“Just tell me one thing.” My voice cracked, and she stopped moving but didn’t turn around. “Why does your dad hate me so much? Do you even know why?”

“Because of the bet,” she tossed easily over her shoulder before getting inside the car and closing the door.

I wanted to rip all my fucking hair out in my frustration. Nothing made any sense. That idiotic bet was generations old, and why our families chose to hold on to the bitterness instead of trying to get along, I’d never understand.

“But your family won it!” I shouted as the cab pulled away and disappeared out of sight, but I swore, I saw the look of surprise in her eyes.

*  *  *

“I don’t know, man. She looked sort of shocked when I said that her family had won the bet. It was almost like she didn’t know or something.” I sat on a stool in the barn, talking Dane’s ear off. I’d actually called him to come over and calm me down, but he seemed to be having the opposite effect.

“Maybe she doesn’t? Have you ever even thought of that?” he asked as he spun around on the chair.

I watched him spin and spin and spin, half-tempted to knock him right off. “Can you stop spinning for two seconds?”

His feet hit the ground as he came to an abrupt stop. “Killjoy.”

“Child.”

“So?”

He flipped me off, and I looked around for something to throw at him.

“You really think she doesn’t know that her family won?”

He shrugged. “I’m just saying, what if she doesn’t? Want me to go ask her?”

“No,” I bit out way too quickly, and he started laughing at me. I noticed the food I’d brought back, as Ginny had insisted, sitting on the table. “Do you think I should go over and bring her dinner?”

“It would be the gentlemanly thing to do. She’s probably starving over there. All alone. By herself. Stomach growling.”

This time, I did grab a paintbrush and lobbed it at his head. He ducked at the last second, and I watched it bounce on the ground before skidding across the floor.

“Okay. Wish me luck.”

“You need it.”

“Go home,” I said as I walked away, food in hand.

“Nah. You might be back soon. I think I’ll wait it out. Maybe I’ll paint something.”

Stopping quick, I turned around. “You remember what happened the last time you touched my paints?”

He threw his hands in the air. “I was ten!”

“You painted over my mom’s birthday present! You didn’t even grab a clean canvas. You just painted all over the one I’d just finished. It had taken me two weeks.”

“Yeah, and then you knocked me over the head with it. Took two weeks for the paint to come out of my hair.”