Ouch. When she put it like that, he sounded like a real asshole. “I passed those plans on to the others though. Piper is working with Whitney and Aiden on a lot of it.”

Jane nodded. “That’s great. But do you think Piper and Aiden and Whitney will come over here and take things over when you get bored?”

Ouch, again.

But he hadn’t gotten bored at Hot Cakes. Or given it all up for sex.

He’d fallen in love.

He just hadn’t realized it at the time.

He needed to show her. He needed to stick with this. He needed to put in the time and the work and prove to her that he was in this for the long haul.

He could do that. Probably.

He wasn’t good at being patient. He wasn’t good at not getting what he wanted right when he wanted it—and he wanted her right now—but he could put in this work.

“And now I own a nursing home,” he said.

She nodded. “All of a sudden.”

He suddenly owned a nursing home. Which she, and everyone, had every reason to think he’d give up as soon as something more fun came along. It looked like he was just fucking around. As usual.

“Right. All of a sudden. Because that’s how I do things.”

She sighed. “You’re a good guy, Dax.”

“Who’s a ton of fun,” he added.

She nodded.

He reached for her car door and pulled it open. She looked at it then back at him, finally swallowing and sliding in behind the wheel.

He thought about just shutting it. Letting her drive off. Letting her believe what she was going to believe until he could prove otherwise.

But at the last second, he gripped the car door, sucked in a deep breath, and crouched next to her seat.

He needed to tell her this. At least once.

In case he couldn’t pull this off.

In case he couldn’t actually do something that wasn’t temporary and just a good time.

“I’m also a guy who’s in love with you.”

Jane opened her mouth. Closed her mouth. Frowned. Then opened it again. “What?”

“I’m in love with you. But I’ve never been in love before, and my default mode is over the top, and you’re not into gummy bears or Ping-Pong, so I bought a nursing home.”

“You’re in love with me?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you sure?”

He laughed, but his chest and gut still hurt. He nodded. “Yeah. I’m sure.”

“Wow.” She was just staring at him.

“So yeah.” There really wasn’t anything else to say. He needed to figure out what he was going to do with Sunny Orchard. How to make Jane happy. How to be the one who made her happy. More than temporarily.

He started to stretch to his feet, but partway up he leaned in and kissed the top of her head.

Then he turned and headed back into the nursing home.

She didn’t stop him. Or follow him back in.

14

Most people didn’t believe you could work up a sweat playing Ping-Pong.

That’s because most people played Ping-Pong for fun.

Not manically as a way of working off pent-up frustration and self-loathing.

Okay, loathing was strong. He didn’t loathe himself. But he was disgusted with himself, and adding a new level to Warriors, including hacking more appendages off more monsters, hadn’t helped. Nor had running—he did loathe running. Nor had visiting an alpaca farm.

Not that visiting an alpaca farm was supposed to help work off any kind of aggression, but he’d expected it to calm him. To make him happy. And it had.

It had also made him even more certain that he wanted to take the Sunny Orchard residents to visit the alpacas on a regular basis. He wanted to go with them too. He wanted to see them interacting with the animals. He wanted to see the cognitive—yes, he’d learned that word from his recent reading—and physical changes occur. And yeah, he wanted to play with the alpacas too.

That’s where it all got mixed up with his self-disgust.

Why couldn’t he just let it go? Why couldn’t he just recognize that the best thing for everyone would be for someone else to be the administrator at Sunny Orchard and he could just own the place?

Over the past two days, as he’d texted and called Jane with no return messages or calls, he’d been trying to convince himself to hire someone else to be in charge of… well, everything. Someone else to do the programming and implement the new ideas. Someone with experience in the field. Someone who had contacts with other people in the field.

His argument with himself went something like this—“Bring in someone who’s worked in eldercare for years.”

“But if they’ve worked in it for years, maybe they’re not the right person for new ideas.”

“But they know better than you do what kind of outcomes to expect.”

“But don’t we want to expect more than what everyone’s used to?”

“What if you’re expecting too much?”

“If you shoot for the moon, even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.”

“You read that on an inspirational poster when you were fifteen.”

“Still counts.”

“You’re ridiculous.”

“You’re an asshole.”

“Yeah, well you still know nothing about running a nursing home.”

Which was true.

Dax whacked the little white ball harder. It bounced back at him as if intent on revenge for the pummeling. He hit it again. And again. And again. It wasn’t really helping his frustration, but it did prove he wasn’t drunk enough to have impaired his hand-eye coordination. At least there was that.

Also, he couldn’t get fired for drinking at work. Because he didn’t work at Hot Cakes anymore.

“Oh my God, you’re even weird when you’re depressed?” Grant asked from the Hot Cakes break room doorway.

Dax looked over. Grant, Ollie, and Aiden were watching him.

“How can you tell if he’s depressed?” Aiden asked. “He’s playing Ping-Pong and eating gummy bears. That’s what he does when he’s happy.”

Ollie pointed at the table. “He’s playing Ping-Pong alone.”

Dax had shoved the Ping-Pong table in the Hot Cakes break room up against a wall. Ollie was right—that in itself was a sign things were wonky in Dax Marshall’s world. He never wanted to do anything alone.

“And those aren’t regular gummy bears,” Ollie said, pointing to the jar on the table to one side.

The guys came closer, and Aiden grinned when he noticed the bears were swimming in clear liquid.

“Vodka-soaked gummy bears?” he asked Dax.

Dax shrugged. “I tried straight vodka, but yuck.” Typical. He liked the fruit-flavored vodkas, and the cotton-candy vodka he’d tried once had been delicious but straight vodka wasn’t his thing. Of course, he was basically a child in a man’s body, so that tracked.

Aiden pulled a bear out with a thumb and finger and tossed it into his mouth. He shrugged. “I don’t think they’ve been in there long enough. Don’t they take a few hours at least to soak up the vodka?”

“Three days to be perfect,” Ollie confirmed.