LILA HAD SLEPT terribly every night for the past two weeks. Her body was restless, and her heart was sore. As was her hand, since she had been making lists constantly, trying to keep track of everything, and in general be responsible with everything that Grandma June had entrusted to her.
Grandma June hadn’t asked her to change, but Grandma June certainly needed her to try her hardest.
Though, none of that was why she hadn’t been sleeping well.
The why was the same big, dumb cowboy that had been keeping her up for years now.
But she had slept with him.
Well, not slept with.
She’d had sex with him. And then told him they shouldn’t have sex again.
She felt utterly betrayed by herself, and while she knew why she had done it, she was still mad.
The way that he talked about marriage, the way that he talked about love... It wasn’t what she believed in. And it wasn’t what she was going to end up wanting if the two of them kept on...
She could accept that she had never known him well enough to love him in the past, but the fact of the matter was, she was also a very short distance away from being pushed right into love with Everett now.
And while she was an optimist, she wasn’t quite optimistic enough to hope against the words that came out of a man’s mouth.
At least she tried to believe that.
There was always that little voice inside of her that said What if?
But what if you gave it a try? But what if he could change? What if Dad invites you to spend Christmas there one year? What if, magically, JJ will understand you? And you’ll magically be able to understand her...and what if clouds really were cotton candy?
Always.
So it had seemed smart to keep herself away.
Which had resulted in sleeplessness, and now, her sleep was being interrupted by the ringing phone.
And it was still dark outside.
Lila scrambled downstairs and picked up the phone. “Hello?”
“Am I the first?” Lila recognize the thin, elderly voice on the other end of the phone, but she couldn’t quite place which of her many visitors it was.
She looked at the clock on the wall and saw that it was 4:30 in the morning.
“I—”
“It’s booth day. And I want booth seven.”
Technically, it was booth day. And this woman was the first to call.
“Yes,” Lila said, a bit dizzy. “It is indeed booth day.”
“Put number seven down for Ms. Jones.”
“You’ve got it,” Lila said.
“Andrea Kim is going to be enraged,” she said gleefully. “Thanks, dear.”
And then she hung up the phone.
The only thing that made Lila cheerful later that day, given all of her sleep fog, was the felted mice that she found on her doorstep later, a clear gift from the victor, and one that secretly pleased Lila.
After that, her day was filled with an unpleasant series of phone calls and the tricky situation of assigning booths and answering questions about the particulars of what would be next to each one, and how it should all be spaced.
The two weeks that followed weren’t much better, and still, she didn’t see Everett.
Her own choice, but she didn’t like it all the same.
She tried to focus on planning the event—exactly as Grandma June had done, because she was determined to live up to her high standards.
She’d checked in with Gretchen a couple of times at Burnside Blooms and had been told all was running well. It surprised her how much she didn’t miss it.
She had pleasant feelings about the shop, about her rotating coworkers, but it felt like a phase of life she was moving away from, and she wasn’t sure what that meant exactly. Only that it...felt like another time and place, and not a home she needed to get back to.
She missed her work, the creative side of it, but planning the Red Sled filled some of that.
Mostly, she was obsessing about Everett, and she hated herself for being such a cliché.
And then one evening, late, the phone rang.
“Hello,” a masculine voice came down the line.
“Hi,” she said, her heart leaping into her throat. “I didn’t think that you...” She cleared her throat. “What I meant to say was I didn’t think you used this line, when you could just as easily make a call to the house.”
“Well, I figured I’d give it a try. I was wondering if you wanted to come over tomorrow. We’re going to have to start assembly in the barn. And I might need your help.”
“You don’t need my help,” she said.
“I don’t have all your charts and lists. I most definitely do need your help.”
And if the next morning, when she got ready with all of her charts and graphs and lists, she spent a little bit of extra time fussing with her hair and putting on a bit of makeup, that was just totally normal for working in a barn and doing menial tasks, and had nothing to do with the idea of seeing Everett again for the first time since they’d slept together.
She had never been out to his place, but the instructions he’d given her were easy enough to follow. He really was close to Grandma June’s, although fifty paces was quite the exaggeration.
The wide, wrought-iron gate opened with the push of a button. The paved drive led to an expansive house and an even more beautiful equestrian facility that was incredible.
Everett wasn’t just successful. He was...rich.
Out in the pastures were some of the most beautiful horses she had ever seen. Tawny gold with shimmering manes and tails—absolutely incredible animals.
For one moment as she sat there clutching the steering wheel in her little Camry, she imagined a life there. With horses, and a beautiful farm and a man whose big hands felt like magic on her skin...
