by Anne Marsh
I cut Mitch off when he starts listing the outstanding debts the estate needs to settle before we can claim free title to the place. There’s always a chance that Rose is reasonable and sells out without a fight, but those tears suck. Home. House. Obstacle standing in the way of my new well.
Yeah. Making those three labels work together will take a miracle.
Before Rose can break out into audible sobs or fire off the million questions she’s clearly itching to ask, I lean down and make my offer. Money makes everything easier, and I don’t mind paying. “You don’t want the place, Rose. It’ll just be a giant headache for you. Tell me what you want for it, and I’ll write you a check and buy you out.”
She twists her head and meets my gaze. Shit. Naturally, she’s gonna take the hard way. If she had the choice of driving a herd of cattle to market over a nice, easy plain or taking them through a snow-choked mountain pass, she’d be climbing the slope already.
“Don’t tell me what I want. You have no business even being here today.” She points to her suitcase. “I’ve brought my papers and my business plan. I’m ready to move in and get started today.”
Business plan? I decide to ignore that for the moment.
“On the contrary, darling.” I can’t keep the satisfaction out of my smile. “I’m just as necessary here as you are. I’m your new partner.”
She crosses her arms over her breasts, which she wouldn’t do if she knew what it did to the top of her sundress. Her breasts are pretty little mounds peeking over the band of ribbon, and part of me insists I trace that naughty line, first with my fingers and then with my mouth. I almost don’t care that Mitch is staring at us, his head whipping back and forth like he’s at a goddamned tennis match. This has to be the most excitement his office has seen in years.
She makes a give-it-up gesture at me. “I’m waiting for an explanation.”
Rose has never been patient. I wonder if she rushes toward orgasm with the same pell-mell enthusiasm.
“I own half. You own half.”
“Half makes us even,” she snaps.
“Maybe I’m the better half,” I growl right back, because fact number one? “I’m the executor, darling, and it’s up to me to settle Auntie Dee’s estate.”
“So you’re in charge. As always.” Her expression turns mutinous as she faces off with me.
Yeah, my Rose is gonna be trouble.
Just like always.
ROSE
Angel thinks he’s in charge, but he’s wrong. No cowboy gets to run my show. He doesn’t get to take away my home or my chance at a tattoo parlor of my own.
I may not have the money for renovations, property taxes, or even the damn electric hookup, but being back in Lonesome puts me one step closer to realizing my dream. I’m going to belong here, even if it kills me.
So no way I sell out to Angel.
Of course, words are easy—the bigger-than-life problem is slouched against the wall behind my chair, his jeans-covered thighs brushing me in too many places. I hate that I tingle where our bodies meet. He doesn’t say another word after I reject his latest offer, though. Instead, he settles back against the wall, watching. That’s Angel for you. Slow. Thorough. Immovable. He’s a fucking wall and a roadblock. Somehow, I need to get through him. Around him.
Under him, a traitorous voice in my head (or maybe it’s my pussy) suggests.
Would he be that intense in bed?
His need to dominate is a major turn-on, but I shouldn’t let it be. When I have sex, I’m in charge. That’s how it has to be. Angel’s will is like fucking steel and there’s every chance he cages me with it.
Oblivious to my inner horniness, Angel holds out a hand, and the lawyer forks over the will. It must be nice to command respect like that, but Angel doesn’t even seem to notice the lawyer’s insta-obedience. Ten minutes later, we’re still waiting while Angel silently reviews the will’s contents. I itch to get going. I hate sitting still, and I need to see the inside of Auntie Dee’s house again.
My place.
Of half of it at any rate. I don’t know why she set things up this way, but she didn’t owe me anything and she’s not wrong about my loving the place. It’s my home.
I make a second attempt at taking charge. “Look,” I say. Calmly. Reasonably. As if there’s no reason at all why Angel shouldn’t agree with me and make both our lives easier. “I just want to go over to my house. Take a look around.”
