by Zoe York
Sure, “Foreclosure is always an option” wasn’t the best statement in the world to overhear someone say, but didn’t she deserve at least a little bit of grace? A chance to explain herself?
She flipped the windshield wipers on high, not sure if it was the moisture outside or the moisture in her eyes that was blurring the world. They flapped hard, swishing maniacally across the windshield, but still, she could see almost nothing.
Tears it was, then.
She wondered what Carmelita was thinking in that moment. Was she listening to Stetson describe what he’d overheard, and wondering why she’d ever been nice to such a traitor? The thought of Carmelita hating her…it hurt almost as much as Stetson’s hatred.
“I am not the enemy!” she yelled again, pounding the steering wheel with every syllable.
She was already screaming when the front tire found a soft spot near the edge of the gravel road. The car jerked. The steering wheel twisted violently from her hands.
Terrified, Jennifer’s body pulled into itself as the car and inertia took control. Her forehead slammed into the steering wheel, pain exploding outward from the impact. She screamed again.
The tire caught in the eroded drainage channel that paralleled the roadway, directing the car forward as it quickly slowed. Finally, with a sudden jerk, the car came to a stop pointing away from the road.
Panicked, her body still curled into a defensive position, she sat there, her heart hammering painfully against the inside of her ribcage.
She didn’t know how much time had passed before she dared to move. She gave herself a personal inventory. She extended her legs and wiggled her toes; she watched as she made fists with both hands and then stretched her fingers outward.
Finally, she reached up and readjusted the rearview mirror that had been knocked askew so that she could look at her face. She couldn’t see any blood on her forehead, which she took as a good sign.
Luckily, she hadn’t been driving that fast. Too fast for the conditions, sure, but not so fast that the crash caused serious damage. She probed the tender spot in the center of her forehead. Ouch! She should’ve been wearing her seatbelt. She was usually so good at putting it on, but today…today, she’d just been too pissed to think clearly.
Self-check complete, she looked around the car for her stuff. Spotting it, she leaned over and grabbed her computer bag from where it had fallen onto the passenger-side floor, and pulled it up onto her lap.
She dug around in the front pockets until she found her phone.
Thank God it isn’t broken.
Then she realized that the phone was ringing. The screen read “Paul Limmer” before it turned itself off, the battery completely drained.
Chapter 22
Stetson
Stetson shifted around, trying to find a comfortable place in his leather recliner. Usually super comfy, tonight he just couldn’t find a good spot. Everything was lumpy and wrong and the wooden frame was digging into him.
Determined, Stetson shifted again, ignoring whatever was happening on the TV. Some sort of sports was on, although under threat of death, he couldn’t begin to guess what it was, and didn’t care. It was just serving as his signal to the world (i.e., Carmelita) to leave him the hell alone.
Finally, he found just the right spot and sank in, letting the tension go just a little bit. Perfect. He was now in a great position to fully enjoy a nice wallow in his funk…
Which was when he heard a knock on the front door.
Stetson didn’t move. He wasn’t in the mood to put on a cheerful face and anyway, Carmelita liked to greet people.
“It is your house, Mr. Miller. You can answer the door,” Carmelita hollered from the kitchen.
Fine. Stetson sighed as he flipped up the handle releasing the foot rest, turning the volume down on the TV as he hoisted himself up. He’d never admit it to Carmelita, but the TV had honestly been hurting his ears. It had been just too damn loud, even for him.
When had he become such an old man?
Padding his way over to the front door in just his socks, he fully expected to find Declan or Wyatt, ready to tear into him now that they’d heard the news about the farm. To be perfectly honest, he was surprised they hadn’t heard the news before now. Sawyer wasn’t exactly the ideal town to try to hide news from others, good or bad. Just what he needed today – an ass-chewing from Wyatt.
Stetson’s shoulders tightened up at the thought. If Wyatt said one word – one word! – about Stetson being the baby of the family, he wasn’t sure he could be accountable for his actions after that. Wyatt deserved a can of whoop-ass to be delivered to him, anyway. Today was just the day to do it. In fact—
He jerked the heavy wooden door open, ready to tell Wyatt to just shut the hell up and get his nose out of places where it didn’t belong, when instead, he found Jennifer.
A soaked Jennifer, hunched over and shivering from the cold.
Dammit, why is she here? Why isn’t she in Franklin, eating dinner? Far, far away from me?
“What are you doing here?” he growled. He folded his arms over his chest and glared down at her. He leaned against the doorframe of the front door, blocking her entrance with his body. If she thought she would slip by him and into the house, she had another think a-comin’. She wasn’t welcome, and he was not going to budge on that fact.
“The better question is, why are you still standing on the front porch, shivering like a newborn kitten in the middle of winter?” asked an angry Spanish-accented voice from behind him.
Double damn. He should’ve known that Carmelita wouldn’t be able to resist coming to the door, even after ordering him to answer it. Nothing happened under her roof that she didn’t know about.
“I told you how I felt about this situation earlier today,” Stetson said over his shoulder to Carmelita through gritted teeth, “and that decision still stands.”
