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“No. Never. I rarely even drink at parties.”
“Only in saloons?” he asked.
She smiled. “Only in saloons.”
“Lucky me.”
“Yeah.” She’d stopped eating, and when her smile faded, she stared at her plate.
“Hey, Grace?”
“What?”
“I’m sorry about that. You being fired by that asshole.”
When she looked up, he saw surprise in her eyes. Just a brief, bright flash, and then it was hidden by old anger. “It’s no big deal. Nothing new. I’ve got to learn how to keep my mouth shut.”
“Maybe not. You did the right thing.”
“Ha. The right thing. It didn’t help her. I probably made it worse. You should have seen her scrambling to defuse the situation. Begging me to stop. It was all about me, wasn’t it? Me telling myself that I’m not the kind of person who’d just stand by while a man treated a woman like a worthless dog. The worst part? Turns out I’m exactly that kind of person.”
“No, you’re not. You said something. You didn’t just sit there and ignore it because you were scared.”
She smiled again. A grimace of a smile, bitter and hurt. And then she jumped to her feet. “Thank you for breakfast. Again.”
“Hey, wait. What are you doing today?”
She was already walking toward the door, her bare feet silent against the wood. She was so much smaller without her heels. “I’ll probably walk around town some more. See what there is to see.”
“Ah. The antlers.”
She stopped with her hand on the doorknob. “The what?”
“The antlers. Haven’t you seen the antler arches yet?”
Her expression defaulted to grumpy again. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I don’t know how you missed them. They’re right in the town square.”
“Antlers?”
“Yes. Elk antlers. Thousands of them. The National Elk Refuge comes all the way up to the city limits.”
“And there are elk there?”
“Not right now, but they’re around if you drive up into the mountains. They come down to the refuge during the winter.”
“And bring their antlers?”
He grinned. “Something like that, yes.”
“Oh.” She didn’t leave. Her hand was still on the doorknob, but she just stood there looking thoughtful.
“Want to go for a drive? I’ll show you around. There’s a lot more to see than just the town, you know.”
She glanced in the direction of the Tetons, even though the blinds were closed.
“Come on. It’ll be fun.”
“Aren’t you busy?”
“Nope. I’m off work today, so it’s either you or laundry.”
“I win out over laundry, huh?”
“Only because I did a load last weekend. Otherwise it’d be laundry all the way.”
That relaxed her. An insult. That was what soothed her prickly stance and made her laugh. Another thing that set her apart from the women of his past. “Then I’d better take you up on it. I might not be so lucky next weekend, and I’ll go crazy if I stay cooped up any longer.”
“Come back when you’re ready, then.”
She was back in three minutes. Cole was still washing the dishes and shouted for her to come in.
“I’m sorry. I should’ve stayed to help, right? People don’t cook for me very often. Let me…”
“Believe me. It’s no big deal. A lot easier than cleaning a stew pot on the trail, I can tell you that.”
“I’m sorry,” she said again, sounding as if the words scraped her throat as they came out.
“You can make me dinner sometime.”
She looked slightly panicked. “I hope you like sandwiches.”
“Peanut butter?” he asked.
Grace’s cheeks flamed red. “I haven’t had time for a real shopping trip,” she said sharply.
Yikes. “I was just kidding.”
She crossed her arms and wandered over to look at the books on his coffee table. By the time Cole dried his hands, her cheeks had faded to pink. He was glad he hadn’t been standing next to her and made a note to himself that she had some sort of peanut butter trigger. Maybe peanut butter was her secret high-calorie indulgence. If he was going to piss her off—and he wasn’t averse to that—he wanted it to be over something worthwhile.
“Ready?” he asked.
She put down the book she’d been looking at, but her eyes stayed on it.
“You like horror novels? I’m done with that if you want to read it.”
“Yeah?” She picked it back up again and opened it to the first page. “Was it good?”
“His best in years.”
“Okay, sure. Thanks.” She slipped it into her purse and shrugged her jacket on. “I’ll bring it back tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?”
“I read fast.”
“An expensive habit.”
“Yeah,” she said. “The library. Anyway, I’m not a resident here, so…”
“I’ll check some out for you if you like. Give me a list.”
She glanced at him as she passed him on the way out the door. “You’ve got a library card?”
“Sometimes they let cowboys in on free range days.”
“With fair warning to the public, I hope.”
God, she made him laugh. He wanted to push and goad her just to see what she’d say next. She might be a touch prickly, but, hell, talking to Grace, he felt more awake than he’d been in months.
* * *
WHAT THE HECK was she doing hanging out with the cowboy again? When she’d walked out of that saloon yesterday—being very careful not to sway or trip over her own feet—she’d given herself a little talking-to.
