are you thinking about?” Crissanne asked.
He shook his head. “Fighting with my brothers to be the first to get a mint from that candy machine.”
“It’s so foreign to me that you’ve lived in the same place most of your life,” she said. “I bet everywhere you go there are memories.”
“There are,” he said. “Don’t you have places where you could go back to?”
“I guess,” she said. “The group home I lived in as a kid was torn down a few years ago, and then as a teen I was in a home in Northern California, but I hated it. I felt so...out of place in my Goodwill clothing. I think I’m better at looking to the future,” she said.
He started to reach out to squeeze her shoulder but stopped and dropped his hand. Desire had always been such a part of the atmosphere when he was around Crissanne. With Mason as a barrier to anything ever actually happening, he’d allowed himself casual touches that were much more dangerous now. He needed to be careful.
She was still off-limits, but it didn’t feel that way.
“That’s the best way to look at it,” he said. “You can’t change the past.”
She moved away to look at the pictures on the wall while he gave their name to the hostess, who was the daughter of one his cousins, Liam Shannon. He exchanged small talk with her as she promised him the first table that was available and then moved away from the hostess stand. Ethan had never noticed the framed prints before. They were all images of cowboys that were at least thirty years old, which he knew because there was one of his father when he’d first inherited the Rockin’ C, standing in front of his F-150 pickup with the Rockin’ C logo. His dad had been the one to take the ranch to the next level of production. The family company had the mineral rights that earned them a large part of their fortune, but Winston Caruthers had made the cattle ranching operation a contender in the portfolio.
“This guy... I love the mixture of confidence and bravado in his eyes,” Crissanne said as Ethan joined her.
“That’s my dad,” Ethan said. “One of his sayings is ‘he who hesitates is lost.’ He’s always just gone for whatever it is he wants.”
She turned to look at him. “You have inherited that. You never hesitate, do you?”
One time.
When he and Mason had both seen Crissanne across the quad and he’d stood there wondering if he should ask her out, while Mason, always willing to take a chance, had stridden over and done just that.
His dad was right.
Again.
He took a deep breath. “I have my ups and downs.”
“Seems to me that you have more ups than downs,” she said. “Your business is very successful.”
“Usually, but I don’t like to brag.”
She mock-punched him on the shoulder. Damn, her touch sent an electric current through him, even though he realized she was still touching him like a friend. He had hesitated...damn, he’d done it again. She rattled him.
He prided himself on being calm and in control, but she was messing with his restraint. He didn’t like it.
If he’d learned anything in his thirty years on this earth, it was that he didn’t do well without some sort of limits.
A strand of her hair fell forward, and he lifted his hand to tuck it back behind her ear. Her lips parted and she caught her breath. He couldn’t help rubbing his finger down the side of her neck—her skin was so soft—before he dropped his hand.
“Ethan...”
“Yes?”
“Mr. Caruthers,” the hostess called. “Your table is ready.”
Crissanne swallowed hard and then nodded and stepped around him to follow the hostess into the dining room. The dynamic had changed between the two of them.
He had changed it. He’d tried to be casual about touching her, but there was no way he could continue to hide the way he felt, especially now that Mason was out of the picture.
And while a part of him knew that caution would be the noble route, another part of him didn’t care about that, the selfish part that could only see the woman he’d always wanted walking in front of him to a table set for two. Her hips swayed gently with each step, her blond hair swinging back and forth as he watched.
But they were friends.
At least that much was true. He thought about his brother Derek and his best friend, Bianca, and how they’d somehow managed to turn friendship into love. But that wasn’t him and Crissanne. It had never been the two of them in their friendship; it had always been three of them. And it would be ridiculous to think that Mason wasn’t going to come to his senses and return for her.
Ethan knew that was what he’d do.
So tonight had to be two old friends catching up...nothing more.
* * *
Crissanne fell back as Ethan engaged in a conversation with one of the many people in Cole’s Hill who knew him as they walked out of the restaurant. It was safe to say he was a favored son here. She saw in the bones of the streets and its charming historic district that it had been a smallish town but was growing quickly. In fact, the man who was talking to Ethan was discussing a development going in just south of the town limits.
Her fingers itched for her camera. She used the one on her smartphone at times, but she preferred to have the lens at her eye, fiddling with the focus until she could capture whatever it was about her subject that fascinated her.
Maybe if she did that, then she’d be able to understand this attraction to Ethan she was feeling. But she wasn’t holding out hope that it would help. The light from the storefront of the Peace Creek Mercantile was throwing shadows on his features, bringing that strong jaw of his into focus. What the heck. She took her phone from her pocket and opened the camera app.
The light played over his hair, drawing her eye to the fact that he had some light blond highlights. She tuned out everything, watching Ethan through her camera app and moving to get the right angle for the photo. She zoomed in closer, and saw he had a scar on his left eyebrow...she’d never noticed that before.
His expression was earnest and confident as he focused on the man he was talking to. That was one of the things she really liked about Ethan. He gave his attention 100 percent to whomever he was engaged with. She snapped a few photos, but when she moved around to change her angle, she bumped into someone.
“Sorry.”
She glanced up to see a cowboy. Like a legit, thought-they-only-existed-in-the-movies cowboy. He had a leonine mane of brownish-blond hair streaked through with gray, his eyes had sun lines around them, and his skin was tanned. Leathery, she’d say, but he wore his years well. There was something familiar about the set of his eyes and his nose. She knew it would be rude to snap a picture of him, but that face told a story.
“That’s okay. I’m sure you could find something prettier to photograph, though.”
“Than
