LITMIR.BIZ

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waited.

      Christine expelled a weary sigh and rose to her feet. “Okay. The problem,” she sputtered, using Alison’s words, “is that he’s just making fun of me by inviting me to the dance. He’s always making fun of me. He taunts and teases and plays on the fact that I had a little crush on him once—a looonnnggg time ago—and he keeps exploiting it. You saw how he was at the auction. He didn’t want that box for any reason other than because I wanted it. And he didn’t ask me to the ball for any other reason than to mock me.”

      She tugged down her T-shirt, then forked her fingers through her ponytail, getting mad all over again just thinking about it. “He just loves to push my buttons. I’m getting tired of it.”

      “I think it’s kind of cute,” Alison said, then laughed when Christine threw her a disbelieving look. “Well, I do. Because it’s all in fun and what it really means is that he has a thing for you.”

      Christine grunted. “It means that he’s childish and sophomoric. And he doesn’t have a thing for me. I mean, look at me—I’m as far from his type as a male stripper is from mine. He’s just…ornery. The man doesn’t have a sincere bone in his body. Everything’s a joke with him.”

      “Everything?”

      She thought for a moment. “Okay. For instance—he got hurt badly in an oil-well fire five years ago. Smoke and fire inhalation did some heavy-duty damage to his lungs and he spent over a month in the hospital. I was the unlucky one on duty the night they brought him in and I ended up spending a lot of time with him over the course of his recovery.”

      When some other class members walked in, Christine lowered her voice because she didn’t want them to overhear her. And she really didn’t want to relive those days in a play-by-play for Alison.

      That didn’t stop her from thinking about it, though. Jacob Thorne had been one sick puppy. She’d been so worried for him, while he’d been brave and determined to recover and joked his way through the pain and the fear of his prognosis. She’d admired him for it…then formed that unfortunate crush.

      She did not admire him for it now. Neither did she have a crush on him. Not anymore.

      “Anyway, a couple of weeks into his treatment his twin brother, Connor, came to visit him. His identical twin,” she added to make sure Alison understood. “Long story short, they pulled a switch on me so Jacob—the evil twin—could sneak out of the hospital and go down to the Cattleman’s Club for a beer. The end result was that I actually gave a respiratory therapy session to the wrong man!”

      She got angry all over again just thinking about it. “He could have caused himself a serious setback pulling a reckless stunt like that.”

      Alison looked at her as if she was waiting for the punch line. Finally she said, “That’s it? That’s why you don’t like him? The poor guy had been stuck in a hospital bed, sick as a dog. A cold beer and some male company sounded good to him so he pulled a fast one on you to indulge in a tiny little creature comfort?”

      “I don’t like him,” Christine restated, not liking that she felt defensive again, “because he doesn’t get it. He doesn’t get it that life is not one big lark. Life is serious. Life is real. It’s not a game, and you can’t just play your way through it the way he does.”

      For the first time Alison looked at her with no trace of humor. And it was then that Christine realized tears had pooled in her eyes. Embarrassed, she quickly blinked them back.

       “Oh, sweetie.” Alison reached out, touched her hand. “What happened to you?”

      Instantly on edge, Christine pulled her hand away. She wasn’t comfortable with touching, even though Alison’s touch held compassion and concern—something entirely different than the hard hands that had touched her in anger when she was a child. “I—I don’t know what you mean.”

      “I mean, what happened to you that made you decide life had to be all about work and duty with no room for fun?” Alison pressed gently.

      Fortunately for Christina, Mark Hartman, Alison’s boss—who was also the self-defense class’s instructor and another Texas Cattleman’s Club member like Jacob—entered the room at that very moment.

      His appearance and the necessity to get down to business saved Christine from opening up like a faucet and spilling out her sordid history to this woman whose insight and empathy had almost broken through defenses she’d kept shored up her entire life.

      Christine was appalled with herself when she realized her eyes still stung with tears. She blinked them back and, giving Alison an apologetic look, moved away from her and onto her spot on the practice mat. Christine wished she could talk to her friend about her past. But she couldn’t. Not yet.

      For the rest of the class she went through the self-defense positions like an automaton, knowing the moves as well as she knew the secret she’d kept from anyone who had ever gotten too close.

       She had good reason to know that life was not fun and games. Life was a father who had beaten her and her mother and a mother who drank to escape the pain. Christine hadn’t had any escape—only fear—until she’d turned eighteen and finally had been able to run. She’d run as far away as she could from that horrible existence and the memories that sometimes still woke her, trembling, in the night.

      That’s what had happened to her, she thought as she showered in the locker room later. That’s why she sometimes worked double shifts at the hospital, why she took her job as a respiratory therapist so seriously and why she also volunteered to work for the Historical Society. She never wanted to have to depend on anyone but herself. Her work at the hospital gave her that self-sufficiency. Her volunteer work at the Historical Society gave her a sense of community.

      Both also gave her something else—something she hadn’t expected and hadn’t known she’d needed—respectability. Acceptance. A place to belong.

      She protected those hard-earned parts of her life. Held them close—held herself aloof to make sure no one got close enough to discover that inside her, there were still strong echoes of a lost and helpless little girl who had always thought she wasn’t good enough for her own father to love her. For her own mother to protect her.

      She never wanted to feel that sense of helplessness or hopelessness again. Respectability, security and safety. She’d needed them most as a child but had never received them. As an adult, she’d earned them and she never took them for granted.

      Life was work. Life was hard. How many times had her father driven that point home? Often enough that she’d absorbed it along with the blows from the back of his hand.

      Yeah, she thought pragmatically. Life was hard. But life was also precious.

      And that’s why she didn’t like Jake Thorne, with his life-is-a-lark attitude and his damn-the-torpedoes grin. He took everything for granted. So much so that it puzzled her how someone like him had gotten invited to join the Cattleman’s Club—a club that was about duty and honor and public service. And if some of the rumors were to be believed, it was also a club where the members were covertly active in thwarting any number of horrible situations. In fact, she’d heard specific rumors that the club had been instrumental in breaking up a blackmarket baby network and once had prevented a bloody overthrow of a small European principality. Jacob Thorne just didn’t seem to fit the Cattleman’s profile.

      Fun and games. That seemed to be as deep as he got. She didn’t know how to react around someone who was always smiling and joking. The way he’d joked with her the other night.

      “Him and his condition,” she sputtered under her breath, remembering how he’d told her she could have the saddlebags if she met his condition.

      Nothing had changed there, she admitted, as with a brief hug she begged off Alison’s offer to stop at the Royal Diner for a diet soda that was really a ruse to get her to talk. Christine wasn’t ready to confide that part of her life with Alison, although she’d come as close to telling

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