Page 25 of Call Me Yours (Lodestar Ranch #4)

CHLOE

Chloe

Anyone want to blow off sewing circle tomorrow and help a friend pack up all her worldly goods? (It’s me. I’m the friend.)

Hannah

You’re moving?? We’re not going to be neighbors anymore?

James

What happened? I thought you loved the bungalow and you were going to ask for a two-year lease this time.

Essie

Chloe Adams, I know you’re not telling us over text that you’re leaving Aspen Springs!

Janie

Where are you going?

Chloe

I’ll tell you everything tomorrow, I promise. This is an in-person kind of conversation.

“Oh, my god.” James stepped over the threshold and looked around my disheveled home with wide eyes. “You’re actually moving. I kind of thought you were teasing us, but no. You’re really doing it.”

I blew a lock of hair out of my eyes, dumped the armload of sheets and towels into the open box, and straightened. “I’m really doing it,” I confirmed.

“Tell me everything.”

Oh, shit.

I had asked James to come over twenty minutes before everyone else so that I could tell her alone.

Essie, Hannah, Janie—they all had strong opinions about Steven, but James was the one I was really worried about.

Radish was literally eating my brain cells.

That was the only reasonable explanation for how I could have said yes to sharing a roof with the man who had gotten my best friend bucked into a fence before talking it over with her.

I had to tell her. A tiny, cowardly part of me briefly considered not telling anyone.

The move was temporary, after all. Maybe I’d only have to live with Steven for a month, and then a perfectly priced, two-bedroom house would miraculously fall into my lap.

But I knew that wasn’t going to happen. More than likely, I wouldn’t find anything until the summer.

Anyway, I believed that if you had to keep a secret from a friend, that meant either they weren’t really a good friend, or you were doing shit you knew was wrong.

James was a good friend. Moving in with her worst enemy?

That made me a bad friend, I couldn’t deny that, no matter how good my reasons were.

I just hoped it didn’t make me an ex -friend.

I had to tell her. I knew that. It was just so dang hard.

“Bedroom,” I said. “I’ll tell you all about it while I clean out my closet.”

She followed me into the bedroom where I pulled my suitcase from the closet and tossed it onto the bed. “So, first of all, I’m moving because I have to.” I told her about Miriam’s daughter while I unzipped the suitcase and flipped it open.

James made a sympathetic sound. “That sucks. I feel bad for everyone involved, but especially you.” Her forehead pinched with obvious worry.

“It’s not like Aspen Springs has an abundance of housing options.

This is a ranching town. What are you going to do?

Are you going to have to move to the city? ”

“No, I…I found a place. Not in town, but close by.” I stared unseeingly at the contents of my underwear drawer.

I needed to reserve a week’s worth of clothes to hold me until I was fully moved into Steven’s house—everything else was going in boxes—but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out how much underwear that meant.

“Chloe,” James said softly, like she knew I was on the cusp of a minor meltdown. “How can I help? Put me to work.”

But I couldn’t let her lift a finger with the weight of my lies sitting on my chest. I shook my head. “Let me tell you first. Then…we’ll see what you want to do.”

James toed off her sneakers and sat on the bed cross-legged. “Okay. Let’s hear it.”

“I don’t know where to start.” I scooped up the entire drawer’s worth of socks and underwear and dropped everything into the suitcase. Better to be prepared.

“Start with now. Where are you moving?”

Here we go.

“I’m moving in with Steven McAllister.” I pushed the words out and backed up a step like I had tossed a grenade.

James snorted. “Haha, Chloe. Very funny. Now tell me what’s really going on.” She looked at me. I looked back. Her eyes widened. “Oh, shit…you’re serious? But you…you hate him, Chloe.” That was so like James, to think about my feelings before her own. “Are you—holy shit, are you dating ?”

“No!” I said, the word coming out louder than I intended. “ No . He’s…I don’t know what he is, to be honest. We’re not friends, exactly. He’s just always around.” Getting me food. Making me take a pregnancy test. Holding my hand during a sonogram. I shook my head. “I can’t explain it.”

“Okay. Okay. Okay,” James chanted, like she believed that if she said it enough, she could magically make it true. “Start from the beginning.”

I tilted my head back to contemplate the ceiling. What was the beginning? Was it before James’s accident, when I thought maybe he might be worth talking to? Or was it the first time he walked into Jo’s after James’s accident and I told him to leave? “So there was this pig…”

James was quiet while I told her all of it. Rescuing Junior, the 3 a.m. conversations, finding out he was working with my dad, the pregnancy test and doctor’s appointment, and then how he offered to let me stay with him.

Her silence held for a long moment after I stopped talking. I waited, my heart in my throat.

“So…you don’t hate him?” she asked finally.

“I…” I blew out a long breath. “I hate what he did to you. That’s the same thing, isn’t it?”

