“I’m just not real good company anymore. Maybe I should stay home?” Jake looked into the sympathetic eyes of his friend.
“Maybe, but then I can’t imagine you’re all that happy with your own company either.”
“Also true,” Jake agreed. “She come in here much? Branna?”
Buster ran with the change in conversation. “Most days, until she can start running again. Then she said it will be less often.”
“She runs?”
“Yeah, seems she’s one of those sicko healthy types like you.”
“Says the man who pumps weights and sits on that rowing machine for hours.”
“True, but I don’t run,” Buster added with a smug look.
“Wonder what she does for a living?”
Buster settled back in his chair. “Annabelle said she was a teacher and is now a writer of some kind.”
“No kidding, just like her daddy. What else you got?” Jake knew the grapevine would be working overtime with a new person in town, especially with Branna having lived here before.
“Annabelle wouldn’t say. She reckons Branna is a private person and didn’t want everyone knowing her stuff.”
Jake snorted. “Someone will get it out of her, or dig up the information. That’s how this town works.”
“Yeah, not much for gossip myself.”
Jake pointed his cup at Buster. “You’re the biggest gossip of the lot, but just hide it behind that piss-off face of yours,” he teased.
“I don’t have a piss-off face. I just don’t understand the need to be yammering on constantly like some.”
“I hope you’re not accusing me of yammering.” Jake climbed to his feet to take the dishes and put them in the sink. “Because I’ve never yammered a day in my life.”
“Whatever.”
“See you at seven.” Lifting a hand, Jake made for the door.
“She’s planting stuff and digging holes. I told her to call me if she needs help,” Buster said, as he headed back into the kitchen.
“And you’re telling me this why?” Jake turned to look at his friend.
“Just on the chance you wanted to apologize for being a bastard.”
“I am a bastard, Griffin. When are you and the rest of this town going to realize that?”
Buster said something that Jake missed as he walked out of The Hoot.
“Hey there, Jake.”
“Macy.” Jake dug around in his pocket for his keys in the hopes that the woman who’d just walked up to him would take the hint and let him leave.
“The committee thinks you’d be a good man to take the microphone on the night of the reunion,” Macy Reynolds-Delray stated.
“Not really good at public speaking, Macy. If you need any cars tuned, however, I’m your man. Plus, I’m not feeling too social these days.” Jake located the keys and started toward his pickup; Macy followed, tottering on her heels.
Macy Reynolds, now Reynolds-Delray, was the girl who had it all in school. Every boy lusted after her; she was certainly the person he’d had plenty of uncomfortable nights dreaming about. As homecoming queen, every girl in school wanted to be her friend. Of course, that club had been exclusive. She was still beautiful, but now it was a forced beauty, and the eyes beneath those long fake lashes were cold. Carefully pampered, her hair was colored almost white. Her breasts appeared bigger, which could mean she’d had some work done, but he wasn’t sure. She looked about as real as one of the dolls his sister had loved as a child.
“It’s one night, Jake, at the school you attended.” Even her voice had lost that enthusiastic, if highly annoying, pitch. This one was cold and emotionless.
