The Charmer in Chaps

by Julia London

  Almost as if in response to her, Buddy suddenly surged to his feet and barked. Ella looked up to see Luca on a chestnut horse, loping across the pasture toward her house.

  Her smile was instantaneous. She hastily raked her fingers through her hair as she stepped off the porch to greet him.

  Luca reined his horse to a halt. He dismounted and looped the reins around the railing on the steps. He was wearing a ball cap today, the bill facing backward, his hair gathered in a small ponytail beneath it. His dark gray T-shirt said Renew Your World.

  “Hey,” she said, hoping her grin wasn’t too goofy. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

  He held out his arms. “Surprise.” Luca turned back to the horse and untied a satchel and a tool belt. He hoisted the tool belt over his shoulder and grabbed the satchel with his hand.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Forecast says rain this week. I brought what I need to patch your roof.”

  She gaped at him. “You’re going to patch my roof?”

  “Yep.”

  “Now?”

  “If that’s okay with you. Won’t take long.”

  She didn’t know what to say. She was immediately and deeply grateful—God knew YouTube wasn’t going to patch her roof—and also confused as to why this guy couldn’t pick up a phone and tell her he was coming. “That’s so nice,” she said.

  “You don’t have to sound so shocked. I told you I’m a nice guy.”

  “Well, sure, everyone says they’re nice. But you’re, like, proving it. Thank you. I have to admit it’s getting a little moldy inside.”

  “Don’t mention it,” he said.

  “I have to. It’s really nice,” she said, and when he arched his brow at her, she said, “Not that there is anything wrong with that. But dude, is your phone working? You keep catching me at my worst.”

  He smiled down at her with hazel eyes that were more green than brown or blue today, and said, “If this is your worst, I don’t think I can handle your best. I told you I’m bad at texting.”

  “That’s such a weird thing to be bad at,” Ella said.

  Luca’s smile broadened, so warm, so brilliant, and she remembered the way he’d smiled at her in algebra just in passing, and she’d been beside herself with girlish glee. She was feeling that girlish glee all over again.

  “Fortunately for you, I’m pretty good at things like patching a roof,” he said, and dropped the satchel to remove his chaps. The denims he wore fit him so well that Ella couldn’t help but look.

  He glanced up at her and gave her a lopsided smile. “Look all you want.”

  Ella could feel her cheeks bloom. “You are so conceited,” she teased him. “I was checking out your tool belt.”

  “Wow,” he said with a shake of his head. “There are so many things I could say about my tool belt right now.” His gaze skimmed over her, and he drew a deep breath. “Do you have a ladder?”

  She wanted to hear about his tool belt. “Yes,” she said. “It’s wooden.”

  He looked skyward for a moment. “I guess we’re going old school.”

  Ella couldn’t help but laugh. “You have no idea how old school it is around here.”

  They fetched the ladder, and she sat on the tree stump and watched as Luca went up on the roof while Buddy snoozed on the ground beside her. He moved around, testing his weight in several places, then dragged the satchel across the roof to repair the hole.

  It hardly took any time at all. When he came back down, she made lemonade. He took the glass she offered him and sat beside her on the top porch step.

  “You ought to get some chairs for the porch,” he suggested.

  “I don’t think the porch can hold the extