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“Awesome. See, we don’t need ghosts for entertainment. We can entertain ourselves.”
Three
He stood there in the middle of the room, completely motionless for a good thirty seconds after Cara left. He could not quite figure out why there was something about his own words that hit him wrong. They couldentertain themselves.
He also couldn’t figure out why his chest still felt electrified where she had put her fingertips.
Things were a little bit weird. And he wasn’t quite sure what to make of that. But he did as he was asked. He laid out the sleeping bags at the foot of the bed, then plugged in the space heater between them.
This kind of amused him. It was a little bit like a campfire.
He looked over at the bed. And he ignored the rising tension in his gut. There was no reason to be tense. His idiot brothers had gotten in his head was the thing. They specialized in that. That was what older brothers did, after all, but what they did not do was understand that Cara was a sacred object.
And Jace was not a man who fucked around with the divine.
No. He knew that he had no call ever taking her out of the category that he’d put her in all those years ago. His best friend. And the woman he wanted to protect more than anything in the whole world.
She’d had it so hard, and he just wanted to shield her from ever having another hard thing happen to her.
She wasn’t a woman to him. Not really. She never had been.
Yeah. There had been the unfortunate moment in high school when she... Filled out a little bit and he’d been seventeen—nearly eighteen—and not as experienced as he was now, and it had been a little bit difficult to keep from marveling at the changes that had occurred. But that was teenage boy shit. Dumb shit.
He was a grown man.
He had been riding out on the rodeo circuit since then, and he had a hell of an education in the female form during those years.
He’d also learned a lot about himself.
There was something about having the miraculous beaten out of you at an early age that made it impossible to believe in lasting love and connections. Well, it did him.
His parents had clung together after Sophie had died. They’d had Callie. They’d kept on hoping. He supposed.
Callie, well, she hadn’t been alive when Sophia had died, so while she knew, she didn’t really know.
Chance and Kit, their love stories were gritty. More than they were miraculous, he supposed. They had both fallen for incredibly tough women, women who took every opportunity to take them to task when they needed it, and Jace found it amusing as hell.
He was happy that they could do that thing.
But then there was Buck, who had left town under a cloud when he was still in his early twenties. Buck, who clearly couldn’t find anything miraculous to hold on to.
And Flint and Boone were as noncommittal as he was in the relationship department. Meaning, they didn’t have them. Flint had quite famously broken up with the woman who’d gone on to be a famous country singer. And the song that she’d written about him—when it had hit the airwaves a couple of months ago it had caused a slight explosion.
Granted, she didn’t use his name, but everybody knew it was about him. Everybody.
People around Lone Rock were too smart to mention it. But... Yeah, occasionally he and Boone would trawl the online forums looking for things to interrogate their brother about.
“Where is the scarf, Flint?”
“Yeah. Where is it?”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” he would growl.
“She claims you kept her scarf.”
“Fuck you.”
“That reminds me, there was a key chain...”
