by Stacy Gail
“Granny.” Winnie pushed through the screen door, looking bright and brilliant in a poppy red dress and her thick mane of golden-brown hair falling in tight corkscrew curls well past her shoulders. “That’ll do. I’ll be back in a couple hours, and then I’ll pack up the rest of Dad’s room. Don’t try to do it on your own.”
“Winnie—”
“I’ll see you in a couple hours.” With that, she marched right by him without so much as a glance, and he had to hustle to open the truck’s passenger door for her.
At least with a start like that, he thought grimly, things could only go up from there.
*
Anger swirled with hurt and grinding insecurity inside Winnie’s chest as they drove into the heart of Bitterthorn, a dusty, sunbaked town that was so small it hardly showed up on most maps. The town probably would have blown away entirely had it not been for San Antonio, no more than half an hour’s drive north, where at least half the town’s population commuted to work on a daily basis.
She’d thought of doing that herself—pounding on doors and pitching her clothes designs to anyone who might be interested in showcasing some local talent—but she’d never done it. Probably out of the fear that what her father had said might be true, and that she was a talentless waste who dreamed about impossible things just because she could sew a straight seam.
As much as she believed in her talent in fashion design, that belittling voice in her head had a way of drowning out that belief when she needed it most.
That same voice was in her head now as she sat beside Des. Out of the corner of her eye she watched him drive the heavy-duty Green Rock Ranch pickup the same way he did everything else—with a confident authority she marveled at. Which was probably weird, but she couldn’t help it. There was just something about a confident man that made her want to purr. It didn’t hurt that he was drop-dead gorgeous, but time and again it was that innate swagger that attracted her like a magnet to steal.
And there it was, she thought in a sigh. The reason she’d hopped into his truck even though Granny had told her what she already knew—Des Brody was only interested in Smiley Lake, not her. She was hopelessly attracted to him.
“You keep staring at me like you think I’m going to murder you. I’m not, if that helps.”
“Is that what I look like?” Good grief, how embarrassing. She needed to fix her awkward self pretty damn quick. “I was just thinking that my father must be rolling over in his grave right about now.”
“Because you agreed to go out with me?”
She nodded. “The Smileys aren’t exactly known for socializing with Brodys.”
“Is that why you decided to go out with me? To stick it to your old man?”
“Considering he’s now pushing up daisies, that’d be kind of stupid on my part, don’t you think?”
He shot her a glance. “So what made you decide to come along with me?”
“I don’t know.” She grimaced, not sure how to explain it. One second she’d been waffling about how to tell him thanks but no thanks, and the next she’d heard how harshly her grandmother was speaking to him. Before she knew what she was doing, she’d had her butt planted in the passenger seat while the sight of her grandmother dwindled in the rearview mirror. “I wasn’t even sure I was going to go until I found myself doing it. I was fully prepared to tell you to go jump in a lake.”
“I did that last night.”
“The thing is, I don’t think you should be let off the hook for trespassing on Smiley property,” she went on, trying to ignore the heat rising up her neck at the memory of how he’d whistled at the sight of her bare booty. Did that whistle mean he’d liked what he saw? No matter how often she told that feverish question to go away, it kept running through her head like a broken record, making her skin tingle in the most distracting way. “The least you can do to make up for invading my privacy is feed me while begging for my forgiveness.”
“Hell will be an ice rink before I beg for any damn thing,” he said with such surprising force it made her turn in her seat to face him. “Don’t you ever expect me to bow my fucking head.”
“I was joking, Des, at least about the begging for forgiveness part,” she said, wide-eyed. Mental note—never joke about making this man beg, unless she wanted another close-up view of what a raw nerve looked like. “Look, I know my granny sounded bitter just now, and I’m well aware my father was the human equivalent of a junkyard dog that never had a rabies shot, but that’s not me. None of that is me.”
“I hear you.” She watched his hands grip the steering wheel like he wanted to throttle something. “You keep talking about how bad your dad was.”
