The Devil in the Saddle

by Julia London

  Hallie was staring at him, anger and desire flaring in her eyes as they moved over his face. What was worse was that she was so damn beautiful, her hair spilling over her brow, her lips slightly swollen, the color in her cheeks high.

  Rafe thought of his family. Of Mrs. Prince. Of Jason and Chaco. He thought of all the reasons that this would never work. His feelings were rising in the back of his throat, making him feel slightly nauseated. “I’m flying out to Chicago in the morning,” he said. “When I come back, I have my last final. Then it’s Christmas, and then I’m moving.”

  “I know. You’ve told me like five thousand times. What is your point?”

  “My point is that we shouldn’t start something here, in the back seat of a car, that we both know we would never finish. It’s only going to hurt us, and there is no reason to risk what we’ve meant to each other for many years.”

  “Maybe the reason is that things change. People change. Maybe the reason is that we need to know. You keep talking like I asked you to marry me, and I didn’t. I wanted to make out, Rafe, so pardon me. What harm is there in enjoying each other while we can? I can handle it.”

  A fling? That’s what she’d settle for? That was not what he wanted. It was so far from what he wanted that Rafe felt sick. “I can’t handle it,” he said, more sharply than he intended. “I can’t.”

  Hallie suddenly scrambled up onto her haunches. “Got it.” She awkwardly tried to climb over the console and the reclined passenger seat, falling onto her butt, and then slinking back to the driver’s seat.

  Rafe started to do the same, but she turned on the car. “You can stay back there. I’m dropping you off.”

  Rafe eased back. “Great,” he said. “It’s already gone south—you’re pissed.”

  “I’m not pissed,” she said as she backed out of the parking spot. “I’m just . . . embarrassed.”

  He crossed his arms over his chest, holding himself tight from the disappointment billowing over him.

  They drove in silence to his house. She kept looking at him in the rearview mirror. Rafe kept racking his brain for what to say, but he knew Hallie, and she was furious right now. He was pretty furious with himself.

  At the end of his drive, she turned a sunny smile to him. “Thanks for getting me out of the house.” She looked strangely serene.

  “Anytime.”

  “Ooh, I don’t think you mean anytime, but okay. Have a great trip to Chicago!” she said cheerily, and faced forward.

  Rafe slowly got out of her car, then watched her barrel away. If he could, he’d kick his own ass.

  He walked into the house and shrugged out of his jacket in the entry.

  “Hey, bro.”

  Rafe’s head came up with a start. “Rico!” Rico wasn’t supposed to be home yet, and Rafe wasn’t ready for Rico. But somehow, he managed to plaster a smile on his face. “I didn’t know you were going to be here today.”

  “Neither did I. They cut me loose a couple of weeks early.” Rico embraced his brother. His dark curly hair was a little long, but his dark brown eyes were shining with delight, and he looked healthy. “Man, come in, come in. I gotta hear what’s going on around town. Pop says I’m stuck here until I pay him back for everything.” He laughed. “That shouldn’t take more than about twenty years. Got any get-rich-quick schemes for me?”

  Rafe laughed wryly. If he had one, he’d be tapping into it and getting as far from town as he could right about now.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Hallie talked Grandma and Luca into helping her with her next shoot—that’s what she called her photography sessions now, because she considered herself a professional wedding deconstructor—and while her grandmother made it clear she wasn’t doing any work, she was happy to ride along.

  Luca groused about it, but he went up to the cemetery and grabbed Grandma’s lawn chair all the same, then marched down to Hallie’s car and flung it into the back while ranting about how stupid this was and how he didn’t care how many followers she had.

  “You don’t have to go,” Hallie said sweetly as Luca fitted his tall frame into her front seat.

  “What, and leave you two wandering around looking for a way out of the warehouse like the Israelites in the desert?” He snorted his opinion of their ability to find their way out.

