Page 45 of Slow Hands Cowboy

“Well, the giant ranch that I inherited is here,” he said. “The one that you’re currently staying on.”

“I get that. But still, it’s not like anyone in town was particularly welcoming to you. Or anyone in your family. You and Cody went away and made your fortune. You could’ve sold this land and gotten land anywhere.”

“All the better to enjoy our newfound wealth, by being in a place where people never thought we would amount to anything.”

Chapter Nine

He put the truck in reverse, eyes on the backup camera, and then turned the wheel sharply as he put it in drive and headed down the road that would take them out to the highway.

She could understand that. But it also showed that he wasn’t anywhere near as unbothered as he often pretended to be. He was an enigma. A human Rubik’s cube, and she had never gotten close enough to him to try and solve the puzzle. To try and get all of his little squares to match up.

So, he remained in fragments. This man who seemed like nothing got to him, but who had flashes of hot anger beneath all of it.

This man who acted like she was inconsequential, and yet he seemed to remember everything that had happened between the two of them in school.

“Does it feel like you wanted it to?”

One thing that she couldn’t relate to was this idea of not being accepted. This idea of being seen as less. But she did understand the desire to show people.

Even though no one had ever acted like she might be like her mother, even though no one had ever been awful to her the way they had been to Walker and his siblings. Awful the way that she had been to Walker, she had still felt like she had to prove herself. It was part of marrying Alan.

This feeling that she was finally reaching safety.

That she was done with the turning out part. That question… How was she going to turn out? Like her father, like her mother? She had spent her whole life trying to show people what that answer was going to be.

He had, she supposed, been doing much the same thing, even if it had been more of a bare-knuckle fight. Scrapping to prove that he was going to turn out the way that he chose, not the way that people had decided.

He had made it.

His standard had never been to make the perfect marriage, it had simply been to prove that he might’ve been born in poverty, but he wouldn’t stay there.

That he could find the external success that no one had imagined him and his brother capable of.

“A lot less satisfying than you would think. Because you know, once everybody found out that our father was David Reynolds, then it sort of seemed like we ought to be successful, right?”

“Oh, like you inherited it. Like you’re always accusing me of.”

“Hey, with you it’s a little bit more valid. It’s not like we even grew up with that bastard who I guess is our sperm donor. We didn’t even know him. It was the shock of my life to be on the list of his beneficiaries.”

He pressed his foot down a little more firmly on the gas, the engine revving. They were driving fast, and there was something about that, the way that his blonde hair was pushed off of his forehead, his cowboy hat sitting on the bench seat between them, his forearm resting on the steering wheel. Something rakish and dangerous about him, the same kind of thing that she had always found compelling about him, and also repulsive.

The thing that made her want to move away from him.

And right now, the thing that made her want to stare at him.

“You never knew him?”

“No. Cody actually spent a little bit of time with him, though I wouldn’t say that it was a good or happy sort of relationship. Just Cody being there in the end, maybe to lord his presence over him. But I don’t know, David got what he wanted, so I’m not sure it was revenge the way that Cody wishes it was. He did take Dad’s name off the place.” He said Dad dryly.

He looked like he wanted to say something else. But he didn’t.

Instead, he turned the radio on and turned it up as they drove into town.

It was heaving, the little side streets and the main drag all packed full of people wandering around, cars parked against the curbs, narrowing the already narrow lanes.

He had to circle twice to find a spot a couple of blocks away from La Befana, and she suddenly realized that it was the first time she would be making a public appearance.

She had realized that when she had put the dress on. She had realized it in the sense that she had thought that she needed to put on a façade. But it was so theoretical. This was more real.