“Eli!” Jacob yelled, jumping off the side of the porch. Eli jerked sideways at the sound, and he barely managed to catch Jacob as he tumbled to a halt in front of him.
“Have you fed Lucky?” the boy asked.
“Nope.” He smiled down at Jacob. She’d forgotten how endearing the man was with her son, how out of his depth but game. She blinked, remembering when he’d said the same thing about her.
“Can I do it?” Jacob asked, bouncing on his feet while reaching down to scratch at his ankle where the summer’s mosquito bites lingered.
Eli smiled and glanced up at her, lovely in his warmth. His surprising openness. “Come on.”
She lingered at the closest paddock, watching Eli show Jacob how to feed the horses. When Jacob caught on, Eli let him take over, and he came to stand next to her, his arms slung over the top rail of the split-wood fence.
“I hope you don’t mind,” she said, pointing to her son, who was diligently following Eli’s instructions, a pretty brown-and-white collie following him.
“Of course not.”
In the silence, her body hummed and her imagination traced the edges of the distance between them, charting him like a foreign land.
“You’ve been coming around the ranch this week.”
He said nothing, spit something over his other shoulder.
“What were you doing this morning?” she asked.
He shrugged.
Immediately exhausted by his still, deep waters, his taciturn cowboy routine, she hung her head, too tired to force him into talking.
“You’re going to chase her away, Eli. Is that what you want? Because it will ruin everything for me.”
He pressed his foot against the fence post and said nothing.
“I don’t need a watchdog, Eli,” she said. “And I don’t need you starting fights with my employees.”
His hand touched her skin and she jerked away. If he touched her, she would unravel, she would. She was so damn weak.
“He started a fight with me.”
“Eli—”
“Look, Tori, I don’t believe her, I don’t trust her, and if Amy’s going to be there, I’m going to be there.”
“Why are you doing this? You have no stake in this ranch.”
“I’m trying to protect you.”
“Two months ago you were trying to ruin me.”
He said nothing, both of them watching the sky, anything but each other.
“Are you saying your feelings have changed that much?” she asked.
“Christ, Tori, we … slept together.”
She laughed, though it hurt a little to diminish what had been so special in her life. But there was no way sex in the front seat of his truck with a lonely widow was all that out of the ordinary for him. “It meant that much to you? I’m flattered. But I don’t think you look at sex that way, Eli. You also had sex with me when you were furious with me.”
Muscles in his jaw tensed.
“I think you’re there because of her. Because …”
“Don’t, Tori. Don’t imagine things that just aren’t there. She’s nothing but a threat right now. To you. She’s nothing to me.”
Yeah, right
, she thought.
“You want me to fire her?”
“Yes! God yes.”
Jacob tossed rocks into the tall grass on the far side of the paddock, and the collie ran in and fished them out, setting them at his feet. Watching her son, the dog waited with such gratitude, such enthusiasm for him to throw another rock.
“No.”
Eli dropped his head, thunking it against the fence.
“My husband committed suicide,” she said, focusing all of her attention on the brittle grain of the wood under her hands. “And my best friend, Renee, told me that Joel married me because he knew I would just spend my life being so damn grateful that he’d even noticed me
that I would never … even if I suspected something about how much money he was making and how fast, I wouldn’t say anything, out of fear that he’d take it all away.”
“Did you know? What your husband was doing?”
“I knew he was doing something,” she whispered. “And I didn’t do anything and that’s enough, right? That’s wrong. And she was right—I was a guest in my own house for years, so damn grateful just to be there.”
“Your best friend sounds like a bitch.”
“She was. Is. They all were. So was I. I was their leader. But she was right, and I can’t … I’ve got to make the right decisions for me. For my son. My life.”
“And you think Amy is the right decision?”
“I do, Eli. I’m sorry.”
He shrugged. “Then I’ll be under those poplars every morning.”
“Don’t you have better things to do? Horse-breeding things?”
“My girls aren’t ready to go yet. And thanks to the land you sold me and the income it brings in, I’ve got some wiggle room. In fact, for the first time in my life, I’ve actually got money in the bank.”
