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“I guess so,” she admitted. It sounded pretty silly out loud.
But then, a lot of her assumptions about Jackson Thorpe seemed a bit silly right now.
It was Nic’s turn to fix dinner that night, and since she was in no mood—okay, she was too distracted—she instead went into town to pick up their favorite meal from Valencia’s, the best Tex-Mex restaurant in town, if not the county. She clearly wasn’t the only one with the same idea this Sunday night, because there were three other people ahead of her when she arrived. One was Hannah Roberts, one of the sales staff at Yippee Ki Yay, who greeted her with a smile.
“Well, here she is, the topic of much conversation in the store today.”
Nic blinked. “What?”
“Had a certain... very famous customer today, with a little boy who couldn’t stop talking about you.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I’d mention the name, but word is out to be hush-hush.”
So the Last Stand grapevine was alive, well-oiled, and functioning according to command. But that realization was nothing compared to Hannah’s pronouncement that she had been a topic of conversation.
“You’re going to explain, I presume,” she said dryly.
Hannah did, and the account of the famous star buying a pair of cowboy boots for his little boy, along with a pearl-snap shirt and a bandana—“Pretty much anything he wanted,” Hannah said—made her smile.
“I tried to talk him into a new hat, or a pair of boots for himself, but he wasn’t having any of it. They were here for Jeremy, he said. But you know the best part?”
Not until you tell me.She knew this was part of Hannah’s makeup. She just loved to gossip, but in her own, hold back the best part until the end, way. “What?” she asked, playing along.
“He put back the Stetson I handed him and said he knew he had no business pretending to be a cowboy here, where so many real ones live.”
Nic blinked.The hat don’t make you a cowboy...
“He said that?” she finally got out.
“He did. You know, I’ve always liked him, and I love the show, but that was... a wonderful thing to say.”
“Yes,” Nic said. “Yes, it was.”
“And I’m jealous. He’s already been to your place and stayed the whole afternoon.”
“Yes,” she said, but what he’d said about the hat was still rocketing around in her brain.
“I went back and read about his wife’s accident after they left. So sad. I mean, we drive fast here, but they drive crazy. And just think, if it had been fifteen minutes later, Jeremy would have been in that car with her, since she was on her way to pick him up from school.”
Nic’s breath caught. She hadn’t known that.
She hadn’t known a lot of things, it seemed.
Chapter Fifteen
Jackson sat, staringat his phone screen. It hadn’t been hard to find the number. She did run a business, after all. And it had been that thought that had started his dilemma. Started the ricocheting of his brain as if it were a billiard ball he’d hit a little too hard.
She ran a business. Training horses. Not riders, horses. But she was obviously a very good rider herself, so would it be a huge step to train a rider? He supposed he could find an actual riding instructor, but Jeremy liked her. A lot, judging by the way he kept talking about her. And Pie. So the bottom line was he wanted Jeremy to be able to keep riding that pony. But it wasn’t right to take up her time and use her livestock and not pay her back.
He started to dial, then stopped. Maybe he should figure out his approach first. For Jeremy’s sake, he didn’t want to piss her off and have her say no.
He let out a sour, self-directed chuckle. He’d gotten quite spoiled in the last five years. Back home, he never had to think much anymore about whether someone would take his call. Not like the early days, when he and Leah had gotten married and had Jeremy, while he worked on the fringes, and only got those jobs thanks to Tucker.
He liked to think he’d at least paid Tucker back a little by making them a package deal. Part of his contract was that if a stand-in was needed, Tucker would be his. And thanks to Leah’s rather intense budgeting and clever investing, even if he hadblown his career to bits now, they’d both be okay for a good long time.
He heard laughter from the living room, where his sister and Jeremy were watching a movie. Or rather rewatching, in Jeremy’s case; he loved the series with the aliens and the smart-mouthed raccoon.
He should be out there with them, not sitting here in the guest room, staring at his stupid phone because he couldn’t work up the nerve to make one simple phone call. All the people in his world, including beautiful women, who would be delighted to answer the phone and hear, “Hi, this is Jackson Thorpe,” but here he sat, fixated on the phone number for a woman even more beautiful who just happened not to like him much.
Disgusted with himself, he got up, shoved the phone back into his jeans pocket, and headed toward the sound of the television. He paused in the hallway opening to the main room, his throat suddenly tight again, as had happened so many times since they’d come here. It had been only four days, but the change in his son was marked and obvious. Right now he sat on the couch, cuddled up against his aunt, laughing at a snappy comeback his favorite character had made.
