“Bubba was out of here hours ago,” Garrett said. Lily didn’t know whether he’d read her thoughts or her eyes. “Chelsea, is it all right to call him Bubba when he’s not here?”
“I don’t think there are rules,” she said.
Garrett shrugged. “He was all worked up about the bank and the cantina.” He put three sausage patties onto his plate. Chelsea reached out her fork and took two of them back. He never missed a beat in his conversation. “He said to tell you that you’re brilliant, and he’ll return your tablet when he sees you.”
Chelsea said, “Brilliant, huh? What’s that about?”
“All I did was put everything we’ve talked about for the cantina into a presentation for him to show the bank.” Then, smiling, she said. “It was kind of cool. Animated and all.”
She took a cinnamon roll and looked at her coffee.
Reading her face, Chelsea said, “You want a travel mug for that?”
“She sure does,” Hyram said. “Here we waited breakfast, and she’s gonna take it to go.”
“I choose to believe she did it for me,” Garrett said, reaching for one of the sausages his wife had stolen. She slapped his hand, then rolled her eyes and let him have it.
Hyram said, “Take two of those cinnamon buns, honey. They were still in the oven when Ethan left so he didn’t get one.” He put extra emphasis on the name with a make-believe-scowl at Garrett.
Garrett shrugged. “Oh, sure, easy for you to say. He’s always been Ethan to you.”
“He’ll always be Bubba in our hearts,” Chelsea said. She handed Lily two freshly filled travel mugs and put two oversized, glaze-dripping cinnamon buns into the big plasticware bowl she’d brought in from the kitchen. “Make sure I get that dish back,” she said. Then she shot Garrett a horrified look and said, “Ohmygosh, I’m old!”
“No, you’re not,” Lily said. “I’m the same way with my plasticware.”
“Me, too,” her father called out. “But I’m also old.”
“And I’m…the only one at the table without an opinion on plasticware,” Garrett said.
Lily blew them all a kiss, headed out to her car, drove toward Quinn proper, and straight on through to Mad Bull’s Bend. She didn’t bother with the highway. It was too nice a day. She drove the back roads with her windows down and flipped on the radio.
A familiar voice filled the car. Ethan’s voice, crooning his heart out in that lonely, longing song that had made her fall in love with Quinn before she’d ever seen it. “Home.” She smiled and let the notes and his deep, rich tone wrap around her, and she sang along, but softly so she could still hear him. She even added a little harmony, and wondered why tears sprang to her eyes when he sang the final lines,
Land of my biography
Too good for the likes of me
In my dreams, I’ll always be
Home
Her chest swelled with emotion. And more, a niggling in her mind that he really meant it. Ethan Brand thought Quinn, Texas was too good for him. He thought his family was too good for him. He thought she was too good for him, too.
The final note died and the DJ said, “That was Ethan Brand, roaring back onto the scene with a just dropped runaway hit that’s already burning up the charts, ‘Home.’”
An ad came on, so she lowered the volume. Runaway hit? Climbing the charts? Ethan hadn’t mentioned it. Though, obviously, they’d been focused been on other topics. Still, this was huge. Did he even know?
Chapter Thirteen
Lily drove into Mad Bull’s Bend the back way, so she had to cross the bridge. She looked down over, wondering if she could pick out the spot downstream where she and Ethan had been all tangled up in each other and in bliss. A knot of longing formed in the pit of her stomach, and a delicious shiver danced up her spine.
Minutes later, she was pulling into the cantina’s parking lot, surprised to see multiple vehicles already there. “Samwell Beckett General Contracting” was painted on the sides of three of them. She got out and made her way among the workers, who noticed her—some more than others—some with big, friendly smiles and hardhats coming off. She smiled back and looked around until she spotted Ethan.
He saw her at the same time and came her way, grabbing her arms when he reached her. “I took that presentation with me to the bank. They approved the financing in like ten minutes.”
“They would have anyway, Ethan. You’re a Brand.”
He barely paused in his enthusiasm. “Then I called Burdick and told him he had the job. I also hired the electrician, and the plumber-slash-water-feature guy and told them they could start today.
