Читать книгу Gambling On A Secret - Sara Walter Ellwood - Страница 8

Chapter 3

If Charli didn’t soon take a break from cleaning the inside of the house to make the place livable, she feared she’d set a match to it. Why the hell hadn’t she given Tracy a time for Dylan to show up?

As she headed off the back porch to the potting shed, she looked up at the fluffy clouds dappling the mid-morning sky. On such a warm day, she itched to be in the garden again.

Mrs. Pratt had spent two whole evenings telling her all about the Blackwell clan after she had mentioned she’d bid on the ranch last month. Did every small town have a crazy mixed-up history? Who would have thought the Blackwells, Fergusons and Cartwrights were all distantly related? From what she could tell, the clans despised each other.

But according to Mrs. Pratt, the county was founded when Cole Cartwright and his two younger cousins–Dylan Ferguson and Elijah Blackwell–won the tract of land making up the county in a poker game just after the Civil War.

Whether she wanted to know or not didn’t matter to the landlady as she rambled on about the ending of the fifty-year oil partnership between the Blackwells and the Fergusons, spurring a feud between Jock Blackwell and Jason Ferguson.

However, what had interested her the most were Aida’s stories about Penelope Blackwell. Jock’s eccentric mother loved gardening and spent hours in the garden healing from her bouts with mental illness. An illness most people in town agreed had been passed down to Jock.

After Charli retrieved the tools from the shed, she placed them by the bed near the wraparound porch. She ambled around the six massive beds in the front yard and the weedy border along the tattered picket fence until she made her way to the small lake in the front. Maybe once she got rid of the neglect, the garden would be beautiful.

Wasn’t that the story of her life?

Horsetails, cattails, water cannas and sweet flags edged the lake created by damming the creek running in the front of her property. A wooden dock, rotted and covered with green slime, jutted into the water. Someday she’d replace it. She could imagine the girls who came to her home to heal from life’s hard knocks paddling around in small boats on the calm water, or fishing along the edge.

An old concrete bench sat on a stone patio near the water’s edge. With the ivy and weeds, she wasn’t certain the stone path wove through all of the large beds to the house, but here and there part of a path would materialize out of the overgrowth. For a half second, she considered sitting on the bench, until something slithered in the ivy and over the edge of the mossy rocks into the water by the lip of the lake.

Snake!

She shrieked and ran through the weeds and high grass to the porch steps, several yards away, clutching her heaving chest. Maybe a match wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Hiring a bulldozer to level the place completely after the fire was an even better one.

She held her chest and waited for her breathing to return to normal. How many more snakes were in the garden? “Don’t think about it.” She gingerly made her way down the porch steps. “It was just a water snake.”

What if it was poisonous?

Don’t think about it!

She picked up the hoe and used it to poke in the weeds and ivy in a bed close to the house where she’d left her tools. Once she was sure there were no snakes hiding in the overgrowth to bite her legs off, she got busy pruning the shrubs.

With one eye on the lookout for another snake.

As she worked, a pang of grief sneaked up on her. She stopped for a moment and looked at the rosebush she was pruning. She missed her grandfather, not the man he’d been when she’d met him, not the man who worshiped his art and wealth, but the man he’d become after she’d run away. Pink roses would be a perfect reminder of him. She paused and stared at the new leaves unfurling on the stems. The day she’d ventured out into the garden at the Long Arrow for the first time soon replaced the vision of new growth.

When she had first gone to live with Hank, there hadn’t been even a flowerpot at the ranch house. But sometime between when she’d left with the rodeo cowboy who’d taken her to Las Vegas and the day she’d come home after being released from the correction center in Nevada four years later, he’d taken up gardening.

She had wandered around the mansion for three days after coming home from the rehab in which she’d been treated for alcohol poisoning. Bored and needing to get out, she’d ventured outside. She’d been surprised to find Hank bending over a purple daisy-like flower meticulously snipping off dead buds.

“What kind of flower is that? It looks like something that would grow wild.”

He straightened his back and put a big work-roughened hand on his hip. “Echinacea purpurea. Purple coneflower, and it is a wild flower.”

