AllFreeNovel
Share Us
JT might be a master at hiding his thoughts, but Violet swore she saw a slight widening of his eyes. To her delight, she’d scored if not a direct hit, then one fairly close to the mark. Fascinating. She was pondering the possibility that he wasn’t as disinterested in her as he’d claimed when he spoke up.
“Your sister has a flare for the drama,” he said. “She’s fallen in love and sees nothing but potential love matches all around her.”
“You’re probably right.”
But he hadn’t actually come out and denied it. Violet decided she’d pushed enough for one day. Much more and she’d run the risk that he’d become even more enigmatic. By allowing herself this tiny win, she now had something she could build on. It was like gaining the trust of a wild creature. Better to use short positive sessions to get them to drop their guard than to try and rush things and make it more skittish.
“Have you eaten?” she asked.
“An hour ago.”
She masked her disappointment. “I’ll eat something quick and be ready to go back to town in half an hour if that works for you.”
“I think I’m in a place where I can take a break and I could use another cup of coffee.” He scooped an empty mug off the edge of the pool table and followed her out of his playroom.
Violet’s pulse kicked into high gear. Maybe she’d learned the secret to dealing with JT: she’d pretend she didn’t care if he spent time with her or included her in his plans to take over his family business and wait for him to come to her. It wasn’t the way she was accustomed to dealing with the men she got involved with. Most of the time they liked her to take the lead.
That would never be the case with JT.
“You were right about the view,” she remarked a half hour later. She and JT were sitting in the breakfast nook just off the kitchen. The wall-to-wall windows offered a panoramic view of the desert and the mountains to the north that speared an impossibly blue sky. “Do you miss the ocean? Growing up in Miami, I would think the desert would be hard to get used to.”
“At first I was worried that I’d hate the dust and the heat, but the mountains make it all worthwhile. And if I need to get on the water, I have a boat on Lake Mead.”
Something about the view or sharing a meal—he’d sampled her eggs and stolen half the fruit off her plate—had worked some sort of magic on him. For the last half hour he’d been almost...charming. And Violet was loath to break the spell. So she sipped tea and nibbled on toast, delaying the end of the meal so she could prolong her time with this more accessible version of her new husband.
“Sounds like the best of both worlds.” She popped a grape into her mouth. “I am curious though, why are you living on a horse ranch out here instead of closer to Titanium?”
“My grandmother grew up on a horse farm in Kentucky.” He took Violet’s left hand and regarded the ring he’d put on her hand to seal his wedding vows. “Even after she married my grandfather and moved to Miami, she kept several show jumpers. Starting when I was five, my mother used to take me to watch her. I’d sit in the stands and marvel at how she and her horse flew over six-foot-high jumps.”
As he spoke, his gaze grew less focused. He’d stopped seeing his grandmother’s ring and was revisiting a happy moment from his past. The muscles of his face relaxed into a fond half smile. Violet watched him with dawning wonder. This wasn’t the first time he’d opened up to her—after all, he’d shared his decision to quit his family’s company. But it was the first time he’d shared a happy memory from his childhood.
Based on their interaction to this point, she’d labeled him as guarded and brooding. She’d assumed his unhappy childhood had left him emotionally shut down and incapable of letting joy in. But maybe it wasn’t that he didn’t feel but that he felt too much? If he was a powder keg ready to explode, what happened when someone lit a match?
“She insisted I learn to ride,” JT continued, oblivious to the thoughts churning inside Violet’s head. “During the summer, she would take me to her family’s horse farm in Kentucky and we would spend hours riding. When I was good enough to compete, she took me to horse shows. It all stopped when she died.”
JT had lost his grandmother when he was ten. Hearing him speak so warmly of her, Violet suspected he’d been devastated to lose the one person who’d showered him with love and attention. She remembered what a tough time Tiberius had gone through when his mother had died. He’d taken Lucille and Violet to the funeral and she remembered how unwelcome they’d been.
