“Not quite.”
“You almost kissed her.”
“I used to be okay with the way things were,” I say without planning on it.
“What do you mean?”
“Our…arrangement. It worked for us. Casual and only once a year or so.”
“And now?”
“Now, it feels like a lifetime ago. Ever since Vegas, things felt like they sped up a thousand-fold.”
“Things changed,” he says. “That makes sense.”
Now every single time I see Macey, I want to kiss her and make her mine again. Bring her up against a wall, or a desk, and run my tongue over her soft skin that always smells like wildflowers. Bury myself inside her and hear her cry out in bliss.
Every. Single. Time.
“I guess it does. But the timing is shit. With what I’m in the middle of…”
“Just a few more months, and you’ll be able to give her everything,” Luke says to me. “You’re doing the right thing, Logan. It may not be the conventional solution, but it’s the cowboy one. Which means it’ll work.”
I look out at the water. Just a few more months of this misery. Gigi and I will exchange vows, she’ll turn twenty, and then we’re done.
Then I can go to Macey and tell her how I feel. That I’ll take her any way she’ll have me. I always would. And I always will.
“Remember why you’re doing this.” Luke’s reminder comes through the line loud and clear. “For Macey.”
“Right.”
For Macey.
And I have to keep it together until then. Remember why I’m doing this in the first place. For her. And that’s always worth it. Even if I lose her in the end, she deserves to be free.
Because nobody deserves to be happy and to have someone looking out for them more than Macey Henwood does.
I’m not trying to rescue her. I’m just trying to make sure she doesn’t have the chance to rescue herself taken away.
Chapter Seventeen
Macey
“What was your sister doing?” Daddy says to me. “Everyone knows you can’t open Jane’s cell. What if the legend is wrong and she gets out before the soul mates are found?”
I spin on him. “Are you really that selfish that you’re willing to hold someone here against her will because you’re scared to run this bar on your own? If you can’t manage it without a ghost, maybe you’re not doing a very good job.”
“Idon’tthink I can run it without her,” Daddy admits. “Her legend is everything to The Cowherd.”
I stare at him. “You don’t think you can run The Cowherd without Jane? Or without me?”
“Macey Henwood, you watch that tongue,” he warns me. “What’s gotten into you?”
I don’t answer him. I just take the key out of his hand, put it away, and leave the room.
I grab my laptop from behind the bar and keep walking until I hit the outside air. No one’s out by the picnic table. People rarely come out here. This table gathers more cobwebs than most attics.
I turn my back on the saloon and face the cow pasture.
