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She could deal with someone who was annoying. That was the least of her worries. It was dealing with someone who made her feel guilty. Who made her feel like a fraud... Yeah, that was what she resented.
She got out of the car just as Chase was circling back to his work truck. He had on a faded denim jacket and a pair of tan, Carhartt pants that clung to his workman’s physique with more loving care than she felt was strictly necessary.
“Good morning,” he said as she got out of the car.
“Yeah. I guess. What have you been up to?”
“Just went and fed the pigs. Haven’t been out to collect the eggs, but I know you like to do that.”
He looked almost boyish when he said that, and it made her want to snap at him. “And we care what I like now?”
“I thought I’d haul the tractor out later, help out with the field.” He said that like she hadn’t just been spiteful about the eggs.
“I didn’t ask for your help,” she said.
“No,” Chase said. “But Mac did. And this was his plan too. Same as the kids are his kids, as well as yours. And I figure if that’s what he wanted, it’s my duty to make sure that some of this is done the way he saw fit.”
“He’s dead,” Lydia said, making a wide berth around his person as she headed toward the house.
She was abitch. She really was such a bitch.
And she was angry with herself. For saying that to Chase, and for the fact that saying it didn’t make her want to cry.
“I’m aware of that. Would you like some coffee?”
She stopped, her shoulders sagging. “Were you in my house?”
“No. I brought some coffee with me.”
She looked at Chase, and she suddenly felt tired. And he looked strong. Tall and broad shouldered, with pale blue eyes and blond hair. When she’d first gotten to know him, at thirteen, he’d been cute, and then he’d transitioned into a boyish handsomeness, his looks appealing to large swaths of Pear Blossom’s female population.
It had been truly irritating to be around. But in Mac’s eyes Chase could do no wrong. His foster brotherknew about the world. And had all the women he could possibly want—not that Mac wanted that. He was perfectly happy with her! He always hurried to say—in an endless source of streetwise confidence.
He was that bad boy most girls couldn’t get enough of and all Lydia had wanted was safe. When Lydia was twelve, Caitlin Groves had disappeared. Presumably killed by her boyfriend. And then she’d found a baby on a bridge when she was thirteen, and that had only confirmed to her that the world had seemed vast and scary.
Bad boys were the last thing she could imagine wanting.
And yet, she seemed to be stuck with one.
And now there were lines around those eyes and grooves around his mouth, representative of the years that had passed and all they had cost him. His face holding ghosts of emotions that had come before, and now a permanent sort of grimness that had come about with Mac’s death.
She directed her focus past his shoulder, at the mountains beyond that had the audacity to look the same.
“Yeah, I’ll take some coffee.”
He took out his thermos, unscrewed the lid and poured a bit of coffee into it. He took a step toward her when she didn’t move toward him, handing it to her.
She sighed and leaned back against the passenger side of her car, and he mirrored her stance, leaning against the side of his truck.
“It’s been six months,” he said. “Do you think you’re ever going to accept that I’m helping you here?”
“It’s been six months,” she countered. “Do you think you’re ever going to accept that I’m not comfortable with it?”
“Why?”
She didn’t have words for that. Rather, it was a whole cascade of feeling. Bound up in her own secrets, her feelings about Mac and her feelings about Chase.
The resentment that she had felt early on at Mac’s closeness with him and the strange sort of resentment that she had decided was because it seemed like Mac could be more open with Chase than he ever was with her. And in the years that she was married, she had come to realize that Chase wasn’t the issue at all. But she had never really shaken the resentment of him.
