Mira’s driveway was full when Paige and Mom arrived, so Paige parked along the curb.
“This is it.” She eyed the beautiful brick single-story home in front of her. A picture of success with its three-car garage, tall white columns and covered porch. Even her flower bed with its yellow, red and lavender tulips, looked cheery and pristine without a dandelion in sight.
Mom clutched her purse in her lap. “Kinda strange we’re invited to a family birthday party. Are you sure they want us here?”
“Of course.” Not really, but Mom needed to interact with people, and Paige needed time with her friend. They hadn’t been able to connect lately. “Now, come on before we melt.” With the engine turned off, the temperature in her car had already begun to climb. “You’ll have fun.” She flashed a grin, cast a glance at her sleeping little one in the back and opened her door.
“Promise?”
“I can promise there’ll be cake.” She moved to the back seat to get Ava. “Can you grab the gift bag?”
“Sure.” Mom climbed out and then waited in the driveway for Paige to unbuckle her groggy-eyed little one.
“You ready to play with some kids, sweet girl?” She brushed a kiss against her warm cheek.
Ava rubbed her eyes with fisted hands, looking like the little darling she was. Paige gave her a squeeze, breathing in the sweet scent of her strawberry shampoo.
She and her mom merged onto the walkway and continued to a tall mahogany door. Paige rang the bell and then waited while Mom shifted from foot to foot beside her.
Mira answered wearing an adorable mint-green dress accessorized with a corded leather belt. “Hey. Thanks for coming.” She pulled Paige into a hug and then did the same to Mom. “It’s so good to see you again, Mrs. Cordell. Oh!” She held a hand to her mouth. “Look at your little one! Hey, sweetie, how are you?” She ran a hand over Ava’s head.
Ava buried her face in Paige’s shoulder.
“It’s been so wonderful having them home.” Mom tugged on one of Ava’s curls.
“I bet.” Mira led the way past a formal living room with cathedral ceilings, and through a tiled kitchen with food covering every surface area.
In the spacious backyard, adults gathered in groups of threes and fours while giggling children ran, skipped and bounced across the lawn. To the far right, a couple of teen boys tossed a Frisbee between them.
“You remember my parents?” Mira looped an arm through Mom’s and crossed to where an older couple sat with a handful of others.
“I’m not sure I do.” Mom glanced at Paige with a creased brow, looking as though she were about to be thrust into a pack of Black Friday shoppers.
Ava toddled toward an empty sandbox a few feet away. Paige shifted so she could keep one eye on her while remaining engaged with Mira and her parents.
The conversation felt stilted at first. They asked her about Chicago and how she was enjoying her time in Sage Creek.
They asked her mother what she did for a living.
“I’m a tier-three security-support manager for PhoneTel Communications,” she replied.
“Interesting. Are they based in Texas?” Mira’s father asked.
She nodded. “Though we service Fortune 500 companies nationally, our headquarters are in Houston. I telecommute from home.”
“How nice.”
Mom took a soda Mira offered. “It’s so convenient. And with all my health concerns—I’ve been battling numerous issues for some time...” She rubbed a hand up her arm. “I don’t know what I’d do otherwise.”
Paige grinned at her friend’s parents, who sat side by side with the husband’s hand resting on his wife’s knee, looking goo-goo-eyed in love. “Mira said the two of you met at an outdoor concert?”
Mira’s mom smiled at her husband. “That we did, back when we were both in college. But I was there by accident.”
Paige raised an eyebrow. “How’s that?”
“My friend dragged me along, but it really wasn’t my thing. The music was so loud, and a genre I had no interest in. So I found a quiet place to sit in the shade of a flowering dogwood tree. That’s when Donald saw me and decided to make his move.”
He laughed. “You were smitten with me from the beginning, and you know it.”
“Hardly.” She turned to Paige and shook her head. “But he wouldn’t leave me alone. Kept pestering me for my number.”
“I wore her down eventually.” He winked.
She patted his hand. “That you did, but my parents weren’t so quick to join the Donald fan club.”
He let out a low whistle. “I’ll say. First time I came to pick her up, her father met me with his rifle. Cocked it, then asked me what business I thought I had with his little girl.”
“But Donald refused to give up.” She twined her fingers with his. “He eventually won my dad over.”
Paige smiled. “I love stories like that—where two people fall in love and hold tightly to each other, despite the obstacles.”
“Oh, it wasn’t like that,” Mira’s mom said. “I told Donald to go away. Thought we had too much stacked against us.”
He wrapped an arm around his wife’s shoulder and tugged her closer. “Good thing I didn’t listen to her—otherwise she would’ve missed out on the best thing that ever happened to her.”
She gave him a playful swat. “Took a stubborn man like Donald to teach me love’s worth the risk. Truth is I used my parents as an excuse, but I was scared. Scared of what would happen if I let myself fall too deep and things didn’t work out.”
