Page 56 of Worth the Trouble

She looked at the two full plates and the bills on the table and had the good sense not to ask anything else.

Both plates sat untouched. The envelope lay beside his plate with the crease Reginald had put in it, and he didn’t have to open it to know what was inside.

He thought about the rooms over the Bloom Shop. About the number in his phone he hadn’t called yet. About what it would be to put a key in her hand and let her turn it. And about the day, because there’d be one, when she asked him where the money had come from, and he’d have to look her in the eye and say her father’s name.

He didn’t have to open it at all.

He took out his wallet and counted what the steak cost and set it under the water glass with a generous tip. Then he moved Reginald’s money to the other side of the table, under the edge of the far plate, and laid the envelope on top of it, crease up.

He picked up his hat.

Tate’s truck was at the far end of the lot with the engine running and everything else dark, and Jason had known it would be since the phone call yesterday. He got in the passenger side. Tate looked at the restaurant door, then at him.

“Well?”

“He tried to buy me.”

Tate’s hands closed on the wheel. “What’d you do?”

“Left it on the table. Paid for my own steak.” Jason set his hat on the dash. “Drive me up to the lodge.”

“She’s got a room full of women tonight.”

“Then I’ll sit in the lobby till they leave. She hears this from me before she hears it from him.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Wendy was the last one out the door, and she stopped with her boots in her hand.

“Lobby,” she said. “Big leather chair by the fireplace. Been there since we came up.”

Cecelia looked at her.

“I told him I’d give it an hour. He said he’d wait the whole night.” Wendy moved the boots to her other hand. “He’d have done it, too. Go on.”

She stood in the doorway after Wendy’s boots had gone around the corner. The room behind her had five dents in the bedspread and a sugar packet under the coffee table and a bowl with nothing left in it but the chalky hearts. It had been full an hour ago. It was the fullest that room had ever been.

The elevator was too slow, so she took the stairs, and she came out into the lobby with her hair coming down and her pulse in her ears. He was there sitting in the chair across from the stone fireplace, the one Tate had sat in for a whole morning last summer waiting on her father. Hat on his knee. Coat still on. He’d been looking at the fire and he looked up before she’d taken two steps, the same as he had at the rodeo rail.

She sat on the arm of the chair across from him. Her knees suggested it.

“Tell me.”

He told her.

He didn’t dress it up and he didn’t leave anything out.

“He had a man asking about you,” she said.

“He said as much.”

The lobby, twice. The face she’d known and hadn’t placed. Her father had used the same man on a deal back east, and he hadn’t looked at her then either.

“He asked about the horses,” Jason said. “Two starts in one town, and what happens when one of us fails. I told him I’d wait on mine.”

“You what?”

“Wait. Not quit. Horses keep.” He said it without any push behind it, a fact about feed. “It got his attention.”