  It turned out Luca was right—Hallie couldn’t even find the light switch in the warehouse. “Move,” he said with exasperation, and walked into that dark warehouse with no fear. After a minute or so of listening to Luca cuss, the warehouse was suddenly flooded with fluorescent light. Hallie and her grandmother were standing in a large reception area, demarcated by glass walls that separated them from the rest of the warehouse. In the middle, offices were boxed together in windowed cubes.

  “Behold, Hallie, your warehouses,” Luca said, and swept his arm grandly at the cavernous space.

  They were her warehouses, all right. Three of them, side by side, left to her by her father. Three giant, empty warehouses that she had absolutely no use for.

  She stepped out of the reception area and into the empty space, recalling the day she’d learned about this gift from her father, on the same day they’d buried his ashes. Or, rather, had tried to bury his ashes—a family brawl had broken out, thanks to all of them trying to drown their sorrows in alcohol. Hallie was not sure who had actually thrown the first punch, but her designer dress had been torn, and Nick had to break it up, and then George had ushered them into the study and told them that they needed to stop acting like heathens and adjust to a new reality. When pressed, he’d said, “I don’t know how to sugarcoat it, so I’ll just say it. Charlie had a gambling problem.”

  This was not news to any of them. It wasn’t as if her father’s frequent trips to Las Vegas or his reckless betting was a big secret—everyone in town talked about it.

  But then George had said, “Now, don’t misunderstand. It’s not like you’re poor. But you’re not as rich as you think.”

  That’s when the emotional roller coaster she’d been on since the day she found out her father had died suddenly took a downward turn. “Rich” was the only way the Princes knew to be. Hallie certainly didn’t know how to be anything but privileged. She was very much aware of it, and she knew she had more than others dared to dream of having. But that didn’t mean she knew how not to be like that. The Prince family had made an art of living high on the hog.

  “You’re going to have to start doing things differently,” George had continued.

  “How differently?” Nick had asked.

  “Don’t spend as much,” George had said.

  That’s when Hallie had really lost it. All her grief came pouring out of her, in ways big and small. Her father had died, things were not great with Chris, and she was now being told that she might not have the big society wedding she’d been planning for a year.

  “Listen, all of you,” George had said, when everyone started talking and shouting at once. “Charlie was a good man at heart, but he had his demons. Nevertheless, he loved his family, and the last time we updated his will, he made sure there was something in there for each of you.”

  What her father had made certain was in that will for Hallie were three empty, aging warehouses on the highway.

  She would never understand it. It felt like an afterthought, frankly. She could imagine him making certain there were important things left to his sons—Nick was handed the reins to the family business. Luca was given land. Her dad had even left land for the never-before-seen bastard son, her half brother, Tanner Sutton. But for his only daughter, his little princess? The girl who was never supposed to be anything but pretty? Charlie Prince had left three empty warehouses.

  Hallie had loved her father so much. But he’d never expected more for her than to be taken care of by him or another man. In his mind, Hallie was a girl, and girls married and had babies. Even when she�
�d come back from New York, devastated, hurting, humiliated by being asked not to return to her ballet school, her father—who had gotten her that spot with a sizable donation—was very cheerful about it. “Don’t worry about it, sweetheart. One of these days you’ll be chasing toddlers around, and you won’t even think of it.”

  Her father had not understood that she would think about it every day for the rest of her life. She had really wanted to be a ballerina, from the earliest time she could remember. As a little girl, she’d worn tutus with everything. It may have sounded frivolous to him, but it had meant something to her. It was in her blood. And at that point in her life, she hadn’t thought of toddlers. She’d thought of dancing in big productions, of dedicating herself to her craft. She hadn’t really thought of marriage and babies until all of that went away.

  “Smells like rotten food in here,” Grandma said, wrinkling her nose.

  “What are you going to do with this place, anyway, Hallie?” Luca asked as he flipped on the lights in the office cubes.

  “I don’t know. What could I possibly do? Sell the property, I guess.”

