Page 11 of The Rancher's Fake Fiancée
I should explain about Harry, the reason I’ve survived this train with my sanity in one piece. Hilary Montgomery can’t be much past thirty, a soft, dark-haired, serious slip of a thing who blushes if you look at her straight on and apologizes for her opinions before she’s even finished having them. And she’s married to the most alarming man aboard, a golden, blue-eyed slab of Texas named Devon who looks like he was hewn out of a mountain by somebody with a grudge against soft things.
The contradiction of the two of them undoes me a little.
She found me at breakfast that first morning, or rather she crept up to my table and asked, twisting her napkin, whether the seat was taken, and whether I minded terribly, and whether she was bothering me, and I liked her so immediately and so completely that I’ve let her trail me ever since like a shy dark-eyed shadow.
Today they’ve cornered me in the observation car, the prettiest room on the train and the one I keep coming back to like a moth with poor judgment, all curved glass and low leather chairs turned to face the country.
And the country is what I can’t get over, the one sight I’d pay to look at if I had a dollar to spare. The Hill Country’s given way to something harder and wider, the land gone tawny and openhanded and enormous, the kind of distance that does something complicated to a person’s chest.
Out past the glass a pair of black vultures ride the midday lift in slow figure eights, not flapping once, just trusting the air to hold them, and I catch myself narrating them under my breath the way I do for my school groups, see how they don’t waste a single wingbeat, see how they let the heat do the work, before I remember I’m meant to be a sophisticated woman in a borrowed silk blouse and not a tour guide in muck boots.
“You do that a lot,” Devon observes mildly, the first whole sentence he’s offered me all afternoon, a man who clearly considers most words an extravagance. “Talk to the birds.”
It catches me out, being seen doing it, and I cover the small lurch of it with a shrug. “They don’t ask anything back.”
The corner of his hard mouth moves, which Harry has told me, in a reverent whisper, is the equivalent of any other man turning a cartwheel.
“Loukas says you run a raptor place out in the Hill Country.” He turns his glass slowly in one big sun-browned hand. “Best in the state, he says. Says you’re too proud to let it be saved properly.”
Something in me trips and catches.
It’s a small thing, learning Loukas has talked about me to a friend, unguarded, the loose careless talk of men who think it doesn’t count, and worse, that what he said was the best in the state. I tuck it away to be angry about later, anger being far safer than what I am right now, which is warm in a spot I keep locked.
“Loukas talks too much,” I manage.
“No.” Devon doesn’t elaborate. He doesn’t need to, a man who’s never spent a syllable he didn’t mean, and the single bare no does more work than a paragraph would.
It’s Harry who fills the quiet, since filling quiet is what she does, nervous and fond at once.
“He told me he’d never love me,” she says, and her voice goes soft and certain, a sureness the rest of her never quite manages. “The day we married. Looked me dead in the eye and said it wasn’t in him, that I oughtn’t go hoping.” She isn’t pink now. That’s what stops me, that for once she isn’t apologizing. “He was wrong. He’ll tell you himself he was wrong, if you can get three words out of him on a good day.”
Devon says nothing at all. But his enormous hand turns over under both of her small ones and folds them in, and he lets her tell it, this granite man who lets nothing show, lets his wife lay their private history out on a train table in front of a stranger, and does the one thing he can do about it, which is hold on.
And I read it the way I read everything, off the small tells rather than the words, and the truth of it goes into me clean and cold and unwelcome.
A man who swears he can’t love you is most often a man already terrified that he does. I learned it just now off the set of a hard mouth and what those silent fingers did, and the trouble is I can’t make it stay over here, safely, with Devon. It keeps drifting two cars down and trying on a worn pair of boots.
I’m still sitting with that, undone by it, when Harry leans in, gathering herself with all that visible effort. “You look how I felt that first month,” she says gently. “Like you’ve already decided how it ends so it can’t surprise you. I just hate to think of you bracing for the worst, when it might be the best.”
I’m still hunting for one single word to give this impossibly sweet younger woman when I feel him, the change in the room, the air pulling tight the instant before weather breaks.
“Blythe.” Loukas is in the doorway, and something in his voice has gone low and rough and not at all rehearsed. “A word.”
I find him on the rear platform, the little railed-in shelf at the very back of the train where the tracks come unspooling behind us in two bright ribbons running clean to the horizon, the wind enormous and warm and loud enough to swallow everything, so a person could say almost anything out here and the world would never catch it.
He’s got both hands locked on the brass rail, his knuckles pale, a man holding hard to something, and I’ve just time to think oh no before he turns around.
“That story you told at dinner,” he says gruffly. “The proposal. The arguing forever.”
“It was a good story. They bought it.”
“You weren’t inventing it.” He says it like an accusation, like I’ve done him an injury. “I’ve spent two days trying to work out how you knew. How you reached into my head and pulled out the one proposal I’d ever have made, and then I understood.” He takes a step toward me, and the wind throws itself between us and loses. “You weren’t in my head at all, Blythe. You were in your own. You’d marry a man for the promise of arguing forever. You’d marry me.”
“You’re out of your mind,” I breathe, and I don’t step back, which is the whole trouble. I never step back. I’ve never once in eighteen years had the sense to step back from this man.
“Then tell me I’m wrong.” Another step, and now there’s nowhere left to go, only me and the brass rail and the tawny country tearing away behind us and Loukas Karalis near enough that the heat coming off him presses on me like a palm to the sternum. “Tell me you feel nothing, and I’ll never raise it again. Look me in the eye and lie, the way you lie about everything else, and I’ll believe you,agapi, I swear that I will.”
I can’t.
