by Ellie Danes
“Well, if you’re feeling poorly, then it’s a good idea to get your rest now,” he said, oblivious. “We’re going to need you to be on top of things come Monday, when we really start the full court press on buying land up in Mustang Ridge.”
I nodded, not even trusting myself to speak for the moment—at least, not on the situation in Mustang Ridge—and told him I’d call him in the morning, before I grabbed my tray and went back up to the service counter.
I managed to convince them to wrap my stuff up to go, and hurried out of the restaurant as quickly as possible, trying to decide what to do about it. I couldn’t think. I fumbled in my purse for my phone, not even sure why I was looking for it, and managed to get behind the wheel of my car. I put the food in the passenger seat, then closed the door behind me.
The only person I could think of to talk to was Rhett. I couldn’t talk to my closest friend, Natalie—not about this. She wouldn’t have any idea what to say, and I could almost guarantee that she would tell me I was overreacting, that my job was more important than some middle of nowhere town.
I found Rhett’s number in my phone and hesitated. As much as I hated what I knew my father was doing, I almost couldn’t stand to admit that Rhett had been right—even if neither of us had known it. The deal I’d originally been selling the people of Mustang Ridge had changed underneath my feet, and I didn’t think it was really my fault. I was going to have to eat crow about it, anyway. I didn’t want to.
But I also couldn’t think of anything else to do. I couldn’t go back to my apartment, because even if Natalie was there, I didn’t think drinking half a bottle of wine with her would fix my predicament, and I’d just get more upset. Better to swallow down some humble pie and see if I could work with Rhett somehow to do something about what Dad was planning. I pushed down my sense of wounded pride and tapped the ‘call’ icon.
“Didn’t think I’d be hearing from you anytime soon,” Rhett said when the call connected.
“I need to talk to you,” I told him. “How busy are you today?”
“Not that busy,” he said. “What do you need to talk to me about?”
I pressed my lips together. If I tried to explain it over the phone, it was going to get more complicated. It would be better to just have the whole thing out with him in person.
“Oh no,” he said, “you’re not about to tell me you missed a period, are you?”
“What? No!” I gritted my teeth. “I need to talk to you about what my dad is planning, but that’s all I can tell you about it now. Are you willing to meet with me?”
“Come by the house,” Rhett suggested. “Mom’s in town visiting with some friends, we can talk.”
He didn’t sound so certain, but then I wasn’t all that certain, either. I ended the call after telling him I’d be there in two hours, and pulled out of the parking spot I’d taken. Maybe by the time I arrived in at Rhett’s farm, I’d know what I needed to say, and have some idea of what I could do about the disaster my father was working to create.
And maybe, by then, I would be able to forgive myself for what I was sure Dad would see as a massive betrayal by one of the only people in the world he actually trusted.
Chapter Fourteen
Rhett
When Emily had called me, I hadn’t had any idea of what she could possibly want to talk about. From the shaken sound of her voice and her insistence that she needed to see me in person, I’d thought our little tryst might have ended up with her pregnant. But when she’d said it was about business, I was almost certain I didn’t want to actually talk to her—not the way she had been all behind him. But I had to admit to myself that I was curious.
I got as much done as I could in the two hours it took her to get to my place from Houston, and by the time she pulled up onto the driveway, I’d managed to get my hands washed and my face mostly cleaned up, ready to talk. Mom was in town visiting the Johnsons, and I figured that it wouldn’t be too long of a talk with Emily. Of course, if she was willing to drive two hours to come and talk to me, it would have to be important, and I didn’t think she’d be in a real hurry to drive two hours back.
When she climbed out of her car, Emily looked as if she’d been chased all the way to my house by a ghost.
I greeted her in the driveway. “What’s going on?”
“My dad,” she said.
“I’m going to need you to be more specific,” I said. I’d gotten a better impression of Martin Lewis from the day before, going around town with him and seeing him interact with the other members of the town, but I had been ready for the other shoe to drop.
“They changed the plans,” Emily said. “What I thought they were doing was to bring in one big company—and before you say something to interrupt me, yes, I understand where you’re coming from, but it wouldn’t have been that bad.”
“Wouldn’t have been?” I sat down on the porch steps.
“They worked a new deal,” she said. “Instead of one big store, they’re going to be putting in a whole complex with partner businesses. A restaurant, a shoe store, a whole host of different companies, all going into one spot.” She closed her eyes and sighed.
“That would completely destroy everything we’ve built here,” I said.
“That’s the problem,” she agreed. She opened her eyes. “I can’t let my dad do this.”
I raised an eyebrow. “You were all for him bringing in some big box company,” I pointed out. “How is this different? Why would you change your mind now?”
“One store is a whole different thing, and you know it,” she said. “I could make the case for that. I can believe in that. But what they’re doing…” She shook her head and sat down, looking so defeated and so conflicted that I actually felt badly for her. “This is a whole different thing, and Dad doesn’t even see how it would destroy the town—how everyone would go out of business. All he’s seeing is that he can promise a bunch of people more money to sell to us since we have a bigger budget. It’s like he thinks Mustang Ridge will just be like a suburb of Houston, or something.”
