Beauty and the Brit (8 page)

Gravel crunched in the driveway again, and Rio looked up half-expecting to see the chief returning. Instead, a green Ford Focus with a slightly scuffed door pulled toward them, bass thumping from its radio. The driver stopped, rolled down his window, and turned down a blaring rock song.

“’Lo, Dawson. Thanks for the noise abatement.” David grinned at the good-looking young man who stuck his elbow and head out of the window.

“No prob. Just dropping her off.”

David bent his knees and peered into the car. “Hey, Kim. Lesson today?”

“Yup.” A cheery voice carried to them from the passenger seat. “A show and a Pony Club certification in the next month. Thanks for letting Jackson stay here while we work on everything.”

Rio had no idea what the conversation meant, but she recognized the awe on her sister’s face as she fixated on the young driver. He looked vaguely familiar, with bright brown, David-colored eyes and wide handsome cheekbones nearly sculpted into adult handsomeness. Dark sable hair cascaded in gentle waves to his shoulders. He gave Bonnie a careless, friendly wave. Rio gave her a tap on the ankle with her toe. “Stop staring,” she whispered.

Bonnie grinned for the first time in fifteen minutes.

“Kim, hang on,” David said, as if he’d just had a brilliant idea. “Jill’s not here yet. Have you got a moment? There’s someone I’d like you to meet.”

“Sure.”

The passenger door opened, and a blond head appeared on the other side of the car. The girl looked to be about Bonnie’s age, but she was the bright, sweet-and-lovely, pretty counterpart to Bonnie’s dark, sultry beauty.

“Do you still need me?” the kid named Dawson asked.

“Nope.” Kim tapped on the car top. “Get out of here. Thanks for the ride. And I get the car tomorrow.”

“Yeah, whatever.”

Dawson waved again, the Focus exited in the tracks of the police car, and Bonnie, her cheeks pink, wordlessly watched it go. Bonnie’s discovery that batting her long lashes had a powerful effect on males was what had gotten her into trouble with Hector. Rio would have loved cloistering her somewhere far from the opposite sex, but since that was impossible, at least Focus-driving Dawson looked a whole lot safer than Hector or the Boyfriend.

“Bonnie, I’d like to introduce you to Kim Stadtler.” David’s proper manners were back. “Kim, this is Bonnie Montoya.”

“Hey, Bonnie! Welcome to Bridge Creek.”

“And this is her sister, Rio. They’ll be guests for a couple of weeks. Visiting from the city.”

“Rio. That’s awesome,” Kim said. “I’ve always wanted a prettier name.”

“Short for Arionna.” Rio smiled, unable to resist the girl’s unpretentiousness. “And I’ll trade you. Kim is pretty in my opinion. Rio’s just weird.”

“Done! Nice to meet you, Kim,” said Kim.

“I’m going to change for a trip to town,” David said. “Could you take Bonnie and Rio on a little tour of the barn? Introduce them to Jackson.” He looked at them. “If you don’t mind waiting to unpack.”

“Sure,” said Kim.

“Sure,” echoed Bonnie.

Unlike with crazy Chief Tanned Hewett or whatever his name was, Rio felt welcomed by Kim. And she didn’t have to make a word of conversation as Kim and Bonnie fell into an easy chatter about their ages, horses, and the “awesome place” that was Bridge Creek.

“Awesome” barely described the stable’s facilities. Kim led them through a twenty-four-stall barn with polished wooden stall doors, a neatly swept cement aisle, and fancy name plaques on each stall. Behind the barn, Kim pointed out two indoor arenas, one small and one much larger, and to the fields beyond the pastures filled with odd-shaped obstacles she called the cross-country course.

They followed Kim along a lane between several paddocks and slipped through one of three gates along the lane where she introduced them to a beautiful, light-brown horse with dark-black legs and a white stripe down its face. Rio swallowed back her first twinge of envy.

“This is Jackson,” Kim said.

Fifteen minutes passed while Bonnie willingly let Kim instruct her in all things barn- and horse-related. She set her to work on Jackson’s dusty sides with a stiff-bristled brush, and Rio stood by reaching now and then for Jackson’s muzzle, letting him nibble at her T-shirt, forgetting about the life she’d run from for a few magical moments. She tasted, fleetingly but in person, the life she’d fantasized about for twenty years.