She snorted, letting him know what she thought of his wiggle room.
“I won’t … you can’t jeopardize this, Eli. I need her.”
He stared at her. But he didn’t say anything. She could get no promises from Eli Turnbull, and it pissed her off.
“Can I ask you a question?” she asked.
“Would it matter if I said no?”
“Where’s your father?”
Back when she had money, she kept the heirloom jewelry passed down to her from Joel’s mother in a vault at her bank. To get to it, she would have to pass through a series of armored doors with locks and keys and pass codes. An armed guard.
And all those doors and vaults and guards had just closed up tight in Eli’s head.
But he reached out to her, his fingers tracing her cheekbone, and just that touch made his intentions clear.
“Do you forgive me?” she asked, her voice made out of steel and concrete, because honestly, he had to be joking.
“Do you really care?”
Her body certainly didn’t. Not when the calluses of his fingers sent ripples over her skin like water after stones had been tossed in.
Luckily, her self-respect, wearing cashmere and silk and a dozen buttons she could mentally count and stroke, shored her up.
She stepped away and his mouth twisted into a grim line.
The silence wasn’t comfortable, but not pained either, and she was reminded of those days in the penthouse, before Jacob—when it was just her and the housekeeper, trying to avoid each other in every room.
“The Elms, downtown,” he said. “He’s got Alzheimer’s. Dementia. Violent … tendencies they call it.” He shrugged, but there was nothing nonchalant about him. “Took care of him as best I could until it became obvious the man needed help full time or something was going to get burned to the ground.”
“How long has he been there?”
“Seven … eight years, this December. Put him in at Christmas …” He stopped, tipping his hat low as if he couldn’t bear her watching him. “That’s the kind of son I am.”
Oh, his heart was right there on his sleeve and she’d never expected to see it. Never expected him to show so much of himself. The desire to kiss away the worst of his guilt, the load he carried like a backpack of dead weight, was hard to resist.
“Sometimes you don’t have a choice in those things.”
His sigh was heavy and deep, pulled up from the bottom of his guts, full of disagreement.
“I was sixteen when I left my mom,” she said, surprised to be talking about her own ancient history. “I left her to her boyfriends who didn’t really care about her. The painkillers that cared even less. I tried for years … but in the end I had to save myself. I just stayed at boarding school, didn’t come home on holidays, told her I was too busy with classes.”
“I never met your mom. All those years you came down.”
“She hated it here. Too boring for a woman who had to surround herself with people just so she could feel something. And with Celeste—”
“Must have been hard.”
She shrugged, because he seemed to know how hard it had been. He seemed to see right into the damaged places, because those same places were damaged in him.
“I actually liked the holidays at school. It was just me and some of the housekeepers. A couple of teachers. Mr. Jennings the gardener. We played a lot of poker. I got to read all day long if I wanted, or help Mr. Jennings in the greenhouse.”
She smiled. The air smelled like sun-baked grass and sweat and horses, and it was better than a glass of wine at taking care of those knots in the back of her neck. The worries that grew on them.
Or maybe it was the man next to her who did that.
She hoped not, she really did, for her own sake.
“Once I pretended to be sick, just so I could spend the day reading,” he offered.
“Once?” Pretending to be sick had been her bread and butter for a lot of years.
“The Hobbit,”
he said. “Uncle John gave it to me for my eleventh birthday and two days later, I had a hundred pages to go and just couldn’t wait.”
“Your Uncle John, I don’t remember him.”
“He steers clear of Bakers.”
“Because of the land?”
Eli nodded. “John’s polished that grudge to a high shine. Doesn’t like the fact that I’ve stopped caring about getting the land back.”
“Where is he now?”
“Full of questions tonight, aren’t you?”
“Sorry. I … I didn’t mean to pry.”
But she did, and he knew that, and she intended to pry until he stopped letting her in, which seemed like it might happen this very moment.
It was time to go home; she’d tried to call off her guard dog and had managed to keep her clothes on. This … conversation was only going to make a complicated situation worse. She didn’t need to like him. She already wanted him plenty.
