“Thanks,” she said quietly.
He drew in breath and said gently, “I’m glad we got that sorted, Greta. With the way I treated you, I don’t deserve it but it means a lot you took the time to listen so I could give it to you.”
“Well, uh . . . thanks for taking the time to give it to me.”
He wanted to smile in order to see if she’d give him that back.
But he didn’t deserve that either.
“Now you’ve got a client,” he prompted.
She lifted her chin. “Mm-hmm.”
“So I’ll let you go.”
She unhooked her hands from her elbows to throw an arm toward the door at the back. “That leads out into the alley.”
“I’m walking through the salon.”
She stared at him.
“We didn’t do anything wrong,” he stated. “We’re adults. We connected. We enjoyed each other. I’m not attached anymore. You aren’t either.” He lifted his brows. “I assume.”
She shook her head, her hair brushing all over her shoulders, something Hix had to avoid watching.
“I’m not.”
She wasn’t.
A woman who could sing with that honesty, listen with it, talk with it and make love with it, of course she wasn’t.
He forged past that too and carried on talking.
“So we have nothing to be ashamed about. Nothing to hide. Hope can get ugly. That’s her prerogative. We don’t have to give people reason to believe she has that right because she doesn’t. She’s a forty-one-year-old woman throwing a tantrum. The folks in this town are close-knit and loyal. They’re also sensible. They’ll see things as they are and move on. If Hope doesn’t, it’s not my problem anymore, and it sure as hell isn’t yours.”
“Okay, Hixon.”
He looked into her big eyes.
And he wanted to ask her to lunch at the Harlequin.
He wanted to see if she was free some evening next week to take her to a movie.
He couldn’t do that.
Because his ex-wife was who she was, and things were how they were, Hope was giving him reasons to fall out of love with her.
But that was where he was at now.
Falling out of love.
He knew Greta intimately. He knew she was funny and honest. And he knew there was a vulnerability to her the cause of which it wasn’t his right to have.
That was all he knew.
Except for the fact that he knew without doubt she didn’t need to be like his apartment.
The in-between while he was sorting out his life.
She deserved more.
He just wasn’t in a place he could give it to her, and with the wounds Hope had inflicted, at that time in his life, he wasn’t sure he could give it to anyone again, at least not for a long time.
In that time Greta could find her more and she didn’t need a man with his head a mess standing in her way.
“I gotta get to my client,” she said.
He stepped out of the way and jerked his head to the door. “Go.”
She moved to it and put her hand on the handle but turned to him.
Then she ripped his heart clean out of his chest, her big, beautiful, blue eyes staring right into his as she said, “She’s a complete fool.”
With that, she opened and walked through the door.
Hix pulled air into his nostrils.
And smelled hints of her perfume.
Shit.
He gave it a beat.
Three.
And after that he followed her, dipping his chin to the women in the salon, a number that had grown more than double to when he’d walked in, murmuring, “Ladies.”
But he caught Greta’s eyes, tipped his head to the side, his lips up, and then without looking back, he walked out the front door.
And he did it not having that first clue that, with a tip of his head and a small curl to his lips, he shifted the axis of Glossop, Nebraska in a way anyone who knew either of them, which was most, started to believe dreams could come true.
All I Need
Greta
THE DOOR TO the salon opened and Lou called out, “Greta is not talking about Sheriff Hixon Drake!”
I sighed and looked from the sink, where I was doing a rinse, to the door to see my next client, Shari, hurrying through, her gaze on me, eyes huge.
She was twenty minutes early.
She was usually ten minutes late.
“So it’s true!” she cried.
Wonderful.
This was what it had been like all day.
To say I was relieved that the salon hadn’t been firebombed after word got out the Princess of Glossop’s ex-husband had slept with its resident easy-trick hairdresser-slash-lounge singer (that being me) might be a high-drama understatement, but it was true.
To say that relief was tempered by the fact I’d learned Hixon Drake was a good guy, he just was never going to be the guy for me, was just an understatement, but a sad one.
“Greta has enough to worry about without every female walking in that door asking her for the lowdown about our sheriff,” Lou declared.
Shari kept her eyes on me. “I know. I’ve heard. I think Hope Drake activated the PTA phone tree to rally the girls to come to your house tonight, drag you out and tar and feather you.”
Wonderful.
“Stupid woman does that,” Joyce, sitting in Lou’s chair with Lou’s shears working at her head, chimed in. “I’ll get Jim’s shotgun, sit on Greta’s porch and offer the medical professionals opportunity to explore the concept of finally extricating her head out of her behind by aiming some buckshot at it.”
“Me too!” Mrs. Swanson, who had her head back in the sink, shouted out.
Mrs. Swanson was eighty-two and sadly had such bad arthritis, her weekly wash and set wasn’t a luxury. It was a necessity since she couldn’t do her own hair.
She certainly couldn’t pull the trigger on a shotgun.
She might not even have the strength to hold one.
Though Joyce did and she was also ornery enough to do exactly what she said.
“We’re not talking about Hope Drake,” Lou announced. “Greta’s got problems comin’ out the ying-yang, starting not with Hope but with the fact her momma threw down.”
Shari’s still-huge eyes turned to me and she pushed out a long, “No.”
I nodded to her then turned back to finish up Mrs. Swanson.
“Oh my gosh!” I heard Shari exclaim. “I hope she comes today. I want it to be a day I have an appointment. I don’t want to miss out on Greta’s mom making a scene, cursing and blinding. All this town’s been talking about is Hix and Hope Drake for months. It’s getting boring. We need something new to talk about.”
We really did not.
Especially if it was about me and my mother.
“She really say the F-word out loud and in public?” Mrs. Young called out from under the dryer.
I hadn’t only told Lou about my mom. You did hair, you chatted. So my regulars knew too.
So did Lou’s.
I grabbed a pink towel off the shelves behind the sinks, shook it out of the precise roll Lou and I folded them in and started to wrap Mrs. Swanson’s head in it, saying, “The F-word, B-word, H-word, D-word, and she’ll probably sprinkle in the P-word and even the C-word.”