by Alison Kent
“I wanted to tell you, too…”
“What?” she prompted when he let the sentence trail.
“Darcy talked to Nora Stokes and she wants to buy some of Tess’s antiques. Thinks she can get several thousand bucks for a couple of the pieces.”
“That’s great. That’ll help y’all a lot.”
“That’s not all. Darcy found some old oil surveys. She gave them to Greg and he had the Trinity Springs Oil folks look at them. Seems the Dalton Ranch is sitting on a very promising sweet spot.”
“Oil? Seriously?”
He nodded, slinging water from the brim of his hat. “Boone and Casper are meeting with them next week.”
“But not you?”
“I wasn’t going to be here so they made the plans.”
Wasn’t. He wasn’t. Not that he wouldn’t, but that he hadn’t planned to be. God. Oh, God. “But now? Are you going to be here? For the meeting? Since you haven’t left yet?”
“I did leave. Earlier. This morning. Took off before daybreak.”
She could hardly breathe. “Is this as far as you got?”
“No. I got to the edge of town. Saw the sign. Crow Hill, Texas. Population 2,875. How long ago do you think that was? Twenty ten? Was that the last census?”
He wanted to know about the census? Her heart was pounding like the Kittens’ boot heels on the bar, and he was asking about the census? “I don’t know. I think so. I remember filling out the form.”
“Huh. I think it said twenty-two hundred when I left after high school.”
“No reason to live here unless you’re born here. No reason to come back if you leave.”
“You’re wrong about that,” he said, and finally, finally turned toward her. “I saw that sign and I pulled to the shoulder and I just looked at it. And I thought what the hell am I doing leaving when the only thing I’ve ever wanted is here?”
“The ranch?”
“No, Arwen,” he said, and she swore the water in his eyes wasn’t rain at all. “You.”
“Okay,” she said, choking because she knew there was more. That his wanting her wasn’t going to be easy. The fight between his head and his heart had been going on as long as she’d known him.
He reached for her hand, and she gave him both, and he squeezed them tight. “Tell me we can do this. I need you to tell me. I need to hear you say it.”
“It doesn’t work like that, Dax.”
“Then how does it work. I don’t know shit about making anything work.”
“Of course you do.” She bounced their hands on his thigh. “You’ve worked the ranch. You’ve kept your friendship with the boys. You and Darcy did a good job making up for lost time. You and I worked beautifully.”
“We did, didn’t we?”
“Do you trust me?”
“I do.”
She closed her eyes, let that settle, opened them, dripping, and asked, “Do you love me?”
The grin that broke over his face was all teeth and dimples and happy happy joy. “Yeah. Oh yeah. Hell yeah. Shit yeah.”
She was nodding like a maniac and sobbing. “Then we can make this work.”
“Not yet.”
“Why not?” she nearly screamed.
“You have to love me, too.”
Her chest burned, constricted, her love for him drowning her. “I never wanted to love you. It scared me, the idea of loving anyone, but especially you.”
“Why?”
“You… consume me. You make me look twice to see if I’m doing the right thing. You make me feel things I don’t know how to balance with the rest of my life. I thought I had everything figured out. I thought if I stopped wondering about you, that would be it. But thinking I could ever work you out of my system has to be the biggest mistake I’ve made in my life.”
“I like that I upset you. You needed to be shaken up.”
She held out a trembling hand. “Like this?”
“So? Do you love me?”
“With all my heart.”
“That makes staying worthwhile.”
“You are? Going to stay?”
“Believe I will. But the pink bedroom’s going to have to go. No pink, and no goddamn brown.”
She leaned close, took his face in her hands, and nuzzled her nose to his as water sluiced between them. Then she kissed him, his lips warming her and his tongue arousing her and his hands holding her reaching all the way to her heart.
“I can’t believe you’re here,” she said, her mouth at the corner of his. “I am so, so happy you came back,” she added, dropping a dozen tiny kisses across his brow. “And you can paint the bedroom any color you want,” she finished with, her arms around his neck so tightly she heard him gag.
“So, maybe I can go tell the boys now? Let ’em know they can stop bitching about having to hire on a couple of new hands?”
“Two?”
“Casper wanted three. Boone said Faith was too tight. Then Casper said… Never mind what Casper said.” He got to his feet then, shook the water from the brim of his hat like a dog shaking its bath. “Let’s go.”
She was drenched. She was freezing. She was so in love she could hardly stand still. “You want me to come with you?”
“Arwen Poole,” he said, hooking an arm around her waist and pulling her to him. “I want you with me every day of my life. For better or for worse. In sickness and in health. For poorer or for even poorer than that.”
“Oh, Dax,” she said, sniffling, brilliantly happy. “I love you.”
“I love you, too, baby. I love you, too.”
KEEP READING FOR AN EXCERPT FROM
ALISON KENT’S NEXT DALTON GANG NOVEL
UNBREAKABLE
AVAILABLE FEBRUARY 2013 FROM HEAT BOOKS
WITH HIS BACK against the side of his truck, Casper Jayne braced for the bad news his gut said was coming. The same gut that had kept him in his bedroom when his old man had stumbled wasted through the door. That had sent him to the ground from his third-story window when his old lady had waved guns and threats. That had told him nearly two decades ago to get the hell out of that house if he wanted to live.