“Jacob,” she called, “it’s time—”
“He’s in Galveston until after Christmas,” he said, winding and unwinding that towel he’d been carrying around the fence post. “When I was a kid, John was an oil rigger. He came to visit once when I was about ten. Dad had been on a three-day bender and I had done what I could with the animals and his work and school, but … well, Uncle John saw what was happening and didn’t leave. Bought a house over in Springfield and tried to pick up the slack as much as he could.”
“Thank God for him.”
Eli nodded. “I do most days.”
She waited a few more seconds just because she wanted to, like lingering in a bath before the water got too cold, and then she pushed herself away from the fence. “We better get—”
His hand covered hers and she gasped at the contact, the sudden heat, the roughness. All the receptors in her
body were thrown wide open and she wanted to absorb him, pull him in through her skin, her nerves.
“Come back. Tonight.” If his touch was desperate, his face was unreadable, a granite mask, and she knew if he’d shown the least bit of weakness, desire, lust, anything,
for her
, she would have said yes.
But right now, this need he had for her had little to do with her.
“Have you forgiven me?” He was silent, his grip on her hand hard enough to hurt, and then he let go. All the answer she needed. “I told you I wouldn’t come back unless you did.”
“How do you know I haven’t?”
She ached to touch him, to cup that jaw in her hands, to press her lips to his, to sip the bitterness and grief from him. “Because I haven’t forgiven myself.”
“Hey, Eli!” Jacob came running up, the dog at his heels, and she jumped backwards about eight hundred feet, not that her son noticed. Nope, he only had eyes for the cowboy. Must run in the family. “Can I come back, help you feed the horses again at night? After school?”
“I … ah …” Eli looked over at her and she reached out for Jacob, putting her hands on his head. She needed distance from Eli, not friendly horse-feeding visits. It had been stupid to stay here, asking questions.
“I don’t know, Jacob, Eli’s a busy—”
“It’s fine with me.” Eli scratched his dog behind the ear and the dog’s fool face split in a wide, happy doggy smile, his tongue hanging down to the tall grass.
Jacob cheered, the dog barked, and she mentally went back to counting those buttons on her self-control.
Back at the ranch, the moon was coming up over the house, the yellow lights leaking out through the new
windows installed today. Surprisingly, Amy’s truck was still there and when Victoria got out of her car, the woman emerged from the shadows.
“Amy? What are you still doing here?”
“Is he coming back?” she asked.
“Eli?” Victoria watched as Jacob trotted up the stairs, yelling for Celeste so that he could tell her every detail of feeding those horses.
“Did you tell Eli to stay away?” Amy demanded, pulling Victoria from her thoughts about Celeste’s eerily good grandmother ways.
“I tried.”
“Damn it, Victoria, why’d you do that?”
“What? He’s causing problems, isn’t he? Starting fights with your employees?”
“Thomas started it, and he’d pick a fight with a scarecrow if he thought it was looking at him funny.”
Victoria tossed her hands in the air. “Well, everyone was acting like he’s been sitting there like a giant pain in the butt.”
“Oh, he is. Yesterday he wouldn’t move his truck to let the guys delivering the two hot tubs closer to the house. We had to get everyone on the crew to carry the things right past him, while he sat there, eating a sandwich.”
“So? It sounds like I tried to do everyone a favor.”
Amy stared at her, her jaw looking as if she were chewing rocks. “Is he coming back?”
Too late, too wrapped up in her own head, Victoria realized what this was about: a mom being close to her son.
Amy’d had Eli, hating her, causing her nothing but grief, sitting a hundred yards away from her every morning. The closest she’d been to him in decades.
And Victoria had told him to stay away.
“If you want to see him, go see him, Amy.”
“You know it’s not that easy.”
“Yeah, and whose fault is that?” Victoria didn’t think Amy was going to walk out on her, she had enough faith in Amy’s professionalism, but she totally understood why Eli would think the worst. It wasn’t just that his mother had walked out on him, it was that she’d worked here for a week without going to see him. Three miles away and she couldn’t bridge the distance she’d created so many years ago.
“Is he coming back?”
“Yes. He said he’ll be here until you’re gone.”