Paige’s mind flashed to Jed, and her stomach flip-flopped.
Was her fear of getting hurt again keeping her from experiencing the love she’d always hoped for?
The rest of the afternoon, though she did her best to stay engaged in the various conversations, her mind kept drifting back to that question.
She had a lot to think through, but one thing was certain. She wouldn’t gain any clarity from avoiding Jed—or her feelings for him.
Jed removed his Stetson and swiped a rag across his sweaty forehead. The late-morning air felt sticky and thicker than a midsummer storm cloud. At least they hadn’t disrupted any copperheads during their demolition.
Mr. Fischer’s barns had been better off than Jed had suspected. Other than some jagged fragments scattered across the tall grass, most of the wood was usable. Seemed they’d salvaged enough to panel the theater’s walls and floor the lobby. Maybe even with some left over for accents.
Drake pulled off his gloves and grabbed a water bottle from a nearby cooler. “Want one?”
Jed nodded, and his buddy tossed one his way, and then threw others to the rest of their crew.
He took a long drink of water, then removed his hat and poured the rest over his head. “Appreciate you fellas helping me clear all this out.” He grabbed himself a second bottle.
“Wait a minute.” Drake sauntered over to Jed. “You’re paying us, right? Figured I’d tag this on to my remodel invoice.”
“Oh, I’ll pay you all right.” Jed gave him a playful shove. “With a five-buck knuckle sandwich.”
Drake laughed, picked up a piece of straw by his boots and stuck it in his mouth. “What about the rest of this?” He motioned toward the wood splinters spread out across the field. “Want us to stick around to clean all this up?”
“The smaller pieces will decompose, but I figure we best do something with the rest of it. What do you think about lighting a big ol’ fire and roasting some dogs on it like we used to?”
Drake and the others, four in all, grinned, and each voiced his enthusiasm for the idea.
“I’ll call my wife.” Seth, a buddy from way back, leaned against the side of his truck and pulled his phone from his shirt pocket. “See what she’s got going on.”
“Tell her to bring a pot of her baked beans, heavy on the bacon.” Drake took a long swig of his water and glanced to another one of their buddies, who was still pulling rusted nails from wood planks. “Hey, Ty, think Shelby will make a jug of her sweet tea?”
Tyler shrugged, carried a plank of wood to his truck and then tossed it in the back. “Probably. Soon’s we unload all this, I’ll give her a call.”
All the talk about calling their women to bring them to the cookout made Jed acutely aware of his single status. That fact hadn’t bothered him—until now, when his thoughts kept drifting to Paige. But he didn’t want to push too hard and risk scaring her off. He knew she had a lot to process, and that everything probably felt all jumbled in her heart and brain after all she’d gone through during and after her divorce.
But he also didn’t want to give her so much space that she would up and take off for Chicago.
He’d lost her once, but God had brought her back to Sage Creek. That had to mean something, right?
With all of their trucks loaded, Jed and his buddies drove to his dinner theater. He entered to find the place in the latter stages of demolition.
Forty minutes later, he and the guys had all but one truck unloaded, and Jed was covered in grime, sawdust and sweat. He could sure use some of that sweet tea Tyler’s girlfriend made. And a big slab of venison, slowly roasted over open flames.
He deposited his handful of boards along the wall and then turned for more. Then he stopped. Paige stood in front of him, dressed in jean shorts and a ruffled blouse with a scoop neckline.
“Hey.” She fiddled with her bracelet. “Um... Are you busy?”
He pulled the hand towel he’d been carting around from his back pocket and mopped the sweat from his face. He could feel his buddies eyeing him, probably wondering what was up with Paige and him talking again.
“Let’s go to my office.” He led the way, ignoring the soft chuckle from one of his buddies behind him.
When they reached his office, he considered keeping the door open to stop folks from flapping their jaws more than they already would be. But with all of the banging, hammering and sawing Drake’s crew was doing, the place was too loud for decent conversation. And Paige’s pinched expression told him whatever she wanted to say would be awkward enough.
“Have a seat.” He motioned to the chair in front of his desk and then sat across from her. “Everything all right?”
She nodded and then took a deep breath. “I enjoyed going out with you the other night. To the dinner theater.”
So that was what this was about.
“It reminded me of old times.” Her crystal-blue eyes studied his with her delicate brow furrowed. But then her features relaxed into the most genuine smile he’d seen from her in some time. “Before...you know.”
He nodded. “Want to talk about it?”
“I think we should.”
“You have to know I never cheated on you.”
“But you didn’t really stick around, either. I needed you, Jed. It felt like my life was falling apart.”
