Sean had three women left out of ten. Three. He couldn’t see himself with Tabitha, which actually left him with two, one of whom was Bonnie.
Tomorrow night, he would go on a date with Bonnie and a film crew. This was a mistake. He couldn’t seem to relax enough in front of the camera, couldn’t ignore it and have a good time as Lori kept telling him to do. But on this date with Bonnie, he might ignore the camera too much and say something revealing. Their history was nobody’s business, certainly not reality TV fodder.
They had to jointly come up with a neat background story they could both agree to share with thousands of viewers, including everyone in town. Like a…script.
For this reason, he made a turn on his way back home and found himself pounding on the door of the main Truehart house where Jo still lived.
She opened the door. “Hey, there. Aren’t you supposed to be—”
He didn’t wait for an invitation and blustered his way inside. “Don’t you ‘hey’ me. Where have you been? I’m going down fast. I need your help.”
“I thought I should stay away when I heard Bonnie Lee was a contestant.”
“Why?”
“Why? It wouldn’t be fair. You know my feelings on this. Bonnie is the one you should pick. I’ll never believe anyone else will do.” She led him to the leather couch in the front room and plopped down, patting the seat next to her. “It’s perfect.”
The décor of the Truehart main house was that of a classic horse rancher. Completely different from the designer mansion women were staying in, touches of dark leather were everywhere. Photos of horses galloping wild in the range were hung from the walls.
“We had this discussion. Bonnie is the opposite of what I want.”
Jolette Marie smirked and crossed her arms. “You want to tell me that’s still true after you’ve seen her?”
He studied his hands and ignored the question. “Well…she doesn’t want to be tied down to Stone Ridge. Never did. It’s not going to work.”
He could hear Lori’s voice in his ears: gee, Sean, are you trying to convince yourself or the audience?
“But what if she changed her mind? That could happen.”
“I’m no longer in the business of changing Bonnie’s mind. I tried that.”
“Give it a chance. Things are different now, I bet.”
“She’s an actor. I think the show brought her on to cause drama. Things aren’t going well in Hollywood. That’s why she’s here.”
“
It was entirely possible no one was here for the right reasons. He was here for a cause which mattered to him, and the women probably had their own causes. This was for entertainment purposes only and he had to remind himself of that.
“Bonnie won the horse-riding event, so I have to take her on a one-on-one date tomorrow night.” He held up air quotes. “Where presumably we’ll talk about what went wrong and how we ‘feel’ now.”
“Oh. They are going to love exploiting that angle.”
“Yeah, and I sure as hell don’t want to have that discussion in front of a camera while everyone watches.”
“No, that wouldn’t be good.”
“And they’re seriously following us around everywhere so I have no idea where I could get her alone. If I try to do that, everyone will notice her gone.”
“That’s where I come in.” Jo smiled sweetly and stood. “Leave it all to me.”
His gaze followed Jo as she moved swiftly through the open archway of the room and headed toward the front door.
“Wait. Where are you going?”
She put out her palm to still him. “Wait right there, cowboy.”
Sean waited. And waited. He waited some more, thinking of how complicated his life had become since he’d agreed to do this stupid show.
Before the ladies of SORROW managed to talk him into this fiasco, he’d been just fine living his life, free of heartache. Bonnie fixed him good for wanting any more serious relationships, so all he did was fool around with women from out of town. Not that he hadn’t tried. A second failed engagement, and that was it for him. Whenever he went off to a cattle auction or some other event away from home, he could get his needs met. Neat, short, uncomplicated. Temporary. About five years ago he’d dated everyone his own age, but occasionally he did go out with someone new from Kerrville. It never lasted which was fine with him.
But Beulah wouldn’t stop nagging.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have more single women moving to Stone Ridge?
Once they get out here and see all our handsome cowboys, many won’t go back home. Especially the one you choose to be your wife.
And can you honestly tell me you don’t want to get married and start a family? How old are you now? Uh-huh, that’s what I thought. Not a kid anymore. You best get crackin’.
True, he was no longer as young as he used to be (nobody was last he checked) but he still had some good years left in him. Truth be told, and after long days spent considering, Beulah nagging, Winona prodding, he’d decided yes, he wanted a family. If he wasn’t sure this was the way to find one, at least he’d meet women willing to move to Stone Ridge and raise a family. He wanted children like baby Mary and the twins. Riggs was happier than he’d ever been.
And then he’d worked in the donation to wild horse rescue, his only required payment for taking a couple of weeks of his life off from ranching.
Sean thought he’d made the right decision until Jolette Marie and Bonnie both implied not everyone would be here for the right reasons. Some wanted their fifteen minutes of fame and a stepping stool to a better opportunity. While at first it seemed this would be Bonnie’s angle, he had to consider it differently. She’d already had a career. This show was a step down for her and unless she saw herself hosting reality shows or broadcasting, she couldn’t get much out of this.
By the time he heard Jo’s truck outside and two doors slamming, he’d worked himself into a snit. Bonnie shouldn’t be here. He should have sent her home already. Why hadn’t he sent her packing? She deserved it after the way she’d treated him for years. Putting him last. She’d broken his heart and not the other way around.
They could have had five children by now. All that wasted time.
But then Bonnie followed Jo into the room, and his heart slammed against his ribs like a wild animal. She wore sweats and a simple Dallas Cowboy t-shirt. Her red hair was pulled into a ponytail, all her make-up removed. To him, she still looked twenty-three.
