Page 44 of Blue Jean Summer

I slipped into the stables not thirty seconds after Catherine, but she was nowhere to be found. The place was spotless and empty. A creak overhead was my clue. I rounded the row of stalls and slipped up the narrow staircase.

Sunlight poured in from the dusty loft windows and leaked through the corrugated metal roof like falling stars. The warm scent of hay hung heavy in the humid air.

Red-painted toes stuck out from a fortress of hay bales.

“Knock knock,” I called out, not wanting to startle her.

Catherine’s feet disappeared, and her head popped up like a gopher. There was hay stuck to the top of her hair.

“Hey,” I said as I stuffed my hands in my pockets and rounded one of the stacks of hay bales.

I remembered coming up here as a kid and feeling sheltered from the cruelness of the world. Sometimes there were too many people in the house. Sometimes the mountains were too big and the valley was too deep. The loft was a safe place to hide when it was all too much.

Catherine peered over the wall of hay. “Hi.”

“You okay?” I asked as I neared, still giving her space in case I was the reason she had flown out of the house like her very fine ass was on fire.

Catherine stood and composed herself as she slipped out from behind the bales.

She was in a pair of denim cutoffs and a simple white T-shirt that had no business being as sexy as it was. Her lips were tinted red, teasing me with the memory of that cherry gloss.

“Just fine,” she said dismissively, smoothing down nonexistent wrinkles on the front of her shorts.

“Really?” I mused as I sauntered forward. “Because I’d say you were training for a marathon with the way you were hauling ass down here.”

Her cheeks turned pink. “I just…needed to get out of the house.”

“All the space in the world and it still feels suffocating sometimes, doesn’t it?”

Denim eyes flashed with surprise. “Yeah. Feels that way.”

I looked around the pitched roof. “I used to come up here when I was a kid. It was my hiding place.”

“Me too.” Catherine stuffed her hands in her back pockets. “Well, not when you were a kid. When I was a kid. If my mom was late picking me up from riding, I’d come up here and build forts with the hay bales.”

The toes of my boots hit her flip-flops. “What brings you up here today?”

Those cherry lips tightened in the corners, and her eyes darted to the left. “House was too big.”

“Why was it too big?” I softly pressed.

Catherine let out a pent-up breath and plopped down on one of the bales. I took it as an invitation to take the spot beside her. “Maybe two weeks was a little ambitious,” she admitted.

My brows knitted together. “What’s going on? This morning Hallie told me most everything’s been taken care of.”

I didn’t want Catherine to be stressed. This was my mess to be worked up about. She should be able to put her feet up and relax for the next two weeks.

“It has been,” Catherine said quickly as she pulled at a thread that was unraveling from the hem of her shorts.

“Then what’s the matter?”

She used the bales behind us as a backrest and closed her eyes. “I didn’t think about the fact that it would take me more than two weeks to get up the courage to call my father and ask him to walk me down the aisle.”

Oh.

I rubbed the back of my neck. “I—um…I didn’t know he was…in the picture.”

“He’s not,” she admitted. “Not really, anyway.”