Something Like Love

by Sara Richardson

  He lifted the mug and sipped the dark brew. Wasn’t quite cowboy coffee, but it’d do the trick.

  “It’s wonderful to see you, dear,” Miss Elsie cooed. “It’s been much too long since you’ve visited.”

  Yeah, well. He’d hadn’t been back since the whole debacle at the gala. Paige had made it clear as that bright blue sky outside that she didn’t want to see him. He eyed the older woman sitting across from him. Had Paige told her about that night? “Say, Miss Elsie. Everything all right with Paige?” He rested the fork on his plate and drooped his eyes into innocent concern. “She seems mighty uptight today.”

  Her eyes shied away from his in a telltale sign. The woman had a terrible poker face. She knew something had happened or she wouldn’t suddenly be so fascinated by her coffee, now, would she?

  “Don’t you worry about Paige,” she said briskly, stirring the spoon round and round in her mug. “She’ll be fine. I’m sure she’s nervous, seeing as how this is such an important trip. She wants everything to be perfect.”

  “Perfect is overrated,” he replied with a sly grin, clueing Miss Elsie in on the fact he was onto her. “Trust me. I should know.” In his experience, perfect meant fake. Superficial. And he wanted to dive past the surface, sink into Paige’s depths. “I happen to think Paige is perfect the way she is.”

  Taking his time, he let that sink in and sawed off another bite, enjoying the chocolate the way he’d enjoyed Paige’s kiss last year, slow and thorough.

  Miss Elsie smiled in her knowing way, but didn’t offer him anything that could help him decipher Paige’s feelings. She only sipped her coffee across from him. Good thing he was a patient man. When he’d finished chewing, he set down his fork in a silent threat to leave the cake unfinished. “Thing is, I’d sure like to know if I’ve done somethin’ to upset her.” In his mind, honesty was always the best policy. “I happen to like her a whole lot, but she seems bent on ignorin’ me.”

  “Oh. Well.” Elsie’s nervous gaze drifted to the door and back to his face. She was a loyal woman, no doubt about that, but she was caving fast.

  “Do you have any pointers?” he prompted. “I’d sure appreciate the help.”

  “When you put it that way…” Elsie kept an eye on the door. “Be careful with her, Ben dear.” Her voice lowered. “She’s more fragile than she looks.”

  “Fragile?” She didn’t look fragile to him. Not one bit. The woman looked strong and capable and…almost untouchable.

  “She’s been hurt by people who were supposed to love her,” Elsie said quietly. “If you like her, don’t tell her. She won’t believe you. Just treat her right. She’ll come around, eventually.”

  And there it was, the wisdom that made Elsie famous for her good advice. She should start charging.

  Treat her right.

  That he could do. He grinned. “You know what I always say…treat a woman like a racehorse and she’ll never be a nag.” He’d picked up that bit of wisdom from Granddad, and it’d earned his grandfather sixty good years of marriage and counting. “Can’t imagine anyone hurtin’ Paige,” he said as he reclaimed his fork and finished off the cake. A guy would have to be as dumb as a cow patty to run Paige off. Of course he’d done it once himself. But not on purpose.

  “Yes, well…” Elsie checked the door again. “She was young and the boy was older. He led her on for years and then he didn’t want her.” An angry look stretched her mouth thin. “He knew what he was doing. Broke her heart in two, the poor dear.”

  Ben stood, walked his plate and mug to the sink, and rinsed them as Gracie had taught him. “Thanks, Miss Elsie,” he said, pushing in his stool. “That helps.” More than she knew. If Paige had let someone get close enough to hurt her once, that meant she had a vulnerable side. Though it seemed she’d buried it down deep.

  Which meant he had some excavating to do.

  * * *

  Going home was all Paige needed to do to remind herself that she was way out of her league with Ben Noble. Not that her studio apartment wasn’t charming. It happened to be right downtown, a couple of blocks from the slopes, on the third floor of a historic brick building that housed a T-shirt shop, a local art gallery, and a Japanese restaurant. She’d always been a big fan of diversity, though she didn’t love the scent of fried dumplings that had been engrained in her burlap curtains. But she practically lived off their veggie udon noodle bowls, so she figured the trade-off was worth it. Speaking of…she unloaded the takeout boxes and set them out in front of Ruby. After stopping by Ruby’s place to shower with some flowery-scented soaps and oils and whatnot, then dressing in one of her friend’s girl-next-door outfits, she was famished.