“Honestly, I don’t know. People make mistakes. What he did was terrible, and he can’t take it back, so now what is he supposed to do? Yeet himself off a cliff?”

“I’m not opposed to that idea,” I said reflexively. My chest tightened and I frowned. Apparently I was opposed to Steven yeeting himself off a cliff. When had that changed?

James squeezed my hand. “You don’t have to hate him on my behalf, Chloe,” she said gently. “He’s giving you a place to stay. Do what you need to do to take care of yourself and your baby.”

I worried my lip. “But Adam…”

“Yeah.” James sighed. “That’s a problem. Adam isn’t going to forgive or forget. I can’t…He would be furious if he found out I was anywhere near Steven, and quite frankly, I don’t want to be near him. I’m not going to waste my time hating him, but I’m not hanging out at his house, either.”

A big, fat tear rolled down my cheek. “It’s just until I can find something permanent. I can go to you at Lodestar. We can still do the sewing circle together, too, right?”

“Of course.” James pulled me into a fierce hug. “I’m going to be your baby’s favorite godmother. We’re friends. Steven won’t change that.”

“It’s temporary,” I whispered again, snuffling into my sleeve. “I’ll find a place of my own.”

“It’s going to be okay, Chloe. I promise.”

I wanted to believe her, but right now, nothing felt okay at all.

I officially moved to Steven’s the following Sunday. It took all morning and a good chunk of the afternoon, but I got it done with the help of my friends. Janie, Essie, and Hannah—not James, for obvious reasons—had each loaded up their cars with boxes.

Things had been…tense…between my friends and Steven.

Essie, being Essie, had deliberately shoulder checked him more than once.

To his credit, Steven had simply apologized for being in her way, even though we all knew she had gone out of her way to bump him, but I saw the muscle flicker in his jaw each time.

This is temporary , I reminded myself. Steven wasn’t my boyfriend. They didn’t have to get along or like each other. They just needed to be minimally civil for a couple months. Surely everyone could do that, right?

Ellis, Garret, and Cole claimed the bigger furniture I couldn’t take with me, like the couch and dining room table, on the agreement that they would return them when I found a place of my own.

It had been a little awkward keeping my pregnancy a secret, and once I almost let it slip when Steven wouldn’t let me carry a box of books to my car.

“Trust me,” Garret had said as he and Cole went by with the couch. “She’s stronger than she looks.”

“Don’t even think about it, princess,” Steven growled in my ear. “If you carry that box, then I’m carrying you.”

It had to be the pregnancy hormones that made me feel light-headed and flustered at the mental image of Steven carrying me out of there with a box of books in my arms.

When the last box had been unloaded and my friends and family were gone, I collapsed onto the couch with a groan. “I’m going to be so sore at Jo’s tomorrow. It will be a miracle if I can steam the milk.”

“You work at Jo’s?” Amy asked. She was star-fished on the floor, as worn out as I was. Steven’s little sister had truly busted her ass for me today and I was grateful.

I nodded. “For about the last four years or so.”

“Interesting. Steven has a huge crush on a girl there. They have this whole enemies-to-lovers thing going on, except they haven’t become lovers yet. He goes in there just so she can kick him out again.” Amy laughed. “You probably know her. Give me all the dirty details.”

A crush? Steven didn’t like me any more than I liked him. My gaze darted to the kitchen, where I could hear him opening cabinets. “Maybe they’re really just enemies,” I dodged. “It sounds like he’s trying to piss her off. That’s not a crush.”

Amy shook her head. “You don’t know my brother like I do. He’s a quitter.”

I thought of that day in the rain eight months ago, the way he refused to leave Junior to the mountain lions. “Steven is a lot of things, but a quitter isn’t one of them.”

“He is,” Amy insisted. “When things get hard, he quits. Football, rodeo, horse training. He’ll self-sabotage or just stop trying.

There’s no way he would ever care enough about pissing someone off to show up every week.

He’s got better things to do. Trust me on this.

My brother does not put in effort when he doesn’t care.

” She lifted her head off the floor and looked past my shoulder. “Isn’t that right, Steven?”

“Isn’t what right?” he asked, rounding the couch with a glass of ice water in each hand. He set one down on the coffee table. “That’s for you, Amy.” He handed me the other one. “Pregnancy adds fifty percent more blood to your body. You need to stay hydrated.”

My eyebrows went up. “Look at you with the random pregnancy facts.”

“I might have flipped through a book or two.” He shrugged. “I was curious.” He nudged Amy’s hip with his boot. “What were you saying?”

Her eyes darted between us as though she were watching a fascinating tennis match. “I was saying that you half ass everything.”

“Not everything. But most things.” He smirked. “Very few things out there are worth my whole ass. It’s too good to waste on petty shit.”

Amy rolled her eyes at me. “See, I told you. He has to really care about something to give it his all, and then…” Her voice trailed off and she split another look between us. “And then he’s relentless.”