“So, you get it,” I said, not quite making it a question. “Why this is a problem.”
“I get it,” she said. “I really do. And I just don’t know how I can explain it to Dad. He doesn’t see it.”
“So, why did you come here?”
She looked at me for a long moment. “Well, you’re the leader of the resistance, aren’t you?”
I smiled. “You’re asking to join the resistance? To go against your Dad?”
She swallowed hard and nodded. “I might end up losing my job over it,” she said. “But I can’t let him do this.”
“How do I know you’re not just using me again?” I crossed my arms over my chest. “How can I trust you after you’ve already lied to me?”
“Do you want me to call Jacob and have him confirm on the phone what they’re planning on doing? Because I will.”
“That isn’t what I’m worried about,” I told her. “What I’m worried about is your motivation.”
“Look, I get that I was on the wrong side of this—at least sort of—before,” she said. “I still think that bringing in one company wouldn’t ruin things here, especially if the company was a specialized one. But bringing in a whole host of businesses actually will ruin this town, and I don’t want that to happen. I’ve gotten to know people here. This place is special.”
“You’re serious,” I said. I held her gaze for a long moment, but she didn’t blink or look away even once.
“You need someone like me,” she said. “You need someone who knows the business world, who knows this business. The only person who knows my father’s business and how it operates better than he does is me.”
“So, what can you do?” I asked.
She took a deep breath. “That’s what we have to figure out. How I can help you. We need to cut him off at the pass.”
I considered that, and considered what she was offering. I had to admit I was—in a w
ay—hitting a wall with trying to keep Martin Lewis from buying up half the farms in town and building a giant store on them. There were some desperate people, more than I’d originally thought. And now it was even worse than I’d imagined. I would need help, and I would need the kind of help Emily could provide.
“You want a beer? I feel like we need a beer,” I suggested.
“Yeah, I think I definitely need a beer,” she said with a grim smile.
We went inside and I got us a couple of beers out of the fridge, and sat down at the kitchen table. It was already mid-afternoon, and I was pretty sure that whatever it was we needed to figure out wasn’t going to be done before night.
“So, the way I see it, the best way to keep this from happening is to put pressure on the town leadership,” Emily said. “And the only people who can do that are the people in the town, right?”
I nodded. “What can the leadership do, if people want to sell?”
Emily pressed her lips together, thought about that, and took a sip of her beer. “The town administration can rescind the deal,” she said. “If it becomes obvious to them that going forward with it is going to be unpopular in the town, they might be convinced to either limit, or get rid of the authorization to build. They have to have issued basic permits to the company, but for the new plans, Dad will need new authorization.”
“Okay, so we get the people in town to put pressure on the town council to have a meeting, listen to our concerns, and then…” I shrugged. “It could happen.”
“So, we have to figure out how to make that happen,” Emily said. “That’s where you come in.”
We had a couple of beers as we talked about the best way to get the town to demand a meeting of its council, combining both what I knew and what Emily knew, and I had to admit to myself that in her own, citified way, she was every bit as canny as anyone in Mustang Ridge was about local politics.
My mom called me while Emily was in the bathroom, and told me that she was going to stay the night at the Johnson’s place—Jackie, her friend from ever since she’d moved to town to be with my father, was sick, and Mom wanted to take care of her and make sure she was feeling better in the morning. It was definitely to my benefit for her to stay away, so I told her I’d heat up something from the freezer for dinner, that she should know by now that I was a grown man and could fend for myself at least for one night.
“Want to stay for dinner? Or maybe stay the night?” I asked Emily as she came back into the kitchen. “We could get a jump on talking to people in the morning, that way.”
“I could do that,” she said, nodding.
“Fortunately, Mom makes lots of freezer meals,” I told her. “All we have to do is throw something in the oven and heat it up.”
“I could cook for you,” Emily pointed out. “I am quite capable in a kitchen—even one as old-fashioned as this one.”
“I’m not going to make a guest in my house cook for me,” I said with a laugh.
We argued about it—jokingly—for a few more minutes, breaking up from the discussion about how to save my little old town. Finally, Emily gave in and let me heat up a lasagna Mom had made and frozen, while telling me about the lunch she had eaten on her drive to my place.
“I’d finally gotten hungry about an hour in,” she said. “So if you can imagine me, on the highway, eating from a container of creamed corn…”
“I can imagine it,” I said with a laugh. “I just can’t imagine how you did it without getting it all over you.”
We ate, had another beer, and kept talking as the night came in.
“It’s just as well that you didn’t decide to go home whenever we finished up,” I pointed out, after noticing it was nearly midnight. “I’d hate to think of you driving through nowheresville at midnight.”
“I can sleep on the couch,” Emily said. “If it makes you feel better about things.”
“I need to check on the barn, make sure everything’s put away before we turn in,” I told her.
“I can come with you, if you want,” she suggested.
