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“Steaks would be great. I’m starving. The food on the train was terrible. I did more picking than eating.”
I grinned and nodded. “Why didn’t you just get on a plane? Couldn’t have been more than a couple hours’ flight. The train is a painfully long ride from Boston.”
She shrugged. “It seemed nostalgic and I’ve never done it before. Besides, I wasn’t in a hurry.”
“Nostalgic, right.” I chuckled. “I’ll leave you to it.”
After I was in the hallway, I inhaled a deep breath to clear my lungs of her. One of the things I didn’t have time for with a full load of running a ranch and training horses was women. Especially not one who would feel nostalgic about being on a ranch until the nostalgia wore off and she wanted to get back to the fast-paced city.
There weren’t enough hours in the day to invest in seeking out and dating women. Plenty set their sights on me but none cared enough to want to spend all their time on a ranch. There wasn’t anything glorious about hard work, pastures, and horse shit. I wasn’t interested in spending time with a woman who couldn’t understand my love for the life I’d been handed.
Having Shore here in my space, with those beautiful eyes, full luscious lips and short curvy frame wasn’t doing much to help my self-imposed celibacy either. The lingering scent of lavender and jasmine that seemed to fill the space she was in wasn’t helping either.
It’d been almost a year since I’d been intimate with anything other than my hand which meant this was going to be an incredibly long week. Melvina had better be grateful I loved her like family or Shore would have been sleeping on a bench at the train station for all I cared.
ChapterFour
“How’s it going?” my sister asked as I lifted a stack of clothes from my suitcase then turned toward the dresser, where I had several drawers open. I could have easily lived out of my suitcases for a week but decided not to and something about this house made me want to settle in.
Hemade me want to settle in.
Had I not been trying to figure out what the hell to do with my life I might have been more inclined to focus on the things he’d made me feel.
“I just got here, so there’s not much to tell.”
I dropped the stack of jeans and tees in one drawer then turned back to the bed with my phone pressed between my shoulder and ear to grab an equally large stack of sweatshirts and hoodies.
“You can tell me if the B&B is nice or god awful like I think it is.”
“You saw the pictures, it’s not god awful, Summer, but I couldn’t tell you for sure because I’m not there.”
“What do you mean you’re not there? You said you’re unpacking.”
“I am but not at the B&B. Some woman had her kid and can’t travel home. The family is in the room I reserved and since the place is booked for the holiday, there weren’t any other available rooms to put me in.”
“Shore, what the fuck! Where are you?”
“Relax, Melvina’s nephew agreed to let me stay at his ranch.” I smiled, remembering the scowl on his face at the train station. “Well more like she bullied him into letting me stay but either way, I’m fine.”
“Are you high? I know there’s a thing about cow shit doing that. I think I saw it on TikTok. Something about it makes you high from the toxicity. That has to be what’s happening because there is no way you’re telling me you’re on some stranger’s ranch and being this calm about it.”
“How can cow shit make you high? Is that a real thing?” I paused, frowning into open space.
“No, I don’t know, maybe. You’re in the gotdamn country. It seems like that would be a thing. It’s not like there’s much else to do in the middle of nowhere and you know people get resourceful.”
“They do but getting high off cow shit is a bit of a stretch.”
“So is you staying at a stranger’s ranch, so can we focus on that?”
“I told you I’m fine. He’s nice enough and the place is beautiful. The guy’s a billionaire. Picture what a billionaire’s ranch looks like and that’s where I am. He’s only twenty minutes from town so not far from the B&B where I was scheduled to stay. The B&B that is a totally legitimate business, with thousands of five-star reviews, by the way. She wouldn’t risk her livelihood to put me in danger.”
“Shore, you sound like an idiot. Every fucking thriller movie is about some legitimate business owner allowing a deranged family member to kidnap unsuspecting women who thought the exact same things you’re telling me.”
“Just scare the shit out of me, Summer. That seems like the right thing to do given my current situation.”
“You shouldn’t need me to scare the shit out of you. Make better decisions, Shore. Fuck. I’ll call and find you another room somewhere. Where is the guy? You’re alone, right? Can you lock the door until I…”
“Would you relax? I’m fine. He’s a nice guy. And there aren’t any rooms available. People come to this small ass town believe it or not.”
