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“I appreciate the sentiment,” I said. “But if he buys the land, I just don’t see how it’ll work out.”
“The bet?” Zoe asked.
“I don’t give a shit about the bet,” I said. “But that he’d buy it knowing how important it is for me that it doesn’t get developed...”
“No Ranger would ever,” Nate said, taking his hand from Zoe, “ever go back on his word. Not happening.”
“Looks like we’ll find out sooner rather than later,” Zoe said.
Both Nate and I followed her gaze toward the door. Sure enough, the man of the hour was just walking in with a guy I’d never seen before. He was the spitting image of a cross between Ian Someholder and Henry Cavill. The kind of chiseled good looks with an incredible jawline that reminded me of one of Gian’s brothers. Or a Greek god.
Not that I’d ever met a Greek god.
“Dear lord in heaven,” Zoe muttered, earning her a smack on the ass from Nate.
That about summed it up.
“Who is he?” she asked.
“I honestly have no...wait a minute. A friend of his was coming in from the city. But I thought that was later this week. So I’m not sure?”
And what was he doing here? Had Jax kept the meeting with Dave? So many questions.
“Hey, Jax,” Zoe said from behind the bar as they reached us. For my part, I could only stare. Wondering. Waiting.
“Hey, Zoe.” He looked at me. “Natalie.”
“Hi, Jax.”
“This is a buddy of mine from Manhattan. Mason, this is Natalie, Zoe, and Nate,” he said as Nate reached across the bar to shake his hand. “You were in the 75th,” Nate said.
“How’d you guess?”
“I’m not that good. Jax mentioned you were coming to town. Just got back myself from a year-long deployment in Africa.”
And just like that, Jax’s friend and Nate were talking all things Army and military as he pushed a beer across the bar to Jax without missing a beat. Mason took a seat as Jax left his drink next to his friend and sidled up to me.
“I thought he was coming Thursday?” I asked.
“Change of plans,” he said. “Mason has to be back by Friday morning, so he came up earlier.”
Still so many questions...
“Fancy meeting you here,” I said as a way to ask how he wound up in the same bar as me, especially when I didn’t typically frequent KC’s so early on a weeknight.
“Not really,” he said. “I was talking to Lucas earlier about Mace coming into town to scope it out. He might have mentioned seeing you come into the bar a little bit ago.”
Lucas’s tattoo shop was just down the street.
“I did see him on the way in,” I said.
“I know.”
So he was talking to Lucas about me. Interesting.
“So you came here?”
“I did.”