In a blink, her defenses slammed up. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“I’m just saying you’re not alone in having shitty parental-type people who were more rabid than not. That’s why I snapped just now. My brothers’ mother—Della Brody—had a game she liked to play with me when no one else was around. She used to call it Make Desmond Beg. So, just in case you were wondering, I’m seriously not a fan of that fucking game.”
Surprise melded with a dark and terrible understanding, and she searched his profile for the pain she knew all too well. “I’ll never say that word around you again, I promise.”
That earned her a sidelong glance. “You promise, huh?”
“Yes, I promise. No one should be made to beg, for anything. Especially when that person is family.”
“That woman wasn’t my family, and she made sure I was never made to feel like I belonged to hers. I just existed under the Brody roof.”
That made her heart ache in a way that made her put a hand to it. “But you are a Brody, the youngest of the famous Brody brothers. That’s how everyone sees you.”
“Not her. I was born a Faircloth. Desmond Faircloth, to be precise.” He said the name with a weird lack of emotion, the audible equivalent of a blank, gray nothingness. “For the first few years of my life I was the son of Jack and Delphine Faircloth, kid brother to Dallas. Then one night that reality blew up and I was no longer who I thought I was. Next thing I knew, I got my ass dumped on the doorstep of the Brody household without understanding how or why I’d come to be there.”
She couldn’t help but wince. “I can’t imagine how confusing that must’ve been. You were a baby.”
“A baby who didn’t understand how babies were made, so yeah. I had no idea why everyone was losing their shit around me. I had no fucking clue what I’d done wrong.”
The hurt in her heart turned to anguish for the boy he’d once been. “You didn’t do anything wrong, Des.”
“I existed. That was enough to turn the father I’d loved, Jack Faircloth, into a screaming maniac. The moment he found out I wasn’t his kid, that fucker didn’t waste a minute getting shut of me. I suppose I should be grateful he didn’t kill me outright like he wanted to.”
She gasped. “He didn’t actually say that?”
“He did. Gotta wonder what kind of lowlife you have to be to take your shit out on a little kid like that.”
“Evil.” She looked out the window so he wouldn’t see how the cruelty adults could inflict on children sickened her. “All it took for him to let that evil off the chain was the excuse of finding out your parentage.”
He made a sound that could have meant anything. “Don’t know if I believe in concepts like good and evil. All I know is that once I touch someone’s life, people usually wind up becoming their worst selves.”
“You didn’t make Jack Faircloth act like a maniac. If he were that cruel to a child he’d thought was his—an innocent child who loved him—he was already that way deep down. Trust me on this.”
“Why should I?” He slid her another glance, and in those peridot-light eyes there was a hungry kind of interest in her that had her pulse going all kinds of crazy. “What makes you an expert on evil parents?”
Nothing in the world could have stopped her scoff. “Did you ever meet Able Smil
ey?”
“Only enough to be cussed out by him.”
“There you go.”
“Everyone cusses out the Brody clan at some point. That’s the price you pay when you’re on top. Everyone hates you, even though they all want to be you. Your old man was no different.”
“You have no idea how different he was,” she muttered before she clamped her mouth shut. The less she talked about that monster, the better her mental equilibrium would be. “What about your biological mother? I only know what everyone in Bitterthorn knows. Delphine Faircloth left town soon after you became part of the Brody family.”
“You mean after she dumped my little-kid ass on the Brody doorstep and took off like the coward she was.” He offered a humorless curling of his mouth that was probably supposed to be a smile and slowed for a stop sign. “She thought that getting rid of me would save her marriage, if you can believe it. But a few weeks after she dumped me, she got what she deserved and got dumped herself.”
“Her husband left her?”
He nodded. “The only problem with that was that Dallas, my half-sister, got dumped by that bastard, too. Our mother offed herself a few months after that, and that left Dallas alone in the world. As much as it sucked being dropped on the Brody doorstep, at least I had Fin and Ry as my new brothers to support me. But Dallas… That poor girl had no one. In fact, she didn’t have anyone until she came back to Bitterthorn.”
