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“Why don’t you get this paved?” he asked.
“I like it,” she said.
“Why?”
That was a complicated question, with a complicated answer. But he was her friend and she was glad to be off the topic of marriages, so she figured she would take a stab at it. “Because it’s nothing like the driveway that we had when I was growing up. Which was smooth and paved and circular, and led up to the most ridiculous brick monstrosity.”
“So this is like inverse nostalgia?”
“Yes.”
He lifted a shoulder. “I understand that better than you might think.”
He pulled up to the front of the cabin and she stayed resolutely in her seat until he rounded to her side and opened the door for her. Then she blinked, looking up into the sun, at the way his broad shoulders blotted it out. “What about my car?” she asked.
“I’m going to have someone bring it. Don’t worry.”
“I could go get it,” she said.
“I have a feeling it’s best if you lie low for a little bit.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Well,” he said. “Your ex-husband just came back from the dead, and both of you cause quite a bit of media interest. You were named as beneficiary of his estate along with four other women, and that’s a lot of money.”
“But Will isn’t dead, and I don’t care about his money. I have my own.”
“Very few people are going to believe that, Selena,” Knox said, his tone grave. “Most people don’t acknowledge the concept of having enough money. They only understand wanting more.”
“What are you saying? That I’m...in danger?”
“I don’t know. But we don’t know what’s going on with Will, and you were brought into this. You’re a target, for all we know. Someone is in an urn, and you have a letter that brought you here.”
“You’re jumping to conclusions, Knox.”
“Maybe,” he said, “but I swear to God, Selena, I’d rather have you safe than end up in an urn. That I couldn’t deal with.”
She looked at the deep intensity in his expression. “I’ll be safe.”
“You need to lie low for a while.”
“What does that mean? What am I supposed to do?”
Knox shrugged, the casual gesture at odds with the steely determination in his gray eyes. “I figured I would keep you company.”
Three (#u2f029b30-5a06-506d-84de-5895cad61026)
Selena looked less than thrilled by the prospect of sticking close to home while the situation with Will got sorted out.
Knox didn’t particularly care whether or not Selena was thrilled. He wanted her safe. As far as he was concerned, this was some shady shit, and until it was resolved, he didn’t want any of it getting near her.
All of it was weird. The five women who had been presented with nearly identical letters telling them that they had inherited Will’s estate, and then Will not actually being dead. The fact that someone else had been living Will’s life.
Maybe none of it would touch Selena. But there was nothing half so pressing in Knox’s life as his best friend’s safety.
His business did not require him to micromanage it. That was the perk of making billions, as far as he was concerned. You didn’t have to be in an office all the damned time if it didn’t suit you.
Plus, it was all...pointless.
He shook off the hollow feeling of his chest caving in on itself and turned his focus back to Selena.
“I don’t need you to stay here with me,” she said, all but scampering across the lawn and to her porch.
“I need to stay here with you,” he returned. He was more than happy to make it about him. Because he knew she wouldn’t be able to resist. She was worried about him. She didn’t need to be. But she was. And if he played into that, then she would give him whatever he wanted.
“But it’s a waste of your time,” she pointed out, digging in her purse for her keys, pulling them out and jamming one of them in the lock.
“Maybe,” he said. “But I swear to God, Selena, if I have to go to a funeral with a big picture of you up at the front of the room...”
“No one has threatened me,” she said, turning the key and pushing the door open.
“And I’d rather not wait and see if someone does.”
“You’re being hypervigilant,” she returned.
“Yes,” he said. “I am.” He gritted his teeth. “Some things you can’t control, Selena. Some bad stuff you can’t stop. But I’m not going to decide everything is fine here and risk losing you just because I went home earlier than I should have.”
She looked up at him, the stubborn light in her eyes fading. “Okay. If you need to do this, that’s fine.”
Selena walked into the front entrance of the cabin and threw her purse down on an entryway table. Typical Selena. There was a hook right above the table, but she didn’t hang the purse up. No. That extra step would be considered a waste of time in her estimation. Never mind that her disorganization often meant she spent extra time looking for things.
He looked around the spacious, bright room. It was clean. Surprisingly so.
“This place is... It’s nice. Spotless.”
“I have a housekeeper,” she said, turning to face him, crossing her arms beneath her breasts and offering up a lopsided smile.
For a moment, just a moment, his eyes dipped down to examine those breasts. His gut tightened and he resolutely turned his focus back to her eyes. Selena was a woman. He had known that for a long time. But she wasn’t a woman whose breasts concerned him. She never had been.
When they had met in college he had thought she was beautiful, sure. A man would have to be blind not to see that. But she had also been brittle. Skittish and damaged. And it had taken work on his part to forge a friendship with her.
Once he had become her friend, he had never wanted to do anything to compromise that bond. And if he had been a little jealous of Will Sanders somehow convincing her that marriage was worth the risk, Knox had never indulged that jealousy.
Then Will had hurt her, devastated her, divorced her. And after that, Selena had made her feelings about relationships pretty clear. Anyway, at that point, he had been serious about Cassandra, and then they had gotten married.
His friendship with Selena outlasted both of their marriages, and had proved that the decision he’d made back in college, to not examine her breasts, had been a solid one.
One he was going to hold to.
“Well, thank God for the housekeeper,” he said, his tone dry. “Living all the way out here by yourself, if you didn’t have someone taking care of you you’d be liable to die beneath a pile of your own clothes.”
She huffed. “You don’t know me, Knox.”
“Oh, honey,” he said, “I do.”
