He was not leaving. He was going back inside. He stormed back into the bar and walked up to Gus. “I’ll pay Jessie’s tab.”
He said it loudly. Loud enough for everyone to hear.
“She said she would square up tomorrow.”
“I know she did. But I’ve got her.”
Then he went back to the table, anger he couldn’t quite sort out rolling through him like a thundercloud. She wanted him; she didn’t want him. It was part of the game.
It made him think too much of his childhood, and if that wasn’t the most messed-up thing …
“You good?” Dalton asked.
“Great,” Flynn growled. He did not take a drink from the beer bottle his sister slid in front of them, because he had a feeling that right now he would end up biting the end off and chewing glass.
Somehow, he and Jessie were going to get through this. Because he had thrown his hat into the ring, and he was going to see it through. It was just a real damn shame that dealing with her made him think of … Well, all the reasons he was involved in this to begin with.
One of the reasons he didn’t do relationships was that he wanted everything to be on his terms. And that just wasn’t how romance worked. It also wasn’t how parent-child relationships worked. Because when you were a kid, they had all the power to make you feel wanted, unwanted … whatever. To be invited to Christmas one year and given extra presents to assuage someone’s guilt, or maybe even because they cared, to being skipped the following year for no reason you could fucking figure out …
He didn’t do hot and cold. He didn’t do uncertainty. He sure as hell didn’t want anything to do with people who didn’t want him.
And that included Jessie Jane. His feeling for her wasn’t that deep. He wanted her, she had teased him a bit. That was all. But there was a burning something in his gut. Something that made him want to push her too. Made him want to get her to admit that this back-and-forth wasn’t part of the show.
He wrapped his hand around the beer bottle, until he was afraid he might break it.
And he realized he couldn’t even dance with one of the women here. Couldn’t even hook up. Couldn’t do a damn thing to get rid of the tension in his gut.
Damn Jessie Jane.
“I’m about ready to go,” he said.
Cassidy’s eyes widened. “Already?”
“I’ll take her home,” Dalton said.
He looked from his sister to his friend and back again. Cassidy had such a crush on Dalton. And honestly, Flynn wouldn’t mind if the two of them hooked up. In fact, he thought it was about time Cassidy hooked up withsomeone. Dalton was a better option than …
His gaze drifted across the bar to West, who was practically being climbed by that redhead, and at the same time, Cassidy seemed to notice as well.
Yeah. It was good to have Dalton take her home.
“Great. I gotta call it. See you both tomorrow, I guess.”
He would also see Jessie in the next couple days, whether he wanted to or not.
You couldn’t choose your family, but he had chosen a pretty miserable partner in poking at his family. One difference between the emotional torture he’d experienced at the hands of his mother and the physical torture he was currently experiencing at the hands of Jessie was that this was his own damned fault.
Flynn Wilder, king of bad decisions.
For the first time, his outlaw status annoyed him. Because it had damn well gotten him into this situation. And the problem with being great at causing trouble was that it was kind of hard to know how to get out of it.
Chapter 7
I don’t know why I keep on moving. Except men are the same everywhere. The only thing I can change is the scenery.
—Belle Martin’s Diary, February 1866
Jessie hadn’t slept well at all the previous night. The evening’s interactions with Flynn played through her mind on a loop.