“Omygosh! Isn’t this just the kind of barn we’re going to have?” Bonnie burst the fantasy.

For one instant Rio wanted to shake her sister. Couldn’t she figure out how dead that dream was now? But she caught herself. There was no point in rubbing Bonnie’s nose in reality at this point. It would all hit the fan soon enough.

“We’re moving out West to our own ranch when I’m done with school,” Bonnie continued, in a shortened version of the story she’d told David just days before. “Rio’s been planning it since
she
was in high school.”

At the prompt, Rio remembered the name of the town: Bear Falls, Wyoming. They’d stopped there for lunch on one day of the Boys and Girls Club trip she’d won in a raffle back in tenth grade. She’d seen some of her country’s most iconic sights: Mount Rushmore, and the Crazy Horse monument, and Wall Drug before reaching Devils Tower with the group. But it had been the ad in the window of a little real estate office next to the Ma and Pa café in Bear Falls—population two hundred and twenty-seven—that had captured her imagination.

Two hundred acres, house and barn, with outbuildings. Needs some repair. Wooded and secluded. Suitable for horses or cattle.

“That’s so strange.” Kim’s cheerful voice brought Rio back to the present. “Ever since my mom got remarried a year and a half ago, my stepdad has offered to let us move to a bigger farm, but Mom refuses. So they’re just fixing up our old place. It’s kind of cool, everything’s getting updated. Like David’s doing here and Jill is doing at their house. But I think it would be fun to move somewhere new. Where are you moving to?”

“It’s going to be a while until that happens,” Rio said.

“Probably Wyoming.” Bonnie ignored her. “There are always farms and land for sale. We can’t wait to get away from the city and have horses of our own.”

“That’s a pretty perfect dream.”

“It’s not a dream, it’s a goal.”

Bonnie parroted the promise Rio had been drumming into her head since their father had died. Now the words of that promise pierced like daggers.

“Sure.” She forced a smile. “We’ve just had a little setback.”

“Setback?” Kim asked.

“We had a fire at our house in Minneapolis,” Bonnie explained. “That’s why we’re staying here until we can find a new place.”

“Oh my gosh! That’s awful.” Kim stopped working on the horse and turned fully to Rio. “I’m so sorry.”

She clearly meant every sympathetic word. She was very hard not to like.

“Thank you.”

“So, do you guys ride?” Kim asked. “Can you at least have some fun while you’re here?”

“I’ve never ridden,” Bonnie said. “Rio has once or twice, but only in Western saddles.”

Kim grinned. “Western is awesome. But if you try English, you’ll never want to do anything else.”

The two girls launched into the new topic. Rio tuned them out and turned to watch a dark-gray cat leap gracefully up and over a stall door. Another cat, this one a wiry calico, joined the first. One stall door just down the aisle hung open with the front end of a wheelbarrow sticking out of it and tuneless whistling emanating from inside. A very short hallway off the tidy aisle led to the smaller of the two indoor arenas. So amazing. So opulent.

The acreage for sale in that real estate window so long ago had seemed worth a fortune to sixteen-year-old Rio. The surmised costs of this horse palace boggled her mind.

“Did you get the penny tour?”

She turned at the sound of his voice and did a double take that shamed Bonnie’s earlier Dawson-gaping. Jeans now set off David’s long legs and hugged his waist like a lover’s embrace. A soft, white, button-down shirt had been tucked in but left open at his neck, and the sleeves were rolled up to his elbows. His thick brown hair curled in damp waves, and he smelled of pine and spice.

“I’d think you’d have to charge much more than a penny for this place,” she replied, and immediately regretted the slight judgment in her tone.

He frowned. “My bank creditors would like me better if I did book tours and collect money. And gave it all to them.”

She knew he meant nothing by off-handed jokes about money, but the man could not be hurting no matter what he said.

“Well, my bank creditors are crap out of luck,” she said.

Discomfort shadowed his face. “Yeah. Rio, I’m sorry.”

She shrugged, swallowed away the omnipresent lump in her throat, and changed the subject. “If we’re going to town, maybe we should go.”

“Right. Good,” David said. “A short drive is all.”

“Could I stay here and watch Kim’s lesson?” Bonnie asked. “I’d rather do that.”

“I don’t think so,” Rio said. “You need to stick with us and help pick out what you want.”

