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But there was always some part of her...some small part that glowed bright sometimes and made her ache.
Hope.
Yeah. Well, for all the good hope had done her. She was filthy and cold and had no money. She’d do better to expect him to turn out to be a creep than a nice person who was actually offering to feed her for nothing.
He stared back at her, his features completely shadowed still. “No. Not really.”
It was the lack of niceness that made her hackles lower, just a bit.
There was something about that honesty that struck her. People were never honest. At least, they weren’t kind and honest. There were people who were cruel, who spent no small amount of time lecturing her about how her circumstances were her own fault.
And maybe they were.
Sure, she’d been sent out to live on her own at eighteen with a garbage bag full of her belongings, but there were plenty of people who didn’t have advantages in life who probably did better than she did.
But people like this... Who could openly admit they didn’t actually care, but offered help, anyway...
There were no people like this. She had no idea what kind of anomaly she was staring down right now.
“Do you want food?” he asked, sounding irritated and impatient now.
“Yes,” she said, scrambling to a standing position. She looked at her blanket, and her backpack.
“Grab those,” he said.
Right. Because of course he was willing to bait her out of the cabin with food, but it wasn’t like he was going to let her stay here. She felt pressure behind her eyes, but she knew she wouldn’t cry. She had quit doing that a long time ago. There was no point.
“Okay,” she said, taking hold of the blanket and her bag and holding them both close.
The man took a step forward, holding out his hand, and that was when her lantern caught his face.
He was...
He was beautiful.
His dark hair was a little bit shaggy, and he had a light beard that might be intentional, or might just be because he hadn’t shaved for a few days. His nose was straight, his lips firm looking, set into a flat line. His shoulders were broad, and so was his chest, his waist lean, the tight T-shirt suggesting that he was also...well, fully and completely built.
She hadn’t made any assumptions about his looks when he had first come in, mostly because he had shocked her, waking her from a dead sleep. And then... He had sounded a bit like a curmudgeon, so she had assumed that he was an older man. But now she thought he couldn’t be much older than thirty.
“Let me take those,” he said, taking the bag and blanket from her.
She started to protest, but he had taken them before she could get the words out. It made her feel naked. He had her things. Everything she owned in the entire world. Except the lantern. She bent down and picked it up, clutching it to her chest. She would hold that.
He didn’t offer to take it from her. He turned, without a word, and walked out of the cabin, clearly just expecting her to follow.
There was an offer of food, so of course she was.
She scrambled after him. It was still dark outside, and it was cold. She had a jacket, but it was in her bag, and currently Mr. Tall, Dark and Cranky was holding it. So she figured the best thing to do would be to follow along.
The place he led her to was a small cabin, but he didn’t go to the front door; instead, he went to an old truck. “We’re going to drive to my brother’s house. It’s on the property. But I don’t really want to walk.”
She didn’t, either. In fact, she had a feeling that he didn’t mind one way or another, but had sensed that maybe she didn’t. Knew that she was cold.
Right. He doesn’t care. Don’t go applying warm and fuzzy motives to him.
She climbed cautiously into his truck, closing the door behind her. “A gentle reminder,” she said when he started the engine. “I do have a knife.”
“Yeah,” he responded, starting the engine and putting the truck in Reverse. “Me, too.”
“Why do you have a knife?”
“For all I knew you had a gun.”
She sputtered. “If I had a gun and you had a knife it wouldn’t help you.”
“It’s just a good thing it didn’t get to that.”
“Well. See that it doesn’t.”
“I know,” he said, his tone dry. “You’ll cut me.”
They didn’t speak for the short drive down the bumpy, pothole-filled dirt road. McKenna folded her hands in her lap and stared down at her fingers. There was dirt under her nails.
You’re homeless. It’s been days since you’ve had a shower.
It was amazing how you could push all of those things to the side, but the minute you had to interact with another person—a beautiful person—it all came rushing back.
“Where are we going?” Suddenly, she was full of panic.
“To my brother’s house,” he repeated. He had said that already.
“And he’s going to be there?”
“Yes,” he responded.
“Oh,” she said, looking back out the window.
So, someone else was going to see her like this. She didn’t really care. Her entire life had been a series of inglorious situations. It was just that this was the worst.
She’d done a pretty good job of letting shame roll off for most of her life. She’d been the poor kid. Had never had cool clothes. Had never been able to have friends over. Had been shuffled around homes, some good, some bad. She’d built up some tough armor over the years.
But this was a new low, and apparently...apparently shame still existed inside of her.
They pulled up to the house and her heart sank into her stomach. She hadn’t fully realized where she was. She had hitchhiked to the edge of town, and she had fully intended on camping out in the woods. She had happened upon a collection of cabins on the edge of the woods, and then had circled around, and found a dilapidated, abandoned one deeper in. She had realized she was camping out in a place people stayed in for money, but she hadn’t realized people also lived there.
Or that it was quite so fancy.
Her companion got out of the truck and headed toward the broad front steps that led to the porch. She just sat there. She took a breath, and opened the door. There was no point being timid. No point feeling like crap. She knew what she was.
And that was: more than her current situation.