  “Check this out.” Ruby set her iPad in the center of Paige’s round bistro table, flipping through a series of horrific pictures.

  “Oh my god.” Paige quit eating. Ben Noble was a jerk. No. Worse than a jerk. She leaned over and gawked at the images, the brown cow’s droopy, innocent eyes tugging at her heart. “I can’t believe he beats his animals.” But really, why should she be surprised? There had to be something wrong with him. The man couldn’t be as perfect as he looked.

  The memory of his face gave her a hot flash. Speaking of his looks, what a waste of hot cowboy genes.

  “You really think he beats his animals?” Ruby squinted, her nose wrinkled, and pushed her face closer to the screen like she was trying to solve one of those mind-bending puzzles.

  “Pictures don’t lie.” She flicked a finger across the screen. There had to be twenty of them posted on various news sites. Ben raising a shovel over the cow’s head, a pond on his ranch oozing trash. “It’s disgusting.” To think that she even gave the man a second glance. And a third. Fourth. Okay. She’d looked him over as many times as she could, but that was before she’d known about those horrible pictures.

  “Actually, pictures can lie,” Ruby corrected as she shoved in a big bite of noodles. “Just look at all those skinny models in the magazines. Don’t tell me they have no cellulite.”

  She opened her big, fat mouth to argue, but the woman had a point. Normally, she gave people the benefit of the doubt, but she was grasping at anything to make the next week easier, to keep that professional distance intact even while he smiled and drawled and swaggered in those close-fitting jeans.

  Unfortunately, it was hard to convince herself that Ben could hurt his animals. He wasn’t that kind of guy and she knew it.

  “I mean, you read the articles. No one has any proof, yet. Maybe he pissed off his girlfriend and she wanted revenge.” Ruby clicked the zoom until they both had a clear view of Ben’s ex. “You want my opinion, she doesn’t look like Little Miss Innocent.”

  No. That was true. Ben’s ex-girlfriend looked like Little Miss Surgically Enhanced, if you asked her. And not just in the bust region. Either the girl had a lip-swelling allergy problem or she favored Botox. Of course, if that was the kind of woman Ben preferred, she had nothing to worry about. He wouldn’t want her.

  And that called for more noodles. “It doesn’t matter, anyway,” she said between heaping bites. “It’s not like he’s interested in a relationship.” One night stand, yes. Commitment, no. That’d been pretty clear the one night she’d spent with him.

  Moving on…

  She glanced at herself in the thrift-store mirror that hung above Gramma Lou’s antique mahogany buffet, taking in her attire, the borrowed powder-blue cardigan, the pressed khaki pants, the string of Ruby’s pearls around her neck. “I hope this getup appeases his mother.”

  “Are you sure it’s his mother you’re trying to impress?” Ruby asked, eyebrows peaked into a probing glare that heated Paige’s cheeks.

  Whew. Time to open a window, get some fresh air flowing.

  “Of course I’m sure,” she insisted, popping out of her seat to crank open the small kitchen window above the sink. She stole an extra second there, closing her eyes as the breeze washed over her. “Ben is nothing special.”

  Her friend
snorted in disagreement. “Is that why your neck gets all blotchy when you talk about him?”

  “It does not.” She reached up to soothe the burn that inched past the neckline of her shirt and trudged back to the table. “I get heat rash easily.”

  “Heat rash,” Ruby laughed. “Yes. Well, he’s definitely hot.”

  “Exactly,” she conceded. “Which is why he dates girls like her.” She stabbed the iPad screen with her pointer finger. “Valentina the catalog model with the ten-thousand-dollar boobs.”

  “Yours are way better than hers.” Ruby lowered her eyes and grinned. “And they’re a hundred percent natural.”

  “Thanks for that.” It was no secret men were drawn to her chest, but who wanted the dilemma of wondering if they were really interested in her or just her cup size? In her previous experience, it’d turned out to be cup size. Take Luke Simms, for example.

