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“I was an idiot,” she said. Her voice shook a little, but her words were clear and decisive. “OK? Have we got that straight? I was a fool and it’s over and if you really want to help me, you can just—you can let the whole thing go and—and—What? That’s crazy! You were all in Europe and now you’re at JFK, waiting for one of the family jets? Listen, if this is because of me, if you lunatics are flying to El Sueño because you think I’m going there, too, if any of you are dumb enough to think I’m going to behave like a—like a lovesick teenybopper and bawl my eyes out…”
Jaimie took the phone back.
“Here’s what’s happening,” she said crisply. “We’re going home. Right away. Yes. We’ll meet you there. Oh, for heaven’s sake, of course with Lissa! Yes, I know what she said… Look, just get in touch with Marco and Zach. Tell them… Fine. In that case, we’ll see you all soon.” Jaimie hung up the phone and turned toward Lissa. “Did you hear what I said? We’re all going to the ranch—and neither Em nor I will put up with any arguments.”
It turned out your heart could be in pieces, but you could still laugh.
“The general would be proud of you, James,” Lissa said.
An hour later, one of the Wilde’s jets was soaring high above the clouds heading for Texas and Wilde’s Crossing, and for the sprawling kingdom called El Sueño, a place that would always be home.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
In the spring, the lush meadows and low ridges of the Wilde ranch always looked as if they’d been touched with an artist’s paintbrush.
They were bright with bluebonnets, the Texas state flower. Legend said that bluebonnets had been brought over from Spain centuries ago. It was a charming story, but like most charming stories, it wasn’t true.
Bluebonnets were true Texas natives. They might look delicate, but they were strong and determined, and Lissa was trying hard to learn from them.
Be strong. Be determined. And life will go on.
She’d been at El Sueño for four days. So was all the rest of her family, well, everyone except the general, and his absence was pretty much the standard.
John Hamilton Wilde had a world to run. A good thing, right now. It meant that nothing about Lissa’s situation had reached him.
But the rest of the Wilde clan—brothers and sisters and spouses, an almost-spouse and even babies—had Lissa’s world to organize.
Lissa clucked softly to her roan mare as she rode the animal to the top of a ridge.
They all meant well. And she loved them with all her heart, but she’d reached the point at which she’d have given anything for an hour of solitude.
This morning, she’d sneaked out of the house in search of some.
Everybody had still been asleep; the house had held an early-morning stillness. She’d tiptoed from her room as if she were still a little girl determined to avoid the housekeeper or one of the nannies who’d traipsed through the lives of the three Wilde sisters after their mom’s death, and gone to the stable.
Soft whinnies had greeted her.
She rubbed noses, said a few words to each horse. Then she’d saddled up the roan that she’d always loved and ridden here, through meadows alive with bluebonnets, past horses grazing on new spring grass, letting the roan find the way because, even after all these years, the mare knew her rider’s favorite early-morning trail.
Now, they were on the top of a ridge that looked out over land that endless generations of Wildes had claimed and worked and cherished, and Lissa, who had always thought of herself as a city person who just happened to have been born in the country, found herself seeing the meadows and, beyond them, the softly rolling hills of north Texas with new eyes.
It was a beautiful view, but not as beautiful as the dense stands of pine and aspen and, beyond them, the fierce mountain peaks that were the view from the Triple G.
She tried not to do that too often, to think about those mountains or anything even remotely connected to them, but it was hard to close your eyes at night without suddenly seeing Louie and Peaches chasing a small rubber mouse down the hall, or Brutus trundling toward her, his tail wagging so hard that she’d laugh as she got down on her knees and wrapped her arms around him. It was hard not to hear Ace’s gruff voice complimenting whatever it was she’d made for dinner, hard not to see the other men coming into the dining room, looking as eager and expectant as a bunch of kids on Christmas morning.
Most of all, worst of all, it was hard not to think about Nick.
To more than think about him.
To see his face in the shadows of the porch at night, to hear his voice t
elling her how much he wanted her, to feel his hands on her breasts, his mouth on her mouth.
When was that going to stop?
Because it had to stop. It had to, or she was going to go crazy. Or maybe her family, her wonderful family, was going to be the cause of her going crazy and, yes, she knew that they meant well.
Nobody talked about Nick. Nobody mentioned him.
