Chapter Eleven
Hayley was something of a model employee. He’d been training her for three weeks now, and she never hesitated to do what he asked. On days he had actual excursions, more often than not she tagged along and observed. On days he didn’t, or only had one, they did a practice hike.
He was going to have to plan a backpacking trip for her soon, an overnight one, because hiking was where she shined, and Sam thought it might be good business to have a woman leading overnight trips for women who might feel uncomfortable with a man running the excursion.
But the thought of training Hayley on an overnight excursion was not a particularly comfortable one.
The more she was in his space, the more he—well, since no one was around, he’d admit it to himself—he liked her company. She was cheerful without being overly chatty. She asked good questions. She never poked or prodded about personal things.
He supposed they had that in common, past scars and pains they didn’t want to talk about.
That bubbling, roiling disquiet that had been building and building inside of him had calmed. Oh, it still spurted up now and again. He wouldn’t think too hard or deeply about how it was usually on Hayley’s day off.
But mostly, mostly, he felt a renewed sense of peace. He had work to do, someone to train, and this project in front of him.
Sam stepped back and surveyed the altar. Well, it was really more of an arbor. He’d decided to go with aspen wood, since he could get it without going into town, and it matched the rustic feel of what Lilly’s picture had looked like.
It was coming together nicely. More than nicely, if he wasn’t being modest, and the more Sam worked on it, the more he wanted to make it perfect. More than a day or two’s work. A showpiece. Something beautiful that would surprise Lilly.
He wasn’t altogether certain there wasn’t something a little warped in that, or that it hadn’t been Lilly’s intention all along, to force him into building and creating.
“Sam.”
At Hayley’s breathless exhale of his name, he whirled to face her. He must have been working so hard he hadn’t even noticed the sound of her car. It would certainly take great concentration not to hear her junker of a car rattle and clatter its way up to where she parked it.
“It’s beautiful,” Hayley said, stepping closer and closer, until she could see the little details he’d carved into the wood. “I had no idea it would be this elegant when you started.”
Uncomfortable with the praise, with her using the word elegant, Sam shifted on his feet. “It’ll do, I guess.”
Hayley traced the cursive L he’d carved onto what would be Lilly’s side of the altar. He’d carved out Brandon’s B on his side, and he had the start of an E up on the top that he’d work on making deeper and stronger looking.
He meant to take another look at it, to consider the placement of some other decorative touches, but his gaze was drawn to Hayley.
She was frowning at that L, even as she traced it over and over. After a few moments of him watching her, she raised her gaze to his.
He kept wondering when that uncomfortable punch of attraction would go away. Because surely if he got to know her, got to thinking of her as a coworker, as part Evans, he wouldn’t feel that anymore. Certainly not as strongly.
He wasn’t there yet, apparently.
“Do you think Lilly and Brandon make a good couple?”
One hundred percent uncomfortable with the question, Sam turned to his tools. “Hell if I know. Only couples I’ve ever known were as dysfunctional as all get-out.”
“Your parents weren’t married?”
“Not happily anyway. I swear half their marriage was spent trying to make the other bleed. Metaphorically, anyway. Mostly.”
Hayley seemed to consider this, taking the few steps toward the other side of the arbor. This time she touched the B, tracing it carefully.
Sam’s gaze was helplessly drawn to the graceful movement of her fingers.
“My mom and my stepdad are very happy, I think. They fight sometimes, but you can tell they really love each other, care for each other. My mom was never a morning person, but when Mack was on night shift, she’d get up early and make sure breakfast would be ready when he got home. I always remembered that.”
“That’s . . . nice.”
“It is now, anyway,” she murmured, intently staring at the B.
He should leave it at that. Walk away from this uncomfortable conversation. It’s what he would do any other day, with any other person. “What was it then?”
Hayley shrugged and smiled ruefully. “Annoying. I was eight and very jealous that I had to make my own breakfast, but my mom would get up to make this man bacon and eggs and all number of things.”
“Well, when you put it that way . . .”
