I have no interest in Katrina.
She’s a client.
Katrina braced her elbows on the kitchen counter and lowered her head into her hands. He’d been so far away, she shouldn’t have been able to hear him. The wind must have timed itself just right, to carry those words to her ears.You wanted something to kill your hope.
Not so brutally, though, yikes. To go from giddily speculating Jas’s tiny overtures meant something other than kindness to hearing from his own mouth that he didn’t want her... oof.
She’d only gone looking for him because she’d wanted to check in on what the internet was saying about her. She’d come to a dead stop before she could turn the corner of the house when she heard whatJaswas saying about her.
It had been such a good day, otherwise. Once upon a time, she had enjoyed traveling, and staying in a different place wasn’t nearly as unsettling as she’d thought it would be. The silence here was beautiful, the only sounds those of nature. She’d slowly relaxed and tried to build an equally relaxed farm schedule.
She wasn’t relaxed now. Her lower lip trembled, and she stilled it. She was self-aware enough to know rejection was not a good playmate for her. She needed to control her knee-jerk response to the revelation that Jas had zero romantic feelings for her.
She stuck her hand in her pocket and fondled the rock there. Doubtful that the rock would calm her right now, but it didn’t hurt. Time would ease this painful discovery, surely.
Only she didn’t get the time, because the front door opened and Jas called out her name.
She straightened and breathed deep, buttoning all those wayward feelings and hopes and dreams up inside her like she might zip up her sweatshirt. Those eyebrows were not meant to be smoothed by her fingers. So be it. This situation would be mortifying if Jas guessed that she’d come outside and overheard him and his brother. That would be even more mortifying than him witnessing Jia calling him hot. “In the kitchen,” she replied.
He entered, and he wassmiling, the jerk. Who gave him the right to look so cute and cuddly right now?
Be cool.“What’s up, bruh?”Not that cool.
She’d so rarely seen such a wide smile on his face. “Come with me.”
She slowly followed him from the kitchen to the front door. Was he taking her outside to shoot her poor soft heart and put it out of its misery?
Cool. “To where?”
“The barn. I found something that you may like.”
Ugh, the last thing she wanted to do was go outside, where she’d eavesdropped on his convo. But since she couldn’t tell him why she was sad—I like you and you don’t like mewas a really terrible color on anyone—she had no choice but to follow him.
The setting sun had turned the sky a pinkish-yellow, and she pulled her hoodie tighter as a ramshackle red structure came into view. She squinted at it, annoyed she had to return to the scene of Jas’s disappointing conversation. “What are we doing here?”
He shrugged, but his smile remained. “You’ll see.”
She coughed when she entered the barn. “Is this place not used much?”
“No, not in a long time. I used to play in it when I was young.”
His flashlight bounced over the punching bag in the corner of the barn, and Katrina wrinkled her nose. “Are you going to have me punch my frustration out?”
Jas frowned, but then followed her gaze. “Ah, no. Though I could teach you how to punch later, if you want. You asked me once, to teach you some self-defense. We never got around to it.”
“I did ask you that.” It had been after her kidnapping. Jas had seemed uninterested, so she hadn’t pushed it.
He scooted around an old piece of machinery her city-girl eyes had no way to identify, and crouched down, shining the flashlight under it. “Don’t get any closer. Look from here.”
She stopped next to him and gasped at the sight. “Oh my gosh.”
The black-and-brown dog blinked up at them from under the machine. She expected a growl, but instead it thumped its tail. “Where did this beauty come from?”
“No idea, or how it got inside.”
“It’s young.” Katrina took a step forward. It was too dark to see very clearly, but the black-and-brown dog looked maybe a year old, and too skinny.
“I figured you’d kill me if you found out there was a dog on the property and I kept him from you.”
