No one knew very much about Jo’s past. She was tall and muscular, pretty, in a quiet way. The only thing everyone knew for sure was that Jo kept a shotgun behind her bar and she knew how to use it.
Jo came out from the back room and spotted Nevada sliding into a booth.
“You’re here early,” the bartender said.
“I know. It’s been one of those days when getting drunk seemed like a sensible option.”
“You’ll pay for it in the morning.”
While the advice was sound, right now morning seemed a long time away. “Vodka tonic. A double.”
“Want anything to eat?” Jo asked, sounding more like a concerned parent than a woman who made her living serving liquor.
“No, thanks. I don’t want to slow the process.” If she drank enough, she would forget. Right now, forgetting seemed really smart.
Jo nodded and left, only to return seconds later with a large glass of water.
“Hydrate,” she growled. “You’ll thank me later.”
Nevada dutifully sipped the water until her drink arrived and then carefully gulped about half the contents. Now it was just a waiting game, she thought. Waiting for the vodka to cloud her brain and make her awful afternoon fade away.
As a rule, she was a big believer in facing her problems head-on. Figure out what was wrong, come up with several solutions, pick the best one and act. She’d always been a doer. She did her best to keep her complaining to a minimum and to be a team player. That meant exactly jack shit when it came to Tucker Janack.
She couldn’t fix the past. There was no game plan for going back in time and undoing a bad decision. The reality was, she’d been crazy in love with the man and she’d acted rashly. The fault was hers. She could accept that. What really fried her was having to pay for it now.
She finished her drink and motioned for another. Before it arrived, the door to the bar opened and her sisters walked in. A quick glance at her watch told her that less than fifteen minutes had passed since she’d sat down in the booth.
“Impressive,” she called to Jo.
Her friend shrugged. “You know how I feel about people drinking alone.”
“It’s medicinal.”
“If I had a nickel for every time I heard that.”
Nevada turned her attention to the two women walking toward her. They were exactly her height, with the same blond hair and brown eyes. Hardly a surprise, considering they were identical triplets.
When they’d been kids, telling them apart had been a nightmare for nearly everyone, including family. But they’d since cultivated distinct differences, including how they dressed and their personal style. Montana wore her hair long and curly, favored flowy dresses and all things soft. Dakota went the more tailored route, although the fact that she was currently pregnant would make identification even easier.
Nevada had always considered herself the more sensible sister—her present condition notwithstanding. She spent much of her days on job sites, where jeans and work boots were a requirement rather than a fashion choice. She made smart decisions, thought things through and did her best to avoid having regrets. Tucker was the biggest bump on the otherwise smooth, slightly lonely course that was her life.
“Hey,” Dakota said, sliding into the booth across from her. “Jo called.”
Montana slid next to Dakota and tilted her head. “She said you were drinking.”
Nevada waved her empty glass toward Jo. “Maybe a quesadilla, too,” she called.
“I thought you didn’t want to eat.”
“I changed my mind.”
“Good.” Jo walked toward her and grabbed the empty glass, then took orders from Dakota and Montana. “If only you were smart enough to stop while you could still avoid a hangover.”
“Sorry, not happening.” Nevada waited until Jo had left, then looked at her sisters. “You two got here faster than I expected.”
“It’s this new invention called a phone,” Montana told her. “It speeds up communication.”
Dakota placed both her hands on the table. “What’s going on? This isn’t like you. You don’t drink in the middle of the day.”
“Technically, it’s past the middle.” Nevada squinted. Ah, there it was. The faintest of buzzes moving through the back of her brain.
“Fine. Normally you would be at the office, but instead…” Dakota sighed. “Your interview. That was today.”
“Uh-huh.” She glanced toward the bar, wishing Jo would hurry.
“It had to have gone well,” Montana said, loyal as always. “Didn’t Mr. Janack realize how qualified you are? He needs someone with your experience to deal with the local factor. Plus, you look really nice.”
Nevada inhaled the scent of grilling tortillas and cheese. Her stomach growled. She hadn’t eaten lunch—nerves about her interview had caused her to work instead.
“What happened?” Dakota asked, apparently less interested in Nevada’s appearance than her sister was. “Why do you think the interview didn’t go well?”
“What makes you think I believe that?” Nevada asked, the buzz getting stronger by the second. Even so, when Jo brought the second drink, she took a big gulp.
“The drinking was my first clue.”
Having a trained psychologist as a sister was a double-edged sword, Nevada thought. “I don’t want to talk about it. If I did, I would have come to see you both. But I didn’t. I’m here, getting drunk. Leave me alone.”
Her sisters exchanged a glance. If Nevada put her mind to it, she could probably figure out what they were thinking. After all, they were genetically the same. But right now all that concerned her were the smells drifting back from Jo’s small kitchen.
“Nevada,” Montana began, her voice gentle.
That was all it took. A single word. Nevada shook her head. Why couldn’t she be like other people and hate her family? At the moment, a good estrangement sounded like the perfect plan.
“Fine,” she grumbled. “The interview wasn’t with Mr. Janack, aka Elliot, the father. It was with Tucker.”
“That’s the guy who was friends with Ethan all those years ago?” Dakota asked. She sounded as if she wasn’t completely sure of her facts. That was reasonable, considering her only encounter with Tucker would have been over a summer, back when they were kids.
“I don’t get it,” Montana said. “He’s in charge now?”
“Running the whole project,” Nevada said, still watching the door leading to the kitchen.
“Why is he a problem?” Dakota asked.
Nevada abandoned her hope for food anytime soon and faced her sisters. “I know Tucker. When I went off to college, Ethan told me to look him up, which I did.”