  “Good luck with that,” her grandmother said. “I know Charlie tried to sell it a few years ago and couldn’t get any takers. Where’s my chair, Luca?”

  “Right here, Grandma,” he said, and with one hand, popped open the chair and set it down for her.

  “This place gives me the creeps,” Hallie said, and rubbed her hands on her arms. “Another selling point.”

  “Have you never seen the warehouses before?” Luca asked.

  “Once. I came with George to see what they were.” She didn’t add that she’d been so distraught she hardly gave the place a look at all.

  She was looking at it now. It was nothing but a big empty room. It had enormous fans on either end of the space, the blades turning absently with each lift of a breeze. There were industrial lights overhead, hanging about six feet apart. The concrete floor looked as if there had been some sort of structure attached to it once—shelving, maybe?—but whatever it had been was long gone.

  Her grandmother was right about the smell—it was awfully musty, as if it hadn’t been opened in years. She could hear a drip coming from somewhere, and parts of the concrete floor were wet. She wondered just how long these warehouses had been sitting empty. She wondered why the Princes had ever come to own warehouses anyway. For what purpose?

  “What are those things?” she asked, pointing to some giant machinelike contraptions stacked along one wall.

  “Look like HVAC units,” Luca said. He was walking across the warehouse floor to the back wall.

  “What am I supposed to do with HVAC units?” she demanded.

  “Maybe you could sell ’em for scrap,” Grandma opined. “I doubt they’re any use to anyone now.”

  Hallie slowly turned a circle, taking it all in. “Can you believe this is what Dad left me? This.”

  “Maybe you should stop thinking of them as warehouses,” Luca called over his shoulder. “Maybe you could do something with them.”

  “Like what?”

  “You’ll have to figure that out.” He opened a metal box on the wall and rummaged around inside. Suddenly, the bay door rumbled to life and, with a loud squeak of metal, slowly began to lift. “That’s better,” he said.

  Natural light flooded the space, and a surprisingly lovely view appeared of a pasture and pond, some oak trees, and a few cows grazing. If that bay door were a window instead of a door, this space wouldn’t be nearly as ugly.

  Hallie walked to the open door and looked out. “I think I know why he left this to me.”

  “Why?” Luca asked.

  “Because he couldn’t leave me out. He had to leave me something after he took care of you and Nick and Tanner. This is what he had left. Which worked out perfectly, because he wouldn’t have trusted me with anything but empty space.”

  “Hallie, that is not true. Your father adored you,” her grandmother said.

  “I know he did, Grandma. But he had a very traditional way of viewing the world, and I am a girl, and he had strong ideas about girls.”

  “Maybe,” Luca said. He shoved his hands in his pockets. “And maybe he left them to you because he trusted you to know exactly what to do with them. Did you ever think of that?”

  Hallie laughed. “Right. Because I know so much about warehouses.”

  “You don’t right now. But you could learn it. I think the bigger issue is that you don’t trust yourself enough to figure it out.”

  That remark annoyed her, mostly because it resonated with her. She didn’t trust herself. She didn’t trust anything about her life right now. If she stuck her finger into any pie, she would fully expect it to go bad. “Have you been reading self-help books again?” she asked her brother.

  “Yep. How to get along with difficult people.”

  “Well, how long are we going to sit around here?” Grandma complained.

  “Right. Let’s get the boxes,” she said to Luca.

  She and Luca hauled the boxes of champagne glasses and various other bags of props. In the mix was an H-E-B grocery bag, which Luca deposited at their grandmother’s feet. She leaned over, unzipped the bag, and pulled out a wine cooler.

  “Grandma!” Hallie said.

  “Don’t worry, I brought enough to share.” She reached into her bag and pulled out two more.

  Luca took one without so much as an arched brow.

  “You know I’m skating onto thin ice here, given the last time I drank,” Hallie said, and took the other bottle her grandmother offered.

  “You just need a little practice, that’s all,” her grandmother said with a grin.

