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Boone and Flint were not as gloriously unattached as they pretended. Commentary from the last couple of days had shown him that.
Of course, that didn’t really help much. It only made him wonder if he’d ever been as detached as he pretended. If he’d been lying to himself as well as he ever had to anyone else.
They finished their burgers, and Boone downed another shot, simply because he could.
“Let’s go,” Flint said. “I’m bored of sitting here sober.”
“See you later,” said Jace. “I’m going to hang out for a bit.”
It was getting crowded in the bar, and he didn’t like the idea of leaving. Not with Cara looking like that. Not with all these men here staring at her.
You just want to keep staring at her.
She was his friend. It was more than that. It would always be more than that.
His brothers left, and he kept his position at the bar. Kept it until things started to fade out. Until Cara rang the bell for last call.
Until the very last patron exited the bar, and they were the only two people left inside.
“I’m going to need a ride home,” he said.
He wasn’t drunk. All the whiskey had left his system a couple hours earlier. He wished he were a little drunk.
“Weird,” she said. “I don’t seem to recall agreeing to that.”
“I figured you probably wouldn’t leave me here.”
“Well, that’s where maybe you don’t know everything about me.”
It was on the tip of his tongue to say that he knew more about her than he had a week ago. That he knew more about her than he wished he did.
But he was trying to get them back on equal footing.
It was tough. It was damn tough when she was standing there looking like she did. When she was looking like the embodiment of...
He cut that thought off.
He was about to think that his best friend looked like the embodiment of sex.
And that was not what he wanted to be thinking. Not now. Not ever.
“I figured we would talk a little more. About the hotel.”
“Oh great,” she said, leaning back against the bar. She arched her back slightly, and he couldn’t help but notice the way that her breasts thrust upward.
He looked away.
“What are your plans.”
“Well. That kind of all depends. On how deep of an investment you’re talking about here.”
He looked back at her, because even though he was feeling off-kilter at the moment, he would damn sure make eye contact with Cara when he was talking about business. When he was talking about things that mattered. “The thing is, I have more than enough. I’ve never been one to sit around and be idle. The rodeo might not have been my dream, but if I was going to do something, that I was going to be the best at it.”
He cleared his throat. “When you have brothers who are determined to be the best at all the same things... Well, it gets a little bit competitive. And on the youngest. So I came after them. And everything they did, I wanted to have done, done better. Every record they had broken, I wanted to come up behind them and break it too. As you pointed out, I’m not a big visualizer. I’m not a dreamer.”
He looked down at his hands. It was high time he did something with those hands. Built something. Made something. And doing it for Cara...that just made sense. “I just put one foot in front of the other. I live in the moment. Because of that... I went. There’s no room for nerves to creep in. No room for anxiety. No room for what-ifs. And the point of all that is, I made a lot of money doing that. I’m proud of that money. Because it’s mine. The money that I’m getting from the trust fund? It isn’t. It’s not mine. That comes from my dad. It comes from everything that he built. And the more I think about it, the more I want to invest in something permanent with it. Because I have it, whether I feel like I have a right to it or not. So. The budget’s big. Did you want an in-ground pool?”
She laughed. “No. I don’t think I need a pool. But... I don’t really know what to do with this offer. I don’t... We’re friends, and I know that you care about me. You always have. But this...”
