“Yes. It’s … beautiful.”
“Thanks. I did most of the work myself.” He paused for a second. “My brother Carson helped with a lot of it. He’s great at woodworking and things like that.”
“You’re obviously not too bad at it either.”
“Not too bad. I try to make myself useful where I can.”
“You don’t really give off that vibe. Useful.”
He shrugged. “I like to have fun. But you know, most of my life I was having fun at other people’s expense.”
“Explain that.”
He turned away from her and opened one of the cabinets, taking out a gray stoneware mug and setting it heavily on the counter. He poured a cup of coffee from a stainless steel carafe and slid the mug toward her. “Cream?”
“Please,” she said.
“Anyway. You know reputation is such an important thing to Danielle, to Michael. To … Mom. And so I always took a lot of joy in not caring about it. The things that always bothered my oldest brother … they’ve never bothered me.”
“Well, it may surprise you to learn that my family has never cared about our outlaw reputation.”
“You’ve built an entire business off it.”
“Damn straight.”
“But it seems sort of out of step with your wanting to be mayor.”
He could have slapped her and it would’ve been less painful. How did he manage to hit her insecurities right on target? She couldn’t quite understand that. His intuition was unerring in so many ways.
“What I don’t like is a lack of fairness.”
“I wouldn’t think an outlaw would care about fairness.”
“That’s not true. Anyway, I’m not an outlaw. To be clear.”
“I get that. But I just meant … You’re sort of like a Western carnie.”
A crack of laughter escaped her lips. “You’re actually not the first person to say that.”
She ignored the fact that the description made her skin feel too tight. She just laughed. Because what she had learned was as long as she could laugh at herself, and her family, at their exploits, then no one could hurt her.
Not even Flynn Wilder.
But for the first time, she wondered how hard he had taken words like that. Because she knew what it was like to have the town look down on her while the Hancocks rallied together as a family, them against the world. Flynn was looked down on by his own family. And that seemed … altogether unfair.
“How old were you when your mom left?”
“Oh. Not quite two?” He shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t remember being emotionally scarred by it. I had my dad. I had Austin, Carson. It was good. We were able to run around and do whatever we wanted.”
“Did you always visit your mom?”
“Yeah. Pretty much. Holidays and birthdays. She wasn’t single very long. Even though my dad never talked about it, and I’ve definitely never had the discussion with my mom, my assumption has always been that she left him for Don.”
“You don’t seem very bothered by it.” But what Jessie knew for sure was that just because somebody pretended not to be bothered by something, that did not mean they were actually unbothered.
“What’s the point of being bothered by it? Like I said: I want to have fun. And I would rather be me than my insurance salesman brother, I’ll tell you that right now.”
“Right.”
