CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
I don’t know how I slept. Maybe it was the leftover sun exhaustion or the buckets of tears I cried, but my eyes didn’t drag themselves open until well after nine. I jumped out of bed and shimmied back into my dirty clothes. Running down the stairs after only a cursory glance in the mirror, I went from room to room, looking for Mack. Last night was a mistake. I had to just tell him that. I had to tell him that we had to let go of unreasonable expectations and live the lives we’d been born to. His was here and mine was across the country. We were completely incompatible.
“Well, good morning, sunshine,” said Angus, leaning against the counter and drinking what looked like a cup of coffee. He pointed to a machine next to the sink. “Help yourself. Mugs are in the cabinet above.”
I shuffled over and got out a cup. “Is Mack around?” I asked, pouring myself a cup of dark coffee. Today I’d be skipping the cream and sugar; I needed straight-up harsh caffeine going right into my veins.
“Nope. He went into town.”
I spun around. “But . . . we had an appointment.”
Angus chuckled. “We don’t generally do appointments out here.”
“Okay, well we had an agreement to meet at nine so we could talk.”
“About your genealogy business?”
I nodded, taking a sip of my coffee. According to my sleepy brain, nodding wasn’t exactly lying.
“You can ask me questions if you want. I’m available for the next half hour, and I’m a MacKenzie.”
“Don’t you have cows to de-testicle?”
He laughed again. “Nope, not yet. I need Mack for that, and he had to go.”
“Where did he go? Do you know when he’ll be back?”
Angus looked into his mug, frowning a little. “I’m not exactly sure.”
I could tell Angus was lying, but it was probably true that none of it was my business. I was just the girl trying to detach myself from Mack’s animal magnetism and get back to my real life.
“Is there any chance I could get a lift back to town so I could get my phone numbers and charger and things?”
“Actually, all your things are in the front hall. Boog brought them over early this morning.”
I put my cup down without saying a word and walked out of the kitchen toward the front door. My jaw dropped open at the sight of all my things sitting there on the floor. How in the hell . . . ?
Angus stood behind me. “Got your car towed to the garage. You’ve got a bent axle. It’s gonna be awhile before it’s fixed. Since you didn’t have any transportation, we figured you’d want to have your things while you’re here. Boog knows the girl at the reception desk, so she let him into your room.”
I spun around to face him, not even sure what I was going to say. The expression on his face made me stop the words that were about to fly out of my mouth. He looked . . . sad.
I frowned in confusion. None of this made any sense.
“Yup . . . so . . . I’m going to head out to the barn. Maeve’ll be in the kitchen in a few minutes. She just went to gather some eggs.” He left me standing there in the hall.
I kept everything where it was except my phone charger, which I brought up to Ian’s bedroom and plugged into my phone and the wall. As soon as there was enough juice to power the phone up, I checked my messages. There were four texts from Bradley, one from Ruby, and one from Candice. I didn’t even bother checking the ten voicemails. I checked Candice’s text message first.
Candice: I hear you’re out in Oregon??? Call me, bitch.
Candice: Okay, you know I was only kidding about the bitch thing, right? Call me. Bitch.
I smiled as I pressed her number. Bradley could wait. The office could wait. I hadn’t talked to my best friend in months.
“Hello? Is this really you?” Candice said, nearly yelling.
“Yes, it’s really me.” I didn’t realize until just then how much I’d missed her craziness.
“And you’re calling me from Oregon, and Bradley’s not with you, right?”
“Yep, that’s right.”
“Squeeeeee!!!” The phone dropped, and I heard a loud bang and then some rustling around. “Oops, sorry about that,” she said, now slightly breathless. “I just lost my shit for a second there. Did you break up? Are you running after ‘twooo wuvv’?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Ruby told me everything. Come on, fess up. What’s he like? Did he flip his cowboy hat when you showed up?”
My heart was racing. “Hold on a second, Candice. How do you know all this stuff? No one knows about this, not even Ruby. All she did was make my travel arrangements.”
She snorted. “As if. Have you forgotten who you work for?”
“Umm . . . no.” What could my law firm have to do with any of this?
“Ruby. You work for Ruby. Ruby knows all, Ruby sees all, Ruby tells me all. Ruby has the password to your computer files, duh.”
I closed my eyes and sighed, putting all my frustration, worry, and feelings of helplessness into it.
“Are you pissed? Don’t be pissed at her. She was just doing you a big, fat favor, believe me.”
“What did she do?” The words would barely come out.
“Nothing. She just told me and Kelly what’s what so we could, you know, help if necessary.”
I rested my forehead in my hand. “Believe me, your help is the last thing I need.”