A long, slow moment stretched between them and her olive skin was suddenly suffused with color. It probably wasn’t nice of him to tease her about her propensity toward messiness. “Well,” she said, her tone stiff. “I do have a guest room. And I suppose it would be unkind of me to send you packing back to Wyoming on your first night here in Royal.”
“Downright mean,” he said, schooling his expression into one of pure innocence. As much as he could manage.
It occurred to him then that the two of them hadn’t really spent much time together in the past couple of years. And they hadn’t spent time alone together in the past decade. He had been married to another woman, and even though his friendship with Selena had been platonic, and Cassandra had never expressed any jealousy toward her, it would have been stretching things a bit for him to spend the night at her place with no one else around.
“Well,” she said, tossing her glossy black hair over her shoulder. “I am a little mean.”
“Are you?”
She smiled broadly, the expression somewhere between a grin and a snarl. “It has been said.”
“By who?” he asked, feeling instantly protective of her. She had always brought that out in him. Even though now it felt like a joke, that he could feel protective of anyone. He hadn’t managed to protect the most important people in his life.
“I wasn’t thinking of a particular incident,” she responded, wandering toward the kitchen, kicking her shoes off as she went, leaving them right where she stepped out of them, like fuchsia afterthoughts.
“Did Will say you were mean?”
She turned to face him, cocking one dark brow. “Will didn’t have strong feelings for me one way or the other, Knox. Certainly not in the time since the divorce.” She began to bustle around the kitchen, and he leaned against the island, placing his hand on the high-gloss marble countertop, watching as she worked with efficiency, getting mugs and heating water. She was making tea, and she wasn’t even asking him if he wanted any. She would simply present him with some. And he wouldn’t drink it, because he didn’t like tea.
A pretty familiar routine for the two of them.
“He put you pretty firmly off of marriage,” Knox pointed out, “so I would say he’s also not completely blameless.”
“You’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead. Or the undead, in Will’s case.”
He drummed his fingers on the counter. “You know, that does present an interesting question.”
“What question is that?”
“Who died?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“There were ashes in that urn. Obviously they weren’t Will’s. But if he’s not dead, then who is?”
Selena frowned. “Maybe no one’s dead. Maybe it’s ashes from a campfire.”
“Why would someone go to all that trouble? Why would somebody go to that much trouble to fake Will’s death? Or to fake anyone’s death? Again, I think this has something to do with those letters. With all of the women in his life being made beneficiaries of his estate. And this is why I’m not leaving you here by yourself.”
“Because you’re a high-handed, difficult, surly, obnoxious...”
“Are you finished?”
“Just a second,” she said, taking her kettle off the stove and pouring hot water into two of the mugs on the counter. “Irritating, overbearing...”
“Wealthy, handsome, incredibly generous.”
“Yes, it’s true,” she said. “But I prefer beautiful to handsome. I mean, I assume you were offering up descriptions of me.”
She shoved a mug in his direction, smiling brilliantly. He did not tell her he didn’t want any. He did not remind her that he had told her at least fifteen times over the years that he did not drink tea. Instead, he curled his fingers around the mug and pulled it close, knowing she wouldn’t realize he wasn’t having any.
It was just one of her charming quirks. The fact that she could be totally oblivious to what was happening around her. Cast-off shoes in the middle of her floor were symptoms of it. It wasn’t that Selena was an airhead; she was incredibly insightful, actually. It was just that her head seemed to continually be full of thoughts about what was next. Sometimes, all that thinking made it hard to keep her rooted in the present.
She rested her elbows on the counter, then placed her chin in her palms, looking suddenly much younger than she had only a moment ago. Reminding him of the girl he had known in college.
And along with that memory came an old urge. To reach out, to brush her hair out of her face, to trace the line of her lower lip with the edge of his thumb. To take a chance with all of her spiky indignation and press his mouth against hers.
Instead, he lifted his mug to his lips and took a long drink, the hot water and bitterly acidic tea burning his throat as he swallowed.
He really, really didn’t like tea.
“You know,” she said, tapping the side of her mug, straightening. “I do have a few projects you could work on around here. If you’re going to stay with me.”
“You’re putting me to work?”
“Yes. If you’re going to stay with me, you need to earn your keep.”
“I’m earning my keep by guarding you.”
“From a threat you don’t even know exists.”
“I know a few things,” he said, holding up his hand and counting off each thing with his fingers. “I know someone is dead. I know you are mysteriously named as a beneficiary of a lot of money, as are a bunch of other women.”
“And one assumes that we are no longer going to inherit any money since Will isn’t dead.”
“But someone wanted us all to think that he was. Hell, maybe somebody wanted him to be dead.”
“Are you a private detective now? The high-end health-food grocery-chain business not working out for you?”
“It’s working out for me very well, actually. Which you know. And don’t change the subject.”
A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth.
He was genuinely concerned about her well-being; he wasn’t making that up. But there was something else, too. Something holding him here. Or maybe it was just something keeping him from going back to Wyoming. He had avoided Royal, and Texas altogether, since his divorce. Had avoided going anywhere that reminded him of his former life. He’d owned the ranch in Jackson Hole for over a decade, but he, Cassandra and Eleanor hadn’t spent as much time there as they had here.
Still, for some reason, now that he was back, the idea of returning to that gigantic ranch house in Wyoming to rattle around all by himself didn’t seem appealing.
There was a reason he had gotten married. A reason he and Cassandra had started a family. It was what he had wanted. An answer to his lifetime of loneliness. To the deficit he had grown up with. He had wanted everything. A wife, children, money. All of those things that would keep him from feeling like he had back then.
But he had learned the hard way that children could be taken from you. That marriages crumbled. And that money didn’t mean a damn thing in the end.
If he’d had a choice, if the universe would have asked him, he would have given up the money first.