Yes, she was bored. Yes, she was a little lost. But flirting with a guy just to pass the time? That was stupid. Especially when he was hot and lived a few feet away from her bed. It wasn’t as if she had a history of restraint. Or wise choices. Or self-control.
Case in point? Less than a day after telling herself to stay away from him, she was climbing up into his big black pickup and settling into the leather seat.
But despite her self-recriminations, Grace felt a thrill of satisfaction as she buckled up. She was going somewhere. Getting out of the house. How many days had it been since she’d even ridden in a vehicle that didn’t have dozens of seats? Even in L.A., she’d been taking the bus or train for weeks.
As Cole started the truck, she rolled down the window, breathed in the cool morning air, and she felt free.
“Where do you want to go?” he asked.
Where? She had no idea. She should go to the store. She should get to know the town better. She should find the post office and the bank and the library. But she took a deep breath and said, “Just drive.”
“You got it,” he said softly.
Cole turned toward town, which surprised her, but she watched the streets pass with new eyes. It was different when you were driving. Everything so quick and temporary and new as it passed her gaze. The Western shops were cheesy but charming. The wooden sidewalks so different from anything she’d ever seen. They passed the bus station where she’d first set foot in Wyoming, and then she saw them: the antlers.
“Oh, my God. There are thousands of them.” There were. They formed a wide, tall arch at the corner of a square park. When they turned, she saw that there was another arch on the next corner. And another on the other side of the park. And there was a carriage parked there, the horses shaking their manes in the bright sunlight. It really was amazing that she’d missed them.
“Did you want to stop and look?”
“No, keep going.” The tourist shops slid past her, the tourists already out in their shorts and sunglasses. They passed another carriage rolling along, two small children looking slightly stunned and unsure as the carriage rocked around a turn.
Then suddenly the crowded blocks of hotels and shops were gone. There was a green park, and then…nothing.
Nothing but a huge expanse of rolling meadows and a tumbling stream and flocks of birds rising up into the bright blue sky.
“Wow,” she said. She hadn’t expected this at all. Somehow it was all invisible from inside the town, but now she couldn’t imagine there was a town anywhere nearby.
They drove along the bottom of a ridge for a while, Grace staring hard over the fields that stretched out from there, watching for elk or anything else she might see. Then the ridge fell away and in the distance, the mountains rose up.
“Wow,” she breathed again. “It’s amazing.”
Cole caught her eye and grinned. “You know, this is what most people do the first day. Jackson’s nice and all, but nobody comes here for the small-town charm. It’s the mountains. The parks. The wildlife. The sky.”
The sky, yes. Something so simple as air, and yet it was beautiful. Magical. Stretching for miles of impossible blue before falling behind the mountains.
She wished she had a camera. It was almost an ache inside her, the need to try to capture the beauty of the moment. They had mountains in California, and she’d passed plenty on the bus ride here, but this moment was just…stunning. A perfect contrast to how screwed up and dark and complicated her life was. She felt insignificant, and that was a relief. That whatever mistakes she’d made, all the things she’d managed to mess up were all meaningless and small.
She wanted to capture that, somehow, in a picture, but she’d pawned her camera the week before. And the kind of cell phone that let you buy sixty minutes at a time definitely didn’t come with a camera.
But for the moment, Grace let that desire go and simply took it all in.
“Where do you want to go?” Cole asked, seemingly unmoved by the amazing sight. Then again, he saw it all the time. Maybe that was why he smiled so easily.
She looked around, searching for a place she wanted to get closer to. A sign at the side of the road pointed the way toward the national parks. They were completely surrounded by beauty. How could she possibly choose? What did she want?
“Take me somewhere no one else goes,” she said.
He was quiet for a moment, looking out the window as if he could see something puzzling up ahead. Finally, he nodded. “All right. I can’t promise no one goes there, but I don’t think many tourists get that far off the path.”
She glanced down at her boots. These were sturdy, but she wasn’t sure they were good for hiking.
“Don’t worry. I don’t mean that kind of path.”
“I can handle it.”
“I’m sure you can handle anything.”
She felt a warm rush at his words. He said it as though he admired that. Most guys didn’t. Most guys wanted to feel needed. They resented that she didn’t need them. And she didn’t.
The warm rush dropped away like falling water.
She couldn’t say that anymore, could she? She couldn’t pretend that she didn’t need anybody and never had. But she’d never let anyone else know that. She’d rather die.
So she smiled. “I’m pretty tough. But I’m not sure if the boots are.”
He glanced down to her feet. “They look pretty tough to me.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” he said, the appreciation in his tone obvious even before he glanced at her with heat in his eyes.
Wow. Grace cleared her throat. He liked the whole tough-girl thing, huh? Wanted a little edginess in his life, maybe? She told herself she didn’t feel flattered. She wasn’t traveling entertainment for a small-town country boy.