Since when did the businessman have dirt under his fingernails? Had he retired from being CEO of his manufacturing business?

“When I lived here before, this garden wasn’t here.”

He looked down at the shears in his hand. “No, it wasn’t. I never liked flowers, but after you left, Tonja Crow gave me a rosebush and told me to plant it. According to her, as long as I nurtured it and it bloomed, you’d be all right.” He pointed the blades at a deep pink blooming rosebush in the center of the large bed. “It’s over there. I probably would have let it die, if it wasn’t for Tonja being an old Indian medicine woman.” He lowered his hand and shifted his feet, but still he didn’t look at her. “While I cared for the bush, I found myself enjoying taking care of it. That was the beginning, and I haven’t stopped since. She was right, as long as I kept it blooming, you were alive, if not okay.”

He wiped his brow with the back of his free hand. “Thing is, I found working with nature, along with finally opening up your grandma’s Bible, helped me realize I haven’t been very nice. I was a bastard to your momma and to you. I’m sorry, Charli.” He finally looked at her, his blue eyes fierce with an emotion she had never seen before. Was it guilt? Was it regret? Could she possibly hope it was love? “I hope we can start over, but I know I’ll never be able to make up for what has already happened to you.”

She wrapped her arms around herself. “Hank–”

“No.” He cut her off with a slash of his hand, but his voice was so gentle the shell around her heart cracked. “I hope you can forgive me, but I’ll understand if you can’t. Now, come here and help me. I’m not as young as I used to be.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

He held out his clippers and a pair of gloves he’d had tucked in his belt. She was surprised to find they were just her size. She stared up at him. He hadn’t been expecting her to come to the garden, had he?

His smile softened the hard angles of his face. “I’m going to teach you. Not just about the garden, but the ranch. Someday this place will be yours. You should know how to run it.”

That day in the garden with her grandfather had become the beginning of her healing and a beautiful friendship with Hank. And had set her on the path leading her here.

She wiped away a tear as she finished with the rosebush. As she lopped off sucker growth from the large weeping cherry tree at the center of the bed, her mind stayed in the past.

Hank Monroe had changed the last few years of his life. He’d mellowed and become regretful of disowning his daughter, LeAnn, and of not understanding Charli’s grief when she’d first come to live with him.

Damn, but it all didn’t change the way he’d treated her before she’d ran away.

She paused in her pruning and wiped at her damp eyes with the back of her bare arm again, shuddering at the old memory. Why had he treated her so bad? Why had Momma died? The answers didn’t come to her now any easier than they had nine years ago.

The sudden sound of a vehicle in the drive drew her back to the present. She lowered the pruning shears as Dylan Quinn stopped by the gate. He climbed out of the pickup and headed in her direction with a distinctive limp.

Shielding her eyes with a gloved hand, she smiled. “Hi. You’re here. Good.”

He stopped under the cherry tree and took in the entire yard with one sweeping glance. His inspection also included her, and something fluttered in her belly. “My sister told me you wanted to see me.”

“Yes. You’re hired, and I’d like you to start today.” She pointed behind her. “There’s a snake in the lake over there. It couldn’t be too far from the edge. I want you to kill it. Then I’ll show you around.”

His lips twitched in a ghost of a smirk. “It was probably a little blotched or broad-banded water snake. They’re harmless and common.”

“Little? The thing was a good four feet long. And no snake is harmless.” When the meaning of the rest sank in, she shivered as the blood drained out of her face. “Common?”

“Yep.” He pushed back his dark brown Stetson, revealing some of his similarly colored short hair. “Water snakes are very common in this part of Texas. When I was a kid, I’d catch them from here and let them loose over on my granddad’s place to torment his wife.” His eyes twinkled at the memory. “Jock loved to watch me. You sure it was four feet long?”

She glanced at the lake again. “I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t that long. Just kill it.”

He shook his head, and his lips twitched further into a genuine lopsided grin. Who cared if he was making fun of her? The guy was gorgeous when he smiled. The hard angles and planes still provided structure, but now small crinkles added life to his silvery eyes, and a small dimple formed in his left cheek. The flutter in her stomach his assessment of her had started just got worse.

