Page 5 of The Spice Is Nice

“That’s right.” Something flickered behind her eyes, there and gone, and then she was grinning again, and I was setting her down on the dry grass by the picnic tables, pretending my arms didn’t feel empty without her in them.

I ran back to her truck for the food and when I passed Knox, he looked up. “Smooth, Colt. Real smooth.”

I glared at him.

“I’m just saying. If Ivy ever needs anything around here, you’re Johnny-on-the-spot.”

“Shut up, Knox,” Ivy teased, moving toward the food table with her dish reclaimed from my hands. She set it between Daisy’s pies and Eldon’s beans and fell into conversation with Sage like nothing had happened, like being carried through a field by a man who was decidedlynot her boyfriend was the most ordinary thing in the world.

I went back to my spot against the corner of the pergola and picked up my beer. It was warm. I drank it anyway.

The evening settled into a rhythm as it always did. People ate. Talked. Laughed. Ro and Eli chased around the fire ring until Willow called her back. Dusty sat with Ash and talked horses and fence lines. Eldon bitched about Knox’s aftershave contaminating his potato salad.

Ivy moved through all of it like she belonged at the center. Talking to Dusty about the recent arrival of horses here at the ranch, complimenting Eldon’s beans in a way that made the old cook puff up like a rooster, checking with Willow about next week’s chamber of commerce meeting.

Ivy touched people’s arms when she talked to them and remembered the names of everyone and asked questions that made people feel seen. When she broke away from Willow and wandered toward the pergola with an empty cup, she reached past me for the lemonade. Close enough that I caught the honeysuckle again.

“You’ve been standing in that same spot all night,” she said, filling her cup without looking at me.

“Pleasant spot.”

“You can see everything from here.”

“Exactly.”

“And is there something or someone who catches your eye in particular?”

The fire crackled. Ro squealed at something goofy Eli did. I ignored it all, focused on Ivy. “Just grateful for the view. It’s not bad.”

She studied me for a moment, then nodded and pushed off the post and went back to her sisters.

I watched her from the pergola. Ash’s question haunted me.What comes next for you?

If I were a man looking for a home, Ivy Wylde would be the woman I’d stay for. But when she looked at me, she saw a friend, arms that could lift and hands that could fix. A mouth she could kiss only when it suited her need to make her ex walk away.

Once in a while, I caught Ivy staring at me like she was curious about what I was thinking, which was more temptation than any of the rest of it. But Ivy didn’t seem the type to want a relationship either. For all the gossip that still followed her around town about her wild years, the Ivy I knew was all passion and drive. She poured everything into the Wylde West Outfitters, the Chamber of Commerce, her sisters, this community. She didn’t date anyone.

There was no room in her life for a man, and she made that clear. If she ever thought about our kiss at the wedding, she treated it the same way I did. A funny story. A onetime thing. Nothing that needed to be examined too closely.

So, what was next? Holly Creek was waiting for me. My mother was waiting. My sisters kept calling, asking me to come home, and my father’s grave kept growing over. I’d left my hometown for the Navy, thinking I’d build a life everyone could be proud of me for. But what happened out there on the ocean, on that aircraft carrier… How could I be proud of it?

I was supposed to head home by now. Maybe by Christmas I’d have my head on straight enough to go back. Maybe by then I’d feel like I deserved to go on living my life.

It was time I figured things out. Time I faced what had happened on that ship. I grew tired of the memory coming to me nightly in my dreams.

The sun dipped behind the mountains, and the sky went from gold to purple. Knox finally lit the fire. He tossed kindling into the ring and coaxed a flame while Ro watched from Ash’s lap. The light jumped and flickered across the faces of the people gathered around it, this strange and accidental family I’d found at the end of a bus route to nowhere, and for a moment I had to look away.

Of course my eyes landed on Ivy’s, who sat across the fire from me, her boots tucked under her skirt, her face glowing like amber. She laughed at something Poppy said, her head thrown back, and the sound of it carried across the clearing like something I wanted to catch and hold.

It was all temporary, though. The ranch. The crew. The Sunday “church” on the hilltop and Knox’s burgers and Daisy’s first apple pies of the season. The way people in this town had begun to recognize me when I walked down the street. The woman across the fire, pretending like she wasn’t watching me.

All of this was temporary.

I couldn’t get too comfortable. One fake kiss didn’t make a home.

Chapter 3

Proving It