She shrugged. “I figured you’re tough. And you can take it.”
“I could sleep there.”
“This will be more comfortable,” she said. “Just down the hall.”
She didn’t really want to alienate him. She also didn’t quite know how to wrangle him. She had a feeling that if she suddenly started being extra nice to him, he would only be more suspicious than not. So she was trying to be measured in her interactions with him. She had to...get to a place where she could talk to him. Where they had a little bit of trust. Perhaps like training a dog. She’d done that. That she understood. She might not have any experience with men, but she did know animals pretty well. Her dad might have spent a lot of years ignoring her, but she also hadn’t been denied much. And when she’d asked for animals, she’d gotten them. She’d had several dogs growing up, and still had her favorite old ranch dog, Pete.
Perhaps Jackson would be like Pete.
If only she knew how to cook. Then she could feed him. Dogs really responded well to food as an incentive. Perhaps men did too.
She’d heard that. That old-fashioned saying about the way to a man’s heart being through his stomach. Not that she wanted Jackson’s heart.
Well, she sort of did. She needed him to feel something for her. Some sort of connection. Without that, he would just think she was crazy and reject everything she had to say. Without that, he might just think she was trying to ruin his family. And that wasn’t it. Not at all. She had no designs on causing any kind of trouble in his family.
But her own family was broken. Smashed all to pieces. And her place, it had never been secure. She wanted to find her place.
She pushed the door open to the small bedroom. The bed was tiny, shoved into a corner, brass rails surrounding a thin mattress that might just as likely be stuffed with corn husks as anything. The quilt that was placed over the top of it was threadbare and worn.
“It’s simple,” she said. “But hopefully adequate.”
“Adequate.” He set his sleeping bag down, and looked around. “It’ll do just fine.”
“Yeah. I suppose.” He looked absurd, too tall and too broad for the space. His feet were going to stick through the rails at the end of the bed. And the little lace curtains behind him... Well, they seemed absolutely ridiculous.
The sun shone through the window, catching his face, highlighting the stubble on his jaw. His hair was dark, his eyes a startling blue. The same color as the bluebonnets on the quilt fabric. She didn’t look like him. Not even a little bit. Her eyes were somewhere between pine cone brown and green, depending on how the sun shone. Her hair was light. But his sister had lighter hair. He was so tall. Cricket was fairly tall for a woman. About an inch above average. He was...massive. His hands were bigger, his shoulders muscular. His chest broad. He looked like a man who did hard labor all day, every day.
She felt a strange sort of cracking expansion happening in her chest.
Then he turned and looked out the window, squinting against the sun, and something in her stomach leaped. And fear gripped her.
He was just very handsome.
Of course he was. It was one of those things that was indisputable. And her feeling about that was...pride. She could see that now.
She was...proud of him.
When she was twelve years old, she’d realized it. The girls in her class were all giggling over Ryan Anderson and his floppy blond hair and she’d been fixed on Jackson Cooper. She’d been a little embarrassed about it. She’d told no one.
She knew she was a girl and he was a man and there was no way they could ever...
She’d never been silly enough or brave enough to write about him in her diary. To have a diary at all. But she’d thought of him every night and wove stories where they could be together, on a ranch.
Him all rugged and handsome and her riding a horse right alongside him. There had been freedom in those fantasies. In this idea that her place in the world, her real and rightful place, was alongside this forbidden man whose family her father hated.
She’d never let on how much it bothered her that Wren had swooped in and taken up with Creed. Cricket had been the one full of forbidden desire for years and years.
Wren had gone and made a Cooper and a Maxfield hooking up a thing of no particular consequence.
But now Cricket knew there was consequence after all. And anyway, she’d been twelve when she’d imagined her place by Jackson. When she’d imagined fitting into a life with him.
And it made sense now. That mystical feeling of connection, the idea that she would fit in with his life, with his family... He was her half brother. Of course. Their connection finally made sense.
A twelve-year-old couldn’t be in love. The truth was just that the connection she’d felt to him had gotten muddled because she hadn’t known.
It was pride she felt for him. That was all. A desperate longing for a place where she fit.
That was all it was.
That was all it could be. All it could ever be.
Get a grip, Cricket.
“Well.”
“Did you still want to go to the store?”
“You know. I was actually thinking I might whip up some food. Some dinner. So why don’t you go to the plumber, and I’ll handle all that here.”
“You cook?”
“Of course I do,” she lied.
She had either been going down to town and getting a burger for dinner or eating frozen pizza for weeks now. But he didn’t need to know that.
“All right. I’ll see you in a bit.”
“See you in a bit,” she repeated decisively. He walked out, and suddenly it was easier to breathe. He walked out, and suddenly, everything inside her chest eased.
She scurried back into the kitchen, and opened up the fridge. Wren had brought her some groceries, and she’d been ignoring them. But now, staring at the leafy greens and wrapped steaks, she felt that she had to figure something out. She picked up the phone and called her sister.
“How do you cook?”
“That is a broad question,” Wren said.
“Well. You gave me all this food. And I don’t know what to do with any of it. And I just told Jackson that I would cook dinner.”
“You’re going to cook him dinner? Honestly, Cricket, are you sure you don’t have some kind of crush on him?”
That would have been a horrifying thing for her sister to ask six months ago.
It was worse now.
“I do not,” she said ferociously, ignoring the tightening in her stomach. “I don’t. That would be...ridiculous.”