“No. Unless it’s a cottonmouth.” He picked up a hoe from where she’d dropped it. “I’ll show you how harmless the water snakes are.”

He went to the edge of the water and prodded around in the overgrowth of cattails by the limestone lip.

She jumped when he pulled the snake out of the water. It twisted around the end of the hoe.

He looked over his shoulder at her. “This little guy’s a blotched water snake. I’m not killing it. Or any of his buddies in here either.”

“It’s a damned snake! Get rid of it. Now!” Dear Lord, was the man nuts?

He chuckled, the sound more than a little rusty as it drifted to her across the yard. “You aren’t really afraid of this fella, are you? This guy’s as harmless as a frog.” He shook the snake off the hoe and probed around in the water for a few feet. Turning, he headed back toward her through the high grass and weeds. For a guy with a limp, he moved fast.

“Maybe it is as harmless as a frog, but I don’t like them much either.” When he stopped at the edge of the garden, she backed up a step, and her feet tangled in the vegetation. With an ompff, she landed on her backside in the middle of a clump of weeds, bluebonnets and, amazingly, yellow daffodils.

He laughed and held his hand out to her, which she ignored. With a shrug, he hooked his thumbs into the pockets of his jeans. “When I was on a mission in the South American jungle, pythons the length of my pickup would come into camp. We didn’t have to worry unless we woke up in the morning with our feet in the mouth of one.”

She widened her eyes. Was he serious?

He snorted and shifted his stance. “Of course that was better than our heads being swallowed first.”

“Oh... Oh!” She struggled to her feet and brushed at her jeans. “If you aren’t careful, you’ll be fired before you even get started. I want that snake and any of his ‘buddies’ removed from my lake.”

“I’m not killing the snake.” He put his hands on his narrow hips, drawing her gaze to the way his jeans fit powerfully built legs. “If it was a cottonmouth, I would, but the water snakes keep down the populations of more unsavory critters like mice and rats.”

“My, my, if this isn’t a scene right out of the Bible.” A smooth voice drawled from the opposite side of the flowerbed by the gate.

They turned to Leon Ferguson standing on the stone walk. She hadn’t heard him drive up the driveway, and considering the thin line Dylan’s mouth formed, he hadn’t heard him either.

Leon had his hands in the pants pockets of his dark gray designer suit. His white Stetson cast his brown eyes in shadow.

“Ferguson, what are you doing here?” Dylan barked.

Leon ambled toward them on the stone path. “I’m saving a young maiden from torment. What are you doing here, playing the part of the devil?”

“I’m Miss Monroe’s new manager.” The deadly edge of his voice matched the flintiness of his eyes. “If there’s anyone to save the young maiden from, it’s you.”

“Mr. Quinn, please.” She turned to Leon. “Leon, is there something I can do for you?”

He smiled, showing off perfect white teeth in a face handsome enough to belong to an actor. “I was just passing by on my way home and decided to stop. How are the boys working out?”

Dylan’s stance widened and his hands flexed at his slides. “What boys?”

“Charli and I have entered into a business arrangement.”

She lost the battle with the urge to wrap her arms around herself. As much as she appreciated Leon’s kindness, respected him, and was even a little attracted to him, something about him didn’t sit right with her. He represented her peers in the community. According to Mrs. Pratt, besides the Cartwrights, she and Leon were undoubtedly the wealthiest residents in the county. No one in Colton could learn about her past. It would ruin her, and Leon, no doubt, had the means to dig up the dirt.

“Really?” Dylan stepped closer to her in a protective manner. Whiskey tainted his breath as the warmth of the exhalations tickled her cheek. “What kind of business arrangement?”

She could protect herself. Dylan Quinn wasn’t any safer than Leon Ferguson. Stepping away from him, she forced her arms to her sides. “Mr. Quinn, I can handle this.”

She faced Leon. “I’m amazed by how much the men got done since starting on Monday. The foreman told me last evening they’d be reseeding another fifty acres for hay this morning. And they have the corrals fixed and started on the fencing in the north pasture.”

