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Except embarrassing.
A man had showed up in the yard one day and the life she’d thought had been built on a solid foundation, generations deep, turned out to be nothing more than a row of dominoes.
None of them hers.
The truth was, she blamed said man for those dominoes. She’d researched him, too. It didn’t take much. It seemed that most papers’ coverage of Ile d’Montagne and its current rebel leader were nothing short of fawning. All papers, in fact, save those actually in his country.
Delaney held on to that like it was evidence.
Or maybe because it was all she had to hold on to.
Because everything else seemed to be rolling downhill, and fast.
Catherine was moving into town. She intended to sell the land to the neighbors, to keep the farm in good hands. But when Delaney had argued that she should stay and oversee the move and the sale and the unfathomable life changes she hadn’t even realized her mother desired, Catherine had waved her away.
You’ve been seeing to me for far too long, she had said, again and again, until Delaney was forced to accept that she really, truly meant it.It’s time you go out and live.
So this was Delaney living.
Against her will.
The fleet of glossy SUVs came back up the lane far too early that morning. And this time, only Cayetano emerged.
They stared at each other, he from beside the muscular vehicle that, if anything, looked glossier and more pristine than before. She stayed where she was—on the step where she had taken herself after saying her goodbyes to her mother, red-eyed and cried out and wondering how on earth she was supposed tolivethrough this.
And how exactly she could prove that she’d lived enough so that she could come back home.
Assuming there was anyhometo come back to, without the farm.
Not to mention, she isn’t your mother, came that same insidious voice inside her, forever telling her things she didn’t want to hear. Not her grandmother’s voice, sadly. She would have welcomed Grandma Mabel’s observations, however dry.
This particular voice sounded a lot more the way she imagined gold might.
If it was burned half to ash.
“You do not look excited, little one,” Cayetano said from his place beside his enormous SUV, in that voice of his that seemed to change the weather. She felt a breeze that hadn’t been there before dance over her skin.
“That’s because I’m not,” she replied, scowling at him for good measure. “Would you be excited to be torn from everything you know and forced to march off to a foreign country because someone thinks your blood will...dosomething?”
“Focus less on blood,” Cayetano suggested, with a faint curve to his hard mouth that she ordered herself to stop looking at. “And more on what pleasures await.”
Delaney didn’t much care for the way the wordpleasuresburst open inside her. Like a water balloon against the side of the old barn.
“If you’re talking about the whole marriage thing, forget it.” And she couldn’t understand why she wished, immediately, that she hadn’t said that. That she hadn’t heard the wordpleasuresand mentioned the marriage that was never going to happen. It was...unseemly, somehow. She hurtled on, her cheeks hot. “My mother thinks that I need to go and see my birthright. I keep telling her I’m happy with the one I already have, but she insists.”
“Are you refusing to marry me?” Cayetano asked, but not as if the prospect made him angry. There was none of that haughtiness. Or even a particular sense of the threat he posed. Instead, he looked as if her refusal amused him.
It was disconcerting.
“I am.” She said it as bluntly as possible, so there could be no mistake. “I am absolutely refusing to marry you. Because the very idea is absurd. I don’t know you.”
And again, that little tug in the corner of his mouth sent a terrible heat, far more intense than the flush on her cheeks, cartwheeling through her. Once again this man felt like a fever.
She ought to tell him to do something about his infectiousness, but she didn’t quite dare. Or maybe the truth was that she liked all that cartwheeling.
“Allow me to tell you something about me, then,” he said, as if he could see her turning cartwheels inside. As if he knew. “I love a challenge, Delaney. I have yet to meet a challenge I couldn’t get the best of. Better you know that now.”
That was an unambiguous warning.
