Chapter 7

The next evening, Isaiah, Tristan and the rest of the guys trooped into Ruby’s for dinner like they always did, but this time, Aria had a heightened awareness that she’d spent the previous evening on a secret date-that-wasn’t-a-date with Isaiah. They’d connected in a way she’d never experienced. He’d made her feel important, special. Like they both belonged to something that no one else did.

When he smiled at her like he was recalling the nice things about it too, her skin prickled.

It shouldn’t feel so delicious and kind of naughty, should it?

“You gonna head over and see what the boys are in the mood for tonight?”

Aria blinked and focused on Ruby. Also known as her boss. Ruby cocked a brow and jerked her head toward the tableful of SEALs in the corner booth, her expression mildly inquisitive. In reality, that was the perpetually thirty-nine-year-old’s way of saying stop dilly-dallying and get back to work.

“Yes, ma’am. I am. Going to.”

Ruby cackled and leaned on the worn counter, forgotten coffee pot dangling from her hand. “You’ve got it way bad, don’t you honey.”

She didn’t bother to tack the question mark onto the end of that sentence since Aria’s crush on Tristan had made the gossip rounds several weeks ago. Mostly she didn’t mind the jokes and pretty well owned up to the truth because there was little point in lying about it when everyone could clearly see that she had no shame when it came to her favorite SEAL.

Except this was the one time she hadn’t been mooning over Tristan Marchande. And the one time she’d have to play it off as if Ruby had guessed one hundred percent correctly about her absentmindedness. “Sure thing. He’s a hottie, no doubt.”

No one could know that she’d enlisted Isaiah’s help. If nothing else, it didn’t feel sporting toward the bet to stack the deck, but that excuse didn’t begin to cover the other, very confusing thoughts that crowded into her brain about the man helping her. Thoughts that she couldn’t explain away. Dreams about seeing the world that she’d put aside, but he’d surfaced so easily. She’d rather not open that up for inspection to anyone just yet.

Good time to hightail it over to the corner booth.

She wound through the half-full restaurant, checking on Farmer Moon on the way and nodding at Lennie Ford, the antique store owner who took up an entire booth bench seat all by himself.

When she got there, Tristan winked and treated her to his megawatt smile, the one that usually made her weak in the knees. Today seemed to be an exception.

“Hey, there’s my best girl,” he said. “You’re looking extra lovely today. Did you do something different with your hair?”

“Not a thing.” Aria couldn’t help but return his smile despite the lack of knee-weakening behind it. Probably something was wrong with her, not him. Maybe she was coming down with a cold. “But aren’t you sweet?”

The first time they’d had this exchange, she’d nearly come out of her skin right there in the middle of Ruby’s Diner. A man like Tristan had called her lovely. Sometimes she was still surprised that her bones hadn’t melted. But then he’d said nearly the same thing with a minor variation the next day, so she got the drift. He flirted by default.

She didn’t mind. When he complimented her in that whiskey smooth voice, anything sounded nice, even on repeat. She just didn’t quite swoon over it anymore. Probably when he asked her out on a date, he’d surely find a different script. Or ditch the lines that sounded practiced and have a real conversation. Like the kind she’d had with Isaiah.

A shiver rocked her shoulders out of nowhere.

That conversation…it had been everything. Isaiah was so different than anyone she’d ever met. He’d not only had some of the same yearning she’d had as a child to get out and experience the world, he’d done it. She shouldn’t find that so fascinating. Or so blindingly attractive. She’d wanted to ask him more about the things he’d seen. Poke at his adventurous spirit and examine how he’d gotten the courage to be the one who left instead of waiting around for someone else to do it to him.

But they weren’t supposed to be learning about each other. He was helping her with Tristan. Only. She should focus on that. Studiously, she avoided Isaiah’s gaze and trained hers on Caleb instead.

“Hey, Aria,” Caleb said with a nod. “You see Havana around, you tell her I’m coming by at eight to take her out.”

“Sister’s keeper in my job description today?” she teased. “Did you lose your fiancée somewhere?”

“She’s not answering her cell phone,” he grumbled good-naturedly, scrubbing at his overgrown whiskers that her sister had told her on the sly was her favorite thing about her soon-to-be husband. “Not sure why she has the thing if she’s not going to use it.”

