He wanted to ask her what she was doing for Christmas and why she never seemed to go anywhere for holidays. Hewanted to find out if Tuck had hired her on for another year or indefinitely. And he wanted to know if she had any siblings and who her last boyfriend had been, why they’d broken up, and everything she knew about the rodeo.
He kept all of it tucked away and actually prayed that Briar would lead out in a topic of conversation.
As they approached the building, the front doors opened, and a cacophony of sound spilled out.
“Wow, they sound busy,” Briar said.
“Yeah, but I got us a reservation,” he said.
“Oh, honey, reservations don’t mean anything.” She grinned up at him, while Tarr’s heart beat a little faster.
“They don’t?”
She simply shook her head. “You’ve been a celebrity for far too long, Tarr.”
“I’m not a celebrity,” he said, and he tugged her through the fray of people to the hostess stand. “Tarr Olson,” he said. “I had a reservation for two at ten o’clock.”
“Mm–hm.” The woman hummed as she looked down at her tablet. “Yeah, I can get you guys back in about ten minutes.” She looked up, eyes hopeful. “Does that work?”
She lifted a buzzer from the stack, and Tarr didn’t really see what choice he had. “Sure,” he said, and he took the buzzer and towed Briar out of the way.
He managed to find a seat on the long, padded bench near the corner, and Briar squeezed in beside him. He lifted his arm around her shoulders, since his were too broad to share the space.
“I have a game I play with myself every day,” Briar said.
“Oh, yeah?” Tarr ducked his head so his cowboy hat created a little pocket for just the two of them to talk.
“Yep,” she said.
“Are you going to tell me what it is?”
“I guess it doesn’t really have a name,” she said. “Do you want to play it with me?” She blinked those oceanic eyes at him, and Tarr could only nod.
“I just try to tell myself one truth every day.”
“One truth,” Tarr repeated.
“Yeah,” she said. “Sometimes it’s the same truth every day, over and over, for weeks, and sometimes it changes.”
“What’s your truth for today?” he asked.
Briar stiffened at his side and crossed her legs. She pulled her crossbody bag up onto her lap and leaned into his chest. “Today, it’s that I can do hard things.”
“What hard things do you have to do today?” he asked.
“Go to breakfast with you,” she said, her voice almost a whisper. “Be a good conversationalist. Accept and embrace my feelings.” She cleared her throat and tilted her head slightly to look at him, her courage re-entering her gaze. “What about you? If you had to tell yourself the truth today, what would it be?”
Tarr’s mind blitzed, and he honestly didn’t know how to answer that question. After what felt like a long time of silence, but had probably only been several seconds, he said, “I think I need to face the reality that the RV is not going to sustain me through the winter.”
Briar turned fully toward him then, alarm crossing her face. “What’s wrong with the RV?”
“Everything?” He didn’t mean to put a question mark at the end of it, but he so did.
“I thought it had heat,” she said. “And running water.”
“Why would you think that?” Tarr asked, because he’d certainly never told her that.
“They’ve started the cabin, haven’t they?”
