smile wasn’t forced as he looked back at his cousin. He was happy for Woodman. He was.
Fuck it, he wanted to be.
“You deserve everythin’ you want, Josiah,” he said, meaning every word.
“Thanks, Cain,” he said, closing his eyes again. “I don’t care how busy you get with Mary-Louise, you come and see me before you head back to Virginia next Friday, you hear?”
Cain’s eyes widened and he blinked at his cousin. Head back. Holy smokes, he’d lost track of time. He was leaving in eight days. Just eight more days.
He straddled his bike and buckled his helmet. “You bet.”
As he sped down the driveway, Woodman’s words trailed through his head: It’s all workin’ out. Me and Gin. Just like you said it would.
Of course it is, he thought, clenching his jaw until it ached, his throbbing heart drowned out only by the raging motor between his thighs.
The girl he loved was making the right choice.
The cousin he loved was getting the girl of his dreams.
And Cain?
He was going back to a job he loved, in a world he understood, where Ginger and Woodman and Apple Valley would eventually lose their sharpness and color, and he’d figure out a way to bear their loss.
It was enough, right? It would be enough?
“It’s all you get! It has to be enough!” he shouted, his eyes burning, his voice lost in the roar of his bike rounding a hairpin curve like it was on rails.
Wincing as he sped away from the McHuid’s driveway, Cain tucked his head down and kept right on going till he reached the old distillery.
Chapter 12
~ Ginger ~
On Saturday Cain had helped her bring some groceries inside the little cottage, and she’d run into Cain and Klaus at the Country Diner after church on Sunday, but the few times she’d stopped by the barn to see him that week, he was either off-site getting a horse shoed, or his bike was gone. No matter what time she showed up, he wasn’t around, and by Thursday she got the distinct feeling that he was actively avoiding her.
Just like insisting they be friends had been a way of keeping her at arm’s length, he was doing the same by lying low and staying busy. But after a week, Ginger had had enough. They’d left things badly enough three years ago. She wasn’t about to let their awkward conversation in her kitchen be her last glimpse of Cain for another handful of years.
So on Friday she skipped her morning classes, called in sick to work, and headed down to the barn at six o’clock in the morning, determined to sit on the goddamned bench across from the tack room and wait until Cain showed his face. Which, unfortunately for her, didn’t happen until almost nine.
When the tack room door finally opened, her eyes widened in pleasure as Cain stepped out into the barn in a pair of jeans and nothing else, rubbing a hand through his black stubbly hair, his eyes still half closed. He stumbled to the open barn doors and faced the sunshine, stretching his arms over his head and giving Ginger an excellent opportunity to check out his bare torso.
A soft mewling sound escaped her throat, and Cain whirled around, opening one eye wide, then the other, surprised to see her.
She stood up and put her hands on her hips. “Are you avoidin’ me?”
“Maybe,” he said with a sweet, sleepy smile, his voice scratchy like it had always been in high school after a night of hard drinking.
“Out partyin’ last night?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Wasn’t much of a party, princess.”
“Distillery?”
He took a deep breath and sighed, cocking his head to the side. “What do you know about the distillery? Nice girl like you shouldn’t hang out down there.”
“Maybe I’m not as nice as you think,” she said, feeling sassy. “Besides, I’m eighteen, Cain. Everyone in Apple Valley has hung out at the distillery at some point or other.”
He shook his head, grinning at her. “As long as you ain’t a regular.”
“I ain’t a regular,” she conceded, grinning back.
“Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”
“Shift got canceled,” she lied.
He took a step closer to her, and she could smell the stale booze and cigarette smoke on his skin. “What you want, Miss Virginia Laire McHuid?”
She wrinkled her nose. “First? I need you to take a shower, Mr. Cain Holden Wolfram.”
His smile just about set her panties on fire. “Yes, ma’am. And then?”