Page 41 of Worth the Trouble

“Since just after your wedding. She was there, as it happens. Roxy invited them.”

Tate turned and looked out the barn door at the land to the east, the parcel the town had spent a season fighting over, and Jason let him look. He knew what was turning over in his brother’s head, because it had turned over in his own a hundred times. The petitions Tate had carried door to door. The meetings. The photograph that had nearly cost him Rylee.

“The town finds out who she is,” Tate said, “the same week you hang out a shingle asking those same people to trust you with their horses.”

“I know.”

“That’s not me telling you to stop.” He faced Jason again. “I stood in front of a photograph once and said nothing, because explaining it meant admitting what I’d done. It nearly cost me everything I’ve got. So I’m only going to ask you one question.”

“Ask it.”

“Does she make you happy?”

“Yes.” No pause, no hedging, because there was nothing to hedge. “She makes me feel like myself.”

Tate nodded, the nod of a man setting a load down. “Then I hope this town is kinder than I think it is.” He picked the saddle back up. “Bring her to dinner. Rylee will want to know her before the town does. And Jason?”

“Yeah.”

“Thank you. For all of it.”

Jason gave him a curt nod and went to get Onyx. It was going to be a good morning.

Cece was waiting at the side of the lodge, at the spot where the trail bent away from the parking lot, and she knew before he said a word. He could tell by how she stopped walking and looked at him.

“What?” she said.

“I told him.”

Her whole body went still. “Told him what, exactly?”

“Everything. The business. Us. Your name.”

“Jason.” She pressed a hand flat against her stomach as if holding it in place. “You were supposed to wait until things settled. Until the meeting mess was over. Until I’d figured out how to be less of a liability.”

“You’re not a liability.”

“Your brother led the fight against my father.” She wasn’t angry. She was scared, which was worse. “What did he say?”

“He asked if you make me happy. I said yes. He said to bring you to dinner.”

Cece stared at him. “Dinner.”

“Rylee’s cooking. There will be a pig present. Socially, not on the menu.”

She laughed, one surprised note of it, and then her eyes were wet and she turned toward the trail so he wouldn’t see. He caught her hand and kept it.

“You didn’t have to do that,” she said.

“I don’t do things I have to do,” Jason said. “I do things I mean.”

She held onto his hand the whole way up the trail, and if she held it tighter than usual, neither of them mentioned it.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The beautiful aroma of pot roast drifted to them as they stepped onto the porch.

Jason knew the house better than his own kitchen. He’d rebuilt half the barn behind it and hauled the couch through that front door with Tate on the other end of it, and he’d never once climbed those porch steps with a woman beside him. Cece had her coat buttoned to the throat and a pie in each hand that she’d bought at Sweet Everything and told him not to mention that she didn’t bake them herself.