“Home Sweet Home,” it read, surrounded by big pink hearts.
Victoria had done this.
She’d mucked the stall and then covered it with this … crap.
He picked up the shovel and got rid of the hay, because he knew Patience wouldn’t sleep with the strange smell.
And in the solitude of the barn, in the dark hushed shadows, with only his horse as a witness, he couldn’t quite stop the smile that tugged at his face.
Potpourri.
As far as pranks went, this was a good one.
chapter
3
In Victoria’s life
, bad things happened in dens. Not just suicide, but systematic marital betrayal. Dens were worse than strip clubs or whorehouses. The password-protected computers in the mahogany-paneled rooms were more damaging than a lap dance or a smear of lipstick on a white collar.
In the dark nights after Joel’s suicide, when the lawyers and accountants were stripping her home down to the studs before selling it out from under her, she wished her husband had just been caught with a whore or two. An orgy of strippers—male and female. A cow, if need be.
It would have been better than what he had done.
And he’d done so much of it—from the Ponzi scheme to the suicide—in the den, which she had so lovingly and diligently decorated with his taste in mind.
Dens were bad, bad places.
And her father’s was no different, perhaps worse. Because it was the den belonging to the first man who’d betrayed her.
Sunday morning, she stood in front of her dad’s closed den door, the wall of the hallway against her back.
It wasn’t as if he’d be in there. And it wasn’t as if she hadn’t been in there since he’d died. But the room … the room was so him.
And now it was hers.
She wondered if the old man was rolling over in his grave. His useless bastard daughter was running his precious Crooked Creek. Not that she’d really been running much of anything these past weeks.
It was time to change that.
The doorknob was cool under her hand, the door heavy against her shoulder. The air inside was stale, smelling of her father’s cigars and Old Bay Rum even after all this time.
The décor was atrocious. Cowhides, serapes, deer heads staring down at her. It was right out of a tacky Western-themed bar.
“Thinking about redecorating?” The smell of Chanel No 5 and cayenne pepper preceded Celeste Baker. The hot spice in the air stood at odds with the coolness in the woman’s voice.
Celeste Baker, Lyle’s ex-wife, had for some totally incomprehensible reason decided to stick around after her son had left the ranch a month ago.
Out of habit, Victoria wanted to believe it was to see her fail. It was not as though Celeste had any reason to want her to succeed. Victoria was, after all, the daughter of Lyle’s mistress, born just eighteen months after Luc.
But for whatever reason, the imperial Celeste, in all of her regal beauty, had thawed toward Victoria in the last few months. Maybe because Celeste seemed to believe that the mistreatment Victoria and Luc had received at Lyle’s hands as kids was somehow her fault for leaving him when she did.
A ridiculous notion, but to her great shame Victoria did nothing to assuage that guilt.
Which only made her more uncomfortable around the woman. When Celeste was judging her, Victoria knew where she stood—directly beneath the former fashion model. Now that Celeste had decided to like her, of all
things, or if not like her, at least support her—well, Victoria was totally adrift.
One more thing in her life that she couldn’t count on staying the same.
“It could use it,” Victoria said, striding across the wide plank floor as if there were no trepidation in her heart about this room and her place in it. “It could use a match.”
“The whole ranch could. The only thing worse than the décor is the architecture.”
Well, on that they were in total agreement.
Victoria didn’t even hesitate as she pushed the rolling chair away from the oak desk and sat on its worn fabric seat as if she belonged there.
A spring poked her butt as if to argue.
Celeste sat in one of the black leather club chairs set up across from the desk. In the day’s brand-new light, she looked like one of those paintings of the Madonna. Serene. Lovely. Her complexion like milk.
Despite her two showers, Victoria still smelled like horse poop.
“When do you leave?” Victoria asked, when the silence pulled taut between them.
“Today. I have a reservation at Big Sky Resort for the week.”
Victoria sighed in nostalgic bliss. Spa weeks. She remembered those.
“Mud baths? Tell me there will be mud.” The mud baths had been her favorite and she tried not to sound like a kid asking for candy, but it was hard. It had been over a year since she’d even gotten a pedicure, much less sat in mud.
