Total pages in book: 144
Estimated words: 147540 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 738(@200wpm)___ 590(@250wpm)___ 492(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 147540 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 738(@200wpm)___ 590(@250wpm)___ 492(@300wpm)
“Babe, it’s gonna be awesome,” he assured. “You’re worried your people aren’t gonna jive with my people. That Blake’s gonna be Blake. That my folks are going to be intimidated by dinner in a mansion with an unrestricted view of Thumb Butte.”
He wasn’t finished when she said, “Your parents are down to earth and have a really awesome house, they won’t get intimidated by that.”
“Then okay, what’s your issue?”
“I don’t know how to be a family,” she whispered.
Jesus.
He had no idea how that felt, he still felt that.
“Baby,” he called.
She looked his way.
He leaned into an elbow on the console. “I’d put money down on the fact it’s gonna be a lot easier learning how to be a family than it was not being one.”
Her two-toned eyes roamed his face, they warmed, and she nodded.
He leaned further, across to her, and pressed hard on her lips.
As he was pulling back, the car behind them tooted.
He looked forward, seeing that the car in front was still at the window, so he looked at the rearview mirror, tension hitting his neck at a memory.
He also felt Alex twist to look too.
“Ohmigod. That’s Dani,” she announced.
The woman who was apparently Dani was a pretty, massively smiling blonde who, for some reason, was pumping two happy thumbs up in front of her.
“Who’s Dani?” Rix asked, still watching as the woman shoved her head out of the side window of her Tahoe.
“A…friend,” Alex answered, and he heard her window whirring down.
He looked right, and watched Al releasing her seatbelt and pulling her entire body out to sit her ass on the window edge.
“Number, bitch!” Dani shouted. She was now waving her phone out the window. “We need drinks and a very long chat!”
“Okay!” Alex yelled back, shouted her number, Rix watched in the review as Dani entered it into her phone, then Alex yelled. “Text me so I have yours.”
“Gotcha, sister. Will do! You rock! You roll! You got it goin’ on! I love it!” Dani hollered.
Rix watched her pump more thumbs up as Alex came back into the car.
She buckled up.
Rix pulled up to the window, got out his wallet, and paid.
He waited for the drinks and remarked, “A friend and you don’t have her number?”
“When I was giving myself a pep talk to go back out and flirt with you that night at the Raven, she was in the bathroom,” Alex began, this share making his gut get tight.
He took the drinks, handed them to her, and she dealt with them as he rolled up his window and rolled out.
She kept talking.
“She helped with the pep talk. She was really cool. I liked her.”
Her phone binged, and Rix glanced at her to see she was smiling at it.
Dani had texted.
When she was done programming in the number, she dropped her hands to her lap, and he said gently, “I thought you’d ditched me.”
She was quiet right back when she said, “It’s okay.”
“I wasn’t there yet.”
She reached out, squeezed his thigh, took her hand away and assured, “I know, Rix, honey. It’s okay.” When he said nothing, she said, “Look where I am. Do you not think I’m okay?”
He grunted.
But he felt better, and he knew she knew it when Alex didn’t reply.
Rix drove.
Alex rode.
He turned left on Mt. Vernon.
“Are we going back to my place? Did we forget something?” she asked.
“No,” he answered.
“Then…uh, do you know a different way to Cottonwood?”
“No.”
“Then where are we going?”
“Quiet, sweetheart, quick detour.”
She grew quiet.
Rix reached for his drink, took a sip, returned it, then went back to the controls so he could pilot them along Senator Highway.
Up they went, past her place, deeper into Groom Creek, then he swung a left onto a dirt road.
They climbed about a hundred feet, swung a right, climbed a hundred feet more, then pulled off into the wide dirt drive next to a semi-sprawling ranch-style log cabin with a blue roof and a full front porch that wrapped around one side and led to a big square deck built suspended over the descent off the back right.
It had a large, blue shed about twenty feet from the house off to the left. It also had a fenced-in area with a greenhouse down the side stairs from the back deck that led to some stone steps in the earth.
There were neighbors, not too close, not too far.
Rix had met them. One elderly year-round couple. Two cabins that were owned by folks in Phoenix and used sporadically, though never in the winter. And the cabin up top that was owned by a park ranger who worked Prescott National Forest, a friend of Rix’s. They weren’t close, but Rix had put the feelers out. So when that cabin came up for grabs, he arranged it so, in a crazy market where shit was selling within hours of it listing, Rix could have first dibs.