sat on the edge of the bed, surrounded by her comforting projects, and tried to figure herself out. Could she really be trying to batter down an old wall without regard to what that might do to him? Because he was pretty much in an emotional blender himself.
A wave of self-loathing rose in her. There were a lot of things she didn’t like about herself, but now she had a new item to add to the list. She didn’t like the way she was cowering from much of life. She knew she was a prisoner of her own fears, and it didn’t make her very proud of herself.
In fact, sometimes it disgusted her, but not even disgust was enough to get her over the hump. Over time she had come to trust a small circle of men, like the sheriff and a number of others. Men she’d interacted with frequently for years. She could talk to them, share coffee with them, even invite them in once in a while as she had with Gage.
She was comfortable in this town, or comfortable enough, because the faces had become familiar over the years, but she’d let them just so close and no further. She only ever entirely relaxed with women.
It was a mental and emotional prison that not even a few years of therapy had been able to banish. Honestly, if she had seen Austin walking down the street before Gage had introduced him, she would have turned and walked the other way.
She didn’t like being this way. It just was, and she had adapted as best she could.
So what was with the tortillas? She’d brought them home from Melinda’s bakery when she could have just left a note for Austin that Melinda had made them. He could have picked them up tomorrow.
But no, she had decided to be nice, mainly to Melinda, who had gone out of her way to make them and deserved to sell them promptly. She’d brought them home, intending to put them in the refrigerator and leave a note for Austin.
Instead, for some unknown reason, she’d decided to try cooking some of them. Had she been hoping Austin would show up? She certainly hadn’t expected it to turn into him cooking dinner and the two of them eating together.
All her reasoning at the time had seemed perfectly innocent, but it had ended in the most intimate time she had spent with a man ever: the two of them sharing a meal.
Maybe the most surprising part was that she hadn’t run when he started cooking, rude or not. She wasn’t incapable of it, although she was slowly getting better about it.
Still. She looked at herself and wondered if all her superficial reasons had been just that, superficial. There was no question that her subconscious controlled a huge part of her life. It made her afraid of strange men. It controlled her level of comfort or discomfort with people.
So how did she know what she’d really been thinking when she asked Melinda to make those tortillas, or when she had picked them up?
If it had been purely friendly, then she’d leaped a big hurdle and should be proud. If some other reason had been involved...
She sighed, her head whirling, and reached for her knitting. Was she ever going to get herself sorted out?
She’d been doing without many of the things that were part of a normal life ever since her mother’s killing. Some of that was understandable, but after eighteen years, shouldn’t she have come further?
And if she was trying to go further now, why had she picked the one man who posed the most threat in every possible way. She didn’t really know him, and he’d leave before long, which was a dangerous emotional game to play.
But maybe that was part of what she was doing here: trying to prove that she had good reason to avoid men, and any involvement with them. To prove that she was right to stay hunkered in her safe little hole.
It wouldn’t surprise her. Not at all. But she had no business drawing Austin into whatever she was trying to do here. He had enough problems of his own.
She resolved then and there to firmly reestablish the distance between them. They’d both be better off.
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