“Sounds like she’s serious about this,” Zane said. “Maybe the twelfth time’s a charm. I told her to invite me to the grand opening party.”
Ethan harrumphed. “Don’t hold your breath.”
He wasn’t worried that the party barn might actually become a reality. In all fairness, Lucy wanted to make the place a venue for weddings and other swanky events. She’d latched on to the idea after Juliette’s wedding planning business had grown legs and had become a runaway success. Juliette had offhandedly mentioned that the closest wedding venue to Celebration was the Regency Cypress Plantation and Botanical Gardens, which was on the northern edge of Celebration. Lucy swore their grandparents’ old barn was an untapped gold mine. Ethan didn’t get it. The dilapidated pile of kindling needed to be burned down, not cobbled back together.
It wasn’t that he didn’t support Lucy. She and their brother, Jude, had inherited some money and equal interest in the family’s 900-acre ranch. Since Jude was living the high life on the Professional Bull Riders’ circuit, he and Lucy had left Ethan with the task of reviving Triple C’s once floundering horse-breeding business. Ethan had worked hard to turn it around and breathe new life into it. Since the breeding arm of Triple C was all his doing, the siblings had mutually decided to divvy up the land, each claiming a specific 300-acre area. Ethan got the land with the stables and the home where they’d grown up. Lucy had chosen the plot with their grandparents’ old house and the barn. Jude’s was untouched acreage.
Lucy could do whatever she wanted with her piece of land. She was perfectly within her rights to turn it into an events venue. Hell, she could turn it into a zoo if she wanted. It was her call. However, over the past three years she’d had the attention span of a fruit fly. She’d already blown through every cent of the money she’d inherited after their parents died and she’d maxed out her credit cards and was left with the debt.
Ethan had helped her out financially until she could find a job with a steady paycheck that allowed her to start paying off her cards. As far as Ethan knew, she was still paying. Now that she was supporting herself, he wasn’t going to enable another whim. When she’d asked Ethan to cosign for a loan so she could have some party barn start-up money, he’d declined.
If he was completely honest, his refusal wasn’t just tough love. Ethan had often worried that his siblings might have the same alcoholic gene that had almost gotten the best of him. It ran in their family. In fact, it had cost their father his life. Their dad had been sauced the night of the car crash that had killed him. For a while it had been touch and go for their mother, who had landed in the ICU.
She’d lived, but she’d come out of the accident a paraplegic because of damage to one of the lower thoracic nerves. She passed away about a year later.
The disease hadn’t hooked its claws into Jude, who seemed to have his act together—even if he never did come home. Ethan still worried about Lucy. She was only twenty-five. She had done some things in the past—like getting caught drunk skinny-dipping in the pond out back of old man Jenkins’s hunting lodge—that made him question whether or not she was immune to alcohol’s hereditary choke hold.
For some ridiculous reason completely out of left field, Ethan found himself wondering if Chelsea Allen, the woman who’d already proven herself capable of breaking into houses, had ever been skinny-dipping.
As he chased away the inappropriate image with a sip of his beer, for a split second he craved a shot of something a hell of a lot stronger than nonalcoholic beer.
After Ethan’s own hard-traversed path to sobriety, he worried that being in a party environment—even if it would be mostly wedding receptions—wouldn’t be good for Lucy.
Sure, she was a grown woman, but she would always be his little sister. She and Jude were all the family he had left. His stance against the party barn stemmed from simply wanting to protect her. Jude may have been the prodigal brother, but Ethan was the protector. As any good big brother would, he wanted to hold back the tide and keep it from drowning her.
Even if the jury was still out on whether or not she was susceptible to the alcoholic gene, her previous, half-baked business ventures indicated she might not possess entrepreneurial instincts, either.
Obviously, she’d been talking about the party barn enough that word was starting to get around town. She hadn’t mentioned any more about it to him. But really, was that so hard to believe? Sometimes he felt like he was the last to know anything. Such as how he’d had no idea that Juliette had such a beautiful friend. Whether or not that friend was hiding something or hiding from something, Ethan couldn’t deny that she’d been front and center in his brain all night. He hadn’t had this kind of reaction to a pretty woman in a very long time.
He’d definitely stop by Juliette’s tomorrow and see what Chelsea Allen was up to.
The next morning when Chelsea’s eyes fluttered open, it took her a moment to remember that she was safe in the sanctuary of Juliette’s spare bedroom, where there was enough floral damask to rival Queen Mary’s gardens at the Regent’s Park. There were roses everywhere: on the duvet, the curtains, the wingback chair and tufted ottoman. It was so Juliette and it warmed Chelsea from the inside out.
She luxuriated in a long, slow, full-body stretch and then squinted at the clock on the nightstand to check the time. It was after nine o’clock. She should get up and get a wiggle on. Really, she should, she thought as she sank deeper into the warm bed.
Her body and mind had needed the rest. It dawned on her that this was the first time she’d slept through the night without waking since her life had blown up in the press last week, when she’d been humiliated and reduced to being the subject of lewd jokes and perverted voyeurism. Her ex-boyfriend had recorded them without her permission and released the footage, yet she was the villain. Her siblings couldn’t look her in the eyes. Her parents didn’t even want to see her face, much less help her solve the problem. They had made it perfectly clear that it was her problem. She needed to make it go away—or at least go away until it had passed.
Recently, it had been the last thing she’d thought about before she went to sleep and the first thing on her mind when she’d awoken. Until today.
This morning the first thought that had crossed her mind was flowers.
She felt safe here. Not that the press couldn’t find her in Celebration, Texas. But with neighbors looking out for neighbors and scaring away those who didn’t belong the way Ethan Campbell had last night, it would certainly make it more difficult for anyone to sneak up on her the way the reporters had in London.
Chelsea pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes, determined to exorcise the media demons. She drew in a measured deep breath, held it for a few beats and exhaled.
Visions of the reporters went away, but thoughts of Ethan Campbell remained.
In the light of day he didn’t annoy her as much as he had last night. Of course, she was rested this morning and that made the whole world look better.
She took another healing breath and reminded herself everything would be okay.
Eventually.
She would put her life back together and maybe even look back at this time and laugh. Well, perhaps not laugh. That was pushing it, but she was resilient and she would be fine soon enough.
In the meantime, she had a lovely place to stay and the company of a good friend with whom she looked forward to catching up.
She’d have to figure out how to be helpful and not get under foot. She and Jules had roomed well together at university because they understood each other’s quirks and idiosyncrasies. She knew Juliette well enough that she was confident she would be able to size up how her friend felt about Chelsea’s invasion the moment she walked through the front door.
Chelsea