LITMIR.BIZ

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candy bowl in front of her, a wide grin on her face. Eli was a step behind her looking slightly abashed. Probably because his fiancée was breaking sacred football laws by bringing the colors of an opposing team onto hallowed ground.

      But she did so every week. And every week, Connor made a show of not eating the candy in the bowl. Eli didn’t eat it either but didn’t make a big deal out of it. While Jack ate half of it without giving a crap what anyone thought. Which summed them all up, really.

      Kate always ate the candy, too. If only because she didn’t see the point in politicizing sugar.

      “Fish and chips!” Sadie exclaimed. “That makes a nice change from pizza. And pie!”

      “The feast is indeed bountiful tonight,” Liss said, eyeing the pie. “We have Kate to thank for that.”

      “Excuse me,” Jack said. “I brought the pie. I will have you all know that Katie has a lemon meringue pie hidden back in her cabin. And she did not bring it to share with you.”

      Kate lifted her hand to smack Jack on the shoulder, and he caught her wrist. Her heart hit the back of her breastbone so hard she was afraid it might have exploded on contact. His hand was so big his fingers wrapped all the way around her arm, holding her tight, a rash of heat breaking out from that point of contact outward.

      Her eyes clashed with his, and the sharp remark she’d been about to spit out evaporated on her lips.

      She tugged her wrist out of his hold, fighting the urge to rub away the impression of his touch with her other hand. “I didn’t bring it because I don’t want to share my pie with you,” she said, looking at Jack.

      “Selfish pie hoarder,” he said, grinning at her in that easy manner of his.

      And her annoyance tripled. Because him grabbing her wrist was a whole event for her body. And he was completely unaffected. That touch had been like grabbing ahold of an electric fence. On her end. Obviously, it hadn’t been the same for him.

       Why would it be? It shouldn’t be that way for you.

       Yeah, no shit.

      “I am not.” And she cursed her hot cheeks and her lack of snappy remark.

      “I might have to side with Jack on this one,” Liss said, her tone apologetic. “Or maybe I’m just on the side of pie.”

      “Traitor,” Kate mumbled.

      “Though, on the subject of pies,” Jack said, turning his focus to Sadie, “we were trying to figure out if there was something that could be done to help bolster Alison’s business.”

      “Hmm.” Sadie piled food on her plate and sat down, Eli taking a seat beside her. “I’ll have to scheme on that for a while.”

      “You have to watch her. She’s a champion schemer,” Eli said.

      “The championest.” Sadie smiled broadly.

      “Scheme away,” Jack said.

      “You don’t have to tell her to scheme,” Eli said. “She can’t stop scheming. This is how I ended up with an annual Fourth of July barbecue on my property.”

      “I’m delightful.” Sadie nodded, the expression on her face comically serious.

      “She is,” Eli agreed.

      “Are we going to play cards?” Kate asked.

      “So impatient to lose all of your money,” Jack said.

      This was a little more normal. A more typical level of Jack harassing her.

      “To me,” Sadie said, her grin turning feral. Sadie, it turned out, was a very good poker player for all her wide-blue-eyed protestations to the contrary when she first joined their weekly games.

      Kate opted to stay silent, continuing on that way while the cards were dealt. And she was dealt a very good hand. She bit the inside of her cheek to keep her expression steady. Sadie was cocky. Jack was cockier. And she was going to take their money.

      By the end of the night Kate had earned several profane nicknames and the contents of everyone’s wallets. She leaned back in her chair, pulling the coins toward her. “Listen to that. I’m going back home, dumping all this on the floor and swimming in it like Scrooge McDuck.”

      “No diving in headfirst. That’s a sure way to spinal trauma. It isn’t that deep of a pool,” Connor said.

      “Deeper than what you have. I have all your monies.” She added a fake cackle for a little bit of dramatics.

      “Then I will keep all the pie,” Liss said.

      “That’s my pie,” Jack said.

      “You have to stay in fighting form, Monaghan. Your bar hookups won’t be so easy if you lose your six-pack,” Liss said cheerfully.

      “I do enough work on the ranch every day to live on pies and still keep my six-pack, thank you very much.”

      “You aren’t getting any younger,” Sadie said.

      The conversation was going into uncomfortable territory as far as Kate was concerned. Really, on all fronts it was getting to an awkward place. Jack and sex. Jack’s abs. Yikes.

      “I would return volley,” Jack said, “but I’m too much of a gentleman to comment on a lady’s age.”

      “Gentleman, huh?” Eli asked. “Of all the things you’ve been accused of being, I doubt that’s one of them.”

      Jack squinted and held up his hand, pretending to count on his fingers. “Yeah, no. There have been a lot of things, but not that one.”

      “Anyway,” she said, unable to help herself, “you comment on my age all the time.”

      “I said I never commented on a lady’s age, Katie.”

      She snorted. “I am a lady, asswipe.”

      “I don’t know how I missed it,” he said, leaning back in his chair, his grin turning wicked.

      For some reason that comment was the last straw. “Okay, hate to cut this short, but I have an early morning tomorrow.” That was not strictly true. It was an optional early morning since she intended to get up and spend some time with Roo. “And I will be stopping by The Grind to buy a very expensive coffee with the money I won from you.”

      Jack stood, putting his hands behind his head and stretching. “I’ll walk you out. I have an early morning, too, so I better get going.”

      Dammit. He didn’t seem to understand that she was beating a hasty retreat in part to get away from him. Because the Weird Jack Stuff was a little more elevated today than normal. It had something to do with overexposure to him. She needed to go home, be by herself, scrub him off her skin in a hot shower so she could hit the reset button on her interactions with him.

      She felt as if she had to do that more often lately than she had ever had to do in the past.

      The thing was, she liked Jack. In that way you could like a guy who was basically an extra obnoxious older brother who didn’t share genetic material with you. She liked it when he came to poker night. She liked it when he came into the store. But at the end of it she was always left feeling...agitated.

      And it had created this very strange cycle. Hoping she would see Jack, seeing Jack, being pissed that she had seen Jack. And on and on it went.

      “Bye,” she said.

      She picked up her newly filled change bag and started to edge out of the room. She heard heavy footsteps behind her, and without looking she knew it was Jack. Well, she knew it was Jack partly because he had said he would walk her out.

      And partly because the hair on the back of her neck was standing on end. That was another weird Jack thing.

      She opened the front door and

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