It was exactly what I wanted.
“Okay,” I said, trying to cover the fact that I was excited at the prospect. “You’ll want your shoes on—don’t know what could be on the ground outside.”
I watched her slip on her shoes, and I stepped into a pair of heavy-bottomed slippers of my own that I kept at the door in case I needed to go outside at some odd hour.
I wanted to kiss her before we even got to the door, but I pushed that impulse out of my head—it was ridiculous and I knew it. It felt weird to be about to take Emily outside, to walk around the house, when the house was totally empty, but I reminded myself that there would come a day that I was the only person who lived in my parents’ old farmhouse. Or if you get a wife at some point, and kids, you won’t be alone—but there will come a day, either way, that Mom isn’t here. The thought chilled me a bit, and I pushed that out of my head too. I was just feeling jumpy. It was a silly thing.
I led Emily out of the house and made sure the door was closed—but not locked—behind us. I looked around the front yard and thought to myself that it was always so calm, so quiet, at night. You could almost hear the crops growing. The air had that kind of dry chill that it gets sometimes in Texas summer, and as Emily and I walked across the front yard toward the barn, I almost wished that I’d grabbed a lantern from inside. But the light from the front of the barn was enough to see where we were going and where our feet ended up, so I didn’t worry too much about it.
“Wow, I forgot how much of the stars you can see out here in the middle of nowhere,” Emily said behind me.
I stopped and turned to see her in the gloomy darkness, looking up at the sky. I grinned to myself.
“You should see it in winter,” I said. “Dad and I used to go out into the fields after we’d harvested and turned down the rows, and pitch a tent. We’d get a fire going, tell ghost stories, the whole deal.”
Emily turned her attention away from the sky to look at me, and I could just see her smiling.
“Even without what happened with my dad today, I think I can kind of—maybe a bit—understand what you’re trying to save here,” she said. “It’s a totally different life than anything I could imagine, but there’s beauty in it.”
I nodded and thought to myself that we should probably actually go to the barn. It was, after all, our reason for coming outside.
I took her hand lightly in mine and gently tugged her along with me toward the barn. “Sometimes rabbits or possums or raccoons jump out,” I told her. “Don’t want you tripping over anything and hurting yourself.”
Mostly, I’d just wanted to feel what her hand felt like in mine—and it felt good. We kept going toward the barn, and my heart started beating a little faster in my chest as I remembered the last time we’d gone in this direction. I hadn’t yet learned about what Emily was really doing in Mustang Ridge, or the fact that she was working for her father, but I’d known that she was cute, that she was capable of hard work, that she was funny and charming and clearly pretty smart. As I pulled open the door to the barn, memories of everything from that night flitted through my head—the feeling of being deep inside Emily’s body, her hot, wet tightness wrapped around me, the taste of her lips, the way she seemed to fit against me like a glove.
I thought about the things I’d told her before we’d ended up having sex, and I thought about how, for a few moments, I’d entertained the possibility of courting her. I’d wanted to find out if we could, as my mom liked to say, “come to an understanding.”
And then she’d told me the truth about why she’d wanted a tour, and everything had gone from being one of the better nights in my life to one of the worst.
We stepped into the barn together and I let go of Emily’s hand, trying to at least hold up some kind of pretense about what I was supposed to be doing. I moved around and checked on all the equipment, making sure that nothing was running hot.
“Do yo
u want to go up?” I gestured to the ladder that led up to my secret space in the barn, the place where we’d ended up having sex before. It was a loaded question and I knew it—but I couldn’t resist the invitation.
“Sure,” she said, smiling at me shyly. “At least this time all the cards are on the table and neither of us has any secrets we’re keeping—right?”
“As far as I know, there aren’t any on my end,” I agreed. “You?”
Emily’s smile got a little broader. “I’ve told you everything.”
“After you, then,” I suggested, gesturing up the ladder. “You aren’t scared of the dark, are you?”
She rolled her eyes and started up the ladder.
I couldn’t help looking up at her, enjoying the view as she moved into the darkness of the loft area. I started behind her as soon as she was two thirds of the way up, and I tried to remember where I’d left the lantern. It should—I thought—be near at hand, along with the matches.
“Okay, it’s really dark up here,” she commented as she stepped slightly to the side to let me join her.
“Give me a couple of seconds,” I suggested, climbing the last few rungs of the ladder. There was a little bit of light coming up from the barn below, but not enough to really see. Thankfully I remembered where everything was. I found the lantern and lit it, and the soft, yellowish light spread out around the loft, just like it had the last time we’d been up here together. Stop thinking about that. It’s not even all that relevant, I told myself. I looked up at the big space in the roof where I could see the stars, and so did Emily.
“I regret how badly things ended last time,” Emily said.
“Let’s not talk about that,” I suggested. “I wasn’t acting my best.”
Emily snorted. “You were a damn sight more restrained than you could have been.” She threw herself down on the pile of blankets where we’d had sex a little more than a week before. “If I’d been in your position, I’m not sure I would have been as…”