No. She wasn’t going there. Once. That was it. Everett didn’t want more than sex, and she’d accepted it.
So there.
She knew it.
And maybe if she knew it, she would start to believe it.
At least, more than she did.
Maybe she could finally stamp out that little bright light inside of her. That was the point of sleeping with him, wasn’t it?
Liar. You wanted to sleep with him because you want him. And deep down you always think things are going to turn out.
She gritted her teeth and got out of her car.
“You don’t know me,” she muttered to herself.
She stopped at the barn, where there was already a light on, and she assumed Everett would be there working already.
She was right.
There he was, halfway up the ladder, a bundle of wood in his hand.
“What’s that?” she asked, walking into the gorgeous, gleaming barn made of high-gloss wood that seemed to glow with a honeyed warmth all around her.
“Pieces of the booths,” he said, opting to jump down the last three rungs instead of continuing to climb.
And her eyes fixating on the way his muscles in his arms flexed, how thick and fit his thighs were. And, well, his butt. Because his butt was amazing.
“Everett,” she began, “this place is amazing. I can’t believe that you... You made all this for yourself.”
“Well, the contractor did most of this for me,” he said, his tone dry.
“You know what I mean,” she said. “I remember how hard you worked for Grandma June. I admired that so much. It’s funny what sticks with you. I was never going to be college-bound like Keira. I didn’t like school enough, plus I wasn’t good enough at it to get scholarships like she did. JJ did all this hard physical work. She’s fearless. I was better at sitting and doodling, dreaming. But I watched you—I watched you step away from your family work, pour your effort into Grandma June’s ranch. It was your own path. I started believing I just had to find my path. Like you did.”
His expression was unreadable. “And did you?”
“I do floral arrangements. Bouquets, whole wedding shows.”
“Are you going to do anything for this?”
“It wasn’t included in the regular list of things. I hadn’t considered it.”
“I heard that JJ has quite the flower garden going up at the Mathewson place now,” Everett said.
She ignored the hurt that lodged in her chest when she thought of her sister.
JJ was growing flowers. That they were so different, but were connected by that love of nature and things that grew. It made her wonder why she couldn’t bring herself to try and bridge the hurt that seemed to grow wider between them by the year.
It wasn’t even because of a fight. There was no spoken anger at all.
When their parents had split, at first it had been a wonderful thing to see her sister at Grandma June’s.
But as the years passed, JJ seemed to dig into her toughness, to an attitude that if she just put her head down she could move any mountain.
Lila had... She had felt so many things, and she had begun to annoy her sister, she knew it.
JJ and Keira seemed to have a lot more to say to each other in general.
And wide-eyed Bella seemed overwhelmed by Lila more than anything.
Then Bella had left and never come back.
Keira had fallen in love with Remy West and had been consumed with him in her pursuit of a better future, and later in her heartbreak. She and JJ were just still there, and with none of the chaos, none of the noise, and no one else around them to be a buffer, it had become clear that the two of them didn’t have much to say to each other.
It was always on the tip of Lila’s tongue to ask, though.
How things were with their dad. Their dad, who clearly loved JJ, and didn’t love her. Her dad, who didn’t even speak to her at the funeral.
God forbid he look her in the eye then, when he’d been breathing the same air as his ex-wife.
The ex-wife he hadn’t been able to be in the same room with, he had claimed years ago. Which was why they’d split the family. Split the sisters. Treated them like a set of salt and pepper shakers. One to one house, one to another. Easy as that.
She wondered if it would ever quit hurting.
And if JJ hurt the way she did.
Always on the tip of her tongue to ask if she wanted to come see Mom, because JJ would probably be a steadying influence on her, and that was something that Lila could never be.
Lila had chosen to try to be a sunbeam in a dark space, and she had learned that sometimes the darkness could just swallow the light whole. No matter how hard you tried to shine.
She knew JJ didn’t understand that. She tried to be an optimist because everything around her was so grim. JJ just found her annoying.
“Think about doing the flowers. And in the meantime,” he said, taking the pile of lumber over to the corner, “you can help by crawling up there and ferreting out the scarecrows.”
Lila grimaced. “That sounds like nothing I want to do.”
“You don’t like scarecrows?”
Creepy vacant faces. “I admit I’m not overly fond of them, no.”
“Are you a bird, Lila?” he asked.
He might be teasing her and that made her stomach feel strange. She resented him for that.
She frowned at him. “No. I’m not a bird.”
“Are you sure?” he asked. “It’s typically birds that have an aversion to scarecrows.”
She tossed her hair back behind her shoulder and did her best to look regal. “I have more of a rodent energy.”