“And now you have your sister back.” Then she tilted her head. “You said you had Fin and Ry as brothers. What about the oldest Brody brother? Did you forget about Killian?”
“No one could forget about Killian.” Again that blank monotone surfaced, along with an ominous flattening of his expression. “What matters is that he’s good to Dallas, and it’s obvious those two are crazy about each other. Her happiness is all I care about.”
She couldn’t help but wonder if that meant he didn’t care about Killian’s happiness. “So, you and Killian aren’t close?”
“Generally speaking, getting close to people isn’t my thing. What about your family? You don’t have any siblings?”
Deflection. It was a tactic she knew all too well. “It’s just me and my granny now.”
“What happened to your mother? I seem to recall she died a while back, yeah? Some kind of accident?”
Her insides tightened like a fist, and in her head the echoes of a horse’s screams mingled with her mother’s. “Accident. Right.”
“Wasn’t it? Hey,” he pressed when she simply shrugged and looked away. “I’ve been honest with you so you can see past all the Brody-Smiley mistrust shit. Now it’s your turn. Try a little honesty and see where it gets you.”
She swallowed hard. He asked for it. “When I was seventeen, she was trampled to death by a stallion my father was trying unsuccessfully to market as a stud. I guess no one thought to ask what she was doing in that vicious animal’s stall when it was known she was like me—terrified of large animals.”
There was a beat of silence. “So why was she in there?”
“My father bashed her in the head with a shovel, then dragged her out to the stables, locked her inside and left her in there overnight.”
Jesus,” he grated, for a moment looking violent himself.
“I couldn’t get to her. He’d locked me in my room, and I couldn’t get out to save her.” She took a slow breath and told herself it would not be cool to throw up all over his nice and shiny truck. “I never thought it was fair that he shot that horse when all was said and done. After all, the poor thing did exactly what he’d wanted it to do.”
“Damn, Winsome.” He sounded rattled, and she could sympathize. It had been five years, but the memory of that horrible night still turned her inside out. “He fucking murdered her. Why wasn’t that bastard ever arrested?”
“Because he told the police she’d gone in there on her own, and by then I was too much of a coward to contradict him. He said he’d do the same to my grandmother if I so much as squeaked, so I dishonored my mother’s memory with my silence.”
“Shut the fuck up, you did no such thing.” The words seemed to erupt from him, and when the truck jerked to a stop she swiveled her head back around to see they’d come to a halt at the side of the road. “Thinking about what you could’ve done or should’ve done… That’s just a self-torturing mind game designed to hurt only one person—you. Deep down you think you deserve that kind of punishment, but you’re wrong. The only fucker who deserves punishment is that shit stain, Able Smiley.”
“You don’t know me,” she said flatly. “And you sure as hell don’t know what I deserve.”
“I know what I’m talking about when it comes to self-punishment, because I used to play that shit game all the time. Same with my sister Dallas. I know that when life goes sideways, the easiest damn thing to do is blame yourself, but you don’t deserve that, Winsome. Instead, try to wrap your head around the concept that you didn’t do a fucking thing wrong. An innocent like you should never take on guilt that isn’t yours to carry.”
Guilt, she thought while her throat clenched. If he only knew. “Like I said, you don’t know me well enough to say I’m innocent. Or anything else, for that matter.”
“Yeah, that may be.” With a glance over his shoulder, he set the truck back in motion, though she could feel it whenever he glanced at her. “But in case you haven’t noticed, I’m doing my damnedest to change that. And you know what? I just decided I’m not going to be satisfied until I know your every last secret.”
Chapter Four
Winnie smoothed her skirt as she sat across from Des, trying not to think how generations of Smileys were probably screaming at her from beyond the grave. But breaking bread with a Brody was the right thing to do. Wars would never end if brave souls didn’t take that first step in letting bygones be bygones. After all, the Hatfields and the McCoys weren’t still feuding.
