Can't Hurry Love (2 page)

“Today?” she asked and he nodded, leaning past her. The smell of him—sunshine and sweat, horse and dirt—eddied around her, making her dizzy with a terrible hunger.

In the early days of their courtship, Joel had called her femininity delicate. And he’d loved that; said her weakness had made him feel strong. Like a protector. So, like any good idiot, she’d cultivated it. Until she was treated like glass, which was fine in public, but boring in private.

Their sex life had been respectful, she told herself.

And if smelling Eli Turnbull made her feel as if she’d been missing out on something in all those years of quiet and plain missionary position, well, then, add it to the pile of disappointments.

She watched his muscles flex and bulge under his brown-and-white plaid shirt as he lifted a shovel that had been tucked into the corner of the stall.

Over the last few years of her marriage, all she had seen Joel lift was his martini glass and the occasional disapproving eyebrow.

“The herd is mine to do with as I will. Said so in the will. I just have to split any proceeds from the sale with Luc.”

“How … how many are you selling?” Not that she knew how many there were, but she had to try.

“All of them.”

“My father has only been dead for three months and you’re selling off his pride and joy?”

“Yep.”

“That’s …” She stopped. Her laughter was a surprise, like finding something she’d lost so long ago she’d forgotten all about it. Lyle Baker had been a terrible father, a wholehearted son of a bitch, and throwing stones at his bastard daughter had been his favorite pastime. Selling his pride and joy seemed like a marvelous idea. “Awesome.”

Eli’s green eyes slid over her, over her face and eyes, the two thin collarbones revealed by the ruffled shell she wore, her breasts, small hills against the silk, and then away.

Light-headed, she had to put a hand on the stall door for balance.

“I’d like to go with you.” It seemed like the rancherly thing to do.

“You want to learn how to be a rancher; you can start at the beginning.”

“Great.” Joy surged through her and she fought the urge to clap her hands with excitement. “I’ll come—”

“You’ll stay,” he said, handing her the shovel. “And muck stalls. Like any good greenhorn.”

“No.” She pushed the shovel back at him.

“You want my help?”

The shovel dangled between them.

“This is a test?” she asked.

He shrugged, his smile gleaming with ugly victory.

She yanked the shovel out of his hand. “You have nothing to teach me about embarrassment, Eli. You think you’re punishing me. You think you’re teaching me a lesson about something, but trust me, you smug bastard, there’s nothing I don’t know about degradation. I’ll muck your stalls. I’ll do whatever you think I need to do—”

“That’s right.”

She leaned in close, her anger a bright flame in her chest, lighting her up in a way she’d never experienced before. As if a pilot light had exploded in her furnace.

“But I’m still your boss.”

For a beautiful moment Eli was blank-faced and silent, and she knew she should regret angering the one person she needed as an ally, but it was just too delicious.

She smiled as the skin beneath the scruff on his cheeks got red. He swung himself up onto his horse in one smooth, effortless motion.

Her body turned to pudding. Did he have to be so … big? Masculine? It made her feel … small. And to her great shame, damp.

“I want every stall in this barn cleaned up by the time I get back.”

And then he was gone.

She stood there, in her inappropriate shoes, holding a shovel that smelled like poop, and smoldered.

He might have won this battle, but he didn’t know who he was up against. After years of lying down, of capitulating, of surrendering before she even realized she had something she wanted to fight for, she was filled with an unholy hostility.

There was a war’s worth of lost fights inside of her. And if Eli was going to stand in the way of what she wanted … well, she smiled, he’d better brace himself.

She was a woman who was just beginning to realize how scorned she truly was.

chapter

2

“Hey, Mom.” Jacob
, Victoria’s seven-year-old boy, stepped into the quiet barn two hours later. “Where are you?”

“In here. The last stall.”

Using her wrist, she pushed back the lock of hair that was flopping into her eyes, and smiled as he walked through the great blocks of sunlight that streamed down onto the dirt floor from the high windows. The horses in this corner of the barn all lifted their heads, shaking back their manes, as if they knew him. And they probably did.