“Please don’t hang up,” she begged. “I finally got you back, and I wouldn’t be able to take it if you dumped me again.”
“Dumped you?” I sat up again. She was making no sense.
“Yes. Dumped me.” She felt very strongly about this apparently. “Ever since you started dating that Bradley, you dumped all your friends. Or did you not notice that you have zero normal people in your life anymore?”
Putting Candice in the category of normal was like putting Ruby in the category of shy, privacy-respecting people, and that was a load of cow poo. “I did notice that you and I haven’t had lunch in ages.”
“Ages? Try a year, my friend. A full fucking year. And now look . . . you made me cuss! You totally made me break my vow not to cuss this week. I hope you’re happy. Anyway, enough of that . . . tell me about your man.”
I felt like crying. “He’s not my man. I’m waiting for him to sign the divorce papers.”
“So you really did marry him,” she whispered. “Oh my god, that’s so romantic!” She squeed again, but thankfully this time not right in my ear.
When she came back, I clarified. “It’s not romantic—it’s awful. It’s terrible-awful.” Tears rushed to my eyes.
“Oh, sweetie, what’s wrong? Why are you crying?”
“I’m not,” I insisted, wiping tears off my cheeks. “I’m just frustrated.”
“Talk to me. Tell me what’s going on. I’m sure I can help.”
“You can’t, you really can’t. It’s just . . . very complicated.”
“Tell me! I’m good with people. I can help you uncomplicate it, I promise. Please-please-please-please-pleeeeaaase?”
She wore me down with her begging, and I really did need to get the secret off my chest. It was killing me to have no one to talk sense into me. “Okay, fine. Apparently, I married him two years ago, after you left us and we had crazy monkey sex.”
“Oh, man. That must have been some pretty amazing stuff to make you go marry the guy.”
“I know, right? I have no idea what happened, though, because the next day he was gone.”
“Where did he go?”
“I have no idea! I found a claim check in the room and called the front desk. They said he came and got his bags from downstairs and left with them. I never heard from him again, so I don’t know anything else.”
“And since you didn’t remember getting married, you did nothing.”
“Right. I mean, I was kind of sad he didn’t call or anything, but I moved on. You know I had the Luke thing to deal with and then . . . well, life got in the way.”
She snorted. “You mean your stupid lifeplan got in the way. When are you going to throw that thing in the shredder and get on with your real life? Life unscripted?”
“I don’t know,” I said in a weak voice.
“Well, hey now, that’s progress! That’s the first time I’ve ever heard you even consider shredding the Dark Forces. Good for you! I think maybe Oregon is good for you.”
I laughed. “Dark Forces?”
“Yes,” she said with conviction. “That damn lifeplan has done nothing but lead you down the wrong path since day one. Dark Forces. Devil in disguise.”
“It got me into college and law school.”
“Granted, it got you into college, which is where you met me and Kelly, but other than that, pooey. What did law school ever do for you other than turn you into a cold-hearted, analytical bitch?”
I nearly choked on my outrage. “Hey! That’s out of line! Even for you, Candice.”
“Hey! I’m just giving you the tough love you’ve needed for years. Now listen up, because I know my time is about to be cut off. This is hard shit to listen to, but you need to hear it. You have terrible taste in men because you’re always trying to get them to fit into a box. You fall in love with potential instead of reality. You are attracted to characteristics on paper instead of the real man underneath. Stop putting men into categories. Stop making checklists and measuring men up next to them! Luke was a puke and Bradley is a turd sandwich. He doesn’t care about you; he cares about what his friends think about you. He’s obnoxious, and one day he’ll be kicked out of the Bar because I’ll bet he cheats. I’ll bet he cuts corners! You’re too good for him and all those other buttheads you’ve gone out with. But maybe not this cowboy. Maybe this guy is the real deal.” She finished in a softer voice. “He sure seemed nice when I met him.”
I’d begun crying halfway through her speech, and now I just sat there, numb. The pain was terrible, not so much because the words had come from the mouth of someone I cared about, but because they were all true. I knew they were true, but I also knew I wasn’t strong enough to do anything about it but ignore them.
“Thanks for the call, Candice. I have to go now.”
“Oh, no you don’t! No way am I going to live with another friendship dry spell! Talk to me. Tell me what you’re thinking right this second!”
“I’m thinking that I have to go.”
“No. I don’t accept that. Try again.”
I let out a long, shaky sigh. “I don’t know what you want from me, Candice.”
“Honesty. Tell me right now, in all honesty, how you feel about the cowboy. What’s his name, by the way?”
“His name is Mack. And how I feel about him? I don’t know. It’s confusing.”
“Give me a bullet list. You like lists.”
“Shut up.”
“No, I’m serious. Bullet list. Go.”
