“Dinner?” she responded. “Already?” Bree looked at the time on her phone. How had she lost track of so many hours?
“I didn’t want to interrupt, but…you didn’t eat breakfast, or lunch.” His eyes studied hers. “You need to eat, Bree.”
She ran her hand through her hair. She hadn’t even showered today. “I can make something—”
“No need. I’ve already made something. Join me whenever you’re ready.”
“You wanna talk about it?” Tucker asked Jace when he found him at the bar.
“Which it?”
“Let’s start with you wanting out of the rough stock business.”
“I don’t know, Tuck. The whole reason I went to Montana in the first place was to get off the road. Now I’m on it four times as much.”
“Maybe we can work out a compromise. You were the one who insisted you would go out on the road twice as much as you needed to be.”
Jace turned away from the bar and scanned the casino floor. “I’m drowning, Tuck.”
Tucker put his hand on Jace’s shoulder. “I know you are, but I didn’t feel it until the last couple of days. What’s changed?”
“Same thing that always changes.”
“Bree?”
“Not just Bree. Women.”
“Tell me what happened.”
Jace told Tucker about his phone call with Bree, and about her change in plans for the holidays.
“I’ve been countin’ the days, Tuck. Literally countin’ them. All I’ve been thinkin’ about is the next time I’ll see her, and now I don’t know when that’ll be. I’m goin’ back to Montana from here. I need a few days to get some perspective.”
“Good idea. We’ll see you back down at our place for Christmas though, right?”
“I don’t know, Tuck.”
“Fair enough. The door will be open.”
“You wanna talk about it?” Red asked Bree when she sat down at the dinner table.
“It’s as though I’m getting to know him all over again.”
Red nodded. “Maybe you’re not getting to know him again, maybe you’re getting to know him for the first time.”
“How do you know this stuff? I swear you’re clairvoyant.”
Red shrugged his shoulders.
“I received the box a couple days before I called you. It was…unexpected.”
“What’s in it?”
“Letters. Most written to me and never sent. But there are also journals. They go back to when Zack was in high school. I don’t know who had them, or why they sent them to me.”
“Someone in his family?”
“It’s an APO return address, so it wouldn’t have been his parents, or his sister.”