“Half a house,” he growls. “You want the first floor or the second?”
I’m sure Angel has read the will before, so there’s no obvious reason for him to reread the document right now. Probably, he’s simply enjoying making me wait. After all, I made him wait—and Angel’s big on balancing the scales. I kind of shiver thinking about that. He’s always specialized in swift-and equal-retaliation. Maybe it’s all those years as a SEAL.
“All you have to do is give me the key to the house,” I press. “And I’ll be on my way.”
The lawyer looks at Angel, and I suck in a breath, reminding myself I’m not sixteen any more. “The key?” I prompt.
Angel finally looks up. You’d think that will was the National Enquirer and the Gettysburg Address rolled into one. It can’t possibly be that interesting. “She wants the key, Mitch. Give it to her.”
Pulling open a drawer, the lawyer rummages around as if he’s glad to be busy. When he finally slides a little manila envelope across the desk to me, I tear the sealed flap open impatiently, dumping the familiar key chain into my palm. The key is attached to the little pink rabbit’s foot I bought Auntie Dee one year. The fur has worn away on one side, where Auntie Dee rubbed it religiously before she got onto the bus that took her on senior trips to the local Indian casino. The fur tip is also permanently matted from a run-in with a diet soda, and that’s just one of many injuries. The little pink token somehow became a road map of precious moments of Auntie Dee’s life. Wrapping my fingers around the rabbit’s foot, I fight back tears.
All I have left of Auntie Dee is this worn-out rabbit’s foot, too many regrets, and a house. I’ve lost my one true family, I realize in a rush. My mother’s out there somewhere, working on stepdad six or seven (I lost count after the fourth guy), but to say we’re not close is an understatement. I hadn’t fully acknowledged just how strong the connection was between me and Auntie Dee until it was too late. Now Auntie Dee is gone, too.
Mitch follows up the key with a little plastic-wrapped package of tissues, as if sufficient Kleenex can fix the enormous, insurmountable problem of Auntie Dee’s death.
“I miss her,” I say out loud.
Angel sets the stack of papers back on the desk. “We all do. Auntie Dee was a good woman.”
Bending over the desk, he signs his name on the last page of the will and then slides the stack of legal documents toward me. Points to the empty blank where my name goes and hands me a pen.
“She was proud of you,” he says quietly. “Real proud. She talked all the time about how you were learning to be a tattoo artist in San Francisco. She didn’t get the chance to go to school herself, so it meant the world to her that you went. When you were on TV for that reality show, she made the entire town watch.”
Great. Everyone watched me lose. Worse, while Auntie Dee stayed, I went. Almost clear to the other end of the state. As far away from this man as I could get because he was just the last in a long line of little failures on my part. Lost in the memories, I almost miss his next words.
“We’ll get an appraisal,” he tells me, because God forbid he actually ask me to do anything. “Find out what the house is worth, and I’ll write you a check.”
Like hell he will. “I’m going to live in my house.”
“We’ll talk about it,” he says, and his tone warns me that he thinks there’s no negotiating room.
I let him grab my suitcase and steer me outside and toward his truck. Just like that, he’s taking over my life. Deciding what’s best for me. I’m hyperaware of
his large, warm body beside me. And that’s the problem, isn’t it? Angel is just doing the right thing, looking out for me. Being protective. Words of interest aside, when he looks at me, he doesn’t see Rose Jordan. Instead, he sees a problem needing fixing—and I’m done with being an item on his to-do list.
“We’ll get the place appraised right away, and I’ll write you a check,” he repeats, and a slow burn starts in the pit of my stomach. I stand on my own two feet now. I look down at my new sandals. Even if my feet are killing me.
“No.” One word, but it covers everything.
Angel pushes his Stetson back on his head and looks me over. “You sure about that answer? Because I’m willing and able to write a check, Rose.”
