Dark Horse: Bad Boy Cowboy Romance (7 page)

Lance nodded, but as I started to stand up, he held out his hand to me. "To living together, Miss Monteclaire," he suggested.

I didn't let myself hesitate as I shook the proffered hand. "To a partnership, Mr. Lance."

Chapter ten

The next few days went better than I expected.

Somehow, I'd expected that things would feel, well, different, with a man around the house. I expected to be running into Lance all the time, to always feel like I was out in public and couldn't relax, knowing that someone else was around and might intrude on my private time at any moment.

But in truth, things didn't feel that way at all.

Sure, they did feel different. But I quickly became used to walking into the living room and seeing Lance sitting on my couch, reading one of the books from my bookshelf. Strangely enough, for a man who spent most of his time out in the wild and working with his hands, Lance had a voracious appetite for books, and I watched in amazement as he steadily chewed his way through my bookshelf.

But unlike with most of the other people I knew, I never felt any pressure to keep some sort of conversation going with Lance if I didn't have something to say. When I wanted to talk, I could just open my mouth and start talking, and I knew that he'd listen to whatever I had to say. If I didn't want to talk, I could come into my living room, drop into a chair, and turn into a blob of exhausted pudding without eliciting any comment from the man.

And the food, oh, the food! I nearly had a heart attack the first time that the man provided me with a grocery list. "You really need all of this stuff?" I exclaimed, staring in dismay at the length of carefully written items. There had to be at least forty or fifty different things on this list!

He just shrugged back at me. "You're the one with the horribly under-stocked kitchen," he replied, no accusation or anger in his voice. "If you want me to be able to cook anything that tastes decent, I'll need what's on the list. At least you've got good pots and pans."

I did have to agree there. The pots and pans in the house were one of the Monteclaire family heirlooms, passed down faithfully from mother to daughter for as long as I could remember. Sure, I didn't know how to use most of them, but I still kept them carefully preserved, lying to myself each year when I promised myself I'd sign up for a cooking class at some point.

I thought about arguing some more, but eventually decided that this wasn't going to become a fight that I'd win. Besides, I did want to see what other skills the man possessed in the kitchen. I winced at the eventual bill, but Lance looked quite pleased when I returned from shopping laden down with bags of groceries.

Very quickly, he proved that he wasn't just bragging about his skills in the kitchen. That very night, he whipped up some sort of delicious baked chicken dish, with the meat pounded thin and wrapped around a core of thinly shaved vegetables and sauce. He didn't say a word as I wolfed down the incredibly tasty food, but I caught him grinning a couple of times when he didn't think that I was looking.

But fine, I thought to myself. Let the man feel good about showing off his cooking skills. I'm sure that it couldn't actually be that hard to properly cook a chunk of chicken. It's just meat, right? Apply some heat, wait for it to be cooked, and then cover it in sauce. How difficult could that really be?

Even better than the food, however, were the conversations. I'd always told myself that I was quite happy living on my own, that I didn't need anyone to keep a conversation going with, but it wasn't until Lance's arrival that I realized how much I missed being able to share some of the thoughts in my head.

"Lance, do you ever think about destiny?" I asked one evening, idly swirling the liquid in my wine glass as I gazed up at the wooden ceiling of the farmhouse's dining room.

He was clearing the dishes, but glanced over at my question. "In what way?" he asked back, sounding a little guarded.

I shrugged, taking a sip. "I don't know, really. But sometimes, especially late at night, I'll just stay awake and wonder whether I'm really making the most of my life, if I'm actually making the right choices. Sometimes, I just sit and think about other choices I might have made. Could they have put my life in a better place than it is now?"

He didn't reply, but I heard the running water in the kitchen as Lance washed off the plates from the night's meal. Instead of ascribing to my time-tested method of dumping all of the dishes into the sink and letting them soak until I had a full stack to clean, he insisted on cleaning up right away. I waited patiently, sipping at my wine and listening to the sound of the running water in the kitchen.

A few minutes later, Lance returned, dropping back into his chair and setting his beer bottle down on the table with a clink. "Destiny, huh?" he repeated. With his drawl, he stretched out the word a little.

"Yeah. Like, other choices that you could make in your life. Other paths that you could have taken."

"I think we all have lots of paths not taken," he mused, not really agreeing to anything. "But who's to say if those would turn out any better than what we have now? Or if we'd just end up in the same place, no matter what we choose to do?"

I turned to face him, putting down my glass. "Well, I'm sure that my life could have ended up differently, if I made some different choices!" I insisted.

He looked at me. "Like what?"

"Well..." I sat back, my eyes looking off to one side as I thought back. "I went to college, but I never really pursued anything with my degree. Maybe, if I'd actually gone to work instead of coming back to watch over the family property, I might have made something of myself."

"What was your degree in?" he asked, taking a sip of beer.

"Um... entrepreneurship." I narrowed my eyes at Lance, waiting to see if he was going to laugh at me, but the man kept his face still and composed. "I always wanted to start my own company, and the Monteclaires used to own several businesses."

"So why didn't you?" he asked, after I fell quiet for a minute.

I shrugged. "I planned to. But just after I graduated, I came back here to look after my dad before he passed away. And once he died, I inherited the house and the land, and I've got enough savings to live off of the returns as long as I don't spend too much. I couldn't really bring myself to leave all of it behind to jump into something new."

After a second, I shook off the cobwebs of memory clinging to me. "So yeah, maybe I'd be a billionaire business owner if I'd kept going," I joked briskly. "But what about you? What's a path that you left behind?"

