“It come between you with anyone else?” he asked.

I felt my face get soft.

“You’ve gotta know, honey, even before I got into the business, with the last name Lonesome, there were people who wanted to be around me not wanting to be around me, but wanting to be around that. That’s why Lace and Anca and I are so tight. We all got that. And we could always trust with each other there were no ulterior motives.”

“And you trust I got no ulterior motives,” he stated, but in a way he wanted it confirmed.

“Of course I do.”

“Babe, want nothin’ to do with your money.”

The way that was stated was not just a confirmation to my confirmation. It was almost harsh.

And because it was, it seemed borderline insulting.

“I know you don’t.”

“Want nothin’ to do with your fame.”

At that, my stomach clutched.

Money was money, everyone needed it and only fools would say life didn’t get better in some ways the more you had of it.

Fame was something else.

Fame was something that, you got it, it was nearly impossible to shake. Degrees, maybe. But in some ways, it always followed you.

It was also something you could never control. It was an entity on its own, untamable, able to give good at the same time cause disaster.

You might not want any part of it, but once it was there, you didn’t have a choice, whether it was yours or it was someone’s you cared about.

And I knew with nearly everybody in my family having some level of fame, and having lived most of my life not actually having my own, it was harder dealing with it when it wasn’t yours, but someone’s you cared about.

“Those are both parts of me,” I said, my voice sounding constricted. “I can’t get rid of them, and like I said, I don’t really want to. They come with the territory of not only who I am but what I love to do.”

“You’re not gettin’ me,” he declared.

I didn’t want to be a bitch but he wasn’t giving me anything and I felt it down to my bones that this conversation meant everything.

Absolutely everything.

I sensed Deke Hightower was my place in the world.

I’d sensed that all the way back in Wyoming.

So this conversation might be the most important one I’d had to that point or ever would have in my life.

Because of that, I laid it out.

“Well then maybe you should say more than a few words at a time because I was a bit nervous about whatever this talk was, honey, but now you’re freaking me out.”

We had been on opposite ends of the couch, but not far apart because the couch wasn’t big but Deke was.

When I said those words, he reached out a hand, hooked it in the bend of my knee that was up on the couch and he used that to tug me closer so that knee was pressed against the side of his thigh.

And he didn’t remove his hand.

“I’m not givin’ you a lot of words, Jussy, because I don’t know how to say them,” he shared the instant he pulled me closer.

“I guess the only thing to say to that is to tell you that I like you, Deke, a whole lot. You know that but maybe you don’t know how much. And how much I actually do like you, you should also know you can say anything to me.”

He studied me a beat after I gave him those words before he opened his mouth to speak.

“Right, then, gypsy, you gotta know, it is not the fact that I drove up to work at the house of a woman who was the finest I’d met and saw police cruisers that put us here right now. It was the fact I wanted you before that and wouldn’t let myself have you. And the reasons for that were not just because you’re the woman you are, you got what you got, though, straight up, babe, that was part of it. It’s because I’m the man I am and that’s not gonna change either, and in my head, you’re right. I was thinking we did not fit.”

It was my turn not to have anything to say but it felt like something was crushing my heart.

“Then I saw those cruisers,” he went on, “and I do not want your money. I also don’t want the hassle that’s sure to come from your fame. Not sayin’ that to be a dick, sayin’ it to be real but also sayin’ it because I don’t wanna have to watch you deal with the hassle that’s sure to come from that. But seeing those cruisers got my head outta my ass about wanting you.”

“Deke, this isn’t really helping,” I shared, no longer slightly nervous, I was downright anxious because he said this wasn’t going to be bad.

But outside the him wanting me part—which I already knew, I just didn’t know when that began—the rest just sounded bad.

And he was being weird, blunt, distant, and it was scaring me.

“My life, babe,” he shook his head, “until I was about twenty, it was not good.”

“Okay,” I prompted carefully, not liking that.

“And because a’ that, I got a way I gotta be and that’s a way that’s not gonna change.”

“Okay,” I repeated equally carefully.

“And Justice, bein’ with you, bein’ with any woman, but especially you, was likely gonna put the pressure on to change that.”

“I don’t want to change you either, Deke.”

“I got no roots. I’ve never had any roots. And I do not fuckin’ want any roots,” he declared.

I just stared at him.

“And I do not like rich people. I do not wanna go to fancy restaurants, unless their menu is predominantly steak, more steak and a choice of sauce you can put on a steak, not that I’d ruin a steak with sauce. And I can go there not havin’ to wear a suit, somethin’ I don’t own and never will.”