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“Tough to imagine anyone Antonia parented being so tightly wound.” His gaze strayed to her calves where her legs swung off the tailgate. When he caught himself, he whipped his attention back to her face, cursing the wayward chemistry. “But I wanted to talk to you tonight so that you’d know my offer to buy Crooked Elm is both sincere and reflective of fair market value.”
Her lips flattened into a frown. “It’s not even on the market yet, and I haven’t had time to research comparable properties.”
“I assure you, I have researched it—”
She swung on him with a huff of indignation. “You can’t believe I’d take your word for what’s an appropriate figure given our relationship.”
Something in her tone got under his skin.
“We don’t have a relationship.” He let the words linger a moment, giving them weight. “But I tried to be a good neighbor to Antonia, and I’d like to think she appreciated my efforts.”
“Then why didn’t you convinceherto sell if you were on such great terms?” Her raised voice told Drake how far off track the conversation had gotten.
Hadn’t he been trying to smooth things over with her? Wrestling down his annoyance, he explained, “I believe she would have sold to me if she hadn’t been committed to giving her granddaughters the option of keeping the place if they chose. But from what I can see, it doesn’t look like any of you want to make a life here.”
“How would you know what I want?” She tipped her head up to look at the stars. “You don’t understand the first thing about me.”
“You haven’t set foot in Catamount for five years. Not even for Antonia. Are you trying to tell me you suddenly want to be my neighbor?”
“I haven’t been here because ofyou,” she shot back, sliding off the truck bed and landing on her feet. “You did nothing to hide your distaste for me, and did everything you could to ruin my relationship with Colin. Especially when I needed his support. Do you have any idea how much I dreaded returning to this town with you in it?”
Seeing her this agitated—this hurt and furious—raked over his conscience for a moment. She hadn’t let him glimpse those emotions five years ago. He’d been surprised, in fact, that she’d backed down about her engagement to his brother. He’d expected a battle from her, or at least some passionate defense of her love for his brother when Drake had lobbied for her to rethink marriage. Instead, she’d acquiesced.
Now, he latched on to her words. “What do you mean that you needed his support?” He’d thought she needed Colin’s money. “Financially?”
An angry sound erupted from her throat before she pivoted on her heel and marched toward the driver’s side of her car.
“Fleur?” He hopped off the tailgate to follow her, wondering what he’d missed. “Explain it to me. If you didn’t mean money, what did you need from Colin?”
She spun around so fast the hem of her dress whipped at his legs and he had to stop short not to run into her.
“You know what, Drake? I don’t owe you any explanations. I didn’t then, and I don’t now.” She was so close he caught a hint of her perfume, vanilla and nutty. Her breath brushed his cheek. “For that matter, you’re the last man on earth I’d take a cent from, so I won’t be selling Crooked Elm to you.”
Her warmth and scent so close to him distracted him from understanding her words for a fraction of a second. So by the time he’d processed the blow she’d just dealt, she was already sliding into the driver’s seat.
“Fleur, wait.” He’d screwed this up. Badly. And with the land at stake, he couldn’t afford to make things personal with Fleur. “Don’t make a decision now, while you’re upset.”
“Good night, Drake.” She reached for the car door to pull it closed, then hesitated, glancing up at him. “And I’m not going to be the one to tell Emma you blew her chances of having me cater her wedding. That’s on you for always assuming the worst of me. But then you don’t have a great track record when it comes to talking to your siblings.”
He would have argued, but since she shut the door, he thought it better to get his feet out of the way of her tires as she put the vehicle into reverse.
How could he lose the land he neededandmess up his sister’s wedding plans at the same time? Yet he found it tough to ruminate on those things when Fleur’s words still echoed in his mind about needing Colin’s support. Had there been more to his brother’s engagement than he’d known at the time?
Fleur’s engine revved as she pulled onto the county road, and he realized he felt uneasy about how upset she’d been. Her anger had seemed genuine enough, making him question everything he’d thought he’d known about her in the past. All he’d known was that his brother went from an easygoing fellow when he started dating Fleur, to a tense, sadder man when they got engaged. He’d refused to talk about his relationship with Fleur, and once they’d broken up, Colin had hightailed it out of town. They’d barely spoken since.
He slammed the tailgate closed on his truck, listening to the barn owl still complaining overhead. Maybe Fleur was just a good actress, and her outrage had been for show. But if it wasn’t—if Drake had missed something about his brother’s rush to wed—then he needed to figure out what had happened. And since Fleur made it clear she wouldn’t be giving him any explanations, that meant he’d need to give his brother a call.
Drumming his fingers on the cool metal of the truck fender, Drake suspected he should feel remorse at the possibility of screwing up Colin’s love life five years ago. But with the memory of Fleur’s fragrance stirring his senses, he couldn’t help thinking it was still just as well that he’d come between them. Because what kind of special torment would it have been to feel like this about his brother’s wife?
Four
“Volume up.” Fleur gave the voice command to the Bluetooth speaker playing a traditional tango song, an almond scent filling the kitchen.
The lilt of guitars and bandonion had her swaying from the counter to the oven to check on thepolvorones, almond cookies that her grandmother used to send to her every Christmas. Fleur had found four different recipes for the holiday treat in Antonia’s notes, but none of them tasted quite like what she remembered. For the past two days, she’d been winging it, combining elements from the recipes to try to re-create the perfect texture.
After peering through the window into the turquoise oven dating from the seventies, Fleur pulled the door open and withdrew a cookie sheet, setting it on the stove top. A thumping noise made her think for a moment that the bass line in the tango song had sped up. But then she realized someone was knocking at the door.
The outline of a Stetson through the sidelights made her breath catch for a moment. She hadn’t seen or heard from Drake since their encounter in the parking lot after her grandmother’s memorial, and he’d been in her thoughts far more than he deserved ever since. She regretted losing her temper to the degree that she threatened not to cater Emma’s wedding. Not only was it unnecessarily rude to Emma, whom she liked. But it was also cutting off her nose to spite her face since Fleur really needed the paycheck.