“You know what I eat,” she said. “You shop at home. Please, Rio, just let me hang out here.”

“It’s okay with me,” Kim said.

“It’s up to you, of course,” David added, “but she’ll be fine. Kim and Jill will watch over her well. She might as well get to know the place.”

The one thing Rio had figured to have some control over, some sense of home with, had been Bonnie. What had happened to the scared teen hiding from the police chief? Here she was, jumping into the pool without Rio as a life preserver.

Grow up, Rio. You always say you never want to be her mother.

“All right, if you’re sure.” She looked to Kim.

“Absolutely.”

Rio turned warning eyes on her sister. “Be careful.”

“Duh.”

David chuckled.

Rio could already see how Bonnie, with her extrovert’s personality, might take quickly to Bridge Creek. Rio felt slightly ill at ease in a place where nobody seemed to be on guard or at least on watch for danger to erupt.

“What do you think? Shall we go? Leave the little girls to their gossip?”

That’s when it dawned on her she was about to head off alone with the man, his muscles, and his accent. She glanced hopefully at Bonnie, but her sister didn’t even look up from her newest lesson on how to pick up a horse’s foot. There was no hope she would change her mind about coming to town.

“All right.”

“Do you need anything from the house?” David asked, when they’d reached the yard. “Take as long as you like. There’s no hurry.”

“I should grab my purse.”

“I’ll bring the car ’round to the front.”

The butler-esque phrase seemed to clear her head. Or maybe it was just being out of the barn where his delicious masculine scent couldn’t scramble her brain.

She faced him. “You’re going above and beyond for us, and I can’t thank you enough. But I hope you won’t keep waiting on us hand and foot. I’m not used to that.”

He frowned. “I know you’re not. You’re used to making your own way, and I respect that. But you’ll find we do for each other around here. And you have an incredible number of things to figure out. They don’t all have to be sorted this minute, but when you need help we’ll be here. Go grab what you need,” he finished. “See you in a couple of minutes.”

She made her way back to the stark room she’d chosen and was pleased with the sense of comfort the empty space still gave her. For one moment it was like standing on a blank canvas, no blemishes, nobody else’s marks on it, no expectations of what should be on it or in her life.

Her shoulders relaxed slightly.

One problem at a time. She could learn to do that. The only truly immediate problem she had was how she was going to survive a closed-in car ride with David Pitts-Mattherson without his presence and that voodoo scent he wore turning her logical brain to mush.

Her logical brain was all she had left.

Chapter Six

D
AVID SHIFTED IN
the leather seat of his Forester and glanced at Rio, who, with her chin in her palm, had lost some of her rigidity. If she wasn’t comfortable in his presence, at least she seemed resigned rather than resentful. Now if only he could bring back the smile he’d seen exactly twice since meeting her. It wasn’t fair that such a stunning woman should have to wear this guarded a look all the time. From what he remembered of her rare happy face, it turned her into a radiant beauty. And him into jelly.

Not that he could blame her for wearing the weight of the world on her slender, angry shoulders.

“Not much to see until we get a bit closer to town.” He broke the silence and nodded to the expanses of corn and wheat fields.

“It’s incredible,” she replied. “I forget there’s this much empty space in the world.”

“After living in the city, this must seem barren. There’ll be houses here soon, though. Land is getting sold acre by acre.”

“That’s sad.”

“We’re just far enough from large cities that it’s taken a while for the growth to reach us. But Faribault and Northfield, the biggest cities in this area, are spreading outward.”

“Until just now, they were foreign names on a map.” She turned to him, her eyes big and blue. “This could be Mars.”

He grinned. “You might be even more convinced of that after meeting the
townsfolk
.” He drawled out the word with an exaggerated American accent.

It had taken him plenty long enough to fit into the quirky community—not that small English towns were any less strange—but he’d grown to love the people and this place he’d called home the past ten years.

“I’ve already met the local law. I’m a little afraid to show my face.”

She turned a grimace into a passable smile, and his pulse thrummed. He’d been right about the smile. It set off her rich russet hair like sunshine set off a lake.

“Don’t worry about him. The word is this job is a bit of a step down for our Chief Hewett. He arrived thinking this is the lawless West, and he’s the man to clean it up. He’ll mellow out. If your brother and his mates happen to show up, they’d not get far. Kennison Falls manages to take care of its own.”