I don’t want a check—I want a house. A place to open my tattoo shop and ink to my heart’s content. A home, said heart whispers because it’s a dumbass, and another chance to get things right.
“I want to see my house, Angel.”
“Fine.” He shakes his head, as if my agreeing to his terms is just a matter of time. “You want to see the place, I’ll take you there.”
“I have a car,” I point out, but he just shakes his head again and opens the passenger door of his pickup. Since this is one battle I’m not winning, I get in. Carefully closing the door behind me, Angel goes around the pickup and slides into the driver’s seat. It’s going to be a really silent ride out to Auntie Dee’s. Angel never does chitchat, but now he appears to have given up on talking altogether. His hands on the wheel shout “capable and fully in control.” He knows where he’s going and why, just like he always has.
After a few minutes, I break the silence. “We could have taken my car.” Now I’m just needling him. Angel doesn’t like others to drive him. Sure enough, he shoots me one of those looks and jams his Stetson down on his head.
It doesn’t matter.
He isn’t getting his way this time.
“You took your sweet time coming back to Lonesome,” he says eventually. He doesn’t take his eyes off the road, doesn’t drive faster than is safe, but riding with him feels like the most dangerous thing I’ve ever done. He’ll never be tame or polite—but he’ll be right.
Damn him.
“I… had things to do.” The excuse sounds weak even to my own ears.
“What kind of things did you have to do, Rose, that were more important than coming up here and settling the estate of the woman who all but raised you?”
I don’t like the guilt or panic that shoots through me, an itchy, sickening coil of unwelcome emotions. I can’t explain why I hadn’t come, why I hadn’t been ready. Why I couldn’t face the empty house, Angel, or any of the pieces of the life I had in Lonesome. Explaining that would mean explaining all the broken pieces of me, and most days I just want to forget.
Plus, if I’d started any one of those tasks, I’d have been that much closer to failing. To not getting it right. So I’d waited. And then waited some more, until I’d failed anyhow and could stop worrying.
Second chance, I remind myself.
“Maybe I just wasn’t ready until now,” I suggest, as if I hadn’t had lists of tasks to check off and a timeline for doing so. As if I hadn’t frozen in panic and done nothing. Sweet procrastinator, I can almost hear Auntie Dee whisper. Someday, you’ll figure it out, get yourself started.
I inked a little pink and purple poppy on the inside of my wrist for her. She loved the bright orange California poppies that peppered Lonesome in the spring, but she’d always wanted to try the exotic kind from the seed catalog.
Angel doesn’t turn, but his big body screams frustration. He isn’t buying the line I’m selling. He’s always has been good at recognizing bullshit.
“Not ready.” His voice is too quiet. “Well, that’s a hell of a thing, Rose, when you’ve been asked repeatedly to come on up here, and you’ve never said why you couldn’t. What did you think was going to happen? We’ve all been cooling our heels waiting for you.”
I stare straight ahead. His voice holds the quiet disappointment, the disapproval I expect. I’ve never pleased him, have I?
“I should have explained.” Like always, he’s right. I should have. Of course I should have—and, instead, I’ve procrastinated. Waited, like always, until the last possible moment. I tried college and dropped out. I became a tattoo artist in San Francisco, and then I lost the reality TV show that was supposed to make me my seed money for a shop of my own. I failed to come back for Auntie Dee in time.
Failure, failure, failure. I should make that my next tattoo.
When I don’t explain now, he waits me out, letting the silence stretch between us.
“But I wasn’t ready, okay?” I won’t cry. Instead, I blink furiously, wanting to curse him but bobbing in place instead.
“Hell, Rose.” He tightens his grip on the wheel. “We would have been happy to wait for you to be ‘ready’—you know that. But, darling, you have to either show up or call.”
“You just want to tear down the house and use the land,” I accuse.
“I do.”
He doesn’t bother sugarcoating his intentions, just hits me low and hard with the truth. A truth that isn’t going to become reality if I have my way.
