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“Surely not the shallow rodeo pageant queen who saved every cent to attend culinary school.” She glared up at him, her eyebrows furrowed as she frowned. “How’s thecroqueta, by the way?”
Surprise made him gulp the food down too soon, but it didn’t detract from the taste. Fleur Barclay might be an opportunist, but she was clearly an accomplished chef. And why was it bitter to learn that she had more determination and drive than he’d given her credit for?
“As good as Antonia’s,” he admitted.
Her expression softened, and the look in her eyes stirred the old heat inside him. A heat he couldn’t afford to feel around his brother’s former fiancée. That had to be the reason he found himself saying, “And I’ll bet attending culinary school turned out to be more rewarding than sacrificing your dreams for marriage, didn’t it?”
Her lips flattened into a thin line. Her gray eyes narrowed.
“I don’t know about that. I missed out on having you for a brother-in-law, Drake.” She folded her arms, her gaze boring into his. “Think about all the fun we could have had silently seething at each other across your family living room every holiday.”
The thought of being related to her sent a chill through him, actually. And it wasn’t one bit like the charged sensation he’d experienced when their hands had touched. Whatever it was she made him feel, it wasn’t an appropriate response to a woman Colin had loved.
“Or not so silently,” he amended, hating the vision of Fleur in his brother’s arms. “You always enjoyed getting a reaction by needling me.”
He should have ignored her when their time on the rodeo circuit had overlapped—him as a bull rider in his twenties, and her showing up to pageants at fairs all over the West in her late teens. But she made it impossible when she constantly drew attention to herself, traipsing through the rodeo grounds in gowns and spangles, attracting all the wrong kinds of attention from guys who didn’t know how young she was. Or did, but didn’t care, which ticked him off even more. He’d come to her defense more times than she knew, but she’d never made it easy.
Drake might not have been born into the school of hard knocks like Fleur had been, but life had pulled the rug out from under him at eighteen when his parents had died in a freak accident on their property just at the time he was supposed to head to college. An old barn had collapsed, a structure they’d hoped to salvage as part of their lifelong efforts to be good stewards of the land. They had been passionately devoted to conservancy, from local wetlands to limiting their carbon footprint, and they’d tried to save an old barn his mother had found “charming” even though it had an unstable stone foundation.
The day the building caved in devastated the family for years afterward. Drake had sacrificed his own rodeo dreams, keeping one foot on the circuit strictly for the extra earnings while he learned the ranching business for himself. Plus, the bull riding competitions had been flexible enough that he could be home with his younger brother and sister until they finished high school.
But no number of obstacles could have made him turn to using other people to get ahead, the way Fleur had with her engagement to Colin. They’d only dated a few weeks before Fleur had a ring on her finger and the promise of Colin’s financial help even if things went south between them.
Why else would Fleur have suddenly decided to sacrifice culinary school to marry Colin instead?
“Good point.” Fleur lowered her voice as a couple of older women moved past them to admire the buffet displays. Then, once they’d moved out of earshot, she leaned closer to him. “I could hardly stay silent when you’re the type of man to go behind people’s backs to get his own way.”
The venom behind the words shouldn’t surprise him when they’d never been friends. But then, maybe he’d fooled himself thinking she’d ultimately be glad to sell off Crooked Elm.
“I suppose you’re referring to me contacting Lark?” He peered around the rented hall again, looking for Fleur’s sisters in the crowd.
He needed someone on his side for this conversation since the glint in Fleur’s eyes concerned him. If she refused to sell him the ranch, would her siblings be able to override her? He couldn’t see either Jessamyn or Lark in the sea of Catamount locals come to say goodbye to the well-liked Barclay widow.
“Of course I am.” She tilted her chin at him. “You could have just told me what you wanted that day at the Cowboy Kitchen. Instead you tried to do me a great favor by giving me a job. Was that to make me so grateful I’d sign over Crooked Elm for a song?”
“I’m prepared to make a competitive offer, Fleur,” he clarified, wondering if that fact had gotten lost somehow. “I thought it might save you time and trouble for me to take the ranch off your hands—”
“Off my hands?” Her voice rose, breasts rising and falling faster with every agitated breath. “As if it was a burden to spend time in the only place I’ve ever felt at home in the last sixteen years. Maybe I won’t sell a single acre of it until I’m good and ready.”
Her eyes shone with emotion as she spoke, and Drake had no doubt that she’d regretted letting him see those feelings by the way she bit down hard on her lower lip afterward.
She spun away from him before he could frame a response, and as much as he would have liked to have continued the conversation and clarify his intentions, he knew her grandmother’s memorial was hardly the place. He barely had time to process the conversation when a heavy hand clapped him on the shoulder.
“What’s this I hear about selling acres?” a too-jovial male voice asked.
Turning, Drake met the sharp, dark eyes of Mateo Barclay, Fleur’s father. Antonia’s only son wore a custom-tailored suit and Italian loafers in a crowd full of cowboy boots. His middle daughter, Jessamyn, stood beside him, dressed in a black jacket and matching pencil skirt, her dark wavy hair pinned high on her head. Drake had heard she’d spent the last six years working for her father’s real estate development company in Manhattan.
“Hello, Mr. Barclay. I’m so sorry for your loss.” Drake shook the other man’s hand before offering condolences to Jessamyn.
“So did I hear correctly that you’re interested in purchasing my mother’s run-down ranch?” Mateo pressed, looking around the crowd as he spoke, as if already searching for someone more worthy of his conversation. He jingled his keys in his pocket and rocked on his heels while he spoke.
It irritated Drake that the guy would bad-mouth the property Fleur had just gotten done saying she loved. Not that he was suddenly on Fleur’s side. But her father had struck him as a self-centered blowhard even before his behavior during the divorce.
“I’ll be submitting an offer on it soon, yes.” Drake wondered why Antonia hadn’t given the property to her son but her granddaughters.
“More power to you,” Mateo said conspiratorially. “I wouldn’t touch the place. Property values out here haven’t kept pace with land in vacation destination cities. I tried my best to convince Mom to come to New York, but she was set in her ways.” He shook his head before turning to Jessamyn. “Well, I’d say we’ve put in enough time here. Are you ready to head out?”
“Dad, please,” Jessamyn protested quietly. “We haven’t even eaten.”
