Candace choked on yet another cheese straw.
I slapped my sister on the back and ignored the hopeful blond romantic at the end of the island. “I don’t know when I’ll see him. His schedule is all over the place, but he usually joins me on my morning run, if he has thetime. If he wants to tell me about George, then he can. It’s none of my business.”
Mac frowned. “Ugh, why do you have to respect people’s boundaries and be such a shining example of maturity?”
“Well, I am the oldest person here.”
She threw another cheese cube at me, and I caught it in my mouth, smiling obnoxiously as I chewed.
“I don’t know how you Clarks didn’t already know about Ian,” I told Bonnie and Mac. “He’s renting your grandparents’ house for the duration of filming.”
“What?” the sisters practically shouted in unison.
“Maggie didn’t tell you? Junior and Nola are renting their house to Ian and his entourage.”
Mac was already typing on her phone, grumbling, “What if I’d gone over there to pick up something out of storage or grab my favorite spatula?” Mac and Brady had been living together for a couple of months. It wasn’t official or anything, but no one was surprised when all of Mac’s stuff had ended up at my brother’s apartment.
The phone buzzed in her hand a moment later.
“Grandma Nola said she signed an NDA, so she couldn’t tell us,” Mac announced, reading from her screen. Then she squawked in disbelief. “And she changed the locks, so I wouldn’t have been able to get my spatula, even if I wanted it.”
Bonnie rolled her eyes. “You can barely cook. You don’t have a favorite spatula. Brady makes all of your meals.”
“Well, I would have liked to have had the option,” Mac complained indignantly. “I can’t believe they rented the house out from under me.”
Junior and Nola Clark were snowbirds who usually only came back to Kirby Falls for the holidays and the summer months.
The phone buzzed again, and Mac recited in an even monotone, “‘Why doyou care anyway, MacKenzie Eloise? You’re living in sin with that sweet Brady Judd. LOL.’”
The rest of us laughed.
Mac glared down at her phone. “Who taught her LOL anyway?”
Suddenly, she straightened, her perfectly lined eyes going wide and her affront forgotten. “Do you think Dorian Masters is staying in my room? Sleeping in my bed?” She seemed giddy at the prospect.
I shook my head at the display. “He is just a person, Mac. Just an overgrown man-baby who is bad at running.”
“But he’s a famous man-baby,” she argued. “How can you be so lah-de-dah about all this? You’ve seen his face on a movie screen. There are fan clubs dedicated to his abs. He has a damn action figure and a car endorsement, cologne ads, and billboards in Times Square. Everyone and their brother knows who he is, but you’re acting like he’s just some guy you ran into down at the feed store.”
Candace finally stopped stress eating and came up for air. “I’m actually a little curious about this, too. Are you unimpressed with all celebrities, or is it just him specifically?”
I thought about it and decided on the easiest answer. “Once you’ve seen someone flat on their back after trying to run half a mile ... I don’t know, some of the shine wears off.”
“Huh,” Mac mused. “You really are a robot.”
Everyone laughed—myself included—because itwasfunny and I knew Mac meant it lovingly. But the joke also rubbed up against something I’d known my whole life. I wasn’t as emotional or affected as everyone else, and when I did happen to be those things, I rarely showed it, even to the people who mattered.
I got home just after 8:00 p.m. It was cold and rainy, and as I stepped out of my car, my eyes immediately went to the property neighboring mine.
A decade ago, when I’d had this house built on Judd land, I’d been surrounded by forest on all sides. It had been peaceful, the perfect private sanctuary in the place I adored.
But then a few years ago, Buck Adams’s wife finally kicked his ass to the curb, and he’d purchased the acreage next to ours. A few buddies had helped him down enough trees so he could plop a mobile home in the overgrown field bordering my solitude.
There was a hundred yards between our back doors, but this time of year, the leaves were off the trees, so I could see and hear more than I ever wanted to out of that pain in the ass.
And right now, I could tell his truck wasn’t in the place he normally parked it. Even though he’d lost his license back in the spring for driving drunk and nearly killing my brother in a car accident.
Anger had my hand tightening on the doorknob as my gaze searched Buck’s backyard. There was the goat, huddled beside the trunk of the big pine tree it was tied to.