“Good, good.” He glanced at Dylan. “I’ll be going, unless you need a more reliable exterminator. I couldn’t help but overhear about your snake infestation. I can give you the name of the company that has gotten rid of the snakes in our lakes over on Oak Springs for years.”

Although he presented the perfect solution, she didn’t the like way Leon had looked at Dylan as he said the word exterminator. “No, Mr. Quinn is quite capable of getting rid of the snake.”

“Oh, I’m sure he is.” Leon tipped his hat. “Let me know if there’s anything else I can do for you, Charli.” Dylan’s jaw tightened as his uncle glanced at him. “It’s good to see you up among the living again.”

Leon headed back to his Porsche. With no pretense of lowering his voice, Dylan said, “Now, there’s a snake no one wants in their garden.”

Upon hearing the jibe, Leon’s shoulders jerked in mid-stride.

Rattled by Leon’s attention and the snake fiasco, she turned on Dylan. “You aren’t off the hook. I want those snakes gone.”

“We’ll see.”

“I hate snakes.” She shuddered and put her hands on her hips. “Maybe I should have asked him who the exterminator is.”

* * * *

Charli’s glare had Dylan looking out over the lake. He followed the creek into the wild flower-filled pasture beyond the yard. Had he ever seen eyes as beautiful as hers before? “Leon Ferguson is the last person you should be doing business with. He wants this ranch. I’d wager that was the reason Jock Blackwell didn’t leave a will. He knew none of his sons wanted the land, and he was afraid the one to inherit it would promptly sell it to Ferguson.” He pointed toward the front of the ranch. “His first cousin Buck, who owns the ranch across the road, can’t afford the ten-thousand acres he already owns. He would’ve easily lost it to taxes. Same goes for Jock’s sister. Which means Leon would’ve gotten it for a song.”

Determined to figure out what unsettled him about Charli Monroe, he looked back into her two-toned eyes. Their secrets were as hard to see as the murky bottom of the lake. “But Jock outsmarted Leon. He didn’t leave it to any of his family. Because of his sons’ greed, probate court held up the sale while the whole Blackwell clan fought over who should get the right to sell it until the judge decided they had to split the profits of the sale. I’m sure Leon was fit to be tied when you beat him to the bid.”

She let out a long sigh. “I didn’t know anyone else was even interested in the place. I went to Dixon Real Estate looking for a small ranch where I could have a few horses, but had a big enough house for what I want to do with it someday. I wasn’t even considering raising cattle. By the end of the meeting, he’d shown me this place. He said it had just gone on the market that morning, but I had to make a bid soon.”

She ruefully smiled, and his gut tightened, sending him in a tailspin.

“I went home and called him within an hour after seeing the ranch. I knew I was being suckered, but I liked the place.” She glanced down at her arms where they crossed over her chest, and lowered them to her sides. After meeting his eyes, she lifted her chin a notch. “I had no way of knowing I’d stepped into the feud between Forest County’s own version of the Hatfields and McCoys.”

Damn, she was feisty. “Leon could have any land he wanted, but he wants this place.” When Charli pursed her pink lips, he answered her unspoken question. “I don’t know why he wants it other than because of his hatred for Jock, and he wants to add it to Oak Springs’ twenty-five-thousand acres.” He shifted his weight off his bad leg. “Why did you choose him to get your fields ready?”

“Mrs. Pratt was adamant he’d help, so I called him.” She pushed wayward locks of gold-red spirals out of her face. “He agreed to contract the men I needed to get my fields planted and the corrals fixed. By harvest, I’ll have my own hands and farming equipment. Once the work’s done, my arrangement with Leon will be over.”

Leon was far worse than even a cottonmouth in her garden. Dylan didn’t want her anywhere near his mother’s stepbrother. Leon might have swindled Oak Springs away from his stepsister, but Dylan wouldn’t let the bastard to take Blackwell Ranch from some innocent girl.

“Look. Just let me handle him from now on. Okay?”

Nodding, she huffed in a breath. The action pulled her tank top taut over her breasts.

