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 ofstillness 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 andquiet money, engineered to remind a woman in dusty boots exactly how far out of her depth she’s wandered.
Only it doesn’t go the way it’s supposed to.
Loukas sets a hand at the small of my back, light as anything, just enough to steer me through a doorway, and a girl appears from nowhere to take the canvas jacket I’ve been clutching like a shield, and she carries off my twice-patched jacket as though it were worth the careful way she folds it over her arm.
On the porch there’s a chair already pulled out for me, angled to the view. A glass of iced tea sweating gently beside the plate. Unsweet. With a wedge of lime.
Which is exactly how I take it.
Which I’ve told no one on this ranch.
I stop in the doorway, completely undone. I came braced for cruelty and contempt and the old familiar smirk, and what’s been laid out instead is care, the specific, itemized care of a man who found out how I take my tea and which side the light would sit in my eyes, and had a chair turned just so before I ever crested the rise.
Nobody arranges a chair for the bird lady. Nobody has, not in twenty years of my being the woman who arranges the chairs for everybody else. And I stand there in my twice-patched dignity and feel something in my chest tip dangerously toward a warmth I can’t afford and didn’t budget for.
He pulls the chair an inch farther out, which is somehow the last straw, and I drop into it before he can watch my face do the unforgivable thing it’s threatening to do.
“You assume you can ruin it,” I say, reaching for the tea like it’s a railing.
“Blythe.” He says it almost gently, and the gentleness is somehow worse than the smirk ever was. I’ve got armor for the smirk and none at all for this. “I’m about to offer you the only thing in the world you want. Of course I can ruin it.”
I wait. There’s nothing to do with my hands or my dignity but wait.
“I need a fiancée,” he says, as plainly as a man might mention needing a ride to the airport. “One week. There’s a journey ahead of me, and a great many people I’ve got to make it in front of, and I need a woman on my arm they’ll believe I chose. You wear a ring. You let them photograph the two of us looking insufferably in love. And at the end of it you go home with enough money to close that north wall, settle the county, and pay every invoice in that kitchen drawer twice over. No one ever has to know it wasn’t real.”
For a second the words won’t mean anything. They refuse to arrange themselves into any shape that includes me.
A fake fiancée. His. Hired by the week. Paid to be adored, in front of an audience.
The one thing I gave up letting myself want, held out to me at last, by the one man on earth I can’t afford to take it from.
