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By the time they got to Roan’s cabin, Tris was smiling. It looked like only Jecca’s job was in the way of her living somewhere else. That and the proximity to her father. And all those stores that women so loved.
Not much, he thought as she pulled up in front of the cabin. Just insurmountable obstacles, that’s all.
Fourteen
The cabin was just as Jecca had imagined it—and would have been disappointed if it hadn’t been. It was quite wide, with a deep porch across the front. There were chairs and stacks of logs on the porch, plus an old washtub hanging on the wall. The steep roof had a chimney in the middle, and a tendril of gray smoke drifted out.
“Perfect,” Jecca said, looking out the windshield.
In the back, Nell woke up, saw where they were, then scrambled between the front seats and over her uncle to get out the door. When her foot hit him in the stomach he grunted in pain.
“I guess she’s glad to be here,” Jecca said as she watched Nell run toward the porch steps.
Tris reached across her to give a quick blow of the horn.
“Inside watching his soaps?” Jecca asked.
“That would be fun. He’s trying to write his novel.”
The front door flew open and out came a big, burly man wearing beat-up dungarees and a blue flannel shirt over a dark green T-shirt. His heavy boots clomped on the wooden floor.
“He looks the part,” Jecca said. When he got to the ground, she saw his face. He was a handsome man, with three-day-old whiskers, and his thick hair had a decided touch of red in it. “Named for his hair?”
“When he was a kid it was like fire,” Tris said as he opened the car door.
“And I guess you guys told him that often.”
“Oh yeah,” Tris said, laughing as he got out. “We called him Burn Boy.”
“And what did he call you?”
“Roan was really nasty. He called me Ken,” Tris said as he shut the door.
For a moment Jecca didn?ng " >
Chuckling, Jecca watched Roan pick up Nell and swing her around while she squealed in delight.
Jecca got out of the big car, but she stood back, watching. She wanted to give them time to say hello. Besides, as far as she knew, Roan didn’t know she was coming.
The three of them were talking on top of each other. Tris and Roan had exchanged bear hugs and were now pantomiming boxing moves.
The two men were about the same height, but that’s all the similarity there was. Roan was huskier than Tris. They were both attractive men, but Tristan’s features were refined, elegant even, while Roan looked like someone in an old photo titled Buffalo Hunters.
All in all, Jecca much preferred Tristan.
As she watched she thought about how now with Tristan, this part of a new relationship was always interesting, when you got to know each other, when you found out the strengths and weaknesses of the other person. She liked learning what a person liked to eat, read, how he reacted to different situations.
Later, when she began to see things she didn’t like about the person, she’d realize that everything had been there in those first few days. There was the way one boyfriend had snapped at a waitress, then told Jecca he was sorry but he hadn’t slept well and that made him short-tempered—which he swore he never was. At the time she’d paid no attention to it, but later she saw that he always treated clerks, waitpersons, mechanics, etc., with contempt. She realized that he’d always been rude, but she’d just not wanted to see the truth.
Maybe she was deluding herself, but so far she’d seen nothing about Tristan that she didn’t like. But then, isn’t that what Kim had warned her about? That Tris made a woman feel like she was a princess, then he . . . What? Dumped her? Maybe Jecca was his favorite date because he knew it could never be permanent between them.
At the end of the summer, would he kiss her on the forehead and tell her he’d had a good time?
She reminded herself that she was the one leaving, not him. She retrieved her jacket—one of her boss’s castoffs—from the back, walked around the front of the car, and waited for one of them to notice her.
“Jecca’s going to paint flowers,” Nell was saying.
“And your playhouse,” Tris added.
