LILA WAS IMPETUOUS, and she was headstrong, and she often led with her mouth. As a result, she often found herself in situations she hadn’t meant to get herself into.
But never had any of those situations landed her in a temporary affair with a smoking-hot cowboy. And they had also never landed her on the front doorstep of her sister’s new house.
The sister that she had been avoiding since she’d come back to town.
Because there were just so many things that she always wanted to say to JJ, and they stuck in her throat, and stuck in her brain, and stuck in her heart, and made her feel like a mess. But here she was. Hoping to get flowers, which, as the Frost sisters went, were something of an olive branch.
She knocked and held her breath and waited.
She heard the clamor of feet, squealing and excited voices, before the door opened.
She looked down and saw two little blonde pixie-like girls, whispering and laughing as though they shared secrets. And somehow, Lila was thrown right back to when she and JJ had been little.
To when they had huddled together like that, conspiring. To simpler times when their lives, and themselves, hadn’t been divided down the middle.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi,” the tallest one said.
“I’m Lila. I’m—I’m JJ’s sister. I’m here to see her. Is she here?”
“JJ!” The littlest one ran off, her bare feet slapping the hardwood.
The oldest one regarded her with an intense amount of seriousness. “I’m Ellie,” she said.
“Very nice to meet you,” Lila said, matching her seriousness.
“You’re JJ’s sister that’s staying in Grandma June’s house now.”
“I am,” Lila said.
Her face looked mutinous. “But you haven’t come to see JJ.”
Lila felt thoroughly chastised by this very small person, and she wasn’t sure that she liked it at all.
“You must be... Cade’s daughters,” she said.
“And JJ’s,” Ellie said, sticking her chin out, defiant.
Lila’s heart crumpled. JJ had slotted into this family, clicked into place, been the missing piece that they needed.
The whole family.
Lila would never find that.
Lila would never find that because...
Well, she was brewing powerful feelings for a man who wanted nothing like it, and she just wouldn’t ever...
“Lila?”
She looked up and saw JJ standing there, so very firmly her, with her brown hair tied back in a low ponytail, her simple, serviceable outfit something that could easily be called plain, but that gave her that kind of effortless, tomboyish beauty that made it look like she hadn’t even tried.
Possibly because she hadn’t. Lila knew that.
JJ had a spark about her, a kind of bewitching charisma that she didn’t think her sister had any idea she possessed. It was in her fierceness. That layer of toughness that she wore like armor.
It was still there, but there was something softer there now, too, and it made her that much more compelling.
“I wasn’t expecting you.”
“I know,” Lila said. “I—I figured I would ambush you. So that you wouldn’t find an excuse to be busy.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Well, we haven’t seen each other. I mean, I haven’t come here. But you... You haven’t come to see me, either.”
“I know,” JJ said, keeping her voice measured. “But... I had the opportunity to be in the house when you weren’t here. And I think... I think Grandma June has a lesson for all of us. And I don’t think it would do you any favors if I jumped in the middle of it. I am, however, happy enough to have you jump into my life. But I didn’t feel it was my place to intrude on you. Not right now.”
That made Lila’s eyes feel scratchy. And it created a whole buildup of words she didn’t know how to untangle. It was disconcerting, for a woman who was used to having to hold words back, to find herself speechless. Which seemed to be what often happened with her sister.
But she thought of Grandma June’s letter. And of her time with Everett. And all those affirming words he’d said to her yesterday in the barn, when they’d still been close together, skin to skin, and everything in her had still burned as if he was still inside of her.
“I—I guess... Yes. That’s true. She sent us four different letters. And she didn’t have us going to the house all together. There must be a reason for that.”
“I didn’t stay away to hurt you,” JJ said.
It only hit Lila then that part of her was hurt and felt like while JJ might not have done it on purpose, she might not have thought of her at all and might have hurt her accidentally.
“I know,” she said.
“This is the house. And those are the girls. Lora and Ellie.”
They waved. They had that look about them, particularly the younger, of bedraggled fairies. And the idea of JJ parenting such soft, feminine things seemed...
Well, perfect.
If Grandma June had intended to change JJ, to provide some missing piece for her, then she’d certainly done it.
More than.
Because she had love.
She had Cade. Lila ignored the burning in her chest that might have easily been labeled as jealousy.
“I don’t want to take up a lot of your time,” she said. “I mean, I want to catch up. I do.”
JJ quirked a smile at her that seemed to say, do you?
Lila ignored it.
“I—I wanted to know if I could buy some flowers from you,” she asked.
“Flowers?”
“Everett mentioned it. Everett McCall.” She tried to suppress the blush she could feel mounting in her face. “He’s working on organizing the Red Sled Holiday Bazaar with me.”
JJ nodded. “I took over the garden here on the property. All the seasonal flowers are blooming right now.”
“I want them. All of them. I want to arrange them for the bazaar. Put them up all over the place.” She hesitated. “If you’re here, you left Dad’s business, then.”
JJ’s smile turned rueful. “Uh. Yes.”
“And...are you going to do it here as a business?”
“It’s all I know. So I was mostly planning on continuing with it, yes.”
“Well, I’d love to advertise for you. And then people will know that they can get their flowers from you. And that you’ll do their landscape.”
“That’s nice of you.” It was such a cautious thing to say. Too cautious for two sisters, but Lila didn’t know how to shift it. How to fix it.
“Well, it’ll be good. Because I know how to arrange them, and you’re good at growing them... And it’ll be...a fantastic way to showcase them.”
“Let me take you out to the garden.”
It was a truck ride away to the fenced-in flower garden on the property. The Mathewson Ranch was a huge spread, which stood to reason. It was worked by Cade and his five brothers, and she could easily see how a place like this, with so many wild acres, needed all hands on deck.
The garden area seemed manicured when compared to the rest of the wild around them. The sharp green mountains blanketed with pine, the uneven fields with green grass and intermittent patches of weeds with spiky purple flowers.
In the garden, white gladioli with deep purple centers, begonias in sherbet hues and cheerful yellow aconite were planted in regimented rows behind a deer-proof fence. It spoke so very much of her sister. Wild by nature but tamed into something deeply practical by necessity.
“These are beautiful,” Lila said.
“They’ll be perfect for the holiday bazaar,” JJ said.
“They will.”
And, as always, there were about a thousand more words that she wanted to say. Something that she wanted to fix.
But she couldn’t figure it out.
She couldn’t find the way.
“I’ll take them all.”
JJ grinned. “Okay.”
“For money, obviously. I have cash for the event.”
“I wasn’t going to give them to you for free, don’t worry.”
Lila laughed. “I wouldn’t expect you to.”
“Hey, did you—did you find anything on the table when you got to Grandma June’s?”
Lila blinked. “I... No.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“Why? Did you leave me something?”
“It’s not important.”
But Lila sensed that it was. She just wasn’t sure if she could, or should, push her sister for more info.
They worked in companionable silence, and even though Lila wished that she could make it more, it felt good to work with her sister. She was glad that even if she and JJ couldn’t find a way to blend their lives, they could blend their talents this way.
At least, she tried to be happy about that.
But when she drove away from her sister’s house, she just felt a bit achy and raw.
And she couldn’t for the life of her figure out why sometimes it was so difficult for two people who wanted to find a way to close a rift to be able to find the materials to bridge that gap.
But she didn’t have answers.
No answers, but a car full of flowers.
And tonight, she was going to spend the night at Everett’s.
So there was that.