“Fine. You want a bullet list? Here it is: Sexy. Handsome. Smart. Sexy. Magnetizing. Compelling. Muscles. Good family. Confident. Polite. Sexy.”
“I’m getting the impression that there’s some chemistry going on over there.” I could tell she was smiling by the tone of her voice.
I took another shaky breath, afraid to admit what I’d done but knowing it was relevant. I really wanted to confess my sins to Father Candice.
“Tell me what you’re not telling me,” she insisted.
“You’re a mind reader now too?”
“Yes. I always have been. Did you sleep with him?”
“In Vegas? Yes.”
“No, dummy, in Oregon. Don’t play games with me. I have a color and cut in ten minutes.”
“Go ahead and go. I have to call Bradley. He’s left me a ton of messages.”
“I can get on a plane and be out there in less than six hours.” She was threatening me.
“No. Stay put. I already have enough trouble juggling what’s here. I don’t need to add you to the mix.”
“Then tell me. You had sex again, didn’t you?”
“Promise you won’t squee into the phone again.”
“Squeeee!! You totally did it, you big fat ho!” She was laughing out loud, probably in the middle of her salon.
“Yes. Last night. It was amazingly erotic and the wrong thing to do and . . . shit, Candice! I don’t know what the hell I’m doing!” I felt and sounded like I was on the edge of sanity.
“Of course you do! You’re going with your heart and your vagina instead of your head for a change! Good for you! It’s about time. Damn, when we were in Vegas I thought you’d finally figured it out. But then we got back, and you put your head right back up into your butt. Ruby and Kelly and I thought you were a goner. But now you’re back, baby, you’re back! Don’t quit on us now. There’s too much riding on this.”
“Too much of what?” I was smiling through my tears. Candice had such a way with words.
“Too much happiness, sweetie. I think this cowboy could make you happy. Why don’t you give him a chance?”
“I can’t,” I whispered, looking up at the pictures on Ian’s shelves.
“Why not?” Candice sounded like she was going to cry right along with me.
“Because I think he has a girlfriend. I think she’s his roommate.”
“Well,” Candice said, sparking up again, “then she’s gotta go. You got there first. You’re his wife.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Sure it is. If he had a girlfriend who meant anything, would he have slept with you last night?”
“Maybe not. Or maybe he slept with me to teach me a lesson.”
“A lesson? A lesson about what?”
“I don’t know. He seemed mad at me from the moment he saw me.”
“Did he remember you were married?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“But he was mad at you, even though he took off and never called?”
“Yes.”
“Hmmmm . . . Well, how come you never called him? Weren’t you even curious why he disappeared?”
I shrugged, sitting alone in Ian’s room, trying to remember back to that day two years ago in the hotel room. “I couldn’t.”
“You couldn’t what?”
“Call him. I didn’t have his number.”
“Are you sure? You blacked out for half the night. You blacked out during a whole damn wedding. Surely he could have put his number in your phone, and you wouldn’t have remembered that either, right?”
My face burned right along with my stomach. “I . . . I don’t remember seeing a strange number on there.”
“Pfft. You have like a million numbers on your phone. Didn’t you even think to look for his name?”
A memory came rushing back. “I couldn’t!”
“Why?!”
“Because you dropped my damn phone in the toilet, don’t you remember?!” I was gripping the bedsheets, feeling like I could shred them with my nails.
“Oh, crapski. I do remember that. Oh, maaaan. And all your contacts had to be loaded onto a new phone when you got back to your office.”
“Except for the one that was added in Las Vegas, since it wasn’t in my office backup,” I said sadly. “Assuming there was one added in Vegas.”
“I guess you have a mission, then,” said Candice. “You need to ask him if he gave you his number. Maybe you were supposed to call him, and when you didn’t, he got mad.”
“But why wouldn’t I have given him my number? If he wanted to talk to me, he could have just called me, right?”
“You’ll never know until you ask.” A stranger’s voice spoke softly next to Candice. “Shit, I have to go. My next client is here. We’ll talk more about this later. Promise me you won’t disappear!”
“I promise.” I wanted to curl up in the bed and sleep the day away. This was a royal mess, and now I realized on top of everything else how I’d basically almost thrown my best friendships in the garbage. When the man-crap hits the fan, girlfriends are the only ones who can make things better. Why had I let them go for Bradley?
“Good. Chin up, gorgeous girl! We’ll figure this out. Meanwhile, I’ll bring Kelly into the loop and get an update from Ruby.”
“No! I don’t know what Ruby’s doing over there, but Bradley cannot find out what’s going on here!”
“Uhhh, it might be too late for that. Gotta go, lovebugger. Tah-tah!” The line went dead.