Lost and Found (7 page)

“And you decided to stay silent and hidden for the entire time I was stripping and washing because . . .?” he asked, but he wasn’t really asking. That smirk of his gave away that he knew exactly what I’d been doing. When I didn’t answer, his smirk grew more pronounced. “Because you were enjoying the free show.” Not a smidgeon of doubt.

My eyes snapped open, and I forced them, upon penalty of plucking them out, to stay north of his neck. Not that Jesse’s face calmed my heartbeat, but at least my lady business wasn’t about to bust something.

“Not even,” I said, narrowing my eyes at him. “I was waiting patiently for you to be on your merry way.”

“Sure you were.”

“Sure I wasn’t doing whatever you so egotistically think I was doing,” I snapped back.

“Whatever, Rowen. You were checking me out so hardcore your face is still red.” Jesse took a few more steps my way. Crouching down beside me, his smirk shifted into a smile. “Mind if I join you down here?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I do,” I lied. “Besides, I don’t think there’s enough room for your big head and bigger ego down here.”

He leaned his arms onto the tops of his legs, making his shoulders roll forward. So much for keeping my eyes in the safe zone.

“Not to mention my big muscles,” he replied in that tone that was as infuriating as him smirking at me. To drive the point home, the muscles spanning his chest popped a bit more to the surface.

My throat went dry.

“If you’re going to hover a foot in front of me, put on a damn shirt or something.” I wrote off playing it cool because I’d failed miserably. Jesse knew exactly what he was doing to me, and from the look on his face, he was enjoying the way I was unraveling.

“If I put on a shirt, will you do something for me?” His eyes, for the first time since he’d kneeled beside me, shifted from my face. They skied down the plane of my back and bend of my legs. His eyes went a shade darker before he clamped them closed. “Could you sit up? Or, better yet, stand up?” When his eyes reopened, one side of his face lined when he found me in the same position. On my hands and knees. With a short skirt on and my ass practically hanging in the air.

I don’t know if I’d ever sat up so quickly in my life.

“Sorry,” I mumbled, skimming my hands down the front of my skirt before standing. I didn’t know what the big deal was. It wasn’t the first short skirt I’d ever worn, and I’m sure it wasn’t the first time I’d been in an inappropriate position wearing one, but Jesse had a way of making me more self-conscious about it. He made everything a bit more intimate.

“I guess I see why Mom’s got you hiding out back here.” He flashed me a wink as he popped up beside me. “And no need to apologize.” He grabbed a white undershirt from the top of the pile and tugged it over his head. “I wasn’t complaining.”

I rolled my eyes and gently punched him in the stomach. Yep. It was as hard as it looked.

“And here I thought you cowboys were supposed to be gentlemen.”

Jesse lifted an eyebrow. “Emphasis on the
men.
” He was tucking his shirt into his pants when he paused. “Whoa. This is the whitest, most wrinkle-free undershirt I’ve ever slipped into.”

I patted the stack of shirts and pants on the counter that I’d taken a bit more care with. The clothes labeled with a JW on the inside tags. “I might have bleached your shirts and ironed them after.”

“You . . .
ironed . . .
my shirts?”

He looked and sounded a little shocked. All I could do was nod.

“Why?”

Exactly. Why? Why had I taken such care with Jesse’s clothes? My immediate answer scared me, so I decided it was time for a conversation change. “By the way, thank you for mentioning you’re not just a ranch hand at Willow Springs, but you’re the owner’s son.”

“You didn’t ask,” he said, tucking his shirt into his pants before buttoning and buckling his pants back up. It was a relief. And yet, it wasn’t.

With Jesse properly covered again, I had an easier time keeping my eyes on his. “Are we back to that whole question and answer thing? Because I don’t think the fact that you’re a Walker is something I should have to waste a question on. That should be common knowledge. A freebie, or something.”

“A freebie?” he repeated, like he was unfamiliar with the idea.

“Yes, a freebie. Things like last names, pedigree, shoe size, et cetera, et cetera, shouldn’t have to be revealed through this sick game of Q and A you forced me into. Some pieces of information should qualify as freebies.” Crossing my arms, I leveled him with a look. “Things like your last name being Walker.”