“Maybe she lost it,” Isaiah suggested with a light shrug, drawing her gaze automatically.

He did that kind of thing a lot—jumping in to guide the conversation toward a more positive note. Normally Aria was so focused on Tristan, she didn’t pay as much attention to anyone else, but Isaiah’s voice had been stuck in her head all day. Hearing it again took her right back to last night. Also known as the thing she’d been trying to avoid thinking about. She glanced away.

“Or refuses to be tied to her phone,” Hudson, the taciturn one of the group, said. He’d dragged a chair from another table and flipped it around to sit in it astride, a habit he’d formed the first day in Superstition Springs and had yet to change. “If so, that makes me like her even more.”

“Everyone’s well aware of your allergy to cell phones.” Caleb rolled his eyes and elbowed his brother, Rowe, who always sat so eerily still that you might wonder if he’d passed into another life right before your eyes. “Remember the time he threw mine in the Persian Gulf because I’d been arguing with the lady at the base for thirty minutes?”

“She wasn’t listening to you,” Rowe reminded him loyally. “It wasn’t your fault she couldn’t do her job. Stillwater just doesn’t like conflict.”

“That’s not true,” Hudson corrected in his lethally calm voice that gave credence to his nickname. “I don’t like conflict I can’t resolve with a Bowie knife and a locked room. That piece of garbage got chucked because it’s proven that cell phones degrade white matter in the brain and your brother has so little to spare.”

“You’re such a comedian,” Caleb said and glanced at Aria apologetically. “Sorry, they get off track too easily these days. Going soft in their old age. I’ll have the usual.”

She nodded and went around the table for the rest of the orders, skipped over Tristan’s crystalline blue eyes easily, but then somehow got tangled up in Isaiah’s unusual gaze when she got to him.

“I can’t decide,” he said with a laugh that turned his brown eye a fascinating shade. And then all at once, he slid from the booth, crowding into her space. “Let me walk with you back to the counter while I think about it. That way I won’t hold up everyone else’s food.”

She had no choice but to do exactly as he’d outlined, particularly since the other four men promptly forgot her existence in favor of the deck of cards Caleb had just pulled out. They played Hearts almost every night. Why, when Caleb always won, she hadn’t yet figured out.

“You never have trouble deciding,” she said out of the corner of her mouth and nearly yelped when Isaiah’s arm brushed hers, sensitizing it almost beyond bearing. Automatically, she covered the area with her palm, but that only captured the heat that had gathered there.

“I’m not really having trouble,” he admitted without shame, his voice skimming through her to fill all the emptiness inside, the same way it had last night. “You can get me a hamburger and fries.”

Isaiah slid into one of the swivel chairs at the lunch counter as Aria skirted it to take her customary place behind the expanse of Formica, praying it seemed normal and not like an escape. With half of her attention on the weird prickly thing going on with her skin, she went to work writing up the corner table’s order on the pad of paper, then handed the slip to Ruby through the window to the kitchen.

“I wanted to talk to you about Tristan,” he said as soon as she turned back to face him. Which she’d dragged out an extra five seconds in hopes of settling her suddenly jumpy nerves. “I have a plan that isn’t fit for prying ears.”

Sounded like a really good subject change that she could latch on to. The sooner she got Tristan to ask her out, the sooner she could forget how much she wanted to hang out with Isaiah on the roof again instead. That was safe. A known.

She needed to be bold if she hoped to change the way her sisters thought about her. Bold like the heroines of her favorite books. It had been a long time since she’d thought about how inspiring those girls had always been, doing their own thing and setting off on adventures. Isaiah had awoken that too.

“Do tell.”

“You and Cassidy come by the barn tomorrow to work on the interior stuff. I’m going to suggest we cut out early and go to the movies in Bastrop. It’ll be the perfect opportunity to hang out with Tristan, no strings. You can talk to him and I’ll be there to make sure everything goes smoothly.”

It sounded perfect. She and Isaiah could wrangle Tristan into a double date that he wouldn’t even label as such and move forward with this bet at the same time. Isaiah and Cassidy would have an opportunity to get closer too, a bonus he’d no doubt considered now that he was all clued in that she had a thing for him.

