Just Want Somebody to Love (Bella Warren Book 1) (25 page)

Brandon paused while writing the check and glanced his way. “You want advice?”

“Standing here, aren’t I?”

“You were standing there last time I tried giving you some.”

“I’m listening this time.” He lifted a shoulder. “I don’t want to fuck this up.”

Brandon tore off the check and passed it to the driver with his thanks. He turned and fixed a glass of water as the back door closed and left the two of them alone. Brandon scratched his jaw and shrugged. “When she talks, listen.”

“Okay.”

Brandon walked out of the room and returned to the stacks of beer. Justin moved in next to him and sorted the cases. He’d been around long enough to know how his brother liked it stocked. It also gave him busy work for his hands while he figured out what to say. After all the years, this was the most he’d gotten out of his brother on this topic and he wanted to avoid pushing.

They finished putting away everything. His brother refilled his drink. A half an hour went by and nothing.

Justin pushed his hand in his pockets. “Anything else?”

Brandon shook his head. “Nah. We’ll be opening soon. This is the best chance for me to grab a break and watch some TV.”

Justin shook his head. “I meant about marriage advice.”

Brandon stared at him and just blinked. Then his brows lifted as if he might have remembered something. “Oh, that. No, that was it. Listen.”

That was it. “You’re honestly telling me you pissed away your marriage because you didn’t listen?”

“How well do you listen when people give you advice?”

Justin sorted through the times he got advice from financial advisors, lawyers, employees, and let out a breath. “All the time.”

His brother gave him a look. “Advice about you. Not the business. Can you have a single thought that doesn’t include the business?”

If Brandon could have a single thought that did include the business, then maybe Justin could have some without it. “Yes, I can.”

“Good. Listen. Think about other things besides Rawlings Steakhouse and you’ll be fine.”

He let his brother be cryptic. It wasn’t worth the argument. He pulled his phone from his hip. He hadn’t wanted to take a lot of notes during the lunch because he wanted to look attentive. But with Whitney there, he didn’t chance forgetting something. “If you got a minute, I’d like to fill you in on using WW Farms. I think it’s a good thing to consider.”

“Is that just because it brings you closer to Whitney? Gets your business close to her, getting you closer to what you want?”

He shot his brother a look. “No. I actually think it won’t affect their farms much at all. They seem to be in a ‘we can do this or not’ type position and are open to doing things pretty much how we want. It was actually her mom’s idea.”

“That sounds good.” Brandon rubbed his hands off on his hip. “Let me grab a sandwich, and then you can fill me in.”

Whitney pushed from her computer. Too much on her mind. She’d power walked into her house and sat at her desk full of purpose to get through the afternoon without thinking of the last five minutes she’d had with Justin.

Asked her to move with him. To Dallas.

It wasn’t like it was a thirty minute drive. Or even an hour. That was a whole other state.

She couldn’t.

Could she?

Leave Chester Farms? Tate had left. Sure, but he never wanted anything to do with the farm.

She’d known work wasn’t going to happen the moment she’d walked into her house. The pale blue walls of her childhood lined the way to the kitchen. The only house she ever expected to live in since her mom moved away.

This wouldn’t just be leaving the farm and her brothers. This was leaving her life. Leaving her friends and everything she knew.

Uprooting her whole life should have her shivering with fear by the very idea.

She pictured Justin leaving town. Just how awesome would Bella Warren be after he left? Would it go back to that itchy restless place where she often spent time staring out the window before she met him? Or would it return to before then. When she spent her time wringing her hands.

What happened to her that changed things? What happened that one day she was happy as could be on the farm to where she’d gotten stuck in some sort of rut?

She dropped in a chair at the kitchen table and found herself surrounded by memories that made her smile and warm, but that’s all she had here.

No activity. No action. No hope for tomorrow that anything was going to be different or change. It was just a house full of good memories. More than she wanted to admit, maybe Justin was a little bit right about that lonely thought.

She couldn’t imagine how she could be lonely with so much happening around her. But part of her, the part that wanted to be hugged all night, agreed. She pushed away from her empty table and picked her way across the yard next door to her brother’s house.

