“What?” Ryan said again.
“Welcome to the club, man.” Jackson looked deeply amused.
“What are you talking about? What club?”
“The hopelessly in love with one of the four sisters club. The dues are high, but it’s worth it.” He reached out with his beer mug and clinked it against Ryan’s.
“I still don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Ryan insisted.
“Dude. You just saw Lacy Jordan with another guy, and you couldn’t have cared less. This thing with Gen? If she decides she wants you, it’s a done deal. Might as well just go with it.”
Ryan thought about that, and he felt a little stunned.
“Well, shit,” he said.
“Ryan kissed me,” Gen told Lacy on the phone just a few minutes after she got home from her date. Lacy passed the word on to Rose. Kate, who’d been Gen’s first stop moments after she’d parked her car, already knew.
The four decided to meet for breakfast on Saturday morning to deconstruct the events of the evening. They were sitting in a big wooden booth at the Redwood Café, big plates of eggs, pancakes, and bacon in front of Kate, Lacy, and Rose, and an egg white omelet with fresh fruit sitting mostly untouched at Gen’s place. She didn’t seem to have an appetite.
“So, the kiss,” Rose prompted Gen after they all were settled in with their food. “I need details. Setting first. Where were you?”
“We were in the gardens at the lodge. You know the bench with the big trellis over it? The one across from the stone fountain?”
“Oh, sweet,” Lacy said with a dreamy look on her face. “That’s a great spot for a first kiss.”
“It really was,” Gen agreed. “There was a lot of moonlight last night. Everything was all silvery and pretty, and there was the smell of flowers …”
“And the sound of the fountain,” Kate supplied.
“And Ryan looking the way Ryan looks,” Rose said.
“I know! Jeez,” Gen said. “It’s not fair for one guy to be that sexy. I mean, just for the sake of balance, there’s gotta be five guys out there with no sex appeal at all just to average him out.”
“I’ve dated those guys,” Rose said.
“We all have,” Lacy agreed.
“And then he just … kissed me,” Gen said. Just saying the words caused a rush of heat through her belly.
Rose held a forkful of pancakes aloft. “So, does he still like Lacy?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is he looking for a relationship?” Kate asked.
“I don’t know!” Gen picked up a forkful of omelet, looked at it, and put it back down.
“Maybe you should ask him,” Rose suggested.
“Ask him?” Gen said.
“Yes.”
“You mean, like, just ask him?”
Rose tilted her colorful head and peered at Gen. “Well, you could send him a message in code, but what if he deciphers it wrong?” She batted her eyelashes in a parody of innocent inquiry.
“You’re funny.” Gen’s tone suggested Rose was anything but.
“Look. You don’t have to have the answers right now,” Kate said, pointing her fork at Gen. “Just … see where it goes. Be open to whatever happens.”
Gen took a deep and shaky breath to steady herself, and then nodded. “Right.”
After the kiss, Gen started finding more and more reasons to drop by the ranch—especially the main house.
When Kendrick wanted to rearrange the furniture in the cottage—to improve the feng shui, he said—Gen dropped by the main house to ask whether anyone would mind if she and Kendrick put the sofa on a different wall and moved the dresser two feet to the left. When Kendrick clogged the toilet, Gen went to the house to ask if she could borrow a plunger.
She wasn’t even fully aware that she was doing it; she simply found herself going to the Delaneys’ front door more and more often, for more and more reasons. Sometimes Ryan was there, and sometimes he was busy out at the new barn, or checking fences in distant pastures, or keeping watch over a sickly calf.
When Sandra was there, she’d invite Gen inside and they’d chat for a while about this and that—the gallery, whatever was happening at the ranch, the minutia of Sandra’s day—before Gen got the information or the item she needed and went on her way. When Ryan was there, he gave her his slow, sexy smile and helped her with whatever it was that she’d come for.
The problem was, the thing she’d really come for was to see whether, given multiple opportunities, he would ask her out on a date that wasn’t shadowed by the thank-you specter, the way the last one was. It seemed like he might. She could feel the unasked question in the pauses before he spoke, in the quiet hesitation of his body in relation to hers.
But he didn’t ask.
The fact that he didn’t made her wonder whether she’d been the only one to feel the electricity in the kiss, whether she’d built a story in her head based on imagination and longing.
The hope of the kiss, followed by the letdown in its wake, left her feeling out of sorts whenever she saw him. But seeing him, even as a reminder of a desire left unconsummated, was better than not seeing him. The ache in her chest that came from wanting him was better than the emptiness that came from his absence. So she kept going to the ranch, and when Kendrick didn’t need anything, she invented things for him to need.
It was the best she could do.
Chapter Sixteen
“Why the hell haven’t you gotten off your ass and asked that woman out?” Sandra demanded of Ryan one morning at breakfast.
“Well, good morning to you too, Mom,” Ryan said mildly.
“Don’t change the subject.” She slammed his bowl of whole grain cereal down on the kitchen table. “If you’re too big an idiot to notice that the Porter girl is crazy about you, then I didn’t raise you right.”
Ryan blinked. He didn’t know what had brought on this scolding, what spark had been added to what accelerant to set off this particular explosion. He knew only that he was unfortunate enough to be in its path.
“You raised me fine,” he assured her. “What’s this about?”
“What the hell are you waiting for?” she barked at him, slamming down a bowl of fresh-cut fruit.
“I haven’t even had my coffee yet,” he said, scrubbing at his face with his hands.
“Good God, Ryan. Just ask Gen out,” Breanna said as she came into the room wearing her getting-the-kids-ready-for-school uniform of sweatpants, socks, and a T-shirt. “So we don’t have to hear about it anymore.” She rolled her eyes and gestured toward their mother.
Ryan poured himself a cup of coffee, added sugar, leaned against the kitchen counter, and turned toward his mother. “Mom? You mind telling me how this is any of your business?”
“It’s my business because that poor thing is so desperate to see you that she keeps coming around here asking for things she doesn’t really need, taking up all of my precious time because she thinks she might run into you. I’m a busy woman, Ryan! I don’t have the luxury of entertaining your would-be girlfriend!”