Jacob snuck in here every chance he got. Despite his allergies, his asthma, and her explicit precautions.

Eli’s horse’s stall, the last of the ten, was almost done. Victoria’s hands were sore, red, and blistered and the smell of horse poop wasn’t going to leave her nose anytime soon, but she’d cleaned out all of the stalls.

Tony, one of the hands not involved with the auction in the north pasture, had shown her where the pile for the dirty straw was. He’d helped her kick fresh hay down from the loft and had managed not to laugh at her surprise that haylofts really exist. He’d even found her a pair of boots—stinky black rain boots that were cracked and faded and made her feet sweat as if she were in the jungle. But they were better than her Chanel ballet flats.

In the end, as she’d expected, he’d offered to help,
watching her with about as much skepticism as one man could muster. And maybe it was because of that skepticism that she told him she was fine.

And she was. The shoveling was harder work than she’d done in forever, but holy hell, it felt good.

It felt good to do something after years of pacing. Of worrying. Of doing nothing but wringing her hands.

“What are you doing?” Jacob asked, coming to stand in the open door of the stall. He was wearing his favorite Spider-Man shirt for what was probably the fifth day in a row, judging by the spots on the front. And his socks had given up the fight of clinging to his thin legs and were slouching around his ankles. Sort of like everything in Texas during August, they had just wilted.

“Mucking stalls.”

“Mucking?”

“Getting rid of the horse poop.”

“Mom,” he said as if it were his job to let her know what a mistake she was making. “That’s so gross.”

“Tell me about it. Did you bring the stuff?”

He lifted a plastic bag, and she knew in her heart of hearts that this little revenge plot was silly.

She should rise above it, but she was so damn tired of rising above everything. Her husband’s betrayal, the public scorn. Eli’s very private scorn.

She was going to wallow in some base and silly behavior. And wouldn’t you know it, wallowing felt good, too.

“I think you’re supposed to wear gloves, Mom.” He pointed at her red hands.

“They didn’t go with my skirt.” Her joke fell flat and he just stared at her. He wasn’t used to a mother who joked. It made her heart hurt, thinking of how cold she’d been, how paralyzed by fear, for so much of his life.

She touched the curl over his ear. His hair was longer than she’d ever let it grow before, almost down to his
shoulders. He looked bohemian, as if he’d never spent a minute in her company, and she kind of liked it.

What she didn’t like was the downward curve to his lips, the slump in his shoulders.

“Jacob? You okay?”

“I was just … I was just wondering when we were going back home.”

“Home?”

“New York City.”

She felt her jaw drop, her eyes open wide. How in the world had she not explained this properly?

“Honey.” She rested the shovel against the wall and crouched down in front of him as best she could in the knee-high rubber boots. “You’re starting school here next month.”

“I thought that was just until you got Grandpa’s will all figured out.”

“It’s figured out, Jacob. We don’t have a home in New York anymore.”

“What about Toronto with Uncle Luc?”

“We were just staying with him. That’s not our home either.”

She blinked and took a big gulp of air, wondering what kind of protest Jacob was going to throw her way. And wondering how she was going to muster up the energy to put it to rest.

“You mean we live here? At the ranch?”

She nodded and slowly, to her great relief and delight, he started to smile.

She laughed. “I guess that’s okay with you?”

“Totally okay. It’s awesome! But what are you going to do?”

For good or bad, the Crooked Creek Ranch was hers now. Well, sort of. Her brother had been given the ranch in their father’s will three months ago. But he had no interest in this land.

And Luc had suggested that she run the ranch for him until it was out of escrow, at which point she intended to buy it.

Not that she knew a single thing about ranching. But she wanted to learn. Needed to. Because she’d utterly failed at everything else in her life, and this place seemed like her last chance to make a home and a future for her son.

But the only way that was going to happen was through Eli Turnbull. And it was pretty safe to say that Eli Turnbull hated her.

He’d made his intentions to buy the ranch very clear and now she was standing in his way, which was a very uncomfortable place to be.

But she wasn’t giving up. She’d done enough of that in her life.