“And seaweed.”
“Oh! Seaweed wraps, with the plastic wrap and the hot towels?”
Celeste smiled like a cat with a mouth full of cream, the bitch. “If it’s a good spa, I certainly hope so.”
“Well, for your sake I hope it is.”
“You could come.”
The idea was like a whisper from her old life, as if someone had left open a window and the memories of better times came swirling in on a breeze.
She’d been a princess, spoiled and pampered, sitting in mud and wrapped in seaweed, and for a few years it had felt so damn good. She’d been so deeply infatuated with the spa lifestyle that in the years before Jacob was born, she’d thought of opening a spa. She’d even picked out property in New Jersey. At one point she’d been so excited, she’d told her best friend, Renee, about the idea.
And Renee had laughed and told their entire circle of friends about it as if it were a joke. As if Victoria herself was the punch line. And Victoria had been young enough, and insecure enough, that she’d tossed the dream aside.
But that was so far behind her it was as though it had happened to another person. And going back or wanting to go back was like a betrayal of every person her husband had robbed. Every life that had been ruined so that she could sit in mud.
It was ludicrous when she thought of it like that.
“I can’t,” she finally said. “I just … can’t.”
Celeste nodded, smiling sadly. “I know.”
Celeste blew on whatever was inside the steaming crimson bowl she carried and then set it on the edge of the desk.
As the scent of eggs, bacon, cheese, and sour cream filled the room, Victoria’s stomach roared like a bear coming out of hibernation.
She jumped, startled and embarrassed. It had been a long time since her body had made itself known. Between her husband’s suicide, and the resulting fallout,
and Jacob’s sickness and hospitalization, she’d begun to consider the feeding and bathing and clothing of her body as chores that needed to be checked off her list.
But suddenly … she was hungry.
Celeste arched an elegant silver eyebrow. “You can have this.” She pushed the bowl across the desk.
“You’re eating it.” Victoria stared at the scrambled eggs with bacon and cheese. Little green flecks of chive sat on the mountain of sour cream on top. She couldn’t even imagine Celeste eating something like that.
“Ruby made it; I couldn’t say no.”
Couldn’t say no? Celeste?
“Go ahead,” Celeste urged.
There was a voice in her head telling her to reject the offer. To pretend that she wasn’t hungry. To pretend that she was fine despite the fact that her stomach was a speaking bear. That was the old Victoria.
“Thanks,” she said and grabbed the bowl, scooping up the dollop of sour cream sprinkled with cheese. It melted in her mouth, salty and tangy, and she nearly groaned.
It tasted like colors, like explosions of yellow and orange and creamy white.
When had she stopped tasting things?
Celeste smiled, and Victoria didn’t even care that the Queen was laughing at her.
“So? How is the ranching business going?”
Again, the lie surfaced on her lips.
Fine. Just fine. Everything is great
.
But it wasn’t.
She stood on the edge of another failure, and pride hadn’t ever helped her. Ever.
“Eli sold the entire Angus herd yesterday,” she said. “I told him I wanted to learn how to ranch, how to do this … well, and he made me muck out the stalls.”
“Muck—”
“Shovel shit.” The words felt good in her mouth, round and then sharp at the end. She should do more swearing.
Celeste’s lips pursed slightly and Victoria mined through the eggs for a big chunk of bacon and then groaned at the taste. Salty and meaty, with a hint of smoke. Pink, it tasted pink, tinged with black. So good. Food was so good sometimes. She’d forgotten.
“He hates me.” She was talking with her mouth full, and even that felt good. “And I don’t blame him, but this land is mine now and I don’t know what to do with it.”
“Well, it seems to me Eli might not be the best person to talk to.”
“He’s run this ranch for years, his father before him, and his father before that.” She shoveled more eggs, finding chunks of tomato like buried treasure.
“Yes. I know.” Celeste crossed her legs and ran a hand over her perfectly behaved silver hair, from crown to nape. “And I suppose if you want to learn how to be a cowboy, or … I don’t know … shovel shit, he’d be a wonderful person to talk to.”
Victoria choked on her eggs in her delight in Celeste’s cattiness. If there was anything Celeste was good at it was being a snob, and as a recovering snob herself, Victoria relished a little backslide into bitchery.