He stared at her, his face totally flat. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”
“It’s true,” she countered. “Vibrant, cheerful, easily spooked.”
“You are not easily spooked.”
“I am,” she said, keeping her expression serious.
He moved in her direction, his eyes blazing with heat, and she froze, all the air drawing itself out of her body. He stopped when he was less than a foot from her, and she could feel the heat radiating off his body. Could feel it echoing inside of her in a scorching wave.
She wanted him.
She didn’t want to stand here having an inane conversation with him about flowers or her energy. She wanted to tear his shirt off of his body and get a good look at those muscles again. Feel his heat and hardness on top of her, surging inside of her.
The idea made her ache between her thighs. Made her clench her teeth.
“See,” he said. “You’re steady as a rock, girl.”
“I’m not afraid of you, Everett McCall,” she said. “I’m afraid of scarecrows.”
And you. Down to my soul. But more myself than you, and the things I could let myself feel.
But she didn’t say it. A rare win for her self-control.
She went up to the ladder and regarded it before starting her ascent. “It better hold me,” she shouted down.
“It just held me,” he said, as if that put paid to her ridiculous fear.
“Yes, but you’re not taking into account the weight of my emotional issues,” she called back.
She had meant it as a joke, but in light of her recent ruminations, it didn’t feel all that funny. She did occasionally feel swollen with her emotional issues.
Like now.
“Again,” he said. “It just held me.”
Now she really did want to jump down off the ladder, and she wanted to ask him about all of those emotional issues. Wanted to pull her own out and compare and have him...
Understand her.
She wanted someone to understand her. And who better than this man? This man who had seen her naked and touched her body. Been inside of her.
“Get a grip, Lila,” she muttered as she reached the top of the ladder and catapulted herself over the top and into the loft, landing inelegantly on her knees. It was tall enough for her to stand up there, but she imagined that Everett would have to bend slightly.
“Okay,” she shouted. “What am I looking for?”
There was a stack of lumber that she assumed was the disassembled booths, and beyond them, in the corners, which were lower, there were other things.
“Are there mice up here?”
“You have a rodent energy,” he called up. “Commune with them.”
“I do not want to commune with actual rodents. I only like rodents that are ceramic, felt or knit.”
“I imagine there’s a full spectrum of mice up there.”
She huffed and crept toward a covered pile of something in the back. She breathed an intense sigh of relief when she removed the cover and found no creepy crawlies of any kind, but did find a stack of large raffia scarecrows.
“These are huge,” she said.
“They go out front.”
“They’re not that scary,” she said, looking down at their smiling faces.
“June made them,” he said.
Lila stared at them and blinked. Okay, maybe she was never going to be a huge fan of scarecrows, but knowing that Grandma June had made them made her pause for a moment, letting her fingertips drift over the material.
She had always known that Grandma June liked to make things. Pies, blankets, quilts. Seeing this kind of handiwork made her feel connected to her. The way that the garden did. The way that the house did.
Grandma June was part of her. More than her own mother ever would be.
She felt angry sometimes, at the way her mother had lived her life. The way that she had cut everyone out of it because of her failed marriage. As if that one heartbreak had destroyed her on such a deep level she had refused to allow anyone to matter to her ever again.
Her father was the same.
But Lila’s mother had Grandma June, and Grandma June would have been there for her, Lila knew it.
She was there for you. That’s what matters.
“You okay?” Everett’s voice came from much closer this time, and she hadn’t realized he had come up behind her.
“I’m fine,” she said. “It’s just... It’s been months now, but sometimes that she’s gone takes my breath away. I know that we were at the funeral, I know that we said our goodbyes. But it doesn’t feel like it.”
He reached over and put his hand over hers. It was big and warm, calloused and reassuring in ways that she didn’t want to ponder too deeply. She looked at his hand, and then up at his face. And she just...didn’t feel alone.
Even dealing with the realization, harsh and stark, that Grandma June was gone, she felt warmth. Deep in her heart. Comfort.
A sense that she was there, in her heart at least, if not beside her, where she could see her.
“Thank you,” she said, pulling her hand out from beneath his, because taking that kind of comfort from Everett was only dangerous.
“I loved her, too,” he said. “She believed in me, like you said she believed in you. It’s amazing what belief from one person can do for you. Just the one.”
Lila nodded. “It’s true. And I think I got my creativity from her. I think if my mother had just learned to knit or something, she might have gotten over some of her bitterness.”
“You think that knitting cures bitterness?” His tone was incredulous.
