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Clara looked down at the top of her coffee cup and wished that she hadn’t put the lid on, so she could make a show out of studying the milk-froth fern. “Oh. Do we?”
“Yes.”
She looked at the clock on the wall and regrettably she had time.
Time she had built in so she could make conversation with Asher if he’d been in the mood to make conversation. Not so she could hassle with Alex and the myriad emotions just looking at him made her feel.
“Well, I’m on my way to work,” she said, edging around his masculine frame and backing toward the door.
“You have a job other than working at the ranch?”
She should have known the big, muscly soldier wouldn’t take hints well. “Yes,” she said. She didn’t elaborate.
“Where at?”
She made an impatient sound she didn’t even try to cover up. “Grassroots Winery.”
“I haven’t been out there yet. Maybe I should check it out.”
Rather than answering, Clara lifted her cup to her lips and absently took a drink. She grimaced, barely stopping herself from spitting out the hot liquid. It was still bitter, with a kind of sickly sweet flavor running over the top of it. Compliments of that extra sugar she had dumped into the cup to linger over Asher a little longer.
She really, really didn’t like coffee.
Alex treated her to a strange look.
“It’s strong,” she said, gesturing with the cup. “Just the way I like it.”
“Glad to hear that.”
“Well—” she waved her fingers “—bye.” She continued walking past him, heading out the door.
Much to her chagrin, he followed.
She paused, turning slightly in the gravel parking lot. “You didn’t get your coffee.”
“I actually wasn’t there for coffee. I don’t like places like that.”
“Why not?”
“You can only get one size. What the hell is up with that? I don’t need some hipster giving me prescriptive coffee. I don’t need to be told the way they think coffee must be served to be better. I need it the way I want it.”
He stopped walking, crossing his arms over his broad chest. He was wearing a plain, tan-colored T-shirt and a pair of dark jeans. Somehow, even out of uniform, he still looked like he was in one.
“Why did you stop in then?”
“I saw your truck outside.”
She frowned. “You acted surprised to see me.”
“No,” he said, “I believe what I said was ‘Fancy meeting you here.’”
She rolled her eyes. “Well, you knew how I would take it.” A strange sense of disquiet stole over her, a feeling of creeping tension.
“I tried to call your cell phone,” he said.
She blinked. “How did you get my number?”
“It was on some paperwork I got from the attorney’s office. It looked like something we both should have had copies of.”
Right. Paperwork that was probably sitting unopened in a pile on her table. To go nicely with the messages from the lawyer she’d been avoiding. He’d tried to talk to her at the funeral too. But she hadn’t been able to handle it. Because then they’d be talking about her brother’s estate. Which was what your possessions turned into when you were dead.
An Estate.
She’d had to discuss her mother’s. Then her father’s. She’d had the feeling she’d crawl out of her skin talking to anyone about her brother’s. It was stupid, and she knew it. Ignoring bills didn’t mean they didn’t need to be paid. Ignoring a lawyer wouldn’t make Jason not dead.
But once she talked to him, it would all feel final. And she couldn’t handle that. She was barely keeping her head above water. She was dependent on her routine. These quiet mornings where she got coffee she didn’t want to drink from a man whose whole being made her feel...happy. If only for a few moments. Then she would go and work at the winery showroom until closing time, enjoying being surrounded by people. Then she’d head home. Home to her empty house, where she would do any chores that needed doing before she fell into bed, passed out, didn’t dream—if she was lucky—and repeated the whole thing the next day.
Maybe it was denial. But she deserved a little denial.
Alex was interrupting her carefully orchestrated coping mechanism. She didn’t like it. “You took my phone number from a piece of paper?”
“I told you, I need to talk to you about a few things. I assumed you knew some of this—I thought an effort had been made to contact you.”
Her cheeks got hot, and she went prickly all over. Efforts probably had been made, but she just hadn’t been able to cope. Which made her feel small and humiliated. She hated it.
Alex continued. “Your brother had a will.”
She didn’t want to do this. Not here. Not now. She couldn’t talk about Jason. She couldn’t talk about his will. She couldn’t deal with this. “I have to go to work,” she said.
She was going to deal with all of this—Alex, Jason’s will—someday. But not today. She just didn’t want to do it today.
“What time do you get off?”
“Six. But I’m going to be really tired and I...”
“Why is your phone turned off, Clara?”
She blinked hard, and yet, no matter how much she wanted him to disappear, no amount of blinking accomplished it. “It’s not a big deal. I don’t use my phone.” She wasn’t paying her bills. That was the truth. There was some money, it wasn’t like she was destitute. But there was something about dealing with the mail right now that felt overwhelming. Envelope after envelope, cards, condolences, bills addressed to Jason like he wasn’t dead. Like he could come back and open them.
He couldn’t. He couldn’t do anything.
“I’ve been busy,” she said. “I forgot to pay the bill. That’s all.”
She wasn’t going to admit her mail gave her anxiety. What kind of twit had mail anxiety?
Well. She did.
“And if I come to your house at six tonight are you going to be there? Or am I going to have to stalk you at your favorite coffee place again?”
She frowned. “Come to think of it, it’s a little bit weird that you were able to find me here.”
“Not really. I saw you here yesterday when I drove into town. I took an educated guess this morning and decided I would stop in. It’s pretty lazy stalking, all in all.”
“Lazy stalking isn’t really less disturbing than energetic stalking.”
“You can avoid all future stalking if we could just talk now,” he said, his expression suddenly turning serious.
“No,” she said, the denial coming out quickly.
