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“We’re fine out here. There’s no reason for you to spend almost an hour driving out here to be holed up in this office. A young woman like you should be enjoying life in town.”
She’d been o
pening her mouth to protest, but she closed it now. Oh, she was enjoying life in town plenty. Thank God she was facing the desk, because she could feel the red-hot blush that flashed over her face. She heard her father walk back into the kitchen.
Last night had been her best adventure yet. It had been hot and naughty and satisfying and perfect. And so completely wrong. One hundred percent wrong. Not because she’d let a near stranger on a motorcycle get her off on a highway pull-off in full view of anyone who might have decided to pull in. No. That she could definitely live with. But because Alex didn’t know who she was. More importantly, because Sophie knew exactly who she was.
The daughter of Dorothy Heyer. The heir of all the heartbreak and scandal her mother had caused. For Sophie. For her stepfather and brother. And for Alex’s family, too.
Not that Alex’s father was somehow absolved from the affair. Sophie was no believer in boys will be boys. The idea disgusted her. Both of them had been married. Both had had families. And both had ruined lives with their reckless choices. But in a small town twenty-five years ago, no one else had seen it that way.
If they’d run off, if they’d abandoned children and spouses... Well, sometimes men did things like that. But women? That just wasn’t natural. It wasn’t right. Dorothy Heyer hadn’t been right. And Sophie wasn’t right either. She just made sure that no one else knew that.
Especially not Alex Bishop.
“God,” she whispered, dropping her face into her hands. That had been such a bad idea. But he’d seduced her. With his bike and his tattoos and that hard smile and then Alaska. How was she supposed to have resisted that?
With your legs closed, a little voice inside her admonished. Sophie clenched her teeth and wished she could slap that little voice. All of those things were the perfect invitation to open her legs, not close them. And he’d been so confident, too. So in control.
The nerves between her legs twitched at that thought. Of his hands on her, so steady and strong and calloused, of the way he’d kissed her, fingers cupped to the back of her head to position her just the way he wanted.
Oh, God, that had been hot. It was exactly what she always wanted. He was the perfect temporary adventure, the man she was hoping for every time she flirted with a stranger at a bar. And he was Rose Bishop’s son.
“Damn it,” she whispered.
“Something wrong?” her dad called.
“No! It’s fine.” She needed to concentrate. An hour or two of work, and then she could enjoy her day off. Spend some time in the garden. Do some work around the house.
Sophie crossed her legs, smoothed down her skirt and opened the statement. Everything looked good. She took good care of the books. There’d been a hiccup when her brother had dropped out of college and played at being in charge for a few months. A hiccup that had taken years to straighten out, but everything was right as rain now. Her dad was still scraping by with his small cattle ranch, but just barely.
It had been a much larger ranch twenty-five years ago. Thousands of acres leased and deeded. Not a lot of the acreage had been flat, but the hills had been good summer grazing. Then Greg Heyer’s wife had disappeared. His kids had needed tending. He’d let things go that summer. The next year, beef prices had plummeted. He’d sold off land and leases and cattle. The year after that, a drought had hit hard. It hadn’t let up for three years. He’d sold off more. Now he was down to a tenth of what he’d owned before, and he was almost seventy years old and hired out some of the rougher work.
Sophie finished balancing the account and reached for the basket that held the bills. This part always made her chest tight, but it was okay. Her dad was fine. With her help, he could keep this place going for another decade if he wanted to. He didn’t seem to want to sell, and she wasn’t going to try to talk him into it. As hardscrabble as it was, this place was his life.
“Before I forget,” her dad said, his voice just behind her in the doorway, “your mail is in the bedroom.”
“Thanks.”
“You should really change your address.”
“I’m not going to stay in Uncle Orville’s house forever, Dad. I don’t want to bother changing my address just to have to change everything back again.”
“It’s been a year, Sophie. I think you’re plenty settled into town now. Why in the world would you want to come back out here?”
Because this was her home. Because he was her family. Because she took care of things for him and she always would.
But living in town did have its advantages. Privacy, namely. Granted, on those occasions when she met a man who seemed to push her buttons, she preferred going back to his hotel room. It was less conspicuous that way. No neighbors to notice and comment. No lifelong acquaintances to realize who Sophie really was. Only tourists and seasonal men. Just the way she wanted it.
Sophie opened the credit-card bill and noticed that her brother had been making a lot of ebook purchases again. It felt strange to resent the way he spent money on books. She was a librarian, after all. But it wasn’t that her brother was overspending on books, it was that he spent his time getting obsessed with learning some new skill he was convinced would make him successful. Gaming online auctions or selling Western crap on websites or starting his own sales lead business for web courses or a hundred other things that he’d purchased books about and then lost interest in. God knew what it was this time. Two years ago, he’d decided to sell mail-order tumbleweeds for people in the East throwing cowboy-themed parties. Then he’d realized he’d actually have to go out in the heat or cold and search for tumbleweeds. They were never around when you wanted them.
“Where’s David?” she asked, thinking if he was around she’d at least ask what he was up to.
She glanced back to see her dad’s mouth flatten. “Sleeping.”
Still asleep at 10:00 a.m. That was practically blasphemy on a ranch. But even their dad was starting to realize that David was never going to take over the ranch. It was hard for him to accept that the remaining land would be sold someday, but there it was. David could do all the work, but he didn’t love the land. Sophie loved the place and she could stumble along well enough, but she was too indoorsy for ranching. Dresses and kitten heels had no place in a corral. Not unless a big, rough man had her pinned up against a fence and—
Damn. Alex was going to haunt her for a long time.
