In the face of her calmness, Randy relaxed.
“Your brother called a few weeks ago to ask about the legalities of giving Tara Jean control of the leather portion of the inheritance once it’s out of escrow.”
“That seems reasonable; she’s earned it.”
“Well, between losing controlling interest in the leather business and the herd, that leaves your brother with only the land and the house.” He paused, as if checking to see if she was keeping up.
Once again, she felt the need to explain the difference between uninformed and stupid, but then she realized all she’d done so far was prove how in this case they were the same thing.
“When he sells the land—”
“We’re not selling the land.”
For a moment he just blinked at her. “You intend to stay there?”
“When the ranch is out of escrow, I intend to buy it—”
“How? You have no money. No job. Thanks to your husband, no bank in the world will loan you money.”
She refused to be beaten. Refused.
“Look, I know I don’t have much money, but it’s not like my brother is going to charge me market value.”
“I’m not making myself clear.” He sighed as if he were talking to a child, and Victoria wanted to scream. “You can’t afford to keep that house, or that land, without income. There are taxes. Utilities. Owning that much land costs money.”
In a heartbeat she realized what a fool she’d been. All this time she’d thought she was building a home with stone and concrete, only to find out it was feathers.
She took tiny sips of air around the crushing pain in her chest. She clutched her hands together to fight the numbing cold in her body.
She had a home. She had her son. There were decisions to make and she would make them. Bit by bit she pulled herself together—her pride, her hope, the intelligence and strength no one seemed to credit her with—and she cobbled it all together with some righteous anger. Righteous anger that had no target.
“What do you suggest I do?” she asked.
“Your brother has given you free rein to act on his behalf when it comes to the ranch. I suggest you sell the land to Eli.”
And there was her target. That man had made her shovel his horse’s poop, while he sabotaged her family’s ranch.
“I’m not selling him anything more than he was granted in the will,” she said.
“But the land he’s most interested in across the river is only a hundred acres.”
“Nothing. Not one acre.”
There was a universe of disapproval in the click of his ballpoint pen, and she realized she was staring right at the difference between stupid and uninformed.
“Unless there’s no other way to make money from the land,” she quickly amended, searching out a plan in her fevered brain. “I would imagine that if Eli is interested in the acreage across the creek, then others might be, too. And I would imagine that if a few people want to buy it, in this market, even more people would be interested in renting it—”
“Leasing.” He ran a hand down his tie. “It’s called leasing.”
“Fine. I’ll lease the land.” Without the herd, what did she need with a thousand acres?
“That is a great idea.” Randy’s approving smile was like a pat on the head, uncomfortable and condescending, but a relief nonetheless.
“Do you handle that or do I need to talk to a realtor?”
This at least was familiar. One thing she knew was realty. And however many miles separated Manhattan and Crooked Creek, realtors were realtors.
“Realtor.”
“Do you have one you recommend?” She pulled her phone from the purse at her feet, intending to type in whatever information he gave her. She missed her iPhone. She really did. But the lawyers had deemed the monthly plan too expensive.
“Cheryl helped us with my father’s land when he passed.”
A card slid across the desk, pushed by Randy’s manicured fingers. Those hands were so like her husband’s that she paused, starting to doubt the sense of this plan. What did she know, really? About anything? The old
demons had their claws sunk in deep and it was hard work shaking them off.
Forcing herself to feel confident, she picked up the card. It was real in her hands, substantial, something she could use to climb and crawl toward higher ground.
She slipped it into the pocket of her light cardigan, where it glowed and pulsed with possibility.
chapter
4
Eli waited a
week after the sale of the herd until the last of the paperwork was done before going to see Victoria. That morning the broker he’d hired to handle the sale had called to tell him that the money had been split and Eli could expect to see his half in his account within two hours.
So at noon on Friday, he was at the front door of the Crooked Creek Ranch, shaking the rain off his slicker, before walking in.