“Okay,” Montana said, sounding confused. “But isn’t knowing him a good thing?”
“I slept with him. Let me just say, that makes for an awkward interview.”
Jo appeared with the quesadilla and several napkins. She set herbal tea in front of Dakota and gave a diet soda to Montana. After placing a basket of chips and bowl of salsa in the middle of the table, she left.
Nevada picked up a slice of the quesadilla and took a bite, ignoring her sisters’ wide-eyed stares.
“Not today,” Montana said in a whisper. “You’re not saying you slept with him today.”
Nevada finished chewing and swallowed. “No. I didn’t have sex during my interview. It was before. Back in college.”
She ate some more while her sisters stared at her expectantly. Montana cracked first.
“What happened?” she demanded. “You never told us this.”
Nevada wiped her hands on a napkin, then took a sip of her drink. The buzz was stronger now, which would make exposing her secret easier.
“When I left for college, Ethan asked me to look up Tucker. He was working in the area.”
Although she and her sisters had been extremely close, they’d made the decision to go to three different colleges. The four years apart had given them the chance to solidify their identities, or some such crap, she thought hazily. While it had seemed like a good idea at the time, now she wondered if things would have gone better with one of her sisters around.
“I wasn’t especially interested in spending time with a friend of his,” she continued, “but he kept bugging me, so I did. I called Tucker and we agreed to meet.”
She still remembered walking into the huge open room in the industrial complex. The ceilings had probably been thirty feet high, with light spilling in from all the windows. There’d been a huge platform in the middle and a beautiful woman wielding a blowtorch. But what had caught Nevada’s attention was the man standing by the platform. The grown-up Tucker was very different from the kid she’d remembered.
“It was one of those things,” she said, taking another bite of the quesadilla, chewing and swallowing. “I took one look at him and fell head over heels. I didn’t have a chance.”
Montana leaned toward her. “That’s not a bad thing, right?”
“It is when the guy in question is madly in love with someone else. He had a girlfriend.” If one could give Cat such a pedestrian title. “I was crazy about him, and he was wild over her and she wanted to be my friend. It was hell.”
“Who was she?” Dakota asked. “Another student?”
Nevada shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.” No way was she going to say the name. There was a chance they would recognize it and Cat wasn’t anyone Nevada wanted to talk about.
“I hung out with them a few times,” she said. “Then I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I pulled back. One night I heard they broke up and I went to see Tucker. He was seriously drunk and we had very bad sex.”
She didn’t mention that she’d basically thrown herself at him. And that, looking back, she was a little surprised he’d even remembered it was her. After all, he’d called Cat’s name at the crucial moment.
She sighed. “It was a mess. They got back together, I was crushed and that was it. I never saw either of them again. Until today.”
There was so much more. The fact that Tucker had chosen Cat over her. Not a surprise, really. Cat was beautiful and larger than life and they’d been together first. Still, Nevada had been heartbroken and humiliated. Plus, the sex really had been awful. So bad that she’d waited nearly three years before risking getting intimate again.
“I wanted the job,” she said, picking up her drink. “I wanted the chance.”
“You don’t know he won’t hire you,” Montana told her. “You’re the best candidate.”
“I don’t think that’s a deciding factor.”
Dakota sipped her tea. “Was it hard to see him again?”
“It was a shock. I was expecting his father. But that’s not what you’re asking, is it?”
“No.”
Nevada considered the unasked question. “I’m over him. It was a long time ago and I was young and foolish. Everything is different now.”
“There aren’t any lingering feelings?” Dakota asked.
“Not even one.”
Nevada spoke as firmly as a nearly drunk person could. The good news was, she was pretty sure she wasn’t even lying.
CHAPTER TWO
TUCKER HAD NEVER THOUGHT much about small-town America. Mostly his work took him to remote places, where they had to create their own infrastructure to get the job done, or to urban areas, often those that were crumbling. He wasn’t used to cheerful storefronts and friendly people strolling along clean sidewalks. In the ten minutes it had taken him to get from his hotel to the center of town, he’d been greeted multiple times, told to have a good day, asked if the weather could be any better and nuzzled by a tiny toy poodle in a pink sweater.
He’d been to Fool’s Gold before, back when he was about sixteen. Tucker’s mom had died when he was pretty little, so his dad had taken him along on construction jobs. He’d grown up all over the world, getting his education through local classes and tutors. His dad had worried that he wasn’t socializing enough with kids his own age, so every summer Tucker was sent to a different camp in the States. One year it was space camp, another had been a drama camp. The year he’d turned sixteen, his father sent him to a cycling camp, where he met Ethan Hendrix and Josh Golden.
The three of them had hung out all summer. Josh and Ethan had both been serious about cycling. Josh had gone on to make a career of it. Tucker had gone into the family business, and went where the next big project was. Ethan had stayed in Fool’s Gold.
Tucker crossed a narrow street and saw the sign for Hendrix Construction. Back in high school, Ethan had planned to go to college, then get the hell out of Fool’s Gold. He and Tucker had talked about Ethan coming to work for Janack Construction. They’d daydreamed about a dam they’d build in South America or a bridge in India. Instead, Ethan’s father had died, leaving Ethan responsible for running the family business. As the oldest of six kids, with a heartbroken mother, Ethan hadn’t had a whole lot of choices.
Tucker opened the door to the construction office and smiled at the receptionist sitting behind the desk. “I’d like to see Nevada, please.”
He’d arrived early enough in the morning to catch her before she headed to a job site, but still expected to be asked if he had an appointment. Instead, the receptionist pointed toward a door at the rear of the big room.
“She’s in her office.”
“Thanks.”
He circled around a couple of empty desks and knocked on the open door.