Lance frowned with introspection, and I leaned forward, trying to not make my interest too obvious. Despite that we got into long conversations most evenings, I still felt like I knew very little about his past. Lance kept his lips tightly zipped, most of the time.

"I could have put down roots," he finally said, still frowning a little. "I sometimes do think about what would have happened if I did that."

"Roots? Like, staying in one place?" I didn't even know where he was originally from.

He nodded. "My dad owned a welding shop - fixing cars, mostly, but he worked on anything that folks brought in. My older brother inherited the shop, but I could have stayed, could have worked there, probably been a partner. Would've been enough to pay for a house, probably."

"Is that where you learned to fix things?" I asked.

Another nod. "Yeah, I liked the mechanical aspect, building and fixing things with my hands. Liked that, but didn't like dealing with the customers. And I always kept an eye on the horizon, too. Think that's why I left."

"What if you had stayed?" I inquired gently. "Where do you think you'd be?"

It took a few seconds before Lance answered. "Maybe have a family," he mused quietly. "Get a house, get hitched, settle down. Get a kid, a boat, maybe, just take it easy. Be a part of the community."

After he fell silent, we both sat there quietly for a few minutes, finishing our drinks.

Finally, I set down my wine glass with a clink on the table. "Well, glad we know what we gave up," I announced brightly. "You could have been a dull, boring dad, and I could have been a mean, cutthroat billionaire businesswoman. Glad we both dodged those bullets!"

I had to look hard to see it, but I caught a smile dance briefly across his features. "Close call," he agreed.

I stood up. "And now, I think another glass of wine is in order."

Chapter eleven

That wasn't our last conversation about destiny, although most nights we kept the topic less serious. Bit by bit, just from proximity, we opened up to each other.

By a month later, I was used to emerging from my bedroom each morning to find Lance shirtless in the kitchen, cooking up breakfast. "Just something thrown together," he'd always defend the food, as if he needed to make some sort of excuse.

I never complained, of course. Most of the time, my mouth was too full of delicious food and hot coffee to even think of voicing any objections. Besides, this was better than I'd eaten in ages!

After breakfast, we'd often part ways. Lance would head out into town to get supplies for whatever project he was working on that day, or else he'd just go straight out into the fields if he was instead finishing up a task he'd started on a previous day.

And me? I had a wedding to plan!

After my outburst at Marsden at the Derby, I'd sulked for a week, but eventually I came around. It didn't hurt that Marsden kept on sending bouquets of flowers out to my house, until I started running low on vases to store the big blooms of roses and wildflowers. Somehow, the man apparently managed to forget the dozen times I'd told him that sunflowers were my favorite, but I still appreciated the gesture - and forgetting my favorite flower just seemed exactly like the sort of thing Marsden would do entirely on accident, without meaning any offense.

Finally, after the tenth or so bouquet, I picked up my phone and called him. "Okay, okay!" I begged him, laughing a little at how I sounded. "I forgive you! You can stop sending flowers!"

"Oh, great," Marsden replied promptly, also chuckling. "All of the florists around here are starting to recognize me by name and ask if I just want to pick up the usual order!"

We both fell silent for a minute.

"So, um, does that mean that you're going to keep planning the wedding?" he asked after the silence had dragged on a bit. "I mean, I'd help, but I've got a lot going on with the cattle right now. I don't have a lot of free time."

Guiltily, I remembered that I hadn't yet told Marsden about the lodger staying at my house - or even about my fall and near-death experience at all. "Of course, that's all right," I replied, feeling like I had to make it up to my fiancé for making the decision to invite Lance to stay. "I'll start getting things in order."

"Great, great!" he replied. "And maybe I can take you out to dinner one of these nights? I haven't gotten to see you in a while."

I smiled. That was really kind of touching, how he missed me! "Sure, dinner sounds nice," I replied.

"And then, maybe after dinner, I'll come stay out at the farmhouse? Wouldn't want to just drop you off and leave you there all alone, you know!"

I knew that Marsden was angling at the fact that we hadn't slept together in a while, but his mention of staying over made another little spasm of guilt rush through me. After all, if he stayed over, he'd definitely meet Lance.

"Yeah, I'd like that," I agreed. I wouldn't tell him now, I decided, but he could meet Lance when he came to pick me up. And then, I'd make sure to let him have his fun with my body that evening, to prove that Lance didn't throw anything off.

We agreed on a date that Friday, with Marsden stopping by the house around six to pick me up. I hung up the phone, smiled dreamily for a minute or so, and then reached for my computer to figure out how in the world to go about planning a wedding.

As it turned out, planning a wedding involves a lot of tasks.

"Can you believe all this stuff I have to do?" I complained to Lance over dinner that evening (peppers stuffed with some sort of delicious meat and beans mixture, grilled and crunchy and spicy and amazing). "Look at all of this! I need to book a venue, find a caterer, arrange for flowers, hire a band, get drinks - it's crazy! And I haven't even started on figuring out all the guests!"

My dinner companion nodded as he munched on a mouthful of pepper. "Too bad you can't save these flowers," he remarked, gesturing around at the bouquets still sitting out on most of the available surfaces.

I groaned. "This just seems like way too much for me to handle. I don't know how anyone actually pulls this off."

"Aren't there folks that you can hire to run everything for you?" Lance asked, scratching at the five o'clock shadow on his chin. "Wedding planners?"

I rolled my eyes. "Yeah, they exist - but forget an arm and a leg for their services. They'll take everything from the neck down, if they can get it. I can afford most of the wedding costs, I think, especially when marsden helps out, but I can't possibly manage it if I have to pay someone else to pick it all for me as well." Looking down at my empty plate forlornly, I glanced over at the stove. "Anything else that I can eat?"