“What if I don’t want to sell it?”
“What else are you going to do with that piece of property? You’re obviously not the settling-down type, Rose, and it takes cash to run a place like that. A steady income.”
I’m working on that, although he doesn’t know it. He’ll find out soon, though, because Angel owns most of Lonesome. Auntie Dee’s is the only place I can open a tattoo shop because Angel owns everything else, and I can’t afford the rent anyhow.
“You don’t think I could do it? What if I want to fix the place up, make a home for myself here?” My heart beats a little faster at my own audacity.
Angel sighs roughly. “Some dreams don’t come true.”
I hate that, like always, he’s right even if he has no way of knowing that I’d been hoping to make a success of myself, then come home to care for Auntie Dee and carve out a better life for both of us in Lonesome.
I just expected to do so before I lost Auntie Dee.
When we pull up ten minutes later, Auntie Dee’s house seems unchanged, heat-soaked and dusty and horribly, deeply familiar. It’s almost possible to pretend I never left, that the last few years haven’t slipped by. Despite the miles I put between myself and Lonesome, I’ve thought about the older woman every day. I needed to stretch my wings and figure out who I really was, and Auntie Dee had understood.
Now I need to come back home.
I wrestle the truck’s door open and hop down from the pickup before Angel can even kill the motor. Whatever doubts he has—and I’m sure he has plenty—he’s keeping them to himself for the moment. Knowing Angel, of course, he’s probably just waiting for me to figure out the truth for myself.
The house redefines fixer-upper.
As I cross the yard, I wave to the contractor I asked earlier to come by to check out the work that needs to be done immediately. Angel took so long reading the will that the other man is almost finished with his external inspection.
The sun’s heat beats down on my bare shoulders, a sensual weight that renders it almost shocking to step onto the porch and into the cooler shadows. Angel follows me inside the house as if he owns the place, the floorboards squeaking noisily with each step he takes, but I can’t bring myself to care. He owns half of my house, but I’m busy wondering if he was always this sexy. He seems even bigger, harder, than I remember.
He’s seen me naked.
The wave of mildew and must that hits me when Angel finally shoulders open the kitchen door—naturally, it sticks—isn’t a good sign. Angel flips light switches. Nada. Of course. No electricity. When I run the tap, however, I score the one win of the day. Water gushes out of the rusty fixture, clear and cool. It tastes good, too.
Angel watches me drink. “You’ve got a good well here,�
�� he says.
Mentally, I arrange the house, placing the furniture I left in storage in repainted, cleaned-up rooms. Angel, on the other hand, focuses on support beams and wiring and whether or not the place is up to code. He’s looking at what Auntie Dee’s is, while I’m already seeing the future.
Still, as the inspector takes me point by point through a damning litany of critical repairs, Angel is a silent, solid presence. He doesn’t add anything to the never-ending commentary of things gone wrong or rotten. Hell, he doesn’t have to say anything. He’s right, just like he always is. The house isn’t livable and might not even be salvageable.
Okay. So it needs work. I’m not afraid of putting in sweat and time—I’ve got those in abundance. It’s possible I’ll still be hammering and sawing when I’m ninety, but I’ll be working on my place.
When the contractor finally shuts the lid of his laptop, he looks as if he just finished a marathon. I’m not sure why he expects sympathy—he’s the one getting paid for his pain, after all.
“I’ll e-mail you the final report,” he says, pocketing the check I hand him. He shakes my hand and then grasps the hand Angel extends.
“Great. Thanks.” I guess it’s good that he’s thorough, but I’m feeling more than a little flattened at the moment. There’s no way my less-than-flush checking account can handle repairs of this scope. Even caution tape or a box of matches might be beyond the scope of my finances.
“You be careful in here,” he says, clearing his throat. “This house needs work.”
“I can handle it.” I do my best to project a confidence I don’t quite feel. Yet. Surely mastering the fine art of home repair should be possible.
