“This is nothing compared to in another hour or so.”
“You’re lucky. It’s so beautiful out here.”
“I loved Seattle and the ocean, but you’re right. It is beautiful here. I guess I never appreciated it until I had to return.”
“Had to?”
I’d rather go back to kissing Kate, but something about her makes me want to open up to her more. She might be a princess who has expensive tastes and who doesn’t actually work for a living like the rest of us, but she isn’t spoiled in the way my ex was. Samantha would have sent someone to pack up the house and clean Scoundrel and Lady’s stable.
Kate is doing both without a single complaint.
“My grandfather figured out a way to force me to return after I refused to talk to him for years,” I explain. “If my brothers wanted to keep the ranch, I had to return to Copper Creek upon his death and help run it. While I might have disliked him for what he did to me growing up, I couldn’t turn my back on my brothers just to spite him.”
“So you returned home. Are you sorry that you did?”
I shake my head. “Not at all. My brothers are here, and I have some pretty great friends here, too. And unlike before, I’m involved with running the ranch. Before I left and experienced big city life, I didn’t want to be stuck in a small town. But now I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. I guess it took me living somewhere else to appreciate this town and the ranch.”
“That makes sense. And you do have some pretty great friends. I really like them.”
“They seem to like you, too.…So what about you? What are your friends like in Beverly Hills?” I hope the rest of them are better than her best friend. What kind of friend sleeps with her best friend’s boyfriend?
“They’re a lot like me. They like to shop on Rodeo Drive. They like to party, which I don’t do anymore.” A raw emotion flickers on her face but it’s gone so quickly, I probably just imagined it.
“Why not?”
“My leg. It’s not a huge fan of dancing. And since partying mostly involved dancing for us, I had to step away from it.”
“Do you miss it?”
She thinks about it for several seconds. “Not really. We used to drink a lot when my friends and I partied. I don’t miss that. And I don’t miss the drugs.”
I stop. “You used to do drugs?” She doesn’t seem the type.
She shakes her head. “I never did, but it was around. I wasn’t even interested in trying them. Some of my friends couldn’t say the same. They associated partying with drugs.
“I was given addictive painkillers after the accident, while I was in a coma. But I refused them once I was able to. It was tough at first, but I didn’t want to risk a long-term addiction.”
“You were in a coma?”
“Yep, for two weeks after the accident that injured my leg. That’s why as bad as my ex-boyfriend’s betrayal was, it’s nothing compared to recovering from the accident.”
Kate shares about her friends, but the more she tells me about them, the more I don’t like them. While Kate seems to be blind to their flaws, they sound like a bunch of stuck-up, privileged bitches who care mostly about themselves.
They sound like Samantha’s kinfolk—once I saw her for who she really was.
The only friend who sounded like a decent person was Kate’s cousin, who died of leukemia when they were kids. Kate becomes animated when she talks about her.
We return to where we climbed the fence, and I help her over. This time she succeeds without any issues, and we start walking toward the house.
At one point she pauses and points to the sky. “Oh, look, a shooting star.”
Her excitement at seeing it makes me grin. She’s like Deacon when he learns I’m taking him out for ice cream.
“Did you make a wish?” she asks.
“I don’t think wishing on a shooting star actually works.”
“Oh, hush. Of course it does. It’s in all the fairy tales, so it must be true.” Her tone contains a hint of her big, gorgeous smile.
