“Cool!” Jill looked at her and her smile dimmed. “Isn’t it?”
Christine felt hot and then cold. She squeezed her eyes shut to ward off the tears. She was such a fool. “Not really.”
“Christine, what’s going on?” She set down the bag. “You look like you’re going to be sick.”
She brushed her fingers along the emerald. “He’s been looking for this.”
“I would imagine.”
The pain flared hot and bright inside her. “He didn’t follow me to Cedar Valley because he was attracted to me,” she said, struggling to get the words out. “He didn’t stay because he was falling for me. All this time he was looking for this.”
Jill’s eyes widened in horror. “No...”
“He pretended to like me so he could get the emerald back.” Christine pulled her gaze up and stared at Jill. “He didn’t want me. He wanted this. It was all fake.”
17
“CHRISTINE.” JILL HELD out her hands as if she could slow down the thoughts racing through her head. “Let’s take a moment and really think about this.”
“What is there to think about?” She grabbed the emerald and held it in her fist, welcoming the hard edge that bit into her palm. “It was too good to be true.”
She had been stunned when Travis approached her in the casino. Thrilled but not willing to look too closely at her good fortune when she spent the weekend with him. But when he arrived in Cedar Valley, she couldn’t believe he felt the strong connection between them.
No one else believed it, either. Her friends and neighbors had to see Travis for themselves. Her ex was under the impression that she’d paid Travis to play her boyfriend. Darrell was half right. It had all been pretend to Travis.
“There could be a perfectly reasonable explanation for all this,” Jill said. “Just stop and think about it.”
“I already know what happened,” Christine said as she started to pace. There was a good explanation, but that didn’t mean it was going to make her feel any better. “His friend Aaron has an emerald that he was using as collateral in a high-stakes poker game in Vegas. It’s missing.”
“How did you wind up with it?” Jill asked. She looked down at Travis’s shirt. “Wait, did he keep the emerald in his shirt pocket? And you grabbed the shirt when you were packing. Okay, I got it now. I’m up to speed.”
Christine’s footsteps started to get faster. “Travis feels responsible for it because he should have kept an eye on it. The emerald winds up in my suitcase, and Travis shows up in my life. Coincidence? I don’t think so.”
“So he followed you thinking you stole the emerald. He didn’t show up here because he couldn’t live without you,” Jill said as she watched Christine go in circles. “But look at it this way. He could have called the cops. He could have confronted you the moment he got in town. He didn’t. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
“It means he thought I was a criminal and he needed to do some surveillance before he pounced.” And she had opened up to him because she thought he was interested. That he cared.
“What are you going to do?” Jill asked. “Tell me your plan.”
Christine stopped. She felt jittery and her heart was pounding in her ears. Her mind was a jumble of emotions and instinct. “I don’t have a plan. I’m just going to confront him and go from there.”
“Seriously?” Jill said in a squawk. “That doesn’t sound like you. You always have a plan. You analyze everything before you make a move.”
Christine rolled her eyes. “When has that worked for me?”
“Okay, do you want my advice?”
She wordlessly looked at Jill.
“Keep the emerald.”
Christine gasped at her friend’s bold suggestion. “Tempting but no.” It wasn’t hers. It wasn’t even Travis’s. It belonged to someone who was desperately searching for it.
“Why not?” Jill complained. “Finders keepers.”
Christine opened her palm and looked at the emerald. It was dark green, like the trees in Cedar Valley. Beautiful and mysterious. And a reminder that she had not been enough to capture Travis’s attention. “I don’t want it.”
“Fine,” Jill said with a deep sigh. “You have to give it to him. It’s the right thing to do, I guess. And Travis returns it to his friend. Then what?”
Christine glanced out the window and saw Travis leaving the general store. His head was bent and his shoulders were hunched forward as the rain came down harder. “I don’t know,” she said. “He said he would come back and that he wants to be here with me. And I believed him.”