A little too perfect. Aria hated the whole idea.

What was wrong with Isaiah and Cassidy together? Nothing. And everything.

“The point was to get him to ask me out,” she reminded him and tried to make the squicky feeling in her stomach go away.

“I know. How is he going to do that without a chance to see you in a casual setting? Here and at the barn, you’re always working. This way, we’ll all be relaxed, and I’ll be there to ask leading questions so he can get to know you a little. If nothing else, it’s a chance to get out of town.” He eyed her suspiciously. “Why don’t you sound thrilled with this?”

Because…she didn’t know why. It sounded great, like an adventure. He’d been listening to her last night, well enough to have devised a plan he thought she’d like. It couldn’t have been an accident that he’d come up with this idea after hearing that she felt kind of stuck here.

That was part of the problem. She might want to get out of this place and see things, but she had responsibilities. Serenity needed her, for one, and so did Ruby. Aria didn’t get to jet off the moment things got rough, like her sisters had done. “I have to be here early tomorrow.”

“So we’ll go the next day. Unless you flat don’t want to. This is totally your call.”

Ugh, she was being silly. Which made no sense when she’d asked Isaiah for help. Here he was, delivering on his promise in a huge way. And in return, she could finagle a way for Cassidy and Isaiah to have some alone time, even though he’d brushed off her help, probably because he was nice enough to not care about reciprocation. She cared though. It was only fair that he get something for his trouble. There was no reason to feel weird about helping Cassidy get on the radar of a great guy, same as it wasn’t weird for Isaiah to help her with Tristan.

Instead of taking inspiration from the characters in books, this was her chance to be like Isaiah, to move forward instead waiting around for things to happen, like the inevitable round of people who mattered to her leaving again. “Okay. Thanks. It’s a good plan.”

“Great. Don’t forget to wear your prettiest dress,” Isaiah said, which got stuck in her craw sideways, probably because she was already out of sorts and a comment like that didn’t help.

“Why, because he can’t like me as is?” she shot back. “I’m not the dress up type.”

Isaiah held up his hands, as if to say I surrender. “Then wear an ugly dress. Or don’t wear a dress at all. You’re going to slay him no matter what you put on because you’re an amazing woman.”

“You’re just saying that,” she mumbled strictly because her brain had turned into oatmeal. That was the first time a man had called her amazing with so much sincerity. Tristan had said something like that once after she’d brought him a plate of fried chicken, but it had a lot more oomph coming from a man who didn’t treat flirting like an Olympic sport.

“I’m not,” he insisted. “You’re fearless, you have impeccable taste in music and your hair reminds me of a sunrise. What’s not to like?”

Geez. Heat climbed through her cheeks and she ducked her head, busying herself with wiping away invisible crumbs on the counter. What was she supposed to say to that? Thank you. She should say thank you.

The words got stuck in her throat. No one had ever said anything nice about her hair color, which was a washed-out shade of red. Havana had gotten their mother’s bright red and Ember’s had come out this gorgeous strawberry gold that was a perfect mix of their mother’s and father’s colors.

Her hair reminded Isaiah of sunrise, when the sky was full of more subtle colors. That was a perfect, wonderful way to say it wasn’t splashy like her sisters’, but still nice.

“Sorry,” she croaked. “I don’t handle compliments well.”

“You don’t say. Don’t worry,” he told her with a smile. “I’m here for you. I’ll keep saying things like that so you can get used to it. Helps that it’s nothing but truth.”

Isaiah pushed away from the counter and strolled back to his friends with his hands stuck in his back pockets as if nothing monumental had happened. Which from his perspective, was true. She was the one still standing there like she’d been turned to stone.

While her body felt frozen in place, her brain seethed with stuff she couldn’t sort fast enough. She was such a dork around Isaiah, arguing with him about going to the movies and whether he’d inadvertently tried to push a makeover on her. That’s why he’d taken off so quickly. Why would he stick around? Why would anyone? She certainly hadn’t been enough to keep her sister’s home, and nothing had changed.

That’s why it was so important to prove she could accomplish something noteworthy like a date with Tristan. It was a message to herself about her own self-worth. And she couldn’t even do a simple thing like take a compliment from a man. She had a lot of work to do to earn this.