“What’s wrong?” She came to him, stopping a few feet away. “Jo said you have to talk to me and it’s important.”
He stood. “There was no other way I could talk to you alone.”
“I’ll give you some privacy.” Jo went out the doors that linked this room to the rest of the house and shut them.
“Did anyone see you leave?”
She chuckled. “No. Jolette Marie had her fun with this. She drew me outside by saying she was a fan who wanted my autograph. After she left, I came inside the house and told the girls I wanted to go for a walk. Lori was preoccupied with watching the dailies.”
“Dailies?”
“Everything she filmed today.”
He troweled a hand down his face. “I’m so out of my element with this.”
“I know, but I’m here. And I can help.”
“You and I are going to be on a date which will be very public. I’m…uncomfortable about this.” He cleared his throat. “I even thought about choosing someone else to win the event. Like Angela. She was okay.”
Her neck wiggled back as if stunned. “You have got to be kiddin’ me. I won fair and square.”
“Well, of course you did. Fair’s fair. In the end I had to go with you.”
She crossed her arms. “I’m sorry. But you could have gotten rid of me before the event.”
“Yeah, and you could have refused to get on Grace and been disqualified. Sent home.”
She tipped her head. “We already went over this. I considered it.”
“You should have swallowed your pride.”
“I couldn’t. Even I’m not a good enough actor to pretend I’m afraid of getting on a horse. Plus, Daisy was watching me.” She gnawed on her lower lip. “And maybe…I wanted to stay.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know why that’s so shocking to you. You’re a good-looking man, or don’t you know it? Any woman in her right mind would be attracted to you, and I happen to have a great mind.” She cleared her throat, making him smile. “If not because of the shortage of women, you’d have been married long ago and forgotten all about me.”
“Who says I haven’t forgotten about you?”
His damn face, probably, speaking for him again. There may have been an edge to his voice, but it annoyed him he could be so damn obvious when it came to her.
“Sorry, I misspoke. I meant that you would be married by now because anyone would be happy to have you.”
“Anyone but you.”
“Well, I was an idiot.”
“I thought you said you have a great mind.”
“Both can be equally true.” She lowered her head.
After a couple beats of silence, Sean got to the point. “We need a story. A script of what we’ll share on our date tomorrow night. It’s an invasion of privacy for us to talk about what happened between us. That’s our business.”
“I agree. It’s too personal.”
“Do you have any ideas?”
“We’re going to skate around the truth. Just say we were teenage sweethearts, on and off again, and—”
“So far, all true.”
“Sean, let me be the bad guy. You did nothing wrong. You—”
“Hang on.” He held up a hand. “All true.”
“Wait. You don’t think you did anything wrong in our relationship?” Her cheeks pinked and she crossed her arms. “You gave me an ultimatum.”
“Because I wanted an answer sometime that decade.” He seemed to be yelling a little bit.
“I had the opportunity of a lifetime! I asked you to wait to see if I got the show, and if it didn’t work out, I’d come home, and we’d get married.”
“I don’t know why I didn’t jump at the prospect of being your consolation prize!”
“That’s not what I meant, and you know it. I loved you, Sean, with all my heart. But you had an idea of who I should be when it came to forever. Your wife had to be willing to stay in Stone Ridge and have a litter of children. I wasn’t allowed to have dreams of my own!”
“Here we go again. No one encouraged your dreams more than I did. I was proud of you.”
“Not proud enough.”
“It wasn’t wrong of me to want to keep you. I tried living in Hollywood, for you. I hated it.”
“You gave it four days before you decided you hated it.”
“I still can’t believe it took me that long.”
He hated arguing, made all the worse this time because he wouldn’t have make-up sex, in his opinion the only solid reason for a heated argument with a woman in recorded history. But now his gut burned with anger for a different reason.
Was she right that he’d wanted her to conform to his idea of a wife? That he’d tried to squash her dreams? The thought seared him with its unacceptability. He would have supported anything she wanted to do, but her dream kept taking her away. He’d put up with it as long as he could.
“Okay.” Bonnie took a deep breath and brushed her hands over her thighs. “I suppose this had to happen. We’ve aired it out and got it out of the way. This is good. It’s something we won’t have to talk about tomorrow night.”
“Right.” He stood. “Let me take you back to the house.”
She walked behind him until the front door which he opened for her to walk ahead. Mad or not, he wasn’t going to have her opening doors. He held the truck door open and waited for her to get in.
They drove in brittle silence to the mansion until Bonnie spoke up. “What are we going to say, exactly?”
“As little as possible. Canned responses like, ‘we were too young,’ ‘too bad it didn’t work out’ and ‘it wasn’t anyone’s fault.’”
“You obviously took some media training for this show.”
He kept his eyes on the road but heard a smile in her voice. “Over the years, I learned a thing or two about being insincere.”
“Ouch.”
He pulled over a few yards from the house under the darkness of a Sycamore tree. “Tell me one thing, will you?”
“Sure.” She unbuckled and turned to him.
“After all this time, why the hell am I still chasing after you?”
He was afraid he knew the answer. For a moment, she didn’t speak, leaving him to notice how a moon ray glimmered in her hair and her emerald eyes sparkled.
“Force of habit. See you tomorrow night.”
She climbed out of the truck and shut the door, but he wasn’t sure she believed the words any more than he did.