“I think learning to create changes something in your soul,” she said. “No matter what it is. When you can bring beauty into the world, it forces you to appreciate what’s beautiful in the world. When I was little, Grandma June taught me to knit, and I learned something from that. That if I could add a little something to this planet, even if it wasn’t strictly useful, I at least felt like I was more than just...me. I can leave little things I’ve made wherever I go, and that makes me feel connected. To the world.” She moved her fingertips over the scarecrow. “And now to Grandma June.”
“Working the land is what makes me feel connected to it,” he said. He moved away from her, going over to the wood that was stacked up against the wall and grabbing another bundle. “You can’t stay disconnected when the dirt has some of your blood in it.”
“I don’t imagine so.”
“It’s the one thing that makes me understand my old man,” he said. “The connection to the land. I can almost sympathize with him. For the way that he clung to it until it killed him.”
He said that as firmly and practically as he did everything else. Something about that, those words of grief so flatly and simply spoken, made them even more painful.
She could tell it wasn’t something he’d talked about before, somehow. And the honor of being the one he did talk to made her glow inside, even as she hurt for him.
“Did it?” she asked, her chest hollowing out with a pang of horror. “Did it kill him?”
“Cancer killed him. But it didn’t have to. If he’d been able to take care of anything other than that piece of ground that he poured his whole life into, he might have gone to the doctor and spared himself. He ignored it until treatable became a death sentence. But you know, it was the land in the end. Because he could never have done anything that might jeopardize that land. He had sacrificed our happiness. Our health, our safety, for that land. And so, nothing could ever come before it. Sometimes I wonder if I’m not that different.”
“Why? Just because this is important to you? It isn’t the same. It’s been productive, and it’s been profitable.”
“And it was more important than my marriage.”
“Are you...?” It hurt Lila to even say it. And it shouldn’t hurt. “Are you still in love with her?”
It did need to be asked. Because, after all, Everett hadn’t been with a woman other than her in the last two years, and he could give any reason he wanted, but she had to wonder if it actually had to do with feelings for his ex.
He shook his head. “Not at all. But you know that stubbornness is in my blood. That feeling that giving up is its own kind of sin.”
“So is holding on when you’re meant to let go. You can see that. And what happened with your dad. With his farm.”
“I suppose that’s true enough,” he said.
They didn’t talk more after that. He gathered the wood and went back down the ladder, and she took hold of the scarecrows, making her way down after him. The scarecrows were slightly flat from being stored for a year, but since they’d been under a tarp, and Everett’s barn was clean and well-maintained, they were not really the worse for wear.
As scarecrows went.
There were other small pieces of decor in the loft, and while Everett set about assembling booths, Lila brought all of those down. Then they got out her seating chart and began to figure out where everything was supposed to be arranged.
Each booth had about six pieces involved in assembly, and Everett was quick. And watching him swing a hammer was...
Well, it was way too interesting. It shouldn’t be. She should know better. And she didn’t seem to.
Woe is her.
The way his muscles moved, the flex in his forearms, the strength in those broad shoulders...
“Are you going to keep on staring a hole through my back?”
She scrunched her face. “I’m not staring at you. I’m admiring the scarecrows.”
“Well,” he said, letting it go as he took a step back, “there it is. The infamous booth seven.”
Lila could not see a difference between this booth and any of the other booths.
“It’s just...where it goes?” It was at the center of the back of the barn, so she imagined when you walked in it was one of the first things you saw.
“Yes, prized for its visibility, proximity to refreshments and where it lands on the shopping route. Because people don’t want to buy too early into their walk-through, but if you’re at the end it might be too late.”
“Very clever,” Lila said. “Well, these little guys are going to be here this year.” She stuck her hand into her bag and retrieved the mice, setting them on the booth.
“You had mice in your bag the whole time,” he said, looking slightly stunned.
She blinked. “They were a gift.”
“Were they a bribe?”
She affected an expression of mock outrage. “I’ll have you know, I did not take them as a bribe, and Ms. Jones happened to call the earliest, and she gave them to me as a thank-you.”
“Seem suspicious. I think you might be tainted.”
“I’m not tainted,” Lila said, sniffing. “I am the soul of integrity.”
She smiled and looked up at him. And there was something about the way their eyes held in that moment of shared humor, the way that the conversation had flowed along and built to this, and now seemed to wrap itself around them.
From mice to grief and back again.
The inane and the essential. And now...a sense of companionable friendship and...well, desire.
Because she knew exactly what those hands of Everett McCall’s could do. And she wished very much that they would do it again. Everything was still for a moment, a perfect beat where everything was swollen with possibility, but nothing had happened.
And then she took a breath, and it tore the air, and Everett closed the distance between them, and in that split second before their lips touched, Lila already knew that she was lost.