Or so she hoped.
And it wasn’t like this was an actual date, she reminded herself firmly. If Des Brody had asked her to dinner, then her ancestors might be right in having a collective afterlife freak-out. But this was lunch. Boring, ordinary lunch. According to a recent article in Cosmo, when a man asked a woman to lunch it was because that woman fell into the same category as his maiden Aunt Gertrude. For a man, lunch was nothing.
Literally nothing.
With her mood taking a majestic swan dive into the doldrums, Winnie perused the menu while trying not to squirm at how their fellow diners kept glancing toward their table. Or, more specifically, toward Des, who was as close to a rock star that Bitterthorn would ever have. Sadly, since she was his lunch date, she was getting almost as much attention. That was new. She was used to being virtually invisible, that behind-the-scenes marvel with a needle and thread in Cleone’s backroom who designed the latest fashions. Now, with all eyes on her, it was all she could do to stop herself from crawling under the table.
Maybe they’d all read that same Cosmo article and knew this wasn’t a date. Maybe they were all pitying her.
Mission of peace, she reminded herself while her hands grew slick on the menu. That was all this was, so people could stare all they wanted. What mattered was taking that first step in forging peace between the Brodys and the Smileys. That wasn’t a date.
If only the thudding of her heart would remember that.
“I’ve never been to this place.” Trying to pull off a nonchalant vibe, Winnie looked around the dining area overflowing with Spanish-Colonial influences, from the heavy dark wood furniture and accents, adobe half walls, Southwestern art, and tastefully placed cacti arrangements. If Zorro had swung through at that moment, she wouldn’t have batted an eye. “What do you recommend?”
“Depends. Do you like it hot?”
For no reason at all, a nerve-tingling wave of heat rolled over her to settle deep in her belly. “Yes.”
“Then you’re in the right place.” Then, much to her shock, Des rose from his chair only to move it cl
ose to hers, as if they were all alone instead of surrounded by a dozen or more diners. “That’s better,” he said, settling himself back down in his seat, now only an inch or two away from her. As she watched in disbelief, he set his own menu aside to instead grab one side of hers, clearly intent of sharing. “My favorite’s the chimichanga plate with the chipotle sauce, but the chile rellenos here also kick ass. And of course you can never go wrong with their fajitas. You’re not one of those Quaker vegetarians, are you?”
“I… Sorry?” She tried sounding cool and calm, but when he managed to suck up all the oxygen in the room the closer he got, cool and calm was simply beyond her. Any second now, she was going to full-on swoon, and it was all his oxygen-sucking fault.
“I read up on Quakers last night,” he said, blowing her mind all the more. “Come to find out, vegetarianism and veganism can be construed as a part of the Quakers’ Peace Testimony.”
“Really?” She tried not to gape at him, but it was hard. Not just because his shoulder kept brushing hers, but for the life of her, she couldn’t figure out why he would research Quakerism other than an interest in her. Which was crazy. “If that’s true, then you officially know more about Quakerism than I do.”
“Aren’t you a Quaker?”
“I’m not anything when it comes to religion. My father was disowned—that’s the Quaker version of being excommunicated—when he was a teenager.”
“Why? What’d he do?”
Was his shoulder getting as hot as hers was? Any second now smoke would start curling up from wherever they touched. “It’s more a matter of what he didn’t do, according to my grandmother. Aside from drinking, bullying countless kids at school, and that one time he stole a car and ran it into the town square’s bandstand, the straw that broke the camel’s back was when he went to the house of a kid he didn’t like, broke into their backyard and set a henhouse on fire. He actually went to Juvenile Hall in San Antonio for that stunt and was held there until he was eighteen.”
“Damn,” he said, his gaze trained on her face as if looking for the secrets of life. “From what I read last night, that’s definitely not Quaker.”
