“All right,” he drawled, easily stepping past her through the enormously wide doorway. Ginny closed the door as he picked up all three dogs, chuckling as they licked his face and neck. He’d come to pick her up at this monstrosity of a house before, and he seemed fairly comfortable here.
Comfortable enough to take the wiggly dogs into the living room and sit down on the couch with them, still talking to them in a low voice and letting them act like psychos as they all tried to get him to rub them first.
Ginny quietly slipped upstairs, her mind racing. In her bedroom, she pulled her phone from the pocket that had been sewed in the dress right above her heartbeat and quickly tapped to call Olli.
“Hey,” Olli said, her voice bright. Noise in the background indicated she was at a party of her own. Of course she was. The Chappells were having their big family get-together tonight. Cayden hadn’t invited her to it, but he’d said he’d had to work some serious magic to get out of attending.
He claimed to have a mother as intense as Ginny’s, but she knew that wasn’t true. Wendy Winters was a special breed of intense, even when she tried not to be.
“What’s going on?” Olli asked. “Aren’t you at your company party tonight?”
“In a few minutes,” Ginny said. “I need your help for a second.”
“No problem. They’re just arguing about how often they used to go to some fishing hole.”
Ginny could hear Olli rolling her eyes in her voice, and she smiled. “I’ve just realized that I’ve been pretending with Cayden. It’s no wonder he hasn’t kissed me yet.” She stepped over to her vanity and picked up the bottle of perfume Olli had given her last week. She hadn’t been out with Cayden since then, so she hadn’t used it.
“You’ve got the perfume on, right?” Olli asked.
“I forgot,” Ginny admitted. “I told him I wasn’t quite ready, and I came upstairs. We’re going to be late now, and I just don’t care.”
She turned away from the mirror, because she didn’t want to see her unhappiness. The way it coursed through her whole body was debilitating enough.
“Ginny,” Olli said quietly. “When are you going to tell your mother you need a break?”
“I’m going to get one,” Ginny said. “The moment the clock ticks to twelve-oh-one on January first.” She honestly wondered if she’d make it that long, and she told herself it was only one more week.
Just one. She could do it.
“Just two sprays,” Olli said, not calling Ginny on the fact that there was literally no break in sight for someone in her position. “Into the air, remember? Then you stand there and let it settle into your hair. One big spray in front of you, and you step through it.”
Ginny did what her best friend said, envisioning the how-to videos Olli had been working on with Renlund United. She’d won a major grant with the massive home goods and distribution company, and she was going to single-handedly change how and when women wore perfume, one spritz at a time.
“Okay,” Olli said. “Now, I want you to go downstairs and tell Cayden what you just told me.”
“Which part?”
“The part where you’ve been pretending. Tell him you don’t want to pretend, and you’d love to have him over for dinner, just the two of you.”
“I can’t,” Ginny heard herself saying.
“Of course you can.” Olli gave a loud laugh. “Ginny, you command a governing board of fifteen. How many of them are you afraid of?”
“None.”
“Then why are you afraid of one cowboy?”
“I’m not afraid.” Another lie. Another thing she hadn’t known until that moment.
“I have to go, but I want you to text me on the way to the event and let me know if you did it or if you chickened out.” Olli said something to someone else as she hung up, and Ginny looked at the bottle of perfume in her hand.
One more spray wouldn’t hurt, and she committed what Olli called the cardinal sin and sprayed it directly onto the skin along her throat.
Downstairs, she found Cayden standing in front of the bulletin board where Ginny tacked all of her nieces’ and nephews’ artwork, cards, little gifts, and anything else they gave her that she could put on the wall.
She stepped next to him, the hint of his cologne touching her nose and setting her desire on fire. She focused on Clara’s note and pointed to it. “This was her first attempt at writing cursive.” She smiled fondly at the joined letters.
“It’s great,” Cayden said. “How many nieces and nephews do you have?”