“She’s in the den,” Ruby told him, rearranging the cards in her hand without looking up, as if the game of gin rummy she was playing with Jacob was the most important thing in the world. They sat at the kitchen table as a summer storm pounded on the windows beside them.
“The den? What the hell is she doing in there?”
Ruby shrugged and picked up a card from the pile on the kitchen table. “Running things.”
Eli smiled slightly at the thought. There was nothing for her to run. He’d made sure of that.
He didn’t care to examine why being a jerk to this woman filled him with a strange goodwill, a foreign satisfaction. He’d never in his life taken such pleasure in the face of another person’s failure, but there wasn’t a bit of regret in him.
It had to be because of her shoes.
He leaned over Jacob’s shoulder and rearranged the boy’s nine of spades so that he could see he had gin.
“Hey!” Ruby cried as the boy slapped his cards on the table with a whoop.
Smiling, Eli walked down the dark hallway, listening to the thunder roll across the land, shaking the foundations of the house.
Inside, he was all sunshine. He was rainbows and blue skies.
The door to the office was cracked open and he knocked while pushing the door wide.
Whatever he’d been expecting—maybe interrupting her while she painted her toenails, or waking her up from a nap—was not happening in the office. In fact, it was totally the opposite.
“Nope, no, that’ll work,” she said into the phone she had cradled between her ear and her shoulder. She pulled the top off a black marker with her teeth and turned toward a big aerial map of the ranch that used to be framed in the front hallway; now it was tacked to the wall behind the desk.
Right into the wall. As if the den were a dorm room.
He entered and shut the door behind him.
“Fifty acres closest to the west access road. Got it. How much? That’s great. Thank you, Cheryl.”
She dropped the phone and set it on the desk, and then with that big black marker put an
x
over a portion of the map. The portion by the west access road. She made a series of notes on a Post-it and then slapped the Post-it on top of the
x
.
There were five
x
’s on the map.
“What the hell are you doing?”
At the sound of his voice she turned, and he was confronted with a new version of Victoria Schulman. First of all, that mean little bun she usually wore at the nape of her neck had, in the week since he’d seen her, migrated
into a sloppy knot on the top of her head, with a white pencil growing through it. She looked like a genie.
The black circles were gone from under her eyes, as though whatever had been keeping her awake at night had decided to leave her alone.
And her skin, which had looked gray and pale, was now … pearly. Pink lit up her cheeks as if she were a girl again.
All of this was strange and slightly nerve-wracking, but what really made him nervous was that she stood there, a smear of black marker and what looked like ketchup across her cheek, smiling at him.
For some reason, the hair at the back of his neck whistled out a warning.
“Well, I was wondering when you’d come find me. My brother called this morning. It seems Matthew Pierce at First National was fairly surprised by a deposit of three quarters of a million dollars in the ranch account.”
“Your family’s part of the sale.” He crossed his arms over his chest, his eyes drawn to the map over her shoulder. The land he’d come in here to buy had one of those black
x
’s over it.
“Yeah, let’s talk about that sale.” She tucked the black marker in the topknot on her head, picked up half of a grilled cheese sandwich, and dunked it in a puddle of ketchup.
“Not much to talk about. It’s over,” he said, strangely transfixed by the sight of her licking a drop of ketchup off the sandwich before taking a huge bite.
“So I gathered.” She was talking through a mouth full of food, a woman who had once told him it was rude to wear his hat in the house. And then she groaned. Not like she was in pain, or even simply enjoying a good sandwich. She groaned with pleasure. With sensual pleasure, like someone was licking her where it felt best. He’d never thought she might have that kind of groan in
her and the surprise of it made his blood thick, his skin hot. “You know I’ve never had this?”
“What? Grilled cheese?”
“And ketchup. It’s the ketchup that changes everything.”
He tended to agree but he kept his mouth shut.
“What are you going to do with the hands, now that there’s no herd for them to handle?” Her question surprised the hell out of him, because it was the right question to ask and he hadn’t given her that much credit.
Maybe he should have.