  “When Ben walked into the kitchen earlier, he hardly even looked at Elsie and me.” In between bites of noodles, Ruby unloaded the ungodly amounts of makeup and hair products she’d brought to complete Paige’s transformation. “His face lit up when he saw you. And you didn’t exactly look indifferent.”

  “That’s ridiculous.” Air conditioner. She should invest in one of those window units. She shrugged off the mounting heat. “I’d never hook up with him again. Not after what happened at the gala.” Even if he didn’t abuse his animals, there were plenty of other reasons not to let herself fall for him again. He went through women like Kleenex and…“That man’s mother is horrible. I couldn’t even fantasize about a man who had a mother like her. He must have some serious baggage.”

  Ruby rolled her shoulders back in a seductive pose, but humor flashed in her eyes. “I’d help him carry that baggage, if he asked.”

  Yeah. Carrying it was one thing. She just didn’t want to be the one sorting it all out. Speaking of baggage…she eyed her friend. “So I noticed you didn’t say much to Sawyer.” If Ruby was looking to carry a hot guy’s baggage, she couldn’t do much better than Sawyer Hawkins. “He’s pretty good looking, too. Don’t you think?”

  The fork dropped from Ruby’s hand and clattered onto the table. “Oh. Um. I don’t know. Didn’t really notice.”

  Yeah, right. Every woman noticed Sawyer. “He seemed to notice you,” Paige observed casually. The man had his gaze locked on Ruby’s backside, and she suspected he wasn’t only staring at the stack of cookies next to her, either.

  “He did?” Most women would’ve squealed at the suggestion that Sawyer had been checking them out, but Ruby’s face paled. She pulled her hands into her lap and knotted them like she was worried.

  “He’s a nice guy.” A real catch by most women’s standards. Wasn’t hard to understand why all of the local women in town called him Officer Hotness. He had dark wavy hair, almost as black as Bryce’s, and piercing blue eyes. But it was his smile that got to most of them. He’d been stopped by many a woman in the grocery store who’d asked him about showing up to a friend’s bachelorette party. Legend had it that he could’ve earned a lot of extra money, if he’d been that type of guy. Except he wasn’t. While he may have looked like a fantasy, he was as wholesome as they came. Unlike Ben Noble.

  Instead of agreeing with her, Ruby sat awkwardly still and quiet.

  “I heard he’s getting a divorce,” Paige said between bites of noodles. “Which means he’ll be single soon…”

  “I don’t date cops.” The tremble in Ruby’s voice held so many things—rage, fear, desperation. But before Paige could ask her what had happened to her, the woman pushed away her dinner and stood. “We should get started. We’ll need every second we have to tame that hair of yours.”

  Paige forced herself to smile, even with a blinding rush of sympathy. Whatever had happened to Ruby, she sure as hell didn’t want to talk about it.

  “Why don’t you dry your hair first,” Ruby asked, seeming to assess what she had to work with.

  Paige’s dramatic sigh puffed her bangs. “Let’s get this over with.” She snatched Ruby’s blow-dryer off the table and plugged it in over the kitchen counter. Who the hell knew it took two hours to actually groom yourself? What a waste of time. On a normal day, she hopped out of bed, showered—well…sometimes showered—ran a brush through her hair, and got dressed. That was it. She could be ready in ten minutes, start to finish, if she had to.

  After plugging the thing in, she examined it. “How do you turn it on?”

  With a disbelieving shake of her head, Ruby walked over, confiscated the blow-dryer, and flicked it on. “The on switch,” she said.

  “I knew that.” Paige took the blow-dryer from her friend’s hand. Hot air puffed out her hair.

  “No, no, no,” Ruby said like a mother correcting a toddler. You have to use a brush and straighten your hair. Like this.” She picked up the brush and stole back the blow-dryer, then caught a lock of Paige’s hair in the bristles and smoothed the blow-dryer over it.

  “Sure. Okay. I can do that.” Paige took over, awkwardly trying to catch of a lock of her hair the way Ruby had.

  Her friend stepped back and watched, arms crossed, mouth alternating between a smile and a grimace.

  Turning her back, she bent and flipped her hair. How the hell was she supposed to brush and dry at the same time? She turned her head to get a better angle, but the back of the blow-dryer sucked up a wad of her hair. “Ow!” A crackling sound rattled. The smell of burned hair polluted the air. She tried to pull the blow-dryer back, but it was stuck.

