“Talk about a curveball,” Blaire said as she parked her silver Lexus in the garage beside my blue Jeep Wrangler.
“Yeah. Hollin asked if Bradley was going to propose, and I freaked out.”
“Wait,” Blaire said as we entered my house, “Hollin saw the engagement ring?”
“He did.”
“Ah.” She blew out a breath. “No wonder.”
“What?”
“He was in rare form tonight.”
“He was the same asshole as always.”
Blaire flipped her long black hair off her shoulder. “If you say so.”
“I don’t want to talk about Hollin.”
“Fine. Tell me about Bradley.”
“I don’t want to talk about him either.”
Blaire laughed. “I bet I have some ice cream in the freezer.”
She went to look, and I went into my bedroom to change out of these clothes. I chucked the tight jeans onto my bed and slowly unbuttoned Hollin’s shirt. I brought the fabric up to my nose and inhaled. It smelled like him. I didn’t know what cologne he used, but it made my mouth water. It was so heady. As if I could fall back into a forever dream at the mere scent of it.
I hastily stripped out of the shirt and threw it on top of my jeans. I needed to get this under control. It didn’t matter that Hollin’s cologne turned me on. Or that I’d worn the shirt all night. Or that Blaire had been right…that he’d been in rare form. He’d pressed every single button and not backed off all night. He’d wanted a reaction from me, and I’d given them all to him.
“Okay,” Blaire called from the kitchen. “Looks like Jennifer killed the cookie dough.”
I tugged on sweats and a Texas Tech sweatshirt. “Strawberry?”
“Yes. There’s a pint of strawberry and chocolate, cherry, pecan.”
“A scoop of both?”
“You got it.”
She doled out ice cream into fancy martini glasses and brought them over to the couch. She positioned them just this way, snapping a few shots.
She guiltily looked up at me. “Sorry, work…”
“I’m used to you taking pictures of everything before we can enjoy it.”
She laughed. “Yeah. Well, after a breakup is different. I should be in the moment.”
“You’re here. You have ice cream. Good enough for me.”
No matter how laid-back Blaire was, she always worried that her carefully curated life interfered too much in real life. But I didn’t care. It never changed anything about our time together.
My mind snagged on one thing that Blaire had said. “What do you mean, no wonder about Hollin? That he was in rare form?”
“Well, he’s into you,” Blaire said with an unapologetic shrug. “Like…he was acting like that because the ring freaked him out.”
I dug my spoon into the ice cream. “Hollin is just pissed that I’m one of the few girls who won’t give him the time of day.”
“He doesn’t act like that around me,” she pointed out.
“Yeah, but it’s different.”
“Not to play the minor celebrity card”—she gestured to herself—“but after a few million followers, I have discovered that guys and girls find me attractive. I could be dating right now. But Hollin Abbey doesn’t even look at me. He’s into you.”
“So? I’m not into him,” I insisted.
Blaire pointed her spoon at me. “You think he’s hot.”
“He is.”
“You like the way he smells.”
I bit the inside of my cheek. I hated that I’d told Blaire that once. “And? It doesn’t change what he did.”
Before Blaire and I lived together, I’d lived with these two girls, Quinn and Khloe. When Quinn asked me about Hollin, I told her what I knew about him. He was a year older than me in school. We’d never associated before the Wright cousins moved here, but I’d heard that he was a good guy. He hadn’t had his sleeve tattoo. He was still so tall but less muscular. I told her to go for it.
Unbeknownst to Quinn, he was already dating Khloe as well. When it all came out, the friendship ended over a guy who three-date-ruled them both and then threw them away. We had to break the lease because they wouldn’t even talk to one another. It was when I decided to get my own place. I’d never do the drama or deal with Hollin Abbey.
“That was a few years ago.”
“You think he’s different? You saw how he was with that Emily girl tonight. If anything, that proves that he’s exactly the same. He’d probably even tell you that he is.”
Blaire sighed. “All right. You win.”
“Good. I like winning.”
“You better win the wine competition.”
I chanced a glance at her. “Was the wine that good?”
“Really fucking good.”
“Ugh!” I was still irritated that Hollin hadn’t let me try it. He’d even called me the enemy. Jerk. “I’d better fucking win.”
“Yeah,” Blaire said with laughter sparkling in her eyes, “or you’re never going to hear the end of it.”
She wasn’t wrong. Hollin would never let me live that down. Not ever.
6
Piper
The good thing about Lubbock was that a person could get to anything they wanted within twenty minutes. Sinclair Cellars was just on the border of that time limit. Built on land the Sinclairs had acquired in the ’60s in the south part of Lubbock, it had acres and acres of vineyards. What had once been a small family operation had bloomed under their careful tutelage and my father’s burgeoning enthusiasm for the property.
Driving onto the land each morning was like coming home. I’d grown up running through the grapevines, had my first kiss on a tractor ride through the fields in the fall, and learned the feeling of a hard day’s work. When I was having a bad day, the first thing I wanted to do was go out and walk through the grapes. I found peace here. I understood how family farmers felt, connected to their entire world in this dirt. It had sustained me for a long time.
So, when I parked my blue Jeep Wrangler at the front of the property Saturday morning, the land was calling to me. I took my coffee out of the center console and trekked out into my fields. The vines were empty of the bountiful fruit that would start growing this summer.
But it settled something inside me.
I’d broken up with Bradley last night. For the last time. I wasn’t sad about it exactly. It felt like a lot of wasted time. It wasn’t, of course. It had shaped me in many ways. I’d dated a bunch of idiots before him, and he’d been good to me for the last couple of years. We just hadn’t had forever stamped on us. As hard as it was to let go, it was the right choice.
I took a sip of my drink and let the early morning rays crash over my golden skin. The mornings were still too cold to go without a jacket. I snuggled into the North Face and let the coffee heat me up.
After a few minutes, a throat cleared behind me. “Thought I’d find you out here.”
I smiled at my dad. “Buenos días, Papa.”
Matthew Medina wrapped an arm around my shoulders. “Did it call to you too?”