“We still have fifty or so head. We’ll train the quarter horses with them.”
“So you can sell them, too?”
“No point in keeping ’em.” She was trying so hard to wear her father’s big rancher hat and it just didn’t fit her. She wasn’t made for this life, this conversation. Refraining from smiling wasn’t usually a problem for him, but right now it wasn’t easy.
“So, do you need all the men to train ten horses?”
“I’ve given two weeks’ pay to the full-time guys; the seasonal workers I’ve paid up in full. We’re keeping Phil and Jerry.”
“Jerry? The old guy?”
“Jerry is sixty years old and has arthritis. If he doesn’t work here, he doesn’t work anywhere.”
“Oh.” She paused, those midnight-blue eyes working hard to see into him. “You know, I just can’t decide if you’re an asshole or not.”
He couldn’t fight the smile anymore and it burst across his face like biting into an orange. As fast as it was there, he put it away, but she saw it and slowly, despite the animosity that snapped and popped between them, she smiled, transforming her face, filling the pinched corners of her lips and eyes with a womanly lushness. She was, suddenly, vibrant.
And he was instantly, painfully aware of her. Of the joy she seemed to be unleashing on the world. She used to be that way before her father and, Eli supposed, the rest of her life had quashed it.
He was oddly happy to see that joy return.
But then she schooled her features back into the pinch.
“What about you?” She took another bite of sandwich, oblivious to the ketchup in the corner of her mouth.
“What about me?” He couldn’t take his eyes off that ketchup, the pink of her lip.
“What are you going to do here with no herd and no men?”
“You want to fire me?”
“I didn’t say that. But Randy Jenkins thinks I could sue you. Over that sale.”
For a moment he was dumbstruck. A lawsuit? “The control of the herd was granted to me in the will.”
“I know, but he was talking about reasonable intent and sabotage—”
“Sabotage?”
He stepped farther into the room, his temper beginning to smoke. “I told you about the sale and you said, ‘Awesome.’ ” He was deliberately snide and she put down the sandwich, brushing crumbs off the tips of her small fingers. She dabbed her mouth delicately with a napkin.
“There’s no case,” he insisted. “And you know it.”
Some of that pink blanched from her cheeks. “Why’d you do it?” Her gaze was so level that he felt, briefly, ashamed. Not because he’d sold the herd, but because of that nasty trick in the barn—she deserved better than shoveling manure.
And he knew all too well what it felt like to deserve better than what you were given.
But he didn’t have any answers for her. None that she would like anyway.
She looked at him and then back at the desk—a tell, if
ever there was one. “You know,” she said, and he nearly rolled his eyes. The woman had to learn to not talk so much; every time she opened her mouth she just handed out secrets like they were dimes. “I learned a lot of things from my marriage—”
He lifted his hand just to shut her up.
“This used to be Turnbull land. Your great-grandfather was the foreman.”
“I … I didn’t know that.”
“Your great-grandfather started that leather business and he bought some acreage. And then more. My great-grandfather couldn’t hold his booze, or the land, and he just kept selling it below value. My grandfather tried to buy some back but your grandfather refused. And then my grandfather started selling off more acreage.”
“None of that is my fault. If there’s anyone you should blame it’s your relatives … not mine.”
Ah, she’d just leveled him with her upthrust chin. Really, someone should warn her about that foolish courage. She was going to get herself in trouble.
“Yeah, well, anytime things got tough for a Turnbull a Baker was there with a lowball offer to buy some land, until there wasn’t any left.”
“So you’re carrying around a hundred-year-old grudge?” She made it sound as if he’d been wasting his life trying to get back this land.
“I don’t expect you to understand, Victoria—”
“Stop it. Stop it right there.” All the girlishness was gone, and standing there in her genie bun was one pissed-off woman. She planted her hands wide across the desk and leaned toward him. “I won’t be marginalized, Eli. Not anymore. I’ve spent the last week getting myself a pretty good education in the business of managing this land, and let me assure you, you have no idea what I do or don’t understand.”