  “Turn it off!” Ruby rushed over.

  “I’m trying!” But where was the switch?

  “It’s smoking!” her friend screeched and somehow found the off switch.

  The blow-dryer quit, but her hair was still stuck.

  “Oh, boy.” Ruby held the blow-dryer in one hand and tried to untangle Paige’s hair with the other hand. “I might need to get the scissors.”

  Panic soared through her. “But I have to be at the meeting in an hour!”

  “Okay. Don’t freak out.” Ruby carefully picked clumps of her hair out of the back of the blow-dryer. “There. I think I’ve got it.” She finally pulled the thing away and laid it on the table.

  Paige spun to look in the mirror. A frizzed ball of hair stuck out against the back of her head. “It looks like I have bed head!”

  “Here.” Ruby found a tube of something on the counter and squeezed clear goo into her hand. “This is frizz control. It’ll help smooth it down.” She spread it evenly across the back of Paige’s head, then ran a brush through it.

  She glanced in the mirror again. Half of her hair was curled in waves and the section that she’d blown dry hung sleek and smooth. “Oh, screw it.” She grabbed a hair tie and pulled her hair into a messy updo, securing it in place.

  “Hmmm…” Ruby pulled out some strands and curled them around her fingers, then sprayed everything in place until Paige was gagging on the fumes.

  “Sit.” Her friend pulled out a chair and she obediently plopped down, still smelling the burned hair now intermixed with the chemical scent of hairspray.

  “I smell like an old lady’s hair salon,” she complained, gagging.

  “Relax.” Ruby sat in the chair across from her and applied foundation, then powder. “Close your eyes.” She came at Paige with the eyeliner pencil. “Stop blinking. Seriously. I feel like I’m putting makeup on a five-year-old.”

  “I don’t like things touching my face,” she whined. It was one of her things.

  “Just stay still. Almost done,” her friend grumbled. A few more swooshes of eye shadow, a heavy coating of mascara, and she leaned back. “There. What do you think?”

  Paige stood, smoothing creases out of her pants, and glanced in the mirror. Whoa. She stared for a long time, then turned to Ruby. “I don’t know what I think.” She looked so different. “What do you think?”

  “Um. Well.” Ruby rolled those pretty green eyes up to the ceiling as if searching for the right wor
ds.

  Great. “What’s wrong?”

  She sighed and leaned onto the table, propping her chin on her fist, her eyes giving Paige another once-over. “You just…don’t look like you.”

  She glanced in the mirror again. Couldn’t argue with that. It definitely wasn’t her usual ensemble of hiking shorts and a moisture-wicking T-shirt, but that was the idea, right? She fluffed her updo. “You haven’t met this guy’s mom. She’s nuts. And she looks like Barbie’s grandma.” Perfect skin stretched over high cheekbones, soft and silky hair that she obviously colored. And who could forget the piercing gaze that made you feel like she could incinerate you. “She already hates me. I have some ground to make up.”

  Ruby handed her a tube of lip gloss. “You’ll win her over.”

  “Right.” She clomped to the mirror in Ruby’s two-inch heels and smeared the strawberry-scented goo on her lips. The shine actually hid the dryness pretty well. Smelled good, too. Maybe makeup wasn’t all bad.

  “Just be yourself, Paige,” Ruby offered.

  “Myself doesn’t seem to be cutting it.” Not for Bryce, not for Gracie Hunter Noble, not even for her own family.

  “Come on. You’re funny and smart. You don’t have to be the preppy girl next door. She’ll see through it anyway.”

  Not if she could help it. “Anyone can change.” Smacking her lips once more, she pocketed the gloss in case she needed it later. “I can turn over a new leaf. I’ll be polite and soft-spoken and no matter what, I won’t let that woman get to me again.” And if all else failed, she’d keep putting on that lip gloss. Maybe the sweet scent would make everyone believe she was sweet, too.

  “Oh, boy,” Ruby muttered. “Good luck.”

  Luck. Ha. She’d never relied on luck for anything. Determination, that was her way. She’d muscle through this meeting, wrestling back every natural urge she had to argue. She’d become the shining example of a customer service star.

  All while ignoring the way Ben Noble jarred her carefully constructed inner walls.

  Chapter Eight