“No. No, it wasn’t bad. It’s just hard to blend a family. Especially when one of you so clearly doesn’t belong.”
“Who’s that?”
She cocked her head at him as though she didn’t understand why he would ask. “Me.” She pointed to her face as if that explained everything, but it didn’t make the slightest bit of sense to him.
“I’m . . . It’s very clear I’m the odd man out in my family,” she said. “Just by looking at us. I’m the light-skinned one, the one with green in my eyes. And I’m not saying they ever made me feel different, it was just always obvious. And you add in the . . . way I was conceived, the way Mom was paid to disappear . . . and . . . Why on earth am I talking about this?”
“I don’t know.”
She laughed, but there was an edge of bitterness to it that wasn’t usual for Hayley. “They called last night, and later I tossed and turned, stewing. Eventually stewing alone starts to feel . . .”
“Pointless?”
She smiled at him, something kind of soft. Hayley had this thing inside of her, a compassion and an empathy, that . . . Well, he wanted it to irritate him or at least remind him he needed to run in the opposite direction of that smile.
But all he ever did was bask in it.
“Yes. Pointless. Eventually you have to vent all that stewing at someone, or it just festers into, well, rot, I guess.” He didn’t miss the way she flicked a glance at his cabin, as though she thought of it as rot.
He scowled, but if she was making any correlations between him and festering, she didn’t say anything.
“You know when someone’s worried about you and you know they mean well. They want you to be safe and happy. But instead of it feeling nice, it just feels like they think you’re stupid or wrong?”
From his family? Plenty of the stupid and wrong, none of the safe-and-happy crap, but he had to begrudgingly admit he knew the feeling from a more than decade-old friendship with Brandon and Will. So, he grunted his assent.
“I just wish they trusted my judgment. Which is stupid, since I’m lying to them.”
“Lying to them about what?”
Her eyebrows drew together, a delicate crease forming between them. He hated to see that pained expression on her face, and he hated that he hated that.
“They don’t know I’m living here. I purposely got a PO Box in Benson so I could claim I lived there.”
“That’s surprisingly sneaky.”
Hayley sighed. “I know. I promised Mom I wouldn’t try to contact my father. Ever. I think that’s why this has been so . . . odd. I want to do it, I do, but hers is always the voice in my head, and I don’t know how to silence it.” She took a deep breath and he wanted to hit rewind on all this sharing.
“Evans,” she muttered, staring at the outline of the E on the arbor. “I think it must be a part of me somehow, but will I like what part I find? What if I don’t?”
He didn’t answer, hoping against hope it was a rhetorical question. Hoping against hope his own damn feelings didn’t start cropping up and making this even more difficult.
“Why are you telling me all this?” he said, shoving his hands in his pockets so he wouldn’t be tempted to offer something to her. What the hell could he offer?
“I’ve never really had someone I wanted advice from about this.” She turned that deep frown from the E to him. “And you know Brandon and Will, and maybe me a little bit. I guess . . . I trust you.”
She probably couldn’t have said words that horrified him more. In fact, he’d much prefer she pull out a machete and give him a solid whack to the chest than trust.
He took a step away, looked away, though it was hard to break that steady, almost imploring, golden gaze of hers. “Don’t,” he managed to choke out.
Trust. Fuck, he didn’t want that. He didn’t want anything from this woman that might lead to . . . That might give her the illusion there was some deeper, stronger part to him.
She’d been right to look at his cabin when she’d said “fester” and “rot.” It was all he was. Rotted from the inside. Like a tree that had fallen in the woods, slowly decomposing over time, until there was only this fragile outer shell.
If she leaned on it, on him, it/he would break. How dare she want to. How dare he wish it was all different.
“I’m sorry.” Hayley’s voice wavered suspiciously. “I thought we were friends.”
“No. No.” He turned, and he didn’t flee exactly, but he walked very quickly and purposefully far, far away.
* * *
Hayley knew she had no reason to be hurt. She was to blame here. What had ever given her the impression Sam was going to be her friend?
