“You’d miss it here. You’d miss us. You’d be calling home begging for a care package of Jenny’s cookies in two weeks, guaranteed.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Cole rolled his eyes.
“Well, in the meantime, since it looks like you’re stuck for at least a while longer, I think you should take the risk and see what could happen with Jess.”
“And here we are, back to Jess.”
Daniel shrugged. “Just saying. Maybe your destiny’s here, knocking on the door for the third damn time. Maybe you’d better listen this time.”
Chapter 10
Later that night, Jess lit the candles she’d brought up from her cabin, placing them in the windowsills of the spa. Her bare feet slid across the polished hardwood, and she itched to dance across the big, empty space. She glanced out the open window, comforted by the nighttime sounds of the ranch. She could hear crickets and peepers in the meadow, and an owl called from somewhere not far away.
She’d been trying to put her aunt’s phone call out of her mind all day, and staying busy with Cole and the kids had definitely helped. Once the sun had gone down, though, it’d been just her and the crickets—and the memories.
The stables glowed in the darkness, the nighttime lights soft and inviting. For a brief moment she was tempted to stroll down and just find a quiet corner where she could sit and breathe in the goodness of hay and horses and grain, but heading down there meant possibly running into Cole on his nighttime rounds.
Since seeing him this afternoon laughing with the kids, soaked to the skin, she hadn’t been able to get him out of her brain. The way his T-shirt had clung to his abs, the way he’d thrown his head back with that laugh that was straight from the belly, the way he’d murmured revenge in her ear—all of it had kept her even more on edge all evening. The sensations in her gut were unfamiliar and completely unsettling, and she had no idea what to do about them.
But until she did, avoidance seemed like a pretty good strategy.
She hadn’t been able to settle down in her cabin, hadn’t been able to fall into that soft bed and sleep, so at midnight, she’d walked up to the spa. This space, with its polished floor and scent of fresh lumber, brought a sense of peace she desperately needed right now. In this space, she felt at home. In this space, she could throw her arms out, spin for hours, and try to forget about manila envelopes and Breezy Meadow and a huge check eating a hole in her suitcase.
And sexy cowboys.
She queued up a playlist on her phone, then set it on a pile of lumber as she moved to the center of the room and stretched. It was a list she’d used for months, with a series of moves she’d perfected to a point where she didn’t even have to think while she did them.
This was what she needed right now. She needed to lose herself in this music, lose herself in the movements of her body, feel nothing but tendons and ligaments and the beautiful stretch of muscles. If she could get to that place, she could leave everything else behind.
She spun and leaped across the floor, doing moves she’d invented herself—moves that were neither yoga nor dance, but a combination of the two. As the music got faster, so did her spins. The leaps got higher, the stretches bigger, and she closed her eyes, lost in the beauty of losing herself.
Fifteen minutes later, as the music finally slowed, she moved through a series of long stretches in the middle of the floor. Her eyes were closed, her muscles were burning, and she was tempted to lie down right on this floor and fall asleep until morning.
But a sound from the doorway had her eyes popping open, and the sight of a familiar Stetson had her grabbing her T-shirt and whipping it over her leotard.
“You here to retaliate for the water balloons, cowboy?” Jess tried to keep the shake out of her voice.
Cole stepped through the open door, hands in the air. “I don’t retaliate so quickly. You’ll never see it coming when I do.”
“Ooh. Shivers.” Jess pretended to quiver.
He motioned toward her phone. “You thinking about adding dance lessons to the Whisper Creek menu?”
She laughed. “Um, no. Definitely not. I have no training.”