Smack! Stetson’s head lurched forward at the impact.
Every time Carmelita hit him on the back of the head, he had to wonder how a woman so short could reach so high.
“You have been rude enough for one day. I try to respect your feelings earlier today even if you were rude when you say them to me,” Carmelita said furiously. “Now there is young woman on the porch who needs warm and shelter of your home. I do not care who she is or where she come from, mi hijo, you will be rude no more.”
Carmelita’s English, usually better than his, worsened the angrier she was. Based on the speech she just gave, she was pissed.
And mi hijo? That was just low. She rarely called him that, but when she did…
She played to win, he’d give her that.
“Come in and I will find you a towel,” Stetson said in a voice so low, it was barely audible. He turned and slunk past Carmelita, his head still bent low.
“Come, come,” he heard the elderly woman say.
Returning with the towel he’d found in the guest bathroom, Jennifer was telling her about spinning off the road as Carmelita was squeezing the water out of Jennifer’s hair. Her jacket was hanging on a hook next to the door, dripping harmlessly onto the tile entryway. It was all for show and had obviously become soaked quickly, offering very little protection during her journey from wherever the hell she’d crashed her car.
Her white blouse was just as wet as the jacket, the thin white material clinging to her lace bra.
For just a second, Stetson forgot to be angry.
Blinking, trying to wipe the image from his mind, Stetson retrieved a raincoat from the alcove and handed it to her. Jennifer stared at him, resigned and disappointed.
He tugged on his boots and grabbed a second coat for himself from the row of hooks.
Carmelita was still fussing over her, grabbing the towel from Stetson’s hand and rubbing Jennifer’s hair with it.
“I will find you dry clothes. They will most likely not fit, but they will be dry. I will wash these and…”
“Before you get too dry, let’s go,” Stetso
n interrupted.
“Stetson Byron Miller!” Carmelita hollered.
“I need her to go back to the car with me,” Stetson interrupted again before she could really get on a roll, “and steer while I pull it out of the ditch with the truck. I don’t much see the point of getting her into dry clothes, just so she can get wet again.”
“You’d do that for me?” Jennifer asked, astonished.
“Carmelita says that I’ve been rude to everybody today, and I probably have. Some of the people I have been rude to did not deserve it,” he said, looking pointedly at Carmelita before turning back to Jennifer. “Some of those people probably did deserve it,” he looked even more pointedly at Jennifer, “but I’m not going to leave you stuck on the side of the road in the rain overnight, no matter why the hell you’re here.”
Stetson looked at the drenched woman. She seemed so small in that moment. Trails of water traced down her cheeks. He desperately hoped that it was rainwater. Crying always made him very uncomfortable.
Very, very uncomfortable.
Dammit, I think those are tears…
Chapter 23
Jennifer
The drive back to her car was uncomfortably quiet. That kind of quiet that makes a person want to break out into song, even if they’re tone deaf, just so that some sort of noise was being made.
Couldn’t the radio be playing something truly awful, like She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy? Or The Watermelon Crawl?
She knew she was desperate if she was willing to listen to The Watermelon Crawl.
But the radio was painfully silent and Stetson was painfully silent and the only noise was the swish of the wipers on the windshield and the growl of the engine and the spin of the tires as the rain-softened road slid and gave way beneath the giant tires of the truck.
Which had the unexpected side effect of making her feel slightly better, because if this truck was struggling, her little Civic had no chance at all, even if she had been driving with her mind totally on the task at hand.
Which she totally hadn’t been, of course.
She mentally sorted through her choices, sparse as they were. For the past three days, she’d held her tongue. She’d thought that actions spoke louder than words, and she still believed that. But that long-held belief aside, she probably needed to face the facts: It was within the realm of possibility that a few words of explanation could go a long ways.
Orrrrr…they could do nothing at all.
But dammit all, she had to try. Then, at least, she wouldn’t be playing the “What if?” game with herself for the next month.
Just as she was talking herself into talking, the rear end of her Honda appeared between the swipes of the wipers. Wow. She’d been so close to making it to the pavement. Another 50 yards, and she would’ve been long gone from the Miller farm.
Well, this was her sign – she had to talk now, before they got involved with the process of trying to pull the car out of the ditch. That would be chaotic and before she knew it, they’d have her car out of the ditch and Stetson would still not be talking to her and nothing would’ve changed. It was do-or-die time.
She opened up her mouth to speak.
“I’m going to have to pull you out backward,” Stetson said flatly, cutting her off at the pass. Her mouth snapped shut. There was no emotion in his voice, as if he were reading a grocery list to a brick wall. “There’s really no point of driving up to the road and turning around because you’re going to have to do the same thing once we pull you out, so we might as well both do that once your car is back on the road.”
“Okay,” she said softly. Don’t chicken out, don’t chicken out. Tell him what’s going—
“You stay here outta the rain while I get everything hooked up and then you can get in your car and steer while I pull.”