“I know.” He released a breath. “And I’m sorry.” Something told him this was about much more than him. It’d all gotten jumbled together in her mind—her dad bailing, their family struggling financially, her mom withdrawing emotionally. “I didn’t leave you, Paige. You pulled away from me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You changed. You were so...angry. All the time.” He winced. That sounded bad. “Like you wanted nothing to do with me.”
“That didn’t seem to bother you much. You were too busy chasing cheerleaders to notice.”
“That’s not true. Things were hard for me, too. My dad alternated from giving me the cold shoulder to telling me how I was never going to succeed in life. On account of I didn’t want to be a lawyer like him. My mom was nagging me all the time to make a college decision—a life decision. The pressure was too much, you know?”
Her eyes searched his, and the edge within them softened some.
He released a breath. “I felt like I was failing everyone, especially you. I didn’t know how to handle it, so I didn’t. I just quit thinking about it all—about everything. I started hanging out at parties. But I didn’t leave you. I couldn’t have. You’d already left.”
“I was upset and totally freaked out. You knew that.”
“I should’ve held tight to you. We should’ve held tight to each other.”
Silence stretched between them, but then she inhaled and smiled. “Seems to me you never quite responded to Ricardo’s challenge.”
“Ricardo...?” He grinned. “I see how that could be a problem.” He rose and rounded his desk, fighting the urge to pull her close and kiss her. “So, tell me, Paige Cordell, are you saying—?”
“Why do you have to put everything into a box?” An old phrase he used often in high school, whenever she tried to overthink things.
He chuckled. “Using my words against me, I see.”
“Something like that. So...now what?”
“Guess maybe we’ll figure that out as we go?” As much as he wanted to lasso her for good, he knew he needed to take things slowly. To prove he planned to stand beside her and Ava for good.
“The fellas and I are throwing a cookout tonight. Want to come?”
She didn’t respond right away, then took a deep breath and nodded. “Sure. Yeah, I’ll go.”
That was a start.
Paige stepped back from the billowing fire and grabbed a soda from the cooler near Jed’s truck. She tried to tell herself it was the thick smoke swirling toward her that caused her eyes and nose to sting, but it was more than that.
She felt as though she’d regressed to that shy, awkward teenager who always felt like the outsider. This was Jed’s world—boots, cowboy hats and cookouts.
She fit much better in Chicago. There, people accepted her for who she was.
No. They left her alone. Allowed her to believe her self-imposed isolation was normal.
And the busyness and traffic and constant noise allowed her to distract herself from the loneliness invading her heart.
A loneliness she hadn’t felt lately. Not since she and Jed had been hanging out again.
She sat at the base of an old, gnarled oak tree. With her back pressed against the rough trunk, she hugged her legs to her chest and rested her chin on her knees. She watched as Jed’s buddies laughed and carried on.
Was there room in their world for her?
Did she truly belong back in Sage Creek?
Jed stepped back from the fire and looked around. He strolled over. “You all right?”
“Just tired, I guess.”
He lowered to the ground beside her; his shoulder felt warm against hers. “You sure? Because seems to me you clammed up the minute Tyler’s girlfriend arrived. She didn’t give you any trouble, did she?”
Paige plucked a blade of grass. “No. It’s just...” She sighed. “Never mind.”
“Don’t do this, Paige.”
“Do what?”
“Hide behind that protective shell of yours. If we’re going to give this a go between us, we’ve got to do things differently. We owe ourselves that much.”
“I guess.” How would she know what it took to make a relationship work? She hadn’t exactly had the best role models in her parents. Nor had she done any better than they had with her own marriage.
“So, tell me—” he nudged her shoulder with his “—what’s gotten you so quiet?”
She gazed toward the fire, wishing she could verbalize all of her emotions. Wishing she understood her feelings herself. “Your friends don’t like me.”
“They hardly know you.”
“They know what they remember.”
“And what’s that?”
She shrugged.
He cupped her chin in his callused hand and turned her face toward him. “Like I said, they don’t know you. Because you haven’t given them a chance. Instead, you’re seeing rejection that isn’t there. Besides, who cares what they think? I sure don’t.”
Her breath caught as he leaned closer. His lips brushed against hers, causing her insides to melt.
Someone whooped, and she jolted backward, whacking her head on the tree behind her. Snickers erupted.
Jed shook his head. “What is this, junior high?”
Paige smiled. “Apparently.”
Except, for once she no longer felt like the awkward, frizzy-haired middle schooler. Maybe Sage Creek wasn’t so terrible after all.
Suddenly she was rethinking her plans to return to Chicago. She knew she couldn’t live in her mother’s guest room forever, not to mention she was a journalist, not a scriptwriter. Besides, for all she knew, Jed’s theater could go bust before summer’s end. By then she could be employed with a prestigious, well-paying magazine, if everything went well at the writers’ conference.
But could she give up her dreams of making it in the magazine world for Jed?
Could she give up Jed for the life she’d left in Chicago?