I kept my eyes closed.
Smiled a smile so big I wouldn't have been surprised if she could see it from behind me.
Or from the moon, for that matter.
"Easiest thing I've ever done."
Some other insecure, douche canoe might have taken athank youas anI don't love you back. But from Calvin? It was as good as any declaration.
I didn't need the words.
I knew because she stayed.
CHAPTERFIFTY
My morning coffeewas too hot to drink yet.
I sat on the front porch in one of the two mismatched rockers Brody had dragged home from an estate sale in Ennis, mug cradled between my palms, bare feet tucked up under me. Bare legs. Bare everything, under Brody's flannel—the one from the hook on the back of the bathroom door, buttoned crooked because I'd done it in the dark without lookin'.
My panties and Brody's flannel.
Because I was Calvin Jennings, and nobody ever accused me of being a lady.
The sun was working its way up over the ridge. A meadowlark was running its three-note routine somewhere past the drive. Cat was inside doing whatever Cat did when she wasn't supervising me, and Brody was inside asleep or pretending to be—hard to tell, with him.
I blew across the top of my coffee.
I'd woken with his arm wrapped around me from behind, good shoulder against the mattress, the bad one laid heavy and protective across my waist. Took me a second to figure out where I was. Took me longer to figure out I hadn't left.
That part I was still sittin' with.
A truck turned off the main road.
I heard it before I saw it. The downshift of a diesel engine that was overdue for service, the dry squeak of brakes that needed replacin'. A truck that lived on the road.
Tires hit our gravel drive, and I set my mug on the porch rail.
Tugged the hem of Brody's flannel down over my thighs. Didn't do much. Tugged it again anyway.
The truck rolled up and stopped thirty feet short of the porch, and the man who climbed out of it wasn't a surprise.
Denny Jennings stood in the same beat-up boots he'd worn in the arena yesterday, hat already in his hands, not a thing about him different than every other time I'd seen him across the last three decades of my life. Same set of shoulders. Same sunburn under the collar. Same face I'd spent a childhood trying to read.
He didn't come up the walk.
"Calvin."
"Denny."
"Went on a wild goose chase findin' you this mornin'," he said. "Asked Calloway—the older. He don't know shit. Asked the younger. He told me to get fucked."
Despite myself, the corner of my mouth pulled.Rhett.
"Started askin' around town. Buncha gossips 'round here couldn't wait to spill the beans. Heard all about your boy. Got yourself a reputation of bein' a homewrecker."
I huffed a breath through my nose.
"But I set 'em straight."
