Nevada was already on her feet. Her mother’s face was pale, her eyes red. It was obvious she was upset and had been crying.
Nevada grabbed her hand and pulled her away from the table. “What’s wrong? What happened? Is someone hurt?” A million possibilities, each one worse than the one before, passed through her mind.
“It’s not that.” Tears filled her mother’s eyes. “I wanted to let you know, I’m selling the house and moving out of town.”
Nevada stared at her. There was no way she’d heard that correctly. “What are you talking about? What are you saying?”
“I have to leave right away.”
“Why?”
“Max wants to marry me.”
“I SHOULD HAVE BEEN an orphan,” Nevada announced.
Tucker looked up from his computer, her words pulling him away from the schedule he’d been revising. “You love your family.”
“Most of the time, but every now and then I think it would be nice to go it alone.” She glanced at him. “My mother is threatening to sell the house and move.”
“Why?”
“She’s hysterical. Max wants to marry her. I’m guessing she doesn’t want to marry him, although getting her to talk in complete sentences that make sense is tough. All she keeps saying is that she has to leave Fool’s Gold and she’s never coming back. I’m meeting my sisters at the house later. We’re going to try to get this cleared up.”
Too much information, he thought, trying to figure out which problem he should address first.
“She doesn’t want to move,” he told her. “This is her town.” He frowned. “I thought she liked Max.”
“Me, too. They’re crazy about each other. We had that family dinner to meet him and we all thought he was great. Even me.”
He guessed the “even me” part was more about Nevada’s having seen the man naked and having sex than her being unwilling to accept her mother’s new boyfriend.
“I thought all women wanted to get married.”
“Cliché much?” she asked sharply, then slapped her hands on the desk. “Sorry. I’m snippy. This just isn’t like my mom and it’s weird to have her unsettled. Whenever something happened when we were kids, she was a rock. Dad died and she was crushed, but she kept moving forward. So to fall apart like this because Max declares his love and wants to marry her doesn’t make any sense.”
“You’re talking to her in the morning. You’ll get it straightened out then.”
“I hope so. Sometimes relationships are complicated.”
“Agreed.” The main reason he avoided them.
“Look at Jo and Will.”
“Do I have to?” he asked. “I work with Will and we don’t talk about personal stuff.”
“Such guys. Talking about it helps.”
“How?”
“You can work out your issues.”
“If you don’t get involved with anyone, you don’t have issues in the first place.”
She narrowed her gaze. “That’s like saying you’re never going to eat again because you don’t want to risk food poisoning. Or is it Cat you’re trying to avoid?”
“I don’t need to avoid Cat. She’s out of my life.”
Nevada wheeled her chair around so she was staring at him. “Are you saying you haven’t been in a serious relationship since Cat?”
“No. Would you want to be with anyone after her?”
“But she wasn’t a regular person. She was more like a…” She paused, as if searching for the word.
“Drug,” he said flatly. “She took over my head and tried to suck the life out of me. No way I want to do that again.”
At the risk of getting too in touch with his feminine side, with Cat he’d lost who he was. He’d been her slave—emotionally and physically, which proved love made people into idiots. He’d been lucky to escape.
“That wasn’t love, it was obsession,” Nevada told him. “There’s a difference.”
“Maybe, but I’m not willing to take the chance.”
“A mature relationship would be totally different.”
He shook his head. “Your mother was in a mature relationship and look what happened there. Max wants to marry her and she wants to move out of town. Trust me, friendship and sex. That’s plenty.” Now it was his turn to look at her. “Do you want more than that?”
“That’s not the point,” she told him. “To say you’re not interested in falling in love—that’s just sad.”
“I believe in love itself,” he told her. “People love each other. But romantically, there are more pitfalls than it’s worth.”
He was sharing his opinion, but he was also warning her. While he wanted her, the rules needed to be clear. If she was expecting more, he wasn’t the guy for her.
Something he hadn’t fully considered, he realized. Both her sisters were engaged. Dakota was pregnant, had a kid she’d adopted. Talk about the dream of the white picket fence.
“You’re like them,” he said slowly, still getting hold of the truth and not liking it. “Your sisters.”