It didn’t matter what these people thought of her.
It mattered if they turned out to be psychotic killers, though. But she really did have a pocket knife.
And okay, she knew that wasn’t the deadliest of weapons. But she had sat outside a self-defense class one time and had heard the woman talking about how the element of surprise was generally on your side when you were a woman. It was about the only thing on your side, so you had to use it. They didn’t expect you to fight back.
McKenna Tate had been fighting back for her entire life. She wouldn’t stop now.
And she supposed that right there was the point of that hope inside her chest she often resented. It had brought her this far. Made her feel determined. It was what kept shame and hopelessness from taking over.
As long as she never let it get out of hand, it was what kept her going.
She walked slowly up the front steps and stood next to the man. She came up to the top of his shoulder. Just barely. He was so tall. And yeah, now that she was a little bit more awake, and it was a little bit lighter out, she could see... Definitely as beautiful as she had first thought. If not more so.
She turned her face back to the door in front of her.
Her new friend knocked, and they waited.
The man that answered the door was nearly as tall as the man at her side, and just as good-looking. Though in a different way. He had that easy manner about him, a charm that the other man did not have.
She didn’t trust charm.
“Hi,” she said. “I was told there would be breakfast.”
The new man looked at the other man, and then back at her. “Wyatt Dodge,” he said, sticking out his hand.
“McKenna Tate,” she responded, grasping it with her own.
Of all the ways she had envisioned being caught by the owners of the property, she hadn’t imagined this.
And then she realized that she still didn’t know the name of the man who had found her in the cabin. The beautiful one. The one who looked like he might not remember what a joke was, much less have a whole store of them like Wyatt Dodge probably did.
She looked at him, and he looked at her out of the corner of his eye, but didn’t offer a name.
“Come on in,” Wyatt said, still eyeing his brother speculatively.
She took him up on his invitation.
The inside of the house was even more beautiful than the outside. Rustic, but incredibly comfortable. Cozy. She suddenly became aware of how cold her nose and cheeks had been when they began to warm up.
She looked to the left of the entryway and saw that there was a fire in a rock fireplace. She wanted to go sit in front of it. She wanted to press her face against it.
But then, she also smelled food. Bacon.
She’d had many a disagreement with the man upstairs over quite a few of the circumstances in her life, but right about now she was feeling much friendlier to him. She sent up a prayer of thanks.
If anything could surprise the divine, McKenna Tate being thankful might do it.
“My wife, Lindy, is in the kitchen,” Wyatt said.
“Not cooking,” a voice rang out from the next room. “Just waiting for the bacon to be done.”
He gestured that direction and McKenna followed the directive, walking into the beautiful kitchen, to see an equally beautiful blonde woman sitting at a small breakfast table. Her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, her manner elegant even though she was wearing sweats.
“I’m cooking, technically,” Wyatt said. “It’s part of the agreement.”
“Agreement?” McKenna asked.
“Yes, I agreed to marry him and move from my winery to his ranch. But only if he cooked me breakfast at least four days a week. The other three days I get a pastry from the coffee place in town.”
McKenna’s stomach tightened. Jealousy. She was as familiar with that as she was with hunger, and right now she felt nearly overtaken by both.
Not because she wanted the man cooking the bacon, specifically. Just that it would be nice to have an arrangement like that in general. Someone who cared. Someone who would vow to cook bacon four days a week just so you would marry him.
She couldn’t imagine someone caring like that.
“What are you doing on my property, McKenna Tate?” Wyatt asked, turning toward the stove and getting bacon and some scrambled eggs out of a pan, putting them on a plate and setting them down on the table. She eyed them hungrily.
“Have a seat,” he said.
She hesitantly did as he said, sitting next to his lovely wife, and feeling every inch the bedraggled urchin that she was. “Eat.”
Her man said that.
Not that he was her man, just that he was the one that had woken her up, and she still didn’t know his name. And on principle, she wasn’t going to ask.
Still, she obeyed.
“Coffee?” Lindy asked.
“Yes, please,” she said, trying her best to eat slow, and feeling like she was going to end up failing the moment the salty, savory bacon touched her tongue. She was ravenous. She hadn’t let herself realize just how much.
“What were you doing?” Lindy asked, her voice soft.
“I just needed a place to sleep. I’m new to Gold Valley... I decided to move here,” she said. She wasn’t going to get into the whole thing about looking for her family. Not that she believed they were going to have some tearful reunion. She wasn’t that stupid. Life didn’t work that way.
Her mother, who had given birth to her, had walked away without a backward glance. A father who’d probably never even met her, maybe didn’t even know about her? Why would he want anything to do with her?
The very thought of it, of putting herself in front of him and risking a rejection, made her feel...
It didn’t matter. From what she had found out about the Daltons, they were well-off. Famous rodeo riders and owners of a massive plot of land just on the outskirts of town.
Surely they would be able to spare a little seed money to keep her off the streets. And they’d probably be happy to fling some money at her to get rid of her, anyway.
She didn’t need a family. She’d been just fine without one all this time.
What she needed was something a lot more practical than that. A shovel to dig herself out of the hole she was in.