Where he lived with his wife.

Where they were thinking of having babies next year.

Whitney glanced to her home. Affection and love for the place stirred a bit of warmth in her gut, but she couldn’t look at her house and see a future like when she looked at her brother’s.

Was that it? She looked between the houses and felt that urge to sit and do nothing while comparing. The urge to watch everyone’s life take off without her. She looked farther away to those ridiculous scarecrows scattered across the fields, and chuckled. Justin had mixed everything up from the first moment she saw him. Fond memories had her glancing to her house. Instead of seeing a place of memories, ideas filled her head. Ideas that included him. A future with him like she saw between her brother and Kara when she looked at their house.

She pushed in the back door of Wade’s and found her mom alone in the kitchen with a rolling pin and something smeared across the counter. By the pie plates and chicken boiling on the stove, looked like chicken potpie for supper.

Her mom smiled, continued her work, and did a double take to Whitney. “What’s the matter, honey?”

“Tired, I think.” She eased on a stool across the counter. Tired of what? No idea. That was half the problem. Tired of life? Tired of waiting? Tired because she’d gotten up at dawn again? Let’s just get a big pot and make a sulking stew for her to mix everything in. Why did she have to fall for a guy who didn’t live here? That was the rub. She didn’t want a long-distance relationship. Could she do it? Yes. For him would she do it? Yes. Did she want to? No. “Where’s Kara?”

“Upstairs resting.” Her mom studied her more and then sprinkled flour across the dough. “You look more than tired. Something on your mind?”

“It’s Justin.”

“I hope y’all haven’t had a fight. I like that boy.”

“Do you?” She couldn’t say she’d ever talked to her mom about boys before. But then, she hadn’t dated the kind of boys she wanted to discuss either.

“Sure. He’s hardworking, polite, and he clearly likes you or he wouldn’t be here working so hard. Your daddy used to say all the time that when it came to men, look at what they do, not what they say. Said they were an untrusty lot.” Her mom smiled as she worked the dough.

“It’s must be hard not having him here.” That was a major sticking point with Justin. She looked at tomorrow without seeing him, and she got the urge to sit in a corner and stare out the window.

Her mom let out a long breath. “Hard doesn’t really describe it.”

“How do you get out of bed every day and do something?”

“Because staying in bed would be wasting what’s left of my life. I love your dad and I miss him every day. There’s times when I still automatically think I should ask Sam what he thinks, only to remember I don’t have him anymore. But he was in so much pain when he died that I’m glad he’s at peace. I try not to disappointment him as he looks down watching me, cause sure as I know, your dad watches me every day. If I sat around doing nothing, he’d probably ask God to hit me with a bolt of lightning to put some bounce in my step.”

Whitney smiled. She didn’t remember Dad being that fun loving. She didn’t remember him too much at all. The farm was everything to him, and he worked sun up to sun down. Between school and her extra-curricular stuff, they always seemed to be more in passing.

Her mom rolled the crust around her pin and placed it in the pie plate. “What brought this up?”

“Justin asked me to move to Dallas with him.”

Her mom paused. “Oh. That’s huge.”

Whitney let out a breath. “I know.

“I’m guessing you’re considering it?”

“Yeah.” She plucked a brownie from the stack to the side. It was likely meant to be boxed up. But it seemed like a brownie kind of moment. Her mom must have agreed as she swiped one too. “I tried not thinking about it, but I can’t get the what if factor out of my head.” She lifted a shoulder. “Sometimes I just don’t think I fit in here. Like I don’t have my place here and that I don’t belong. That makes me think I should go.”

Her mom dipped her brows. “I hope you haven’t always felt that way because you’re an important part of Chester Farms. Wade tells me all the time about things you do that he wouldn’t even know where to start.”

Did she dare? Whitney searched her mind, and well, it was the truth. “Sometimes I just think you and Dad would have been happier with a daughter more like Kara than one like me.”

“Honey.”