“That’s what you’re going to be paying me to do,” he said, as he forced his gaze to hers and not on her breasts.

“I guess we’ll need to talk about your pay.”

“I figured we’d get around to it sometime today.” Her interest in Leon hadn’t eluded him, even though she wasn’t completely comfortable with the oilman. If her fidgeting with her arms was any sign, she wasn’t too comfortable with him either. He wanted to protect her from Leon, which meant making her self-sufficient. “I think on Monday we should take a trip into Fort Worth to do a little shopping.”

Instant suspicion narrowed her eyes, bringing a smile to his lips.

“What kind of shopping?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Let’s see.” Shrugging, he started counting off his fingers. “We’ll need a tractor–actually we’ll need at least two tractors–a few ATVs, a skid-loader with all the attachments, farming implements, hay mowers for all that hay you’re sowing. At least one, maybe two balers, depending on the size of the bales. Feeding equipment, a combine, tack for those horses you bought from Cartwright...” He looked around at the tall grass of the yard. “A lawn mower. Give or take a few small ticket items.”

By the time he finished with his list, she looked a little green under all her freckles. “Can’t forget those small ticket items.”

“You sure can’t. The sooner you cut your ties with Ferguson, the better.”

He looked toward the house. Several of the porch posts needed replacing and the broken and weathered shutters were unsalvageable. The roof looked relatively new, but he’d have to check it for bad shingles. The inside couldn’t be in much better shape. Besides the surface repairs like painting and replacing flooring, undoubtedly there was bad plumbing and wiring, too. He looked back at her. She watched him with intensity again, stirring his blood.

He glanced back at the house. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to do some of the carpentry work on the house.”

Her eyes widened. “You would?”

Would he?

He took off his hat, only to reset it right back on again, then cleared his throat. “Yeah. I would. I’ll subcontract for anything out of my expertise, and I have a couple of guys in mind to help out with the repairs on the ranch buildings and fencing.”

“The work you did on Tracy’s salon is beautiful.”

He slid his gaze away and shrugged. “Like her place, this old house has good bones. Unfortunately, I’ll need tools to do the work. I have some, but not enough. I hope you have a business account with liquid cash or a bank willing to give you a loan.”

She simply nodded and sighed.

“Why on Earth did you buy this dump?”

“I wanted a place I could make my own.” She looked at the ramshackle mansion. “When the realtor showed me the ranch, I knew it could be beautiful.”

The sun played on loose coils framing her freckled, heart-shaped face and the deceptive youth of her make-up free profile. The rest of her long hair was pulled back into a snarled ponytail. With the overgrowth of spring green, bluebonnets and daffodils tangled around her feet, she reminded him of one of the fairy statues his mother collected.

Charli peered up at him with an ageless depth showing in her crystalline eyes. She had seen more than she should have for someone so young. He vaguely remembered the kids in the bar last Friday night and their conversation about her not having any friends. What had happened to her to make her so guarded?

He jutted his chin toward the house. “It was a beautiful place once. Built at the end of the eighteen hundreds, after fire destroyed the original place. The house was white and the shutters and trim were dark red–you know, like a brick color. And the gardens were spectacular until Jock’s mother died about fifteen years ago.”

“That’s how I imagine the house.”

The deep intensity of her eyes pulled him in as if he’d walked off the dock into the lake beyond the overgrown yard. He felt things he hadn’t felt for a long, very long, time. Charli Monroe’s appeal went deeper than attraction. What about her intrigued him so damned much?

When she spoke, her soft voice came to him like a whisper on the warm breeze. “I think of it like a caterpillar–a wrinkly, ugly worm with traces of dull colors on it. But when the worm metamorphoses, it becomes something truly beautiful.”

As if conjured by a fairy’s voice, a small blue butterfly fluttered by them. It lighted on a spire of bluebonnets. He stared at until it took off in flight to land on another flower. “Like a butterfly.”

For a moment, he let himself drift back to the day he’d carried Brenda over the threshold of the house he’d built for her, and the dreams that had died when he read her letter two days before the mission.

