ONE
Haven
It was my twenty-first birthday and I wasgoing to get a kiss.
We'd been looking for the kisser—which I told Amber we could not call them because that made him sound like a butt—all night. Every single person we'd found, though, had possessed some fatal flaw. I knew them in high school…or they weren't my type. Or he was too old, or too tattooed, or not enough.
By the time we got to the Spur, we were desperate.
Amber started pointing at every single guy there with her brows raised in a question mark. Everly said we could even ask the bartender.
Amber said I was being too picky.
Everly said there was no such thing.
But the truth was…Iwasbeing picky. And the one guy I wanted just so happened to be sitting at the bar.
Wyatt Holt was old enough that he didn't celebrate his birthday anymore, but he was also gorgeous and perfect and stoic and mysterious. I'd worked under him—not that way—for six years, and he's always been kind to me. He was the whole reason I was shooting for vet school. I loved watching him with the animals, watching him do anything…
Watching him drink alone. Which was weird, because I couldn't remember ever seeing Wyatt away from the ranch.
“Ooh…your brooding vet,” Amber said, wiggling her eyebrows. “You should go talk to him.”
"I work for him," I said.
"So?"
"So it would be weird."
Amber looked at me the way she looked at people when she thought they were being stupid. She had a very specific face for it. "Haven. It's your birthday. Go talk to him."
I looked back at Wyatt. He was nursing his beer and not talking to anyone and looking at the middle distance the way he did sometimes on the ranch when he thought nobody was watching.
"He's here alone," I said.
"I know."
"That's weird, right? That's weird."
"Very weird. Go find out why.”
“You'd better hurry though.”
We both looked at Everly, who had tilted her head toward the bar. “I think he's leaving.”
I turned just in time to see Wyatt set his beer down and head for the side door.
"Go!" Amber said.
I went.
The night air was cold and smelled like cedar and somebody's truck exhaust. I came around the corner of the building and stopped.
Wyatt was leaning against the wall with a cigarette between his fingers.
I had worked for this man for six years. I had never once seen him smoke.
He hadn't heard me yet. He was looking out past the parking lot at nothing, and his face was doing something I didn't recognize. Not sad. More like…keeping an appointment he'd made a long time ago.
