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CHAPTER ONE
DELANEYCLARKRANthe back of her hand over her too-hot brow, frowning at the clouds of dust in the distance.
Someone was coming up the long dirt drive toward the rickety farmhouse and the tired old barns and outbuildings. In the middle of the afternoon. And that was unusual, because no one was expected.
She glanced over toward the oldfarmhouse, whereher mother had raised her the way she’d been raised in turn. The way Clarks had raised their childrenhere since theland was first settled. But she didn’t need to walk insidefromthe vegetable garden to see what Catherine Clark wasdoing or whether she was expecting anyone.Her mother didn’t getout much any longer,and any visits were planned well in advance—usually through Delaney,who hadn’t planned a thing for her this week.
Delaney’s confusion only grew when she saw what looked like a fleet of gleaming black SUVsroaring up the quiet lane.
Pickup truckswould havebeen one thing.This was Kansas. Right smack in the middle of the great prairie. Pickups were the preferred mode of travel, because everything was farmland or farmland adjacent. She would have been surprised to see a line of pickups barreling her way, too. But she could come up with a number of reasons why her neighbors might show up together.
She could not, however, think of a single reason that fiveextremely fancy-looking SUVs should come out to the farm at all. She couldn’t even imagine who might be driving them—or where they would get such vehicles this far from anywhere. Her closestneighborwas a fifteen-minute drive away.Thenearest townaround was Independence, but calling it “close” was pushing it.It was halfa day’s drivesouth.
Well, missy, I expect you’ll just have to wait and see what’s going to happen, won’t you?came a familiarwryvoice inside her.Her beloved grandmother’s voice. Delaney still hadn’t fullyaccepted Mabel Clark had passed. It had been some five years ago, but the pain of it still walloped herwhen she least expected it.
Even now, with the memory of her grandmother’s scratchy voice in her head, she could feel the hit of grief. She tried to shake it off.
Delaney walked across the yard,wiping the dirt off her hands on the bib of her worn and torn overalls. She wasn’t dressed for company, but she supposed that folks who turned up out of the blue shouldn’t expect much more than the dirty overalls she was wearing and the faded bandanna on her head. She stood there, frowning alittle, as the gleaming black vehicles came to a stopbefore her, kicking up dust in all directions.She counted five in total.
And for a moment, she thought that maybe they’d realizedtheir mistake. Maybe they were all peering out their dramatically tinted windows at her and realizing they’d taken a wrong turn somewhere.
Because nothing happened.
It was just Delaney, out beneath the endless bowl ofa Kansas sky, cornstretchingin all directions. It was a pretty day, not too warm or too cold,and she supposed ifshe had to stand around in her own yard waiting to seewho’d taken itupon themselvesto show uphere today,she ought to be gratefulthere wasn’t a rainstorm.Or a tornado.
Thank you, Grandma Mabel,she said in her head.
She was grinning a little when the door of the vehiclethat had stoppedin the center of the other four opened.
By this point, Delaneycould admit,she’d let anticipation get the better of her.
But it was only a driver.Though that, too, was fascinating. Who had adriver?She supposedshe’dbecomeher mother’s driver, in these last few yearssince Catherine’s arthritisand heart troublehad robbed her of so much.But she did not make her mother ride in the back seat. Nor did she wear a uniform.Unless her overallscounted.
Somehow Delaney knew that her overalls did not, in fact, count. Not to the sort of people who rode about in fleets andhad uniformed drivers to open up their doors.
And it was an otherwise ordinary Tuesday, so she found herselffar more interested in who, exactly, those sorts of people might be than she might have otherwise.Shewas really bemused more than anything elsewhen the driver nodded at heras if she was exactly who he’d come to see, which was both laughable and impossible, then opened the back door of the SUV.
Some part of her was expecting trumpets to sound.
Butthere was stillno particular sound, sothere was nothingto distract her from the way the breezedanced in from the fields, or thesound of the wind chimes that made her mother happy, and then, there before her,the mostbeautiful man she had ever seen in her entire life...unfoldinghimselffrom the backof theSUV thatseemed entirely incapable of holding him.
Because what could possibly hold...him?
He was otherworldly. Almost alien, so little did he belong here in the middle of this rolling prairie,where the farmhouse and the red barn stood exactly as they had for agesand yet, she was sure, had never borne witness to anything like him.
Even the tornadoes would find it hard to top this man.
She knewexactly where the sunwas above her, and yet Delaney felt certain that it had shifted. The better to beam itsgoldenlight all over this man.As if the sun itself wanted nothing more than tohighlight him as best it could.
Delaney found she understood the urge. She felt it herself, everywhere. Whenshe could not recall a singleothertime in hertwenty-fouryearsthatshe had ever had any kind of reaction to any kind of man.The boysshe’d grown up withhad beennice enough. They still were. And if she’dwanted, shehad always suspectedshecould havegotten close to one of them andsettled downthe wayso many of her high school classmates had.
It had never really occurred to Delaney to do anything of the kind. Because there was the farm. There had always been the farm. There was Grandma, and her mother,and Delaney tookvery seriously the fact that she was the last Clark.This land would be hers—was already hers in all the ways that mattered—and whileshe didn’t intend to farm it alone the way her mother had done since Delaney’s father had died before she was born, she also knew she had to make sure she picked the right kind of man.
She had yet to find a man around here who came close to her idea of the right kind.
It had never crossed her mind that the reason for that might be because none of them weremen. Not like this man was.
As if he was redefining the term.
