Well, apparently, she was going to go stand by him.
She moved over to the sink, and he thrust a dish towel in her direction. She grabbed it, her fingertips brushing his. His hands were rough.
She’d never touched him before.
She’d dreamed about it.
About his hands.
She hadn’t known just how rough they would be.
She felt the lingering echo of that touch and she did her best to try and ignore it. He was warm too. She could feel heat radiating from his body as she stood beside him. Her shoulder vibrating with it as they stood with just an inch between them while she dried the dishes that he set on the side of the sink.
She looked over at him, and he turned his head. Then she immediately looked back down at the dish in her hand. She was acting weird. And he must realize that. He must know that things were weird. But she imagined he had no idea why.
She could tell him. She could tell him right now.
You don’t even know why. Do you get what you’re doing?
This wasn’t the reaction a woman should have to her half brother.
A pit of despair grew in her stomach.
She was supposed to know better. She was supposed to have fixed this.
No. She couldn’t tell him her suspicions yet. It would only cause problems. It would only... It would ruin things. Everything. She couldn’t take a chance on springing all this on him too soon.
So instead, she cleared her throat, mirroring the same gesture he’d done only a moment before, and carried the plates to their rightful spot in the kitchen.
“Well, I’m going to head to bed,” he said, turning and gripping the edge of the counter. The muscles in his forearms flexed, and she made a study of the red paint on the tabletop. Of all the places that it was chipping and wrinkling.
“It’s early,” she said.
“Not really.”
Then he brushed past her and left her standing in the kitchen. The room suddenly felt much larger without him standing in it. And that left her with a whole lot of questions she couldn’t quite form. And even if she could, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answers.
Three
This was Jackson’s favorite part of the day. When the sun hadn’t risen yet, and he put the coffee on. As strong as he could make it. When the world outside was quiet, and still. When the whole day had a wealth of possibilities in it.
Once upon a time, he’d spent mornings like this with his mother at the kitchen table. His father wasn’t one to enjoy mornings. A rancher he was, but he also was always half stumbling out the door after the first rays of light had begun to filter over the mountains, his coffee in a to-go cup, his eyes bleary.
Not Jackson. And not his mom. Four o’clock had been his wake-up time for as long as he could remember. Plenty of time to get a jump on the day. To plan everything that needed to be done. To do it without all the damn people cluttering up the world. Let them sleep.
Those times had become especially precious when his mother had been ill.
He had lived in his own place at that point. But he still worked the family ranch. He got up, he drove over, he sat with his mother and had coffee. And then he went out to work the ranch.
In the years since, he had begun to exclusively work his own place. His father had enough hands on deck to handle the family place without Jackson. And anyway, once his mother had been gone, there had been no real reason to stay. There had been no one to have coffee with in the morning.
Jackson had realized at that time that the only reason he had stayed was that he was hanging on to something in his past that he had known wouldn’t last forever.
And once she was gone, it had been time for him to move on too.
Anyway. His father was still barely dragging his ass out of bed and making it out to work on time.
Jackson didn’t mind having coffee alone.
He walked down the hall, taking note of each squeaking board as he went into the kitchen and started the pot of coffee. This was not the kind of coffee maker he was accustomed to. But in truth, he could make coffee anytime, anywhere. He could MacGyver coffee with nothing but a tin can, a cheesecloth and a campfire. He could do what needed to be done. He could make this little plastic job work. But he preferred his programmable machine at home. Which had everything waiting for him as soon as his feet hit the ground.
He might enjoy this hour of the day, but there was nothing wrong with wanting everything to be in its place, and as easy as possible. At least, not to his mind.
He thanked the good Lord that Cricket had coffee, and got it all started, his mood lifting immediately as the sound of the water beginning to heat filled the room, as the scent of the freshly ground beans hit him.
He really did love mornings.
He had a feeling Cricket didn’t. Because she wasn’t up. That actually suited him just fine.
He still couldn’t figure out what the hell she actually wanted.
For a woman who said she couldn’t wait to run a ranch, she really didn’t seem to have a concept of what it took. And then there had been the way she’d behaved last night.
Like you don’t know what it is?
Dammit. It really wasn’t worth examining. He had been sure that when she wasn’t in that dress, when she was back to being the Cricket he had known since she was awkward and had those buck teeth she’d been talking about earlier—which he did remember—those feelings of lust that he’d felt the night of the poker game would vanish.
But the problem was, now he’d seen the potential in Cricket. And he didn’t much like it.
He wasn’t a man for relationships. He had arrangements. Satisfying, adult relationships with women his age who, for whatever reason, didn’t want relationships either. Divorcées, single mothers, busy women who traveled through in a group of friends, or with a bachelorette party. City girls looking for flings with a cowboy.
Yeah, he was down for all that.
But not young, earnest looking girls who had roots in this valley as deep as it was possible to have, who had already been wounded by her father, and who clearly had issues. Daddy issues.
That made him grimace. He supposed being a bit more than a decade older than her put him squarely in the territory of daddy issues.
And what did that make him?
Just a man, he had a feeling. Men were basic. And while he prided himself on maybe not being as basic as some of them, the fact of the matter was... He wasn’t any different. He liked arrangements because he liked sex. And he didn’t go without.
Come to think of it, though, he’d been without for a while.
He’d had to increasingly spend more time at the vineyard. Their father hadn’t really gotten better since their mother had died, he’d only gotten worse. He was withdrawn. And he wasn’t functioning in quite the same way that he used to.