“Are you comparing yourself to shitty pizza?”
“Sort of. Not exactly.”
Silence settled between them. “If I want a woman, she doesn’t need to ask for clarification. She knows.”
It sounded good, but it was a lie. Because he wanted her. But he didn’t want to want her, and he was going to go ahead and claim what mattered. Because he was never going to do anything about it. At this point, his pride was tangled up in that shit.
And her making assumptions about the fact that he might …
“I’ve never had to do anything underhanded to get a woman into my bed, Jessie Jane Hancock. And you ought to know that.”
“Yeah. I’ve watched you walk out of the bar with a whole parade of women, so there is that.”
“Right. The thing is, you don’t really know me.”
“You don’t know me either. And why would you? Our families are mortal enemies and all of that.”
“Yeah. Well. It’s going to be interesting to see what Austin thinks about all this. I’m going to have to level with him.”
“He’ll understand,” Jessie said. “I’m sure he will.”
“You don’t know him either,” Flynn said. “You really have no idea what my brother would understand or not.”
“I guess I don’t, but I do know that your relationship with Danielle is complicated.”
“I don’t know that I would call it complicated. I would call it nonexistent. When we were kids, we were forced to interact sometimes, and every so often my mom manages to guilt me into going to an Easter brunch or something. But I’m never sure why she wants me there. It has something to do with her own guilt, I think.”
“Yeah. I don’t know. For dirtbags, my parents are pretty great.”
That was funny. He had never given it much thought, but the Hancock family was close. Not just the siblings, like the Wilders, but the parents. They seemed to be a united group, and that was something he didn’t know anything about.
His dad had been all right. Just irresponsible as hell. And then he had gone and gotten himself killed being a dick driving drunk on his motorcycle.
“Nice for you. My dad was lousy at picking partners to have babies with. And he never really grew up himself.”
“Yeah. I know. I mean, everybody knows. It’s kind of town lore.”
“Just like you guys, I guess. And all the fables about you cheating people out of their land.”
“The way I see it,” she said, “we get talked about an awful lot, and it’s not for anything we choose to be talked about. I actually run a lot of the Wild West Show. I do a lot of the paperwork, the marketing, all that stuff. I manage the budget. West is great. He has an eye for showmanship. Like my dad. He does insane tricks. Totally fearless. But he can’t complete a piece of paperwork without getting distracted. He wants to do things. He doesn’t want to organize them. My dad is the same. The place was a mess before I took over. I’m good at organizing. I know that I could do a good job for the town. I’m actually great with money. Why do youthink I make it hand over fist with all that gambling stuff? I can read the odds.”
“And you want to be known on your own terms,” he said. He could actually understand that. This little gambit wasn’t going to do the same for him, but it was going to take down his mother’s family a peg, so there was that.
“Yeah. I want to be known on my own terms, I guess.”
“I get it.”
He had a feeling that was as close as he was ever going to get to understanding Jessie.
He took a sharp left turn, pulling off the paved, curving road onto the dirt driveway that led up to Lonesome Ridge. His ranch was right on the border between Oregon and California, with some of his pastureland straying over into what he considered to be enemy territory.
But the view was fantastic. The road wound up and around, but in the darkness, the vista of trees and lake below was invisible.
“Like, no offense,” she said, “but do women honestly go home with you? Because it seems dumb. Like you might be a serial killer.”
“Typically we get a room in town,” he said. “But I’m not going to spend the money when I’m not getting laid.”
She huffed. “Well, that would’ve been very showy, though.”
