Page 14 of The Rancher's Fake Fiancée
“One of us had to.”
“And it had to be the man who once stood up in front of two hundred strangers and informed them love was a line item.” I set the cup down before I do something to it. “You haven’t changed a syllable in eighteen years, you know that? Still the same boy with a cash-box where his chest should be, still certain that if you just name a thing coldly enough, first, out loud, it can’t get its hands on you.”
Something flickers behind his eyes, quick, there and gone. “Careful.”
“Or what? You’ll go cold on me? You’re cold on me right now, Loukas, over eggs, the morning after you—”
And I stop, the sentence having nowhere safe to go, and we both hear it not-go.
“After I what?” he asks, very quietly.
“After you looked at me in the dark like I was the answer to something.” To my horror my voice doesn’t come out angry. It comes out true. “You can call it a storm and a night and two sensible adults all you like. But I was there. I felt your heart. A spreadsheet doesn’t do what your heart was doing.”
The cabin goes quiet around us, just the rails clicking and the country sliding gold past the glass, and for a moment I think I’ve actually done it, reached past the smirk and the arithmetic to the boy underneath. His face opens. Just slightly. Just enough.
Then it shuts, the way it always shuts.
“It’s a sound arrangement,” he says, picking the philosophy back up like a tool he set down. “Honesty up front, no illusions, two adults who know exactly what this is. Nobody gets hurt that way. I learned it watching a friend do the opposite.”
“Nobody gets hurt.” I almost laugh. “Loukas. Look at me and tell me, this minute, that nobody’s getting hurt.”
He looks at me. He doesn’t tell me.
And this is the truth about a man who’s walled himself in too, brick by careful brick, every brick stamped love is a con. You can’t argue him out of it, the argument being the mortar. So I don’t argue.
I do the one move eighteen years of war never taught either of us to defend against. I set the cup aside, and I cross the foot of expensive cotton between us, and I take that proud, cold,terrified face in both my hands, and I kiss him the way he kisses me, slow, patient, refusing to be hurried, a kiss with all the time in the world in it, a kiss that asks nothing and proves everything.
And for one long sweet treacherous moment he forgets every word of his own cold logic and kisses me back like a man gone under for the third time and glad of the water.
He’s the one who breaks it. He’d always need to be the one who breaks it.
“That,” he says, his voice gone to gravel, “isn’t how mature adults conduct a sensible agreement.”
“No,” I agree, climbing off the bed before my own heart can file an objection, reaching for yesterday’s clothes with all the dignity a barefoot woman can muster. “It’s how the rest of us conduct being alive. You ought to try it sometime, when you’re feeling brave.”
I’ve made it all the way to the bathroom door, almost clean, almost out with the last word for once in my life, when he says my name, and something in how he says it stops me with my hand on the frame.
“Blythe.” A pause, the rails filling it. “I don’t know how to do the thing you’re asking. I’ve never once in my life known how.” Another pause, longer. “But I lay awake last night after you fell asleep, and I have to tell you, it’s becoming a genuine problem that I want to learn.”
Chapter Ten
THE TROUBLE STARTS, as most of my troubles do, with me being good at something.
We’re in the lounge car after dinner, the whole investor crowd of us, brandy going round and a card game I don’t know the rules to and the lamps turned low against the dark sliding by outside, and I’ve been parked on a velvet bench beside a man I’ll spare the naming of, he not deserving to be a footnote in what comes after, a younger rancher with an easy laugh and kind eyes and four thousand head of cattle up near Amarillo.
He asked me, an hour ago, what I actually do, not what a Karalis fiancée does but what I do, and made the fatal error of seeming to mean it, and so I’ve been telling him about the birds.
I forget myself when I talk about the birds. That’s the trouble with me. I forget the borrowed dress and the borrowed name and the man across the car, and I light up, I know I do, I’ve been told, and the young rancher’s leaning in with his chin in his hand asking real questions about jess and creance and why a one-winged kite is worth saving.
And somewhere in the middle of explaining how you imp a broken feather, I notice the whole car’s gone a little quiet, and I notice why, and the why is standing by the bar with a brandy he isn’t drinking and a look on his face I’ve never once seen there.
Loukas Karalis is jealous.
It’s so absurd I nearly laugh. This morning the man recited me a whole philosophy over the eggs, how we were far too mature to confuse a storm with anything daylit, how nobody gets hurt, how sensible it all was, and now here he stands gone the color of his own brandy because a nice boy from Amarillo wanted to know about my birds.
He’s no right to it. He bought my company for a week and swore the rest meant nothing, and a man who means nothing doesn’t get to look at me like that across a crowded car, like he’s working out whether the velvet bench will hold his weight if he comes over and removes the competition by hand.
So I do the unforgivable thing. I let it run a little.
