own soul, but it was what it was, she supposed.
When she turned onto the road that led to Four Corners, she really looked at it in a different way.
A big, mysterious collective that no one else in town could access unless they worked there.
A gigantic ranch that almost nobody could compete with, that had been there since the dawn of time.
Of course it was a big deal for Levi to agree to work with them. It would probably even make other people feel like he was a sellout, or like he was suspicious.
