Total pages in book: 26
Estimated words: 24637 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 123(@200wpm)___ 99(@250wpm)___ 82(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 24637 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 123(@200wpm)___ 99(@250wpm)___ 82(@300wpm)
Then I remember whose sky she’s riding over, and I go back to hating him, which is firmer ground anyway.
The house is long and low and built of pale local stone that looks like it grew up out of the ground instead of getting trucked in, and it’s got the absolute nerve to be beautiful. The nerve to make me want to walk its rooms and stay.
I price it on reflex, the way being broke turns you into a permanent appraiser who can’t look at a lovely thing anymore without running the meter.
The meter on this house sails straight past my entire operating budget without slowing down. A week of this place would re-roof my barn. A month would buy the back forty I’ve wanted for six years, where the harriers hunt come fall.
Stop it, Sensible Blythe says, and she’s right, this arithmetic only ever ends in the same place, which is wanting things, and I gave up wanting things a long time ago, for reasons I keep behind a locked door and don’t hand out to ranch hands or billionaires or anyone else.
And then the front door opens, and there he is, and eighteen years has done absolutely nothing to the man except, infuriatingly, improve the inventory.
Still black-haired, though there’s a thread of silver at one temple now that I refuse to find distinguished. Still built like a closing argument I’m going to lose on points. He’s traded the classroom arrogance for something quieter and frankly worse, the kind of stillness money buys, where a man doesn’t raise his voice or cross a room, he just stands in his own doorway and lets the world rearrange itself around him.
Dark jeans. Boots that have actually been worn. A shirt with the sleeves pushed up his forearms.
He looks like he belongs to this land, like the stone made him too, and it’s the single most annoying thing I’ve seen in eighteen years, and I once watched Sergeant refuse food for three days purely to spite me.
“Blythe Vergara,” he says slowly, and my name in his mouth comes out half-tasted, the faint Greek of it sanding the corners off the syllables. “You came.”
“You sent a truck and a very nervous child to fetch me.” I’m climbing down before the ranch hand can come around and help, the way I climb down from my own truck a dozen times a day, and I’m not about to start needing assistance now, in front of him, of all the insufferable men ever assembled. “It seemed rude to make them drive back empty.”
And then he looks at me.
I mean he really looks, the way you’re absolutely not supposed to look at a woman you’ve summoned like a contractor coming to quote a fence line, a slow, unhurried drag of those black eyes that starts at my dusty boots and travels all the way up, taking an inventory of its own.
And by the time his gaze gets back to my face it’s gone a shade darker than it’s got any business being at noon on a Tuesday with a hawk watching.
I want this to disgust me. I want it more than I’ve wanted anything in a while, since disgust I could work with, disgust would let me get back in the truck with my head high.
But what actually happens is that my pulse picks up a beat nobody cleared with me, and some idiot girl I evicted nineteen years ago picks the lock on her room and presses her face to the window and reports that he’s still looking, he is, he’s still looking.
Don’t look, Sensible Blythe warns.
But I do. I look back. That’s the trouble with this man, it’s always been the trouble, he says a thing in that voice or aims those eyes a certain way and waits to see if it gets under my skin, and the genuinely humiliating part, the part I’d deny under oath, is that it does every time, and I’ve never once in eighteen years had the sense to pretend it didn’t.
Hate him, I remind myself, since hating him is the one renewable resource I’ve got. I’ve hated him with real discipline for almost two decades and I’m not handing that over now for a man in worn boots standing in a doorway he probably had imported.
“You’d better come in,” he says, stepping back to let me pass, and as I cross in front of him the heat of him reaches me across the last foot of Texas air and does something completely unforgivable to the backs of my knees. “There’s lunch set for us on the west porch. You’ll want to see the view before I ruin your afternoon.”
The walk through his house is supposed to make me feel small. That’s what these places are built to do, all that pale stone and quiet money, engineered to remind a woman in dusty boots exactly how far out of her depth she’s wandered.