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“Hey, Aria,” Caleb said with a nod. “You see Havana around, you tell her I’m coming by at eight to take her out.”
“Sister’s keeper in my job description today?” she teased. “Did you lose your fiancée somewhere?”
“She’s not answering her cell phone,” he grumbled good-naturedly, scrubbing at his overgrown whiskers that her sister had told her on the sly was her favorite thing about her soon-to-be husband. “Not sure why she has the thing if she’s not going to use it.”
“Maybe she lost it,” Isaiah suggested with a light shrug, drawing her gaze automatically.
He did that kind of thing a lot—jumping in to guide the conversation toward a more positive note. Normally Aria was so focused on Tristan, she didn’t pay as much attention to anyone else, but Isaiah’s voice had been stuck in her head all day. Hearing it again took her right back to last night. Also known as the thing she’d been trying to avoid thinking about. She glanced away.
“Or refuses to be tied to her phone,” Hudson, the taciturn one of the group, said. He’d dragged a chair from another table and flipped it around to sit in it astride, a habit he’d formed the first day in Superstition Springs and had yet to change. “If so, that makes me like her even more.”
“Everyone’s well aware of your allergy to cell phones.” Caleb rolled his eyes and elbowed his brother, Rowe, who always sat so eerily still that you might wonder if he’d passed into another life right before your eyes. “Remember the time he threw mine in the Persian Gulf because I’d been arguing with the lady at the base for thirty minutes?”
“She wasn’t listening to you,” Rowe reminded him loyally. “It wasn’t your fault she couldn’t do her job. Stillwater just doesn’t like conflict.”
“That’s not true,” Hudson corrected in his lethally calm voice that gave credence to his nickname. “I don’t like conflict I can’t resolve with a Bowie knife and a locked room. That piece of garbage got chucked because it’s proven that cell phones degrade white matter in the brain and your brother has so little to spare.”
“You’re such a comedian,” Caleb said and glanced at Aria apologetically. “Sorry, they get off track too easily these days. Going soft in their old age. I’ll have the usual.”
She nodded and went around the table for the rest of the orders, skipped over Tristan’s crystalline blue eyes easily, but then somehow got tangled up in Isaiah’s unusual gaze when she got to him.
“I can’t decide,” he said with a laugh that turned his brown eye a fascinating shade. And then all at once, he slid from the booth, crowding into her space. “Let me walk with you back to the counter while I think about it. That way I won’t hold up everyone else’s food.”
She had no choice but to do exactly as he’d outlined, particularly since the other four men promptly forgot her existence in favor of the deck of cards Caleb had just pulled out. They played Hearts almost every night. Why, when Caleb always won, she hadn’t yet figured out.
“You never have trouble deciding,” she said out of the corner of her mouth and nearly yelped when Isaiah’s arm brushed hers, sensitizing it almost beyond bearing. Automatically, she covered the area with her palm, but that only captured the heat that had gathered there.
“I’m not really having trouble,” he admitted without shame, his voice skimming through her to fill all the emptiness inside, the same way it had last night. “You can get me a hamburger and fries.”
Isaiah slid into one of the swivel chairs at the lunch counter as Aria skirted it to take her customary place behind the expanse of Formica, praying it seemed normal and not like an escape. With half of her attention on the weird prickly thing going on with her skin, she went to work writing up the corner table’s order on the pad of paper, then handed the slip to Ruby through the window to the kitchen.
“I wanted to talk to you about Tristan,” he said as soon as she turned back to face him. Which she’d dragged out an extra five seconds in hopes of settling her suddenly jumpy nerves. “I have a plan that isn’t fit for prying ears.”
Sounded like a really good subject change that she could latch on to. The sooner she got Tristan to ask her out, the sooner she could forget how much she wanted to hang out with Isaiah on the roof again instead. That was safe. A known.
She needed to be bold if she hoped to change the way her sisters thought about her. Bold like the heroines of her favorite books. It had been a long time since she’d thought about how inspiring those girls had always been, doing their own thing and setting off on adventures. Isaiah had awoken that too.
“Do tell.”
“You and Cassidy come by the barn tomorrow to work on the interior stuff. I’m going to suggest we cut out early and go to the movies in Bastrop. It’ll be the perfect opportunity to hang out with Tristan, no strings. You can talk to him and I’ll be there to make sure everything goes smoothly.”
It sounded perfect. She and Isaiah could wrangle Tristan into a double date that he wouldn’t even label as such and move forward with this bet at the same time. Isaiah and Cassidy would have an opportunity to get closer too, a bonus he’d no doubt considered now that he was all clued in that she had a thing for him.
A little too perfect. Aria hated the whole idea.
What was wrong with Isaiah and Cassidy together? Nothing. And everything.
“The point was to get him to ask me out,” she reminded him and tried to make the squicky feeling in her stomach go away.
“I know. How is he going to do that without a chance to see you in a casual setting? Here and at the barn, you’re always working. This way, we’ll all be relaxed, and I’ll be there to ask leading questions so he can get to know you a little. If nothing else, it’s a chance to get out of town.” He eyed her suspiciously. “Why don’t you sound thrilled with this?”
Because…she didn’t know why. It sounded great, like an adventure. He’d been listening to her last night, well enough to have devised a plan he thought she’d like. It couldn’t have been an accident that he’d come up with this idea after hearing that she felt kind of stuck here.
That was part of the problem. She might want to get out of this place and see things, but she had responsibilities. Serenity needed her, for one, and so did Ruby. Aria didn’t get to jet off the moment things got rough, like her sisters had done. “I have to be here early tomorrow.”
“So we’ll go the next day. Unless you flat don’t want to. This is totally your call.”
Ugh, she was being silly. Which made no sense when she’d asked Isaiah for help. Here he was, delivering on his promise in a huge way. And in return, she could finagle a way for Cassidy and Isaiah to have some alone time, even though he’d brushed off her help, probably because he was nice enough to not care about reciprocation. She cared though. It was only fair that he get something for his trouble. There was no reason to feel weird about helping Cassidy get on the radar of a great guy, same as it wasn’t weird for Isaiah to help her with Tristan.
