Elsie looked at her sister-in-law then swung her feet down. “Sorry. Anyway, yeah, I lost about a week’s worth of chores to him but I did them all yesterday.”
Sawyer looked over at him. “You don’t look savaged beyond all reason.”
“I’m a woman of honor,” Elsie said. “I’d never go back on a bet.”
She’d wanted to, though. In fact, tonight was a total change in demeanor from where she’d been when he’d seen her yesterday.
This was the Elsie she’d been all the ever before Vancouver. And it was the Elsie that should have been more familiar to him. But for some reason the Elsie who was fraught and tension filled seemed...more real.
The Elsie he’d held in his arms and all but pinned to the ground yesterday.
The Elsie who’d been so soft beneath his hands...
He cleared his throat for no good reason but to jar himself back into the present. Evelyn took June from his arms and set her in her high chair, and he was grateful because holding a child right now felt wrong.
“I have her doing everything I haven’t wanted to do for the last year. And all the things Gus, Brody and Lachlan didn’t want to do along with it,” he said.
“You’re not usually such a graceful loser,” Sawyer pointed out.
Elsie turned crimson around the edges. “Well. I might not have been all that graceful in the moment.”
“Are you repentant?” Hunter asked.
She looked up at him from beneath her lashes. “No.”
This was more like their usual banter. And yet it wasn’t.
It felt nothing like it.
Because when she looked at him like that...
It was like something wholly new.
“That’s typical,” he said, the words scraping his throat raw.
“You’re a hard case, Elsie,” Wolf said.
“You raised me.” She served up a heaping helping of roast beef and potatoes, and he spent the rest of the night practically outside his body.
It was a weird-ass sensation.
He didn’t like it.
And when it was time for him to go home, he was surprised to find Elsie saying her goodbyes at the same time. When they stepped outside, it was dark, the sky clear, stars twinkling overhead like diamond dust deep in the heart of a mine.
“It was good to see you,” Elsie said.
And it occurred to him then that she was really trying to be the bigger person. That she was really trying to go out of her way to choose to make this better. To make it all okay.
And he had to respect that. But something in him didn’t like it.
“Good to see you too.”
“Do you have plans tomorrow night?”
The question knocked him back a pace. “What kind of plans?”
“Oh nothing. It’s just... It’ll be nightime. I have nothing to do. No dinner plans. I figured I would head to the bar.”
He nodded slowly. “Sounds like a plan.”
“Hopefully...hopefully everything will go well.”
“I’m done teaching you,” he said. The words sounded rustier than he intended. The fact that he said them out loud was actually unintended.
“In what sense?”
“In the sense that you don’t have anything left to learn from me.” And he was grateful for the cover of darkness. Because if he could see her face... If he could see her face, he would close the distance between them. “You go in that bar and you’ll be able to get any man you want. But you make sure you want him.”
That was his last warning. And the rest of this... It didn’t have anything to do with him. He wouldn’t let it.
He’d spoken his piece. And what else he did from here on out was his business. He just didn’t want her doing anything just for the sake of it. Because she was bullheaded. Because she had set her mind to something before she had fully realized the implications of it.
She nodded slowly. “Sure.”
“Good.”
“See you tomorrow?”
“At the bar?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“Probably not. I think I’ll stick to home.”
“All right. Maybe I’ll see you when I report back to McCloud’s, then.”
“Yeah,” he said. “See you then.”
And then he walked back to his truck, and just like Elsie yesterday, he didn’t look back.
* * *
“THIS IS A good dress, right?” Elsie asked, looking across Alaina’s bedroom, eyeing herself critically in the full-length mirror.
“Yes,” Alaina said definitively. “And Hunter said he’s not going tonight?”
“No.”
“Do you want me to come?” Alaina asked. “For moral support?”
She considered that. “No,” she said. “I think if you were also hoping to pick somebody up it would be different.”
She shook her head. “No. I might go loiter around some of the common areas and see if I get a Hunter sighting, though.”
She ignored the stabbing feeling in her breastbone. “That sounds like a good idea,” she said.
Because there was no point in the stabbing feeling. No point at all.
And she had gone to her brother’s house last night for the sole purpose of affirming her position with Hunter. For making sure that she could be normal around him. And that he could be normal around her. And they had managed it, hadn’t they? And she had told him that she was going to go after Travis, and he hadn’t done anything to stop her.
Did you want him to stop you?
The very idea made her go red all the way to the roots of her hair. No. She didn’t want him to stop her. She wanted him to let this all go back to normal. She wanted him to let this die down. Obviously.
“I can see that. Having your friend watch you be sexy is uncomfortable,” Alaina said with deep pragmatism.
“There are whole flocks of girls who don’t seem to have a problem with it,” Elsie said. “They descend on the bar in groups, and they all...shake their hips. In front of each other.”
“In front of God and everybody,” Alaina said, stretching out on her stomach on the bed. “My mother would have had choice words for women like that...”
“Because your mother really had choice words for your father, but reserves them for other women instead.”