“I am going to run the ranch.”

“Isn’t that Eli’s job?”

“Eli is the foreman.” Like his father and grandfather before him. Eli had roots in this land that were twisted and tied up with her own. “But the ranch belonged to my dad and now it belongs to Uncle Luc, and I’m going to run it for him until you and I can buy it next year.”

“Wow.” She tried not to preen as he looked at her as if he’d just noticed her superhero cape.

That right there, the pride and wonder in her son’s eyes, was worth all of Eli’s disdain. She’d muck a hundred stalls if that was what it took to have her son look at her like that.

“But … what about our friends?” Jacob asked, and just like that the pride, the cape, the wonder—it all vanished.

“What about them?”
They’re not our friends
, she wanted to say.
Not anymore. Not after what your father did. Not after how they treated us
.

“We’re not going to see them again?”

“We’ll make new friends.”

Her son’s shoulders curved forward again and she waited for his next question, but he was silent.

Unused to his silence, she cocked her head to see his face.

“Jacob?”

“Do you miss Dad?”

It took a long time for her to get her breath back.

Jacob didn’t talk much about Joel, and the grief book she had on her bedside table said that was okay. But Victoria hadn’t gotten to the chapter about what to say when the kid started to talk.

“Do you miss him?” she asked, because that seemed like a self-help-book kind of thing to do.

Jacob tilted his head and his eyes, so big and dark, the best thing he’d gotten from his father, looked far too old.

“Not really.” She blinked with surprise. “Is that bad?”

Ahhhh … maybe? Honestly, she should have finished that damn book by now.

“He just … he worked all the time.”

She nodded, stroking Spider-Man on his sleeve. “I know.”

“Did he love me?”

“Of course,” she gasped. Not that she had any proof she could hand him, anything she could point to and say “See, that’s what a father does when he loves his son.” But she couldn’t let her baby believe otherwise.

“Then why—?”

“Daddy got into a lot of trouble with people,” she said quickly, hating the thought that her son would attach anything Joel did to his own small shoulders. That he would feel any responsibility for his father’s sins made her ill.

Crouching down in the dirt and hay, she cupped his cheeks, ran her thumbs over the tender rosy skin.

“Because of the Potzie thing?” he asked.

“Ponzi,” she corrected, stroking back his hair, her heart cracking right down the middle even as she smiled. She’d tried once to explain a Ponzi scheme, but Jacob just didn’t understand. Truth be told, she didn’t either. She didn’t understand why Joel had started it, how he’d kept it going knowing he was stealing from people, and why he hadn’t just gotten out when things had started to fall apart. “He tricked a lot of people and he was scared and embarrassed.”

“Because he lied?”

“Yes. He owed a lot of people a lot of money.”

“That’s why he killed himself?”

Bile and grief kicked up stones in her stomach, sending lumps into her throat. For a moment she saw the blood splattered against the den’s plum silk wallpaper, and the smell, hot and coppery, flooded her nose.

The gunshot had woken her up that night. And she’d raced through the penthouse, past Jacob’s room, right to the closed door of the den.

She’d made a lot of mistakes in her life, but opening that door had been one of the worst.

Jacob’s hands twitched in hers and she grabbed onto his fingers, probably squeezing too hard. She usually did. But he was all she had to hold on to, the only thing she knew she’d done right.

This boy was Joel’s gift to her, and because of that she had to make peace with what he’d done. The anger and fear of being widowed in such a violent way, of being hounded by the press, of being yanked by her hair out of the ivory tower she’d lived in, was nothing compared to her wonder in this boy.

She had to remember that. Every day she had to balance the scales in her head. When he’d been sick in the hospital nearly a year ago, it had been easy to keep the balance. But now that he was better, now that life had moved on, everything was harder.

“Did he love you?” The question put a hook in her stomach and yanked, and for a moment she couldn’t breathe for the pain. This was how Eli had wanted to make her feel with his cruel comments, but he had no idea how hard he would have to work to succeed.

“Yes.” She lied. Right to his face, she lied.