SLEEPING PROVED IMPOSSIBLE for Brook Lynn. She tossed and turned in bed, thinking of nothing but her almost-kiss with Jase.
Why had he stopped?
Did it really matter?
Sometime between falling onto her mattress and rising to take a shower, she’d made a decision: she would overcome her attraction to him, and that would be that.
There were too many problems stacked against them, anyway. Jessie Kay. Brook Lynn’s employment. His attitude. Oh, his attitude! Smoldering one moment, ice-cold the next. Always annoying.
Besides, she still wasn’t interested in a fling. Give me long-term or give me nothing.
Right?
“Jessie Kay,” she called, banging on the girl’s bedroom door. “What do you want for breakfast?”
Silence greeted her.
She peeked inside—no one was in the bed draped with sheets covered with silly pandas or anywhere else. Peachy. Had her sister even come home last night? Brook Lynn tromped to the kitchen...where she found a note. And a glass jar with a giant spider trapped inside.
Dude! Do you see what was waiting in the kitchen for me? The devil! I managed to catch it—you’re welcome. Now you get to kill it. All I ask is that you check for a pulse afterward to make sure he’s really, really, really dead. Love, JK
PS: I would have killed it myself, because I’m tough like that, but I was in a hurry to go out and make us some dough. You’re welcome x 2.
“You are deathly afraid of spiders, and you know it,” Brook Lynn muttered to her absent sister. And Jessie Kay, out making money? I’ll believe it when I see it.
After freeing the spider outside, Brook Lynn decided to forgo breakfast and made her way to the Rhinestone Cowgirl. Strawberry Valley was just beginning to rouse. Shop owners were outside, dusting off sidewalks while Closed signs flipped over behind them.
She waved to Mr. Rodriguez. Virgil hadn’t yet arrived to begin their next checkers game. There was Wanda Potts, taking pictures of her storefront to post on Twitter and Facebook. She sold “designer” clothing—meaning, she’d designed them. Next door, Donut à la Mode was being unlocked. It was nice, seeing the same people, the same sights, every morning. Comforting.
When Brook Lynn stepped inside the RC, she was ten minutes early and more fatigued than usual. Her eyes burned, and her feet dragged. And her ears! The itching had only gotten worse. If this kept up, she’d have to call her doctor and pay for a checkup she couldn’t afford.
Maybe she could get an advance from Jase...
No! No way. She wasn’t going to treat him like a piggy bank. He was her boss, and he was a person. A distant person, sure. Gruff, but a natural-born protector. Look how quickly he’d stepped in front of his friend simply to stop the guy from yelling at her.
And she was still insanely curious about his past. How bad would it be to look him up online?
Oh, who cared? She plugged his name in a search engine. Jase Hollister.
Not much popped up. He had no Facebook page that she could find, no Twitter account. But she was asked if she’d meant Jessie Hollister, Jake Hollister, Jason Hollister or Jane Hollister.
Jason seemed the most obvious choice, so she clicked on it...and oh, wow, there seemed to be thousands of them. She narrowed the search to Jason Hollister in Oklahoma. The first thing to pull up was Hollister Co. at Penn Square Mall, followed by a few links to people on Facebook and LinkedIn. But none of the pictures matched the Jase she knew. There was an article about some kind of fight to the death between teenagers, but again, the picture next to it looked nothing like her Jase. The boy was far too scrawny.
The bell above the door tinkled, signaling the arrival of the first customer of the day, and she glanced up to see a young man she’d never before met standing in the doorway.
“Can I help you?” she asked. Tourist? Just passing through?
He had sandy-colored hair and wore a wrinkled white button-down and black slacks. He scratched his arms as he glanced behind him nervously before retreating outside, the door closing.