It was just she’d never felt so comfortable with someone before. Certainly not so quickly. But it was clearly, 100 percent her fault for reading too much into the past few weeks and how good everything had felt. How herself she had felt for the first time in her life.
She wanted to go home and crawl under the covers and cry. She was sorely tempted, because what would it matter? What would it change?
But if that was true for the self-pitying response, it was true for the stand-up-and-fight response too. If giving up didn’t matter, neither did fighting. Both hurt, and sucked.
She found that thought oddly liberating. Because talking to her family last night had taken something out of her. They did matter. Their disapproval of her current choices, especially when they didn’t know the full extent of them . . . It hurt. She had spent her life trying to gain their approval, but she had come to a certain realization that it didn’t matter whether they approved of her choices or not. She didn’t feel how she needed or wanted to feel about herself.
That was not their fault. It was hers. She knew that. Which meant that only she had the power to change things. It wasn’t about what other people could give her or didn’t, it was about what she could give herself.
Which, as much as it baffled her family—probably since they didn’t know the whole truth—meant she needed to make decisions that would lead her to what she was searching for.
Hayley looked at where Sam had gone. The man had a legion of issues. That was clear in everything he did. And those issues weren’t at all about her. Her issues weren’t at all about him. There was a liberation in that too.
She didn’t have to belong to him, or care what he thought. She didn’t have to feel anything with him. They didn’t have to be friends, but there had been a certain affinity there. He could pretend that there hadn’t, and he could make her feel like crap. Or, she could call him on his.
That filled her with this kind of fire. A certainty. She wanted to follow that feeling that she had never really had before.
So, she marched after him.
She was surprised to find he hadn’t disappeared inside to hide or seclude himself. Instead, he was standing on the opposite side of his house, glaring at the mountains. As though simply his gaze could make them crumble.
It was a wonder they didn’t. He looked furious and violent maybe. His hands were in his pockets, but based on the shape she was pretty sure they were clenched into fists. His jaw, even under the now neatly trimmed beard, clenched so hard it couldn’t be good for his teeth.
Hayley had spent a lot of time in her life watching people, observing how they acted to try to determine how she should act. So she could tell, oddly enough, that his anger and frustration weren’t geared at her.
How could they be? He was clearly an inward person. Everything he did here was with the intent to isolate himself from the world. People isolated themselves when they didn’t trust themselves in the world. If a man like Sam didn’t understand or trust himself in the world, it was for big reasons. She could see that clearly.
What she couldn’t see clearly was how the hell to approach him. How to get what she wanted out of him.
Wasn’t that what she was always searching for? With Brandon and Will. With this part of her genetic makeup she knew so little about. She had the weirdest feeling if she could figure out what she wanted from Sam, what she wanted from this job and this life, she could figure out what she needed from this blood family she didn’t know.
Sam was something like an experiment. She could test out what it was like to ask questions, demand answers, and call people out.
She never called her mom or Mack or James out. Whatever they said, she took it. They had told her to come home, that clearly time away wasn’t the answer to her finding herself. They had repeated—each one of them—how imperative it was that she give up on living away from home.
She hadn’t argued. She hadn’t fought for herself. All she’d done was put them off in the lamest, most noncommittal way. She couldn’t possibly explain to them what being on her own meant, so she hid.
She didn’t have to be that way with Sam. She could be a woman. She could keep getting in his face and standing up to him, in a way she couldn’t do with anyone else.
So, she marched right up to him, and when he gave her that withering glare she did not falter, she did not cower. She looked him straight in the eye.
“That was crap.”
“What was crap?”
“I can’t decide if you really are this stupid, or you’re just that intent on pretending you are.” It was scathing. It was darn right mean. She felt giddy.
He looked her up and down as though she had transformed before his eyes. And he didn’t like what he saw. Someday, he won’t just like what he sees, he’ll respect it.
“You certainly think you’re something.”