She really couldn’t deal with this now. She couldn’t deal with discussing Jason in the past tense. Couldn’t deal with talking about his will in a parking lot. Couldn’t face looking at all the things her brother had left behind, his worldly possessions, which no longer belonged to him because he wasn’t part of the world anymore.
Hell, she couldn’t open a damn phone bill. She wasn’t going to do any of the rest of this.
“Then we’ll talk later. If I have to camp out in your yard, we’ll talk later.”
Then he turned and walked back toward his truck, leaving her standing there with her cappuccino.
She took another sip. “Dammit!”
She forced herself to swallow it, rather than spitting it out into the gravel, on the off chance Asher was watching.
She had to get to work now, she couldn’t worry about Alex. Whatever he had to say to her, she would take care of it then. Her life had already been rocked beyond recognition in the past couple of months. There was nothing Alex Donnelly could say that would bring it crumbling down now.
* * *
VERY FEW PEOPLE would call Alex Donnelly a coward. He had dodged gunfire, survived a rain of mortar shells—more than once—and worn full tactical gear in arid heat that could practically bake a loaf of bread, or a man’s brains for that matter.
But he had been a little bit of a coward when he’d allowed Clara Campbell to put off their conversation about her deceased brother’s will.
The fact of the matter was he had been a coward for the past couple of months that he’d been back in Copper Ridge, and had avoided having the conversation with her at all. He’d had his excuses, that was for sure.
Some of them were actually valid. Like the time he’d put into investigating the legality of what her brother had asked him to do. And then the time spent going over the letter Jason had left. The one that clarified just why he wanted things this way and made it impossible to deny him.
Still, Alex had waited to talk to Clara, even after that.
At first, it had been out of deference to her grief. And after that, because he was trying to get his feet underneath him at the Laughing Irish ranch, which he worked at with his brothers.
Frankly, after losing his best friend and his grandfather, he’d had enough to deal with without adding Clara to the mix. But it couldn’t be avoided anymore. And when he had discovered her cell phone was turned off, he’d felt guilty for avoiding it as long as he had.
Clara must be hurting for money. Enough that she had taken a job at Grassroots Winery, and was letting bills go unpaid.
He’d expected her to call if things were that bad. Hell, he’d expected her to call period. But the way she’d acted at the coffee shop, it didn’t seem like she’d spoken to anyone about the details of Jason’s will.
Now that he thought about it, if she had, she probably would have come at him hissing and spitting.
She might still. But she was late.
Alex pushed his cowboy hat back on his head and looked at the scenery around him. The ranch was small, and so was the ranch house. Rustic. From his position on the front porch—which was squeaking beneath his cowboy boots—he couldn’t see the highway.
Couldn’t see anything but the pine trees that grew thick and strong around the property, standing tall like sentries, there to protect the ranch and all who lived there.
“Well, you’re doing a pretty piss poor job,” he commented.
Because damned if the Campbells hadn’t been through enough. But he was here to make things easier. He knew—was one hundred percent certain—that Clara wouldn’t see it that way initially. But this was what Jason had wanted, and he knew that Jason had nothing but his sister’s best interests in mind when he’d made out his will.
Alex owed it to his friend to see his last wishes carried out. No question about it.
He took a deep breath, putting his hands on his narrow hips as he turned a half circle to take in more of the property. The driveway needed to be graveled. It was slick and muddy right now, even though it had been a few days since it had rained.
There was a truck and a tractor that Alex would lay odds didn’t run, parked off in the weeds, looking like metal corpses left to rust into the earth.
The place needed a lot of work. It was too much for him to do by himself, let alone one woman. One grieving woman who was having to work part-time on top of doing the general ranch work.
He figured at this point the place wasn’t really functional. But he was forming some ideas on how to get it working again. On how to make sure Clara hadn’t just been saddled with a millstone.
Or, more accurately, that he hadn’t been.
The center of the sky was dimming to a purplish blue, the edges around the trees a kind of dusty pink by the time Clara’s truck pulled up the long driveway into the house. She stopped, turning off the engine, staying in the vehicle. She was looking at him like she was shocked to see him, even though he had told her he would be there.
He shoved his hands in his pockets, leaning against the support for the porch, not moving until Clara got out of the truck.
She was such a petite little thing. And she had definitely lost weight since he’d seen her a few weeks ago. He couldn’t imagine her taking on a place like this, and suddenly he felt like the biggest ass on the planet. That he had stayed away because she was going to be angry, when she had clearly been here working her knuckles to the bone.
Jason had been clear on what he wanted. The fact that Alex had screwed it up so far seemed just about right, as far as things went.
“Big wine-tasting day?” he asked.
Clara frowned. “No. Why?”
“You’re home late.”
She raised a brow, then walked around to the back of the truck and pulled out a bag of groceries. “I had to stop and get stuff for dinner.”
“Good. You do eat.”
She frowned. “What does that mean?”
“You’re too skinny.” He felt like a dick for saying it, but it was true. She was on the sadness diet, something he was a little too familiar with. But he’d learned not to give in to that in the military. Learned to eat even when his ears were ringing from an explosion, or the heat was so intense the idea of eating something hot was next to torture. Or when you’d just seen a body, bent and twisted under rubble.
Because food wasn’t about enjoyment. It was about survival.
A lot like life in general.
Clara Campbell needed help surviving. That was clear to him.
Clara scowled even deeper as she walked toward him. “Great. Thanks, Alex. Just what every woman wants to hear.”
“Actually, in my experience, a lot of women would like to hear that.” He snagged the paper grocery bag out of her arms as she tried to walk past him. “SpaghettiOs? What the hell is this?”
