Shine Not Burn(51)

“Las Vegas?”

“Yeah.” I wasn’t looking at her. I was staring at the floor, lost in the memories. They were coming in clear for some reason, like it had just happened last week. It was the first time in two years this had happened. “My best friend Kelly was marrying a mortician.”

“A mortician?” Maeve chuckled like I was joking.

“Yes, seriously, she was marrying Matty the mortician. So my other best friend, Candice, organized a bachelorette party in Las Vegas. I was dating a guy named Luke at the time and I was really busy with work, so I didn’t want to go, but they guilted me into it. Or Ruby did.”

“Who’s Ruby? Is she another friend?”

“No. Yes. She’s both. She’s my assistant but she’s also like a mother, neighbor, and girlfriend all mixed up into one big ball of fire.”

“She sounds like fun.”

I nodded, warming with the memory of our last few hours together. They were so much better than the last year had been. “Yeah, she is. She is so sassy. But she’s real and she’s honest and she is the best damn legal secretary in the business.”

“Probably very valuable for a busy lawyer,” Maeve suggested.

“Yes, absolutely. She’s not only valuable, she’s also pushy. And she guilted me along with Candice into going to Las Vegas, so I went.”

“Sounds like fun. Girls’ night out in Las Vegas.” She kicked some shoes over in my direction. They looked like moccasins. “Here, put these on. Let’s take a walk.”

I slipped my feet into the comfortably worn leather and followed her out the back door and down the porch stairs, only limping a little now. My ankle felt much better. The air was warm enough that I didn’t need a sweater, but Maeve handed me one that I put over my shoulders.

“So tell me about Las Vegas,” she said. “I’ve never been.”

I walked next to her down a path, headed towards the sounds of cows mooing. “Well, it’s loud and there are lights everywhere all day and night. And there’s this air of excitement, like anything can happen and anything will happen.” I couldn’t stop the smile from blooming on my face. “It’s kind of a magical place in that way.”

“What did you do there? Gamble? I hear the buffets are fabulous.”

“We didn’t see any buffets, but we did gamble. Or I should say, I gambled. My friends ended up in the room most of the night. I guess it wasn’t much of a girls’ night out in the end.”

“They were in the room all night without you?” Her smile disintegrated into an expression of worry.

Shit. Why am I telling her this? “Um, yeah. I was alone for a while that night, but it was okay.” It was more than okay. I had company. My heart clenched at the memories.

“You said you gambled. Which game did you play?”

I swallowed hard. Maeve’s questions were starting to feel more like an interrogation, but it wasn’t because of something she was doing. She was just getting too close to the part where her gorgeous son entered the picture.

“I played blackjack.”

“Oh, that’s Mack’s favorite. He went to Las Vegas with his brother a couple years back, for Ian’s bachelor party, as a matter of fact. He won over a thousand dollars … used it to buy a new horse. Funny thing about that, now that I think about it…” She turned to me with a weird expression on her face for a few seconds. Then she smiled and the weird look fell away. “Hey, maybe you were there at the same time.”

I tried to smile, but my lips were trembling too much. Luckily the sun was in her eyes as it dipped closer to the horizon, making me think she couldn’t see me very well. “Maybe,” I said.

Maeve sighed. “That was a tough time for our boys.”

The sadness in her voice made me intensely curious, but it felt wrong to push her for information when it was very possible my interactions with Mack may have influenced the situation. He’d spent at least part of the night with me. If he’d been there for the purpose of celebrating his brother’s last nights as a single man, Ian would have been pissed to not have him around. Maybe Ian knows what happened. Maybe that’s why he’s so rude to me.

I was just about to ask her for details when we turned a bend in the path and came upon a huge group of cows, fences, and men, and the men were in the process of doing things that were making the cows very nervous.





Chapter Twenty-Three





MAEVE MOTIONED FOR ME TO sit with her up on a fence that gave us a good view of what was going on but wasn’t actually close enough to get in the way of what the men were doing. I climbed up next to her with a little difficulty, my ankle not excited about lifting my weight like that. Once we were settled, Maeve began to explain what we were watching.

“All these calves need to be treated with vaccines, branded, and castrated before they get too big, so that’s why the men are working so late and Boog’s here to help. We have several hundred head to get through, and it’s exhausting work.”

The smallish animals were being led down a path between metal rail fences with encouragement from Ian to a small, square, fenced-off area set up where Mack was waiting. When the calf made it into that area, Ian would shut the entrance to trap the calf inside a smaller box made of bars. Mack pulled levers to trap their head and then their body.