The very house he was now standing in front of.
The one-page, handwritten letter folded to fit in his back pocket felt bulky and heavy and made it hard to get comfortable as he watched the inspector circle the house he’d lived in before leaving Crow Hill at eighteen. The house was now his, as useless as tits on a boar hog, and would be hell to dump or to keep.
It had been a pit as far back as he remembered. His old lady hadn’t done a damn thing to make it livable the years they’d called the rambling monstrosity home, or even later, when his life was rodeo, his old man in the wind, and she’d been the only one keeping the fires burning.
Gutting the interior and starting from scratch might be his only option, but first he needed to know if the structure itself was sound. Check that: He needed to know what it was going to cost him to make it so. Especially since he was cash poor and getting his hands on the money he did have meant barreling his way through the woman who held his purse strings.
A woman tighter than a ten-day drunk.
He suspected he’d have an easier time getting her to give up what she hid beneath the suits she wore than the funds he needed. And he wasn’t sure he wouldn’t rather have the first than the second. But since both options hung off the edge of possibility’s realm, what he wanted didn’t matter a lick.
He took off his hat, ran a hand across the bristled buzz of his hair, resettled the beat-to-hell straw Resistol, and pulled the brim low. But he didn’t push away from his truck. He stayed where he was, crossing his arms as the man with the electronic gadget in his hand and acorns popping beneath his feet kicked at the sidewalk, the cement buckled by the roots of the yard’s hundred-year-old live oaks.
The inspector pecked out another note on the screen before walking through the thigh-high gate missing two pickets and hinged at a cockeyed angle. He stopped, swung it back
and forth, then screwed his mouth to the side before looking at Casper from behind sunglasses that hid his eyes but not his expression. They both knew there was more wrong with this house than was right, but Casper didn’t care what the other man was thinking.
He needed an official report to back up his request for the cash to do what was needed. Even shouldering the bulk of the labor himself, the supplies would set him back the cost of a herd of good horses. He doubted the house had been worth that much when he’d spent his nights staring at the holes in the ceiling and hoping the balls of newspaper he’d used to plug them would keep out the biggest of the spiders at least.
“Sure you don’t want me to take a look inside?” This was the third time the inspector had pushed to get through the doors. “Let you know what you’re looking at with your heating and cooling systems? Your plumbing fixtures? Your outlets?”
Casper shook his head. He wasn’t ready for that. Besides, there was no cooling system. Never had been, unless he counted opening the windows and praying for a breeze. The space heaters he and his mother had used had been no match for the lack of insulation or the gaps in the siding—and the two of them hadn’t done more than try to control the temperature in the four of the two dozen rooms they’d used.
Summers and winters. Both had been hell. “Just give me the external damage. What am I looking at?”
The other man glanced at the house again—the wraparound front porch and badly canted columns, the Victorian gables over windows made of cardboard instead of glass, the oaks spreading from either side to meet in the middle, branches laced as if praying for the house to be put out of its misery—before turning to Casper with a shrug. “You could raze the whole thing and come out ahead.”
Easiest solution, but it wasn’t going to happen. “I know it needs a new roof—”
“A new roof’s the least of it.” Frustrated, the inspector made an encompassing gesture that took in the house and the tree and the entire half acre that resembled a landfill more than a yard. “Your fascia board’s rotted through most of the way around. Eaves and gables both. Same with the soffit. Kid hits a baseball against the house, the vents are gonna fall plumb out. Your gutters are hanging on by a thread, and you don’t have a single attached downspout. Both of the chimney masonry caps, the support beams on all the porches, the grade of your lot…”
“Yeah, yeah. It’s a piece of shit. I got it.”
A shrug, and, “This house is not where I’d be pouring my investment money. Like I said, razing’s your best bet.”
And, again, that wasn’t going to happen. As long as Casper got his hands on the money, the risk of making over the house was his. What he did with it after that… He nodded toward the tablet the inspector held. “Can you print out a report on that thing? Give me a list or whatever?”
“I’ve got a printer in the truck, sure,” the man said, making his way to where he’d parked his mobile office behind Casper’s big black dualie.
“What about a fax machine?”
“Yep. I can send it wherever you want it to go.” He opened the passenger door, glanced over as Casper approached. “I can send the bill, too. All I need is a name and a number.”
For the first time since the letter from his old lady had arrived, Casper felt the hard tug of a smile. What he wouldn’t give to be a fly on the wall of the office when this particular paperwork arrived.
“Send it over to the First National Bank.”
“Attention of?”
His smiled tugged harder, and grew just a little bit mean. “Faith Mitchell.”
ONE MORE THING. That was all Faith Mitchell needed to go wrong. One more thing and she wouldn’t have any trouble telling the higher-ups to take this job and shove it. She got that the bank was not a charity, that good business didn’t allow for extending a loan indefinitely, or offering additional credit to account holders already unable to pay what they owed.
