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Yeah. He knew. And her honesty peeled away so many layers of life he’d buffered his relationships with. “So you’ve stayed all these years, keeping your promise?”
“I have. I mean, I do love it here.” She wrinkled her nose. “I got engaged last year. Give me all your sevens.”
Oh?
He glanced at her bare left hand and surrendered a seven of diamonds. Hoped he’d kept some kind of poker face. “But you’re not now.”
“Nope. Kings?”
“Go fish.” He waited for her to finish her draw. “What happened? Give me all your eights.”
“Go fish.”
He drew a card.
“Give me all your fours,” she said. “He picked a job in Texas over me.”
“You didn’t want to go?” Grayson dropped a couple cards onto the table for her.
“I made that promise to my dad. Lyle knew that, but he still expected me to choose.” She rubbed the back of her neck. “Queens?”
“Go fish.”
She drew a card. “If things with this camp job fall apart, it’ll be one more way he was right—that I’ll never be my own person.”
Lyle. Suddenly his least favorite name.
“Give me all your aces.”
Beth handed over three cards, and he placed the set down.
Grayson tidied the stack. Swallowed. Beth could so easily prove that jerk wrong. “How about I take you riding tomorrow?”
“How about you don’t.”
“Just give it a try? We both need this camp running in a week.” He rubbed his hand over his face. “There’s no one else around who can fill in.”
“I’m sure we can find someone.”
He cut her a look. “Really? Didn’t you say you’d already exhausted your call list?”
She worried her lower lip, her eyes on Tally. “I don’t know that I can.”
Somehow, the words tumbled out of his mouth. “Trust me. You can do it.”
She swallowed and took a deep breath. “Okay. I’ll try.”
Nope. Beth wasn’t the worst company one could have all evening, and that little fact needled at Grayson when he finally lay down for a few hours of sleep. He wasn’t a guy who needed friends, right?
Or seventy games of Go Fish, Crazy Eights, and Slapjack.
Oh, who was he kidding? If he was being honest, he’d found himself leaning in to her company. The fact that she’d trusted him with her story kept him restless until dawn.
* * *
Beth had made a grievous mistake.She stood in the pasture beside Grayson, the dew sparkling with the early Sunday morning light, and the chatter of birds mocking her for agreeing to show up to ride.
She’d said too much the night before. Just blabbered on about her parents. Her dad. Lyle.