Before the sad tone of her mom’s voice could crush Whitney, she rushed out the rest of what she wanted to say. “She’s more like you. She’s what daddy would have wanted for someone to represent us. He, I don’t know. He never seemed to like me. I didn’t even know him.”

“Your daddy loved you very much. He just wanted you to have a chance to do better than what we did.”

Whitney looked around. “Better than what? Y’all built all of this and turned Grandpa’s struggling farm into a powerhouse competitor in the field. That’s not too bad.”

“But it wasn’t always that way. Do you think it was easy being pregnant with Tate when I was sixteen and your daddy just graduating high school? It was hard. It didn’t take long watching you grow up, and we knew you were just like me.”

Whitney met her mom’s gaze.

She lifted a shoulder and cleaned the counter. “And he was afraid you’d do some of the same things I did and be pregnant at sixteen. It’s not that he didn’t approve of you or didn’t love you. He raised two boys, and when you came out, he nearly passed out. He had no idea what to do with you.” Her mom gave her a fond smile. “You terrified him every day.”

Whitney couldn’t stop the smile. She supposed she was somewhat of a handful at times.

Her mom shook the rag out over the trash can. “So that’s why when I found out you spent most of planting season in the woods, I didn’t tell you or your dad. Because while we didn’t want you pregnant at sixteen, my life turned out great because I took risks. I knew I would have suffocated if someone had tried to hold me back.”

Whitney’s eyes widened. “You knew?”

Her mom chuckled. “Do you think you could have snuck off as often as you did without your father knowing without my help? He knew this farm inch by inch, and there wasn’t much that didn’t get past him. Yeah. I knew. Kara and I had a few…” She laughed. “Well, talks to make sure you were being safe.”

She smiled. All this time and she had no idea. “Thanks. For giving me that space.”

“If you decide to leave, the farm will be fine. We’ll figure something out. So if you think you have to stay to meet some obligation, don’t. I’d never want that for you and know you’d be miserable and grow to hate it.”

Whitney took a breath and ate her brownie. “I just feel like, I don’t know. I want to be here, but I also feel like I don’t belong and that I should be somewhere else. I’m tempted to go, but I’m afraid to leave. What if I hate it there?”

“Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to, but we do them anyway because we do it for the person we love. When your grandparents offered your dad and I the chance to come here, I was terrified. But to not come would mean losing Sam and possibly Tate, too. I couldn’t do that. So I packed my bags.”

But did she love Justin? She knew she loved the farm. And she knew she loved Bella Warren. Thinking about Justin, though, the same warmth didn’t fill her chest. This was pounding and a rush. An excitement that went everywhere from her fingertips to her toenails. “It’s not just leaving the farm. It’s leaving a small town and going to a big city. If I go, everything about my life will change.”

“Maybe after you spend six months there, you’ll decide you hate it. If you don’t love Justin enough, then you’ll be able to come back. Or maybe if you gave it a real try, you’d find out the big city isn’t bad after all. Like bananas.”

She frowned. “Bananas?”

“You refused bananas as an infant. What baby refuses bananas? You did. I don’t know why. You refused them until you were a toddler. Wade peeled and ate one, and you were coping him for some reason that day. Low and behold if you didn’t pick up a banana just to be a smart-aleck and you ate it. You’ve eaten them ever since. You could have just put the banana down and never touched them again and continued on like you were.”

So maybe Justin and the big city was her new banana. “If I don’t like it and come back, then I’ll be failure.”

“At least you tried. If you’re unsure and you don’t go, thirty years from now, will you always wonder what if?”

That angle hadn’t crossed her mind yet. This was all happening so fast, she hadn’t gotten to the part of considering regrets. If she went, and she came back in six months, so what? She’d be back in time for Christmas and maybe she’d have spent her summer by a pool trying to find out if she loved a man or not. Not to mention, the best sex of her life happening through the middle of all that. That wasn’t a bad deal, and it was hard to see a downside with it laid out that way. She breathed out and pushed from her chair. “I’m going to find Wade.”

“Did you decide to go?”

“I don’t know yet.”

Her mom leaned on the counter. “If you’re the least bit curious and tempted to go, then go and find out. There’s no reason why you can’t.”