In a flash, the memory changed. He stood along the roadside aiming an M-16 at the man behind the wheel of a derelict car. After the man refused to get out, he had ordered his men to surround the vehicle, and the Arab driver sneered. Then it exploded.

Nothing in his life would ever be bright and beautiful again.

* * * *

Later that evening, Charli set two mugs of coffee on the table and took the chair across from Dylan at the kitchen table. He tapped a pen on the wood top as he mulled over something. On a sheet of paper before him were listed several things he’d need from the home center.

She sipped from her mug. “So, where do we start? The horses I bought will be delivered the Monday after Easter. Sheriff Cartwright bred one of the sorrels to one of his prized stallions.”

He stopped tapping and looked at her. “You’re not fooling around.”

She shrugged and looked into her cup. “Once I get the idea to do something, I jump right in and do it.”

“I can see that.” He leaned over his arms on the table. “The stables look pretty damned good, surprisingly. They’re not as old as the other buildings. Jock added them about twenty years ago when he decided to raise cutting horses to irk my granddad. The stalls need fixed and it needs cleaned out. I’ll take care of those first. I’d also like to call the men I told you about while we were on the grand tour.”

“The carpenters?”

“Yeah, Tom Miller and his uncle, Jesse Riley.” He picked up his mug. “Tom got out of the Navy not too long ago and worked for his father-in-law’s construction company, but he recently went out of business. Tom’s wife just had a baby, and I know he’d appreciate the job. He and Jesse have been doing handy work in the area, and both men have some ranching experience.”

“Okay. Call them. They can work on the fences and then the barn.”

He took a sip of his coffee. “I’ll get the storage barn in shape for holding feed and hay. It’ll be a mess to clean.” He lowered the mug and arched a brow. “But thanks to Uncle Sam, I’m no stranger to bullshit.”

She groaned and shook her head. “That’s just bad.”

His lips twitched into the rusty crooked grin, and as it had the other times she’d seen it, a quiver tickled her belly.

“I know. My jokes used to be funnier.”

Somewhere the real Dylan still lurked inside the shell. Would working for her bring him out?

“Tracy told me about what you’re planning to do with this place once you graduate.” He leaned back in his chair. “I think opening up your place to troubled teens is a great idea. Noble.”

Heat warmed her cheeks, and she looked down at the mug between her hands. “I hope I can get the support of the community. Without them, it won’t work.”

“Get the Cartwrights on your side and everything will be fine. If you haven’t figured it out yet, they pretty much run this county.”

She smirked at him. “They do seem to be pretty high up the food chain. The mayor’s nephew is the sheriff.”

“Not to mention Winnie Cartwright is the queen of gossip.” He picked up the pen and started tapping again. “Where should we start in the house?”

“We?”

“Of course, we. Tom and Jesse will be set to work on rebuilding the barn and stringing fencing. But I’ll need some help in here. I can teach you whatever you need to know. Mostly, I’ll need a gofer.”

“A gofer?” She sat back in her chair and crossed her arms. “Sounds boring as hell.”

He stopped tapping the pen. “Probably is. I can hire someone else if you’d like. I figured you’d be interested in helping, otherwise you’d have hired a contractor and been done with it.”

How did he read her so well? “Yes, I’d like to help. It’ll be fun.”

“Fun, huh?”

She shrugged and picked up her cup. “Sure. But let’s take it slow. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Besides, the gofer has classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

He grinned and set off the fluttering in her belly again. How did he do that?

“I suppose on those days I’ll kick back and relax.”

“Not if you want a paycheck.” She drained her mug. “Where did you learn to be a carpenter? Was it something you learned in the Army?”

Shifting in his seat, he looked down at his hands. “No, I didn’t learn carpentry or plumbing or electrical work in the Army.” He toyed with the pen. “When I was a kid, Dad was stationed in Heidelberg, Germany. Right about the same time the Berlin Wall came down. Anyway, because my mother loved the city so much, we lived there instead of on base. Our landlord lived in the house next to ours and was a local carpenter. He took pity on me, I think.”