He crossed his arms, too. “I didn’t realize this was a rule to the game I made up. My bad. It won’t happen again.” He was amused. By me or the conversation or who knows what, but I could tell from the way only one of his dimples was on display. “And you expect me to believe you would or will give me any freebies in the getting-to-know-you department? Because really, Rowen. I’ve seen brahma bulls that open up easier than you.”

I knew that was true. I had a million issues, the most apparent one being my inability to open up to others, but hearing it from Jesse still hurt like hell. In a little over twenty-four hours, he had figured that out about me.

Only because I felt a little belligerent did I snap back when I should have shut my mouth and gotten back to folding. “Oh, really? Two ton bulls who can’t talk, have kiwi-sized brains, and basically want to kill you if you come within ten feet of them open up better than I do?” I stepped into him, trying to get into his face. I stepped back when I realized just how close that put me to his mouth. “What do you want to know then, Cowboy? What are you so certain I’ve been hiding from you? What could someone like you possibly want to know about someone like me?”

The words spilled from his mouth like he’d only been waiting for me to ask. “Why are you here?”

That was quite possibly the easiest hard question to answer.

“I want to go to art school in the fall,” I said, hoping that answer would appease him. Knowing it wouldn’t.

“And what does Willow Springs have to do with art school in the fall?” He searched my face like he expected the answers to be there if he looked close enough.

I inhaled slowly to give myself a chance to put together my answer. “The school I want to go to is expensive. My mom only agreed to fund it if I came and worked here this summer.” I did an internal cartwheel; honest, yet vague. Just the way I preferred my answers.

“Why would your mom only agree to pay for school if you worked the summer here?” Jesse asked with genuine curiosity. He leaned into the island and waited for my response.

“Your dad and mom didn’t tell you why I was coming here?” I found that hard to believe.

He shrugged his shoulders. “They told the girls and me that the daughter of one of Mom’s old friends was coming to spend the summer with us. There weren’t any additional details.”

“They didn’t tell you why?” If it wasn’t for the innocence of Jesse’s expression, that would have been utterly impossible to believe.

“No,” he said with another shrug. “And I didn’t ask.”

I didn’t know what was worse: assuming Jesse knew what a bad egg I was all along, or realizing I’d have to tell him face-to-face.

Either way, I was about to find out.

“I’m here because I mess up, Jesse. I mess up a lot. So much my own mom has pretty much written me off as a lost cause. I’m a failure at pretty much everything—I barely graduated high school—and, for whatever reason, she chose Willow Springs as the place I could redeem myself and prove to her I’m not the piece of shit failure she thinks I am.” The words came out strong, but I felt anything but. Admitting that to Jesse, a person I wanted to like me, I
really
wanted to like me, made me feel weak and vulnerable.

Jesse’s expression didn’t change. His eyes didn’t leave mine. Nothing I said ruffled him. “Rowen,” he said, moving his hand toward mine like he wanted to grab it. At the last moment, he pulled back. “I’ve known you a solid day and a half, and I would swear on my life that you’re not a lost cause. Or a failure.”

I opened my mouth to interrupt.

“Or a piece of shit failure,” he said, making air quotes with one hand. “So why are you
really
here?”

Just like that, he’d moved past the whole Rowen-Sterling-Is-A-Waste-Of-Space topic. Apparently it was settled in his mind I was not the person my mom, ninety-nine percent of other people I’d come in contact with, and myself, as of late, thought I was. The only thing that mattered to him was why I was there.

“Because I don’t have any other option,” I whispered, looking away from him at last. Our conversation in the laundry room had gone about five levels too personal for my taste.

“Bullshit,” he said instantly.

That brought my attention right back to him. “Excuse me?”

“That’s not the reason you’re here,” he stated. “You don’t have any other options? Please.” He made a face and shook his head once. “Ever heard of a little thing called financial aid? How about a summer job waiting tables at one of those big city coffee shops? Oh yeah, and let’s not forget about scholarships.”