She lifted her chin to show him she would not be intimidated, no matter how he spoke to her, looked at her, threw out his bear-disturbed-during-hibernation hostility. Who was he, living this sad, pathetic excuse for a life, to intimidate her?
“Something.” Yeah, for once in her life she was determined to be something. Even if it was a pain in his ass. “You don’t get to dictate what I talk about and what I feel or what I think. I think it’s crap that you’re pretending like we haven’t been friendly the past three weeks. That we haven’t . . .” She was getting emotional, and that was silly. Foolish little girl that she was, but she wouldn’t give in. “You don’t get to tell me what I feel.”
“Why don’t you go tell that to your family?”
“Because they do. They raised me, and they love me, and they did things for me, so they get to have a say. I have to deal with the fact that I failed them a little bit. But you’re nothing, Sam. Boss at best and apparently not a friend. So I can tell you whatever I damn well please.”
It was scary to talk like this, but it was very nearly addicting. The more she said, the more she wanted to say. She wanted to pour it all out. Because between the two of them, he was clearly the more screwed-up one. She had a leg to stand on, and she had things to say that had value.
He had this sad cabin in the woods.
Sam looked at her with a kind of dazed expression, and for the first time a little sympathy snuck through her irritation and fervent, self-involved anger. But more than sympathy, she thought maybe she recognized something.
“You know what? I think you’re afraid of me.” She expected him to scoff or snort. Maybe roll his eyes because it was such a strange and likely wrong observation. What about her would possibly intimidate a man like him?
But he just kept looking at her with that inscrutable gaze, like maybe, just maybe, she was on to something.
“What do you mean? You just made it abundantly clear that I am nobody to you. Excuse me, your word was nothing.”
Was it her crazy imagination that he was a little hurt by that? “I think you want to be nobody and nothing, Sam. To me—to everyone. You’re going to have to try a lot harder.”
Something in his gaze changed. All of that hardness and anger and blankness that he affected so well lifted for a few stunning seconds and all she saw was fear.
He really was a fascinating man. And she had no business being fascinated, but she couldn’t bring herself to stop.
“We should plan an overnight session,” he said in that brisk, demand of a voice.
“Overnight session? I don’t understand.”
“Hiking is your strong suit,” he said brusquely, reminding her of how he talked with clients on Mile High excursions. “It will take a long time to train you to do any rock climbing, but even if we did that, I don’t think that’s where your talents will be best used at Mile High. It would benefit us as a business to have a woman who could handle some of the overnight trips. Some female groups might feel more comfortable. So, I think we need to start training you in the camping element. Which means . . . overnight.”
He wasn’t looking at her at all now. He was looking back out at the mountains. His eyebrows were drawn together as though he were confused, but she was the one who was confused.
They’d been arguing about non-work stuff, and now he was saying that she needed to camp with him? Overnight? Because it would be good for business?
Hayley didn’t know what to do with that. She didn’t know what to do with him most of the time though, so perhaps this was par for the course. Getting back to normal.
“So you’re going to take me camping. Overnight.”
He shifted on his feet, clearly uncomfortable. “I’d prefer it if you let one of your brothers do it, but I agreed to train you, so if you won’t compromise, it’ll be me.”
Something odd fluttered in her stomach, something she was slowly beginning to recognize. Fear and attraction and . . . spending the night with him. Holy crapola.
She took a deep breath and tried to remind herself this was business. He specifically mentioned Mile High business. “I . . . I don’t think I’m ready for my brothers to do this sort of thing. Half brothers.”
“Then what night do you want to do it?”
To go on an overnight camping trip with Sam by herself. She swallowed. “Any night you choose, I guess. My schedule is wide-open.”
Sam gave a stiff nod. “I’ll check my schedule and let you know which night would be best.”
“Oh . . . okay.”
“Now are we going to work today or what?”
He started walking toward his Jeep. The plan had been to watch him lead a kayaking trip, with her in the back of his kayak. Apparently, they were going to pretend like the whole argument about friendship hadn’t happened.
Hayley was off-kilter enough to let that go.