Folding her hands under her chin, she rested her elbows on the table. “Why?”

He exchanged the pen for his mug. “I was always something of a loner. Tracy was often my only friend. Anyway, Karl saw that and decided to take me under his wing, I guess. In the three years we lived in Germany, he taught me everything he knew. Including a very colorful vocabulary of German curses.”

“You learned enough to build the beautiful house near Killeen?”

“So, you went to the ranch?”

“Yes. Tracy said it’s Italian.”

Nodding, he looked into his mug, then took a drink. “Brenda and I were stationed in Italy for about a year before Nine-Eleven. It’s a sized-down replica of a villa we saw there.”

She had to press him despite the dangerous ground. Understanding his relationship with his ex-wife meant she’d begin to understand what happened to him. “How long were you married?”

He didn’t look at her, and for a long time, he didn’t speak. He tensed, and she knew she’d overstepped. She was about to tell him he didn’t have to answer when he said, “Eleven years. We met my first day of high school. Brenda was the prettiest girl in Colton High and was the head cheerleader. I was the new kid no one knew, a geek actually.”

“You, a geek? Never.”

“Oh, I was. I may not have been the stereotypical geek with the thick glasses and a calculator tucked into my shirt pocket, but I was an outsider. I could speak German and a few other languages, too, better than I could ride a horse.”

He stood and took his mug to the coffee maker beside the sink. His back muscles flexed under his t-shirt as he refilled his cup. An eagle and flag tat moved under his right sleeve as he slid the pot back on the hotplate. “Brenda and I had biology together. I loved it. She hated it. By the second term, I was her tutor and quite infatuated. By the end of the year, she was my girlfriend, and we both had a much better understanding of biology.”

He took a long draw on the mug and turned to face her.

Dylan didn’t enjoy talking about his ex, she could tell, but healing required discussing and dealing with the things causing the pain. Wasn’t she still learning that lesson herself?

He leaned against the edge of the counter. “We broke up a half dozen times. The longest time occurred while I went to Texas A & M and she went to Texas Tech. The last time was when I told her I was commissioning into the Army. But we always got back together.” He stared into his mug, and his already deep voice dropped an octave. “Now, she’s married to another geek.”

“High school sweethearts,” she muttered. She couldn’t begin to relate. Her high school sweetheart had been an older cowhand on the Long Arrow. Danny introduced her to sex and marijuana. With him, she could forget the grief and the hatred of her new life, but there was a price. She had to steal from her grandfather.

When Hank had caught her with him, he’d fired Danny and threatened to send her to boarding school if she didn’t straighten out. He refused to provide for another whore like her mother. So, she pretended to be the model granddaughter while waiting for Danny to come for her. When the loser hadn’t come, she’d run away to Las Vegas two months before her sixteenth birthday with an even bigger loser. There she’d met the ultimate loser, Ricardo Rodriguez.

Oh, yeah, she understood losers. Sweethearts–not so much.

He downed his coffee, put the mug in the sink, and turned to her. “After we get the stables ready, which room do you want to start in?”

She stood and tapped her fingers on the table’s edge. “I think probably the bathroom off my bedroom. I want to totally remodel it. For a house as big as this one, I can’t believe it doesn’t have more modern conveniences.”

“Jock’s parents added the first floor master bedroom suite. But Jock never did anything more to the house after they died. Okay, we’ll start in your bath.” He paused at the kitchen door onto the back porch. With an unsteady hand, he removed the brown Stetson from the peg by the screen door. “Miss Monroe, thanks for the coffee.”

“You’re welcome, but please, call me Charli.”

He nodded once and donned his hat. “Likewise call me Dylan or Quinn.”

She held out her hand. “Sounds good to me, Dylan. So, Monday we go shopping?”

His hand shook as he took hers. The sensation of his callused fingers brushing against hers sent tingles to her wrists. His eyes locked with hers, and he held her hand a heartbeat longer than needed.

“That’s the plan. I’ll be here at seven. Be ready to go.” He stepped through the door. “Goodnight, Charli.”

“‘Night.”

His warm touch tingled in her hand even after the door closed.