  Hallie twisted the cap and took a sip—and instantly coughed the sip onto the floor. “Oh my God, what is this?” she said, holding the bottle up. “A pineapple wine cooler?”

  “Why not? They were on sale.”

  “That statement is definitely a sign of just how much this family has changed. Since when did a Prince ever worry about anything being on sale, much less cheap wine coolers?”

  “That was because we hadn’t discovered Walmart, and sales are a big part of the Walmart culture,” Grandma said. “When in Rome!” She lifted her bottle in pretend toast and drank.

  Hallie had a sip or two of hers, then handed the sickly sweet wine cooler to Luca. She began to set out her champagne glasses while her grandmother and Luca watched. What she loved about them was that they didn’t ask why Hallie was doing what she was doing. Especially her grandmother—unlike Hallie’s mother, Grandma apparently had no compulsion to explain to Hallie why this could be considered bizarre behavior, or how it suggested she wasn’t moving on with her life.

  That’s what her mom had said yesterday, when she’d attempted to apologize to Hallie for her remarks at Thanksgiving dinner. The so-called apology had somehow veered off into a discussion of what her mother perceived as Hallie’s lethargy. What her mother failed to realize was that Hallie was moving on with her life—she just wasn’t doing it like her mother wanted her to.

  When Hallie got the glasses set up, she arranged some lovely silk flowers around them. Her phone dinged. She scrambled for it, digging it out of the bottom of one of her bags, hoping it was Rafe.

  She was very disappointed to see that it was not Rafe. It was Chris, damn him. Please, Hallie, can we talk?

  She scrolled through her texts to make sure she hadn’t missed one from Rafe, because she hadn’t heard from him since she’d crawled onto his lap and kissed him, and then had gotten mad when he said it wasn’t a good idea. Maybe he was right about ruining a friendship, because frankly, she was a little panicked that she hadn’t heard from him. She’d checked her phone a thousand times, and nope, he’d just flown off to Chicago and left her to stew in her juices.

  She could be such an idiot sometimes. She kept thinking he’d
call and smooth it over with a careful consideration of what had happened between them, but he didn’t. He was going to make her do the careful consideration this time.

  He was right. Of course he was right. She had just gotten out of a relationship, and she’d already decided that, for once in her life, she needed to figure out how to stand on her own two feet. And he was right that they had a fantastic friendship. Not to mention he was going to Chicago, and she was very seriously thinking of moving back to Austin to go to school. What did she think would come of it then? Was she going to start some holiday fling and then take off? No. She would never do that to Rafe.

  But what had he meant, anyway, that he couldn’t handle it? He couldn’t handle what? Her? Was she so off the chain? Was the prospect of being with her so repugnant that he couldn’t handle it?

  But that made no sense—he handled her better than anyone and had for a long time. Was she just not his type? Was she too needy? How could she be too needy for Rafe? He helped everyone. How could she, of all people, be the one that tipped him over the edge?

  What was his type, anyway? Little dark-headed, petite pixie women?

  “Are we going to do this, or are you going to stare at your phone?” Luca asked.

  “Oh, honey, did you get a message from him?” Grandma asked.

  Both questions startled Hallie, and she looked up from her phone. “What?”

  “I know you two haven’t been talking, and I was just wondering if he sent you a message.” She waggled her brows as she sipped from the bottle.

  Hallie’s eye widened. Grandma knew about Rafe? “You know . . . how do you know?”

  “Your mother told me. She said he’s been calling and texting you.”

  “Wait . . . Chris?”

  Her grandmother laughed. “Who else would I be talking about?”

  Hallie blinked. She’d almost said it. She’d almost said Rafe. She glanced at Luca. Her twin was silent, his look thoughtful. Appraising. Like he knew something. “Yep,” she said, and tossed the phone into the bag. “But I’m over him. I mean, okay, I’m still pissed about the wedding that I planned for more than a year. But Chris?” She fluttered her fingers. “So done.” She began to arrange the flowers next to the glasses.