It didn’t.
It had just been hot enough to get under his skin.
Connections like that… They were best left unromanticized.
Sex was sex. Nothing more.
“Wow!” Lila walked into the barn, her voice echoing off the rafters. “This place looks great.”
They had their tables and chairs set up, with rustic linen over the top. They had five linen options for their wedding guests, and for this event, they had chosen cream-colored tablecloths with plaid accents underneath. There were rustic lanterns on the tables, something that Walker said was the pioneer package. That was something he should probably know more about, and Walker had ranted at him about it extensively, but he always zoned out when things got too granular into the aesthetics of it all.
He cared about that. But, not really on that level.
The design of the hotel was one thing. Linens were another.
“You can thank Walker for that,” Cody said.
“I won’t,” Lila said cheerfully.
“Feral,” Nolan muttered, stepping into the barn.
“Talking about yourself?” Lila asked.
“Sure, sprout,” he said.
“Sprout up your –”
“Everybody has to be on their best behavior tonight.” Zane chose that moment to walk into the barn. “Including you, ZB. You might want to practice smiling.”
Zane grunted and crossed his arms over his chest. “No thanks. Place looks good, though.”
“I’m surprised you showed up,” Walker said.
“I’m part of this,” Zane said.
A man of few words, as always, he didn’t expand on that.
But, forty-five minutes later, when guests started to filter in, he was almost sure that he saw Zane checking the door repeatedly.
He wondered who he was looking for. When Cody wasn’t checking the door for Marlowe, he wondered, anyway.
He knew that he couldn’t be doing that. He had to make his way around the room, talk to everybody. Make sure that he introduced himself. The bigger Painted Ridge got, the less personal it all felt, and he wanted it to feel personal.
This was his… It was his functional revenge plan, really. Make himself rich enough off the place his dead, deadbeat dad had left him.
As revenge plots went, it wasn’t exactly the most spiteful, he supposed. But what he wasn’t going to do was cut his nose off in an effort to hurt a dead man. Or something like that.
He just wanted to prove that he was better. That he was the best.
He had done that in the rodeo. He would do it here. Nothing else mattered. Not even how good it felt to kiss Marlowe. How soft her skin had felt underneath his hands.
That was a distraction. Nothing more.
The barn was mostly full, staff and their loved ones eating and drinking and laughing.
“Does the food pass muster?” He asked Walker quietly.
“It’s great,” Walker said. “So I feel really confident moving forward with this caterer for the weddings.”