“I need to tell you something!” she blurted out, before he could say anything else. Talking to Stetson Byron Miller was stupidly difficult to do, she was starting to realize.
“Yes?” Flat. Distant. He stared straight ahead, refusing to make eye contact.
“I know what you heard today sounded bad.”
“Yeah, it sounded pretty damn bad.” Taking his hand off the door handle, he turned towards her. His hard features were cast only in the light of the dashboard. She took a deep breath. She just had to get through this.
“I know you’re not in the mood to believe me, but I need to tell you anyway: I don’t want to take your farm away. My job is to come out here, look at your books, and see if there’s a way for you to get caught up with the bank. That can range from selling equipment to selling a small piece of land to maybe even finding a different market for your crops that pays a higher amount. The possibilities are endless, and I’m here to help you work through those possibilities together. I’m not here to simply foreclose.”
He was just staring at her. No emotion. Nothing at all. She wondered hysterically for a moment if she’d been inadvertently assigned to the first case of true artificial intelligence. Of course, a robot would’ve acted a lot more rationally over the past few days.
“Look, you can be 100% sure of that!” she exclaimed, inspiration striking. “If I was just going to recommend foreclosure, then why even audit your books, right? The bank could’ve just foreclosed and spared the expense of sending me out here. I get my hourly wage plus my hotel and a per diem every day that I’m out on an audit. It’s expensive to do this. The bank doesn’t have to send me, but they choose to, because they want to find a way for you to keep your farm.”
“You’ll have to excuse me if that sounds slightly insane,” Stetson said sarcastically, the first emotion peeking through since they’d started this conversation. “Why not just take the farm? It’d make you a pretty penny on the auction block.”
“Yes, that’s true. If we can find a buyer who has deep enough pockets to buy an operation like this. Not everyone has millions of dollars laying around to buy a new farm. Hell, you wouldn’t be able to buy this farm if you were starting out today. You only own it because you inherited it from your father.”
“You do wonders for a man’s pride, you know that?”
Jennifer chose to ignore that comment. “Also, you want to know where banks make their money? Interest. If they auction this farm off to the highest bidder, that bidder will be paying cash. They won’t be borrowing from Intermountain. Which is a nice little pile of cash right now, but long-term, the bank makes a lot more money from a customer through interest.”
“So why are you discussing foreclosure with some random guy on the phone?” he challenged her.
“That ‘random guy’ happens to be my boss. He…he doesn’t always see the world the same way I do.” She shrugged, her turn to stare out the front windshield, the methodical swishing of the wipers and pattering of the rain the only sound in the cab.
She could do this. She would do this.
“Look. Here’s the truth: The bank only looks at the overall closure rate on our cases when deciding whether we were successful or not – in other words, whether my boss gets his Christmas bonus this year. That means the sooner we make it through a case and move onto the next, the more cases we can make it through in a year, and the better my boss looks. Even though the bank wants me to find a way for farmers and ranchers to be able to keep their property, my boss…not so much. He just wants me in, out, and on my way. A misalignment of incentives, honestly.”
She paused for a moment to debate whether or not she should tell him everything – that even for her boss, he was being unreasonably pushy and demanding that she wrap things up quickly; that this particular case seemed strangely personal to Greg for reasons she couldn’t even begin to fathom.
But before she could decide whether that was a good idea or would just feed into Stetson’s paranoia about the bank being out to get him, he spoke.
“So, you’re looking for a way for me to keep my farm?”
“Yes,” she said with conviction.
“Okay,” Stet
son said, slapping the steering wheel lightly. “Let’s get your car out of the mud.”
Jennifer sat there, stunned, as she watched him hop out of the truck into the rain. Did he actually believe her? Or was he simply done listening to her “excuses”? Was he just trying to get through this so he could send her away?
What the hell does “okay” mean? Argh! I will never understand men.
Chapter 24
Jennifer
Jennifer was laughing as she burst through the front door of the farmhouse, shaking and stamping the water off onto the entryway tile. Carmelita came hurrying in to see what the commotion was all about, and stuttered to a halt when she spotted Jennifer.
“Did you get your car out of the mud?” she asked, her eyebrows wrinkling with concern as she took in Jenn’s appearance.
Which even Jennifer had to admit was a bit on the dirty side. Still unable to control her giggles as she shucked the oversized raincoat off her shoulders, Jennifer looked at the housekeeper.
“Nope, it’s still stuck,” she said cheerfully.
“Where is Stetson?”
“He went ‘round the back of the house. He said you’d be mad if he came through the front door.” Jennifer barely got the words out before another round of laughter overtook her.
Carmelita was completely confused.
“What is so funny about going out in the rain? And why would I care what door he comes in?”
“Because of the mess,” Stetson said, emerging from the back of the house.
Carmelita turned and Jennifer’s laughter stopped abruptly. Stetson was wearing just a pair of jeans, slung low on his hips. Jennifer’s mouth instantly went dry.
“Why are you half naked?” Carmelita demanded. “Nobody wants to see you like that.”
Speak for yourself, lady.
