“Like I said, at times in my life I tried to figure out how to be the kind of person who could sit at dinner with my mom’s family. Especially my grandpa. He was a good man.”
“He used to be the mayor,” she said. “When I was almost too young to remember.”
“Yes,” he said. “He was. And he was a good one. I think my mom was rebelling against her family, against the idea of having to be perfect, when she hooked up with my dad. You know they were never married or anything. But my grandpa never held that against me. I don’t know what things were like between the two of them, and I’m not foolish enough to think that everything is as simple as it looks on the surface, but he was good to me. He used to take me to dinner sometimes, and we would talk about wine that he liked, music he liked. You know, he left me that property, and his sweaters.”
“His sweaters?”
“Yeah. They’re ugly. Loud-patterned knit things that I would never wear. But they remind me of him, and they smell like his pipe tobacco. So I have them in the closet at my house.”
“I didn’t realize that you had a good relationship with him.”
“Well, it’s strange. Because having me was so difficult for my mom. And you would think maybe that was in part because of how difficult her parents made it. I don’t really remember my grandmother. She died when I was young. I don’t know what she thought about me. I don’t know that she was as enamored of me as my grandfather was. He was good to me from the beginning.”
He wanted Jessie to keep on softening up. Wanted her to continue to share things with him. He was fascinated by her. By the realization that there was more to her than met the eye. He had a feeling that if he was gentle with her, he could continue to draw her out. It was the one thing he’d never tried to be with her. Becausehe had been locking horns with her forever, he hadn’t realized her toughness was all a facade.
“There are probably some really important parts of me that wouldn’t be there without him. This is where things have always been complicated. I can’t hate them.”
“I get it.” She looked down at her hands. And he covered them with his own.
Chapter 10
I saw him in town today and told him that if he was going to stare, he might have to pay like everyone else.
I’m sure he’ll never look my way again.
—Belle Martin’s Diary, April 1868
Jessie didn’t know what was happening. And she wasn’t exactly sure why she was allowing it to continue. He was being so nice to her. He was touching her, but not in a heated way, not with that same kind of electric energy as in the bar bathroom, or even when he had kissed her for show the other day.
His hands were rough, his touch was gentle.
She didn’t know what to do with that. She didn’t let men get close to her, but they sure as hell never treated her like this.
She looked up at him, and those green eyes touched something inside. Her inclination was to try to run from it, from him. To do what she always did: make some kind of distancing comment.
His look made her chest feel sore and her body feel things that she couldn’t ever recall feeling before. It made her feel like telling him. Who she was and why. The way her childhood hurt. Because he seemed to understand complicated, even if his brand of complicated was different from hers.
But then the waiter came back and set their appetizers down between them, and she was distracted by the smoke coming from the herbs at the center of the olives. “What is that?”
“Fine dining,” Flynn said.
She laughed and admitted to herself privately that it smelled good, and she was enjoying herself. Maybe she should tell him. Butthen that would be like showing him another part of herself, and she had already shown him quite a bit.
So she ate the warm olives, and did her best not to close her eyes and groan at how good they tasted. Same for the deviled eggs, with their little pickled onions on top. She could only be grateful that this wasn’t a real date, so they weren’t actually going to kiss at the end of it, because that would be adventurous.
Except now she had thought about kissing him.
Without her permission, she found herself looking at his mouth.
“Yes?” He looked at her in a way that made her feel as if he absolutely knew what she was thinking.
“Nothing.”
“That isn’t the face of a woman thinking about nothing.”
“It would be pretty amazing if I became mayor.” Somehow, that topic seemed safer than admitting she was looking at his lips and thinking about kissing him. “Because I … I used to feel I didn’t belong here. But of course there’s nowhere else for me to go either. I think that’s the weirdest part about being baked into the history of this town, even on the negative side of it. You know how that is. There is nowhere else that you are as rooted to, and yet nobody likes your roots.”
“Yeah. Though I always had fun with being an outlaw.”