I didn’t like what he was getting at. I liked even less the way it made me rethink a bunch of things. Narrowing my eyes, I met his. “I. Didn’t. Have. Another. Option.”

“Bull. Shit.” Apparently, that was Jesse’s new favorite word. Appropriate given he spent the majority of his days up to his knees in it. “You’ve got as many options as the rest of us. You’re just choosing to ignore them for some reason.”

I’d had enough. Enough laundry room, enough Jesse, enough crippling conversation. “You’re right,” I seethed. “There is ‘some reason’ I’m here. Good for you for figuring it out. Discovery of the decade.” I clapped at him. “What other scintillating tidbits do you have for us?”

Again, Jesse’s expression didn’t change. Nothing I said or did seemed to unnerve him. “Just one more thing,” he began, looking so hard into my eyes I half expected his stare to go right through me. “The reason you’re pushing me away, and the reason you’ve probably pushed everyone else away, is also the reason you’re here.” Stepping into me, Jesse’s eyes dropped with what I guessed was sadness. “You think you deserve this. You think you deserve to be alone and suffer. You’ve convinced yourself you’re so worthless that you’ve gone to the extreme to punish yourself. You think you deserve a life of misery.”

Yeah, I was going to cry. Big, ugly tears I really didn’t want him to witness. Instead of letting myself open up that way, I did what I did best. Stepping away from him, I lowered my eyes. “Get out,” I said, my voice shaking. “And leave me alone.”

Jesse sighed, then followed the first part of my directions. After the laundry room door closed behind him, I almost got down on my hands and knees to pray to whoever and whatever that he wouldn’t follow the last part of my directions.

If a brain could shrivel up and die from too much contemplation, mine was dangerously close to living out the rest of its days as a pruney, gray raisin. I wasn’t sure how much time had passed since Jesse dropped that bomb on me, but I couldn’t stop thinking about what he’d said. How had a teenage guy figured out what I worked hard to ignore? All in the span of a couple of conversations?

I came up empty in the answer department. What was almost as frustrating as having no answers was worrying about what those answers might be. Was I just that transparent? Had everything I’d done to build the eighteen-year-old girl equivalent of the Berlin Wall been nothing more than a house of cards? Was Jesse Walker the most perceptive human being to have ever walked the face of the earth? Was he psychic?

I felt a migraine forming when the door to the laundry room opened a while later.

“Oh, honey. Have you been in here the whole time?” Rose asked, inspecting the room. Her eyes widened. “When I assigned you laundry room duty, I didn’t expect you to clean the actual room top to bottom.”

I dumped the bucket of soapy water into the sink and shrugged. “I finished up with the laundry a couple of hours ago,” I guessed. The concept of time had escaped me after Jesse left. “Sorry. I still had some energy, so I figured I’d keep going.”

Rose chuckled. “I doubt this room has been this clean since the day it was built a hundred years ago.”

I slid the bucket back beneath the sink, finally feeling tired. It had taken about thirty loads of laundry, a hardcore cleaning of an entire room, and a loaded conversation with Jesse, but exhaustion finally creeped into my veins.

“Don’t tell my mom I know how to clean. It’ll ruin her whole world outlook.”

Rose took a few steps inside the room, looking around it like she didn’t recognize it. “Speaking of your mom . . .” Nothing good could come of that opening line. “I just got off the phone with her. I guess she hasn’t heard back from you since you got in yesterday, and she was worried.”

That’s because I hit “ignore” every time one of her calls came in. “I doubt that was worry, Rose. It was probably irritation. Or annoyance. Or something more along the Rowen-is-hopeless line.”

Rose stopped in front of the island and leaned her hip into it the way Jesse had. In fact, I saw a lot of Jesse’s mannerisms in Rose. Like mother, like son. “No, it was worry. Concern. After thirty years of knowing your mom, at least give me a little credit that I’ve almost got her figured out. Your mom might act a certain way and say certain things, but she keeps her intentions hidden between the lines.” Rose paused and looked at me pointedly. “Sound like anyone else you know?”