“But I can guarantee you that Lyle didn’t ask Eli how to run his business.”
Victoria sat up straighter, catching on to Celeste’s way of thinking. Being the recipient of Celeste’s smile was like getting blessed by the pope—Victoria felt suffused with purpose.
She took another bite of breakfast and started opening drawers to the big desk, stopping when she found an old-fashioned Rolodex. Rifling through the cards, the white paper worn and frayed under her fingers, she
pulled out the ones that might be helpful to a woman in her position—bank managers, accountants, lawyers.
“I need to talk to the accountant. Arrange a meeting with Randy Jenkins. There’s probably someone at the bank who—”
The soft click of the door closing behind Celeste as she left the den sounded like a door slamming.
Victoria stared at the shut door.
Once upon a time she would have thought that she’d done something wrong. That Celeste was mad at her. And she would have gone out of her way to figure out what the problem was and then try to fix it.
She’d stopped humming early on in her marriage because Joel had found it disruptive.
Victoria took another bite of eggs and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
Feeling gloriously unmannered, she went back to her Rolodex and the task of becoming a rancher.
Monday morning Victoria walked into Randy Jenkins’s Dallas law office with all the enthusiasm of the freshly converted, the born-again.
Look out, Crooked Creek Ranch; I’m ready to make some decisions
.
About what, she didn’t know.
“Good morning, Victoria,” Randy said, coming around his desk to shake her hand. The mid-morning Texas sun blasted through the floor-to-ceiling windows and hit the polished surface of his desk. She squinted against the glare and shook his hand.
“Hi, Randy.” She smiled into his nondescript face. He had all the trappings she’d come to associate with lawyers. The wire-rimmed glasses that probably cost more than they should. The dark suits, the red ties. The too soft hands.
Where Randy was different, however, was in the eyes.
There was none of the raging judgment there that she was used to from the Manhattan lawyers prosecuting her husband’s estate. Instead, there was an almost apologetic eagerness. Probably because Randy’s son had knocked Luc unconscious on the ice last month. It was an accident, but it had ultimately put an end to Luc’s NHL career. Either way, Victoria was ready to pretend that eagerness was all about her.
“I assume you’re here to start paperwork against Eli Turnbull?”
“That … what?”
“Eli sold the herd on Saturday.” Randy turned back around the desk, reaching for a file.
“I know.”
He stopped mid-reach, gilded by the sun flowing in from outside, and she felt the cold breeze of insecurity. “You know?”
“He was given control of the herd in the will. Remember?”
“Not so he could sell the whole herd. We could argue intent, and frankly, there’s a case for sabotage—”
“Sabotage of what?”
“The ranch?”
“He wants to buy the ranch.” She managed a weak little laugh, despite the hard lump in her throat.
“I know. Trust me, Eli’s made his intentions clear. But your family has been adamant about not selling it to him or his uncle.”
“His uncle wants the ranch, too? What is it with these men?”
“Eli’s uncle, John Turnbull, is a man of some means. He is the bank account behind Eli’s offers.”
“But how does selling the herd sabotage the ranch?” She tried to connect the dots on her own, but she didn’t
even know where all of them were. And suddenly there seemed to be a lot more than she’d ever dreamed of.
“Much of the valuation of the ranch is based on that herd. And since your brother intends to give the controlling interest of Baker Leather to Tara Jean Sweet—”
“He does?”
“You didn’t know?”
“Clearly.” Randy Jenkins with his bland face was too easy a target for all of her embarrassment and anger, so she let him have it. “I don’t know anything, Mr. Jenkins. That’s why I came here today. To learn something.”
Randy blinked and then sat carefully behind his desk, as if his office was suddenly filled with land mines.
He gestured for her to sit across from him and she did, forcing herself not to clutch her nearly empty purse like a life jacket. It was the last of her Coach bags, the leather frayed at the edges and the straps getting sticky from use.
She crossed her legs at the ankle, tucking them underneath the chair, and cultivated stillness. If there was one thing she knew how to do, it was keep her shit together while bombs were raining down from the sky.