Page 53 of Terms and Traditions

Stephanie touched my forearm. “Please let me in,” she whispered.

My body deflated, and I scrubbed a hand over my face. “Wanna get out of here?”

She glanced back at the bickering group. “Follow me.”

Chapter twenty-three

Nash

Wordlessly, we slipped on our coats and snuck out the front door. The wind in Wyoming was no joke, and I tugged my gloves on.

“This way.” Stephanie tilted her head, guiding me across the front deck and around the corner where it wrapped around the side of the house to a private enclosed area with the hot tub. She flicked a switch and small white lights winked to life overhead. This part of the deck was nestled against the house, sheltering us from the directness of the wind. It might not be strong, but it was nippy. Another switch kicked on the free-standing patio gas stove.

Aha. This was the hot tub deck. It was built up on a custom platform with wooden edging and stairs. Boosting herself up onto the platform edge, Stephanie patted the seat beside her, inviting me to join her.

I obliged, letting my eyes adjust to the dimness of the night and the distant smudges of the Tetons. Taking deep breaths and praying I wouldn’t mess this up. “I’m not sure where to start,” I confessed.

Stephanie didn’t say anything for a minute. She slipped a ChapStick from her pocket and applied it quietly, and I half envied her because that dry wind was chapping my lips like crazy. The benign movement settled something in me, though, giving me a minute to collect my thoughts. When she slipped her gloved hand in mine, threading our fingers, I was ready. “I’ll listen to whatever you want to tell me,” she said, the sincerity of her words burrowing deep in my heart.

Here went nothing. “Alexis was my college girlfriend for three years. We were serious, or I was. I bought a ring and proposed right after we graduated.” I huffed softly, remembering the moment. “She looked down at me with pity as I knelt in front of her, then she snapped the ring box closed and told me she was moving on. She’d met someone else, a guy with deeper pockets and more potential.”

“She cheated on you?” An unearthly, strangled growl came from the woman beside me, and I turned to see Stephanie’s face dark with rage, eyes flashing in the soft twinkling lights. She shook her head. “The woman is an idiot!”

“It’s what inspired me to start my own company. Prove to her I could be something.” I tried to laugh it off, but it sounded a little bitter in my ears. “Things worked out, and I made more money than the man she left me for. Now money is the only thing women see when they show an interest.”

“Did she try to win you back?”

“How’d you know?”

Stephanie shrugged. “‘Cuz she made the mistake of a lifetime, and she’d have been a fool not to have tried, even if it was for the worst reasons ever.” She side-eyed me, swinging her legs. “What happened to starting a company because, and I quote, ‘I saw a gap in the market I could fill?'”

I smirked. “Can’t a man be multifaceted?”

“Meaning you didn’t want to talk about Alexis and wanted your privacy. I get it.”

“Yeah? You don’t seem surprised by this.”

Ooh, an eyebrow raised. “You’re thirty-three and look like that.” Stephanie waved her hand in the general vicinity of my body. “I assumed there was at least one woman who thought you were a catch. And as for the privacy, I do get it because one whiff of heartbreak and you’d have every woman from Washington to Texas lined up to date you. Heartbreak makes a man more attractive for some reason, but when it’s a woman, she has baggage.”

“Just to Texas, darlin’?” I teased, sensing she wanted to move away from the heaviness of the conversation.

Stephanie patted my knee. “Easy there, cowboy.”

“Not a cowboy.”

She tipped her head back and laughed, and it echoed softly off the distant hills. “Right.”

We sat there, hand in hand, just watching the gently floating snow and the hypnotic dance of flames from the patio stove. This was the most comfortable I’d ever been with another person, and I wasn’t in a hurry to head back into the madhouse.

“What about your family?” Stephanie asked softly.

“What about them?”

“I’m sure you have one.”

“Had.” I grunted then sighed. “My dad was never in the picture, so my mom raised me alone. We spent most of my childhood in Texas and lived with her parents for a few years before she packed up and carted me off to Southern California, just before my sixteenth birthday.” I could remember Grandad teaching me to play chess and checkers. The bolts upon bolts of fabric in Gran’s sewing room. She was a quilter, and I’d had one of her quilts on my bed for years, until Mom lost it in the move. “Mom went no contact with them, but I secretly kept in touch. Grandad called me just before I graduated high school and told me Gran had passed. Mom didn’t even care when I told her.”

I swallowed hard, focusing on the distant darkness while I tried to rein in the wave of anger at my mother even all these years later. “Grandad was the whole reason I went to college. He helped pay my way after Mom kicked me out at eighteen, tired of being saddled with a kid. And then just before I went to spend a summer with him after my freshmen year, I got the call he’d passed, too. I never got to see either of them in person again.” But I could still hear Grandad’s easy laugh and smell Gran’s vanilla perfume. It reminded me of home.