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“Me feeling like an older brother doesn’t preclude me seeing you as an equal.”
But it definitely precluded him seeing her as a woman. Great. Maybe it was even worse than she was thinking. Maybe he did remember what she had said last night, and he was not surprised that she was a virgin, and also didn’t take seriously her offer for him to relieve her of it at all, because why would he, because she would’ve had to be kidding, because obviously they weren’t attracted to each other.
She was rescued by the arrival of her breakfast, and she tucked into her eggs fiercely, mixing the yolks up in her hash browns and dipping her toast in the rest.
“You okay?”
“Starving,” she said.
“Yeah. All right. Anyway, I figure if you’re going to go over to the bank today, maybe I can go with you. And we can maybe have me cosign the paperwork.”
“I don’t need you to cosign, Jace. And if you’re thinking that’s a way to help keep me safe or bail me out or whatever...”
“Hey, all right. If you don’t want my name on the paperwork, that’s fine. I really was just trying to be helpful. I promise that I’m not... Doubting you.”
“Whatever your crisis is, it doesn’t have anything to do with me.”
“Not a crisis,” he said. “I’ve basically lived my life this way on purpose. I don’t have a lot of connections. Other than my family, and I love them. And I’ve got you. But I don’t own property, I don’t do a job where I am doing any one thing for any length of time. I got all this money that I earned riding bulls, and you tell me what’s...meaningful about that? Now I’m going to get a whole bunch of money that I didn’t even earn. I don’t know. Part of me wants to live that way, but... At this point... It’s also starting to seem a little bit pointless. And useless. You want things, and I admire that. You’re right. I don’t put a lot of stock in dreams. And I’m still not in a place where I want to put any in my own. Or even have any of my own. But I’m happy to invest in yours. Don’t see it as anything other than that. Your dreams feel valuable to me. So...”
“Yeah,” she said, her heart seizing up. “Okay.”
Why was it like this? Why was he like this? It really... It really got her. Right square at the center of her chest. He was doing this for her. And not to be condescending or anything like that, just because he cared.
And she didn’t know why in the hell that made him feel like he was sitting further away from her than he had been a moment before. Because it should feel like they were closer.
But there was just something... There was something. Something that was there for her that was missing for him.
And she would never be able to talk to him about it. She would never be able to bridge that gap, because he was all she had. She had made an idiot out of herself last night. But there were a ton of handsome men. A ton of them. She saw them every night at the bar. Little Rock was lousy with hot cowboys. If that was her thing, then there was ample opportunity for her to pursue that. The one thing she would never be able to replicate or re-create was this relationship with him. The one thing she would never be able to have again, with anyone else, was what she had with Jace. This long-standing, completely trusting friendship. Something that was kind of more like family, if she were honest.
And he was the only family she had left, really.
He was important to her. In ways that were so complicated and imperative, there was no untangling it all. “Okay,” she said again. “I’ll take your help. You can invest, but I’m going to sign the paperwork on my own.”
“Fair enough. What I’d like to do is help finance the remodels then.”
“All right,” she said.
“Then you have yourself a partner.”
“A haunted house partner,” she said.
“It’s not haunted by anything but raccoons.”
“Still. That’s pretty haunted.”
She reached across the table and stuck her hand out. And only when his large, warm, calloused hand wrapped around hers completely, did she recognize the error of her ways. Yeah, maybe that wasn’t the smartest thing to have done. But he was her friend; she wasn’t going to just not touch him. To not shake his hand.
So she did, firmly. And then brought her hand back over to her side of the table and started shoveling more eggs into her mouth.
“I’m going to make my offer right after breakfast,” she said, around her eggs. “Then I’ll sign the paperwork, and then... We can make a meeting with the contractor.”
“All right. Sounds good.”
By the time he got back to the ranch, he almost wasn’t thinking about that moment last night, over and over again. Almost.
He thought that he had done a pretty good job playing it cool this morning. But when he’d woken up, it hadn’t been the raccoon that he thought of. It had been that moment when she looked at him, all glossy eyed, and told him that she was a virgin.
And that if he wanted to have sex with one...