But after the chewing out she’d just received for daring, daring, to suggest the bank give the Harts another month before foreclosing on property that had been in the family over a hundred years, she was beginning to think it took a special kind of heartlessness to turn one’s back on the honest-to-God need created by the nation’s depressed economy and the state’s ongoing drought.
The Harts were good people, struggling to make their living off the land the same way Henry Lasko, Nina Summerlin, and so many others were doing. The same way Tess and Dave Dalton had done for years, before passing on and leaving their ranch to Crow Hill’s notorious Dalton Gang.
As teens instructed to give the elderly couple a hand, the three had earned the Daltons’ love and trust while raising hell with the rest of the town. As grown men who’d returned to work the spread they’d inherited from Tess and Dave, the three were now fighting to get ahead like all of the area’s ranchers.
Since Faith’s brother, Boone, was one of the trio, she got to see his side of the picture as well as where the money men were coming from. That probably had a lot to do with the sympathy she felt for the Harts. Yes, they’d put up their land as collateral, but no one could’ve seen the drought coming—and staying—or anticipated the depth of the economy’s downward spiral.
Turning one’s back on the sort of ridiculous request outlined in the fax she’d received earlier was a different thing entirely. Casper Jayne knew exactly how tight the ranch’s finances were. His own were no better, and he wanted to pour tens of thousands into a house that would be better served by going up in smoke? Please.
Her position as loan officer aside, the risks involved in his request were innumerable. The wiring in the house would have to be brought up to code before he could even think about powering the tools to do the job. Unless he wanted to start a fire as a way to get out from under this newest burden.
Hmm. The camel, the straw. Did he even have a homeowner’s policy? If he did, and if she approved just enough—
“Faith?”
“Not now, Meg,” Faith said, dismissing the tempting thought of arson and waving one hand toward her assistant while reaching for the phone with the other. Might as well give the Harts the bad news.
But Meg insisted. “You’ve got a visitor.”
“Okay. I’ll be done here in—”
“How ’bout you’re done now,” said Casper Jayne, pushing past Meg before she could stop him.
Not that anyone had ever been able to stop him.
Abandoning the phone, Faith sat back and laced her hands in her lap to keep from jumping up and choking him. One more thing. Hadn’t the thought just gone through her mind? And he qualified in ways nothing else did, all long and tight and wiry, with thighs he’d used for years to grip the backs of bulls. Thick thighs. Purposeful thighs. Thighs she wanted to ride and had her close to moaning.
Her reaction was just stupid. She’d known him since he was sixteen and she was fourteen and he’d become best friends with her brother Boone and Dax Campbell, the group’s hell-raising third. Playing his big brother role to the hilt, Boone had made sure she and Casper seldom crossed paths, and Casper hadn’t pressed the point.
So what if she’d been brokenhearted? She’d been a girl, and that had been forever ago. She should be immune to him now.
For some reason, she wasn’t. For some reason, as soon as he’d returned to Crow Hill, her teenage crush had become a very adult fascination. And the way he wore his jeans didn’t help.
But he was crazy reckless, a lesson in insane abandon, wild and out of control. She didn’t need that in her life now any more than she had in the past. If nothing else, that much was a given.
He was standing, staring. Waiting. Taking up too much room in her office, breathing too much of her air. And God help her if she wasn’t undressing him, peeling those jeans away, wrapping her legs around those thighs, grinding against him.
Could this day possibly go any further downhill? “What are you doing here?”
He walked closer, taking slow steps, lazy steps, his hips at her eye level
and causing her so very much grief. Please, please go away.
But he and his thighs and his championship belt buckle stopped in front of her desk to tease her. “I came to see you.”
“If it’s about the fax, you’re wasting your time and mine.”
“I wanted to explain things in person before you had a chance to say no.”
“No.”
“C’mon, Faith—”
“No,” she said again, watching his nostrils flare, his bright hazel eyes flash. Watching the tic pop in his strong square jaw. A bead of sweat crawled over his Adam’s apple to the hollow of his throat.
She swallowed hard, but she held his gaze. She knew him, and she would not be tempted. She would not. She would not.
“You enjoy this, don’t you?” he asked, planting his hands on her desk blotter, leaning forward, bringing with him the scent of horses and hay. “Making it hard on a man.”
She took a deep breath and a long pause, then said, “No, I don’t. But you know as well as I do that you don’t have the money for the extreme makeover that house will need before you can even think about putting it on the market.”
He frowned, hovered a couple more seconds, then straightened, crossed his arms, and raised one slashed brow. “Who said I’m going to put it on the market?”
“You’re going to live there? And still work the ranch?” She gave him a whatever shrug, because he needed to know he didn’t bother her at all. “What else would you do with it?”
“Dax lives in town with Arwen, and he still works the ranch.”
“Dax lives in Arwen’s house. He didn’t rob Peter to pay Paul for a place to stay.”
“It’s my money. I’ll be using it for me. No Peter. No Paul.”
“It’s the ranch’s money first, and only a third of that is yours. And not even that, really, because of the debt y’all are dealing with.”
“I added my rodeo winnings to the coffers, remember?”
She did, but he’d obviously forgotten the rest. “And you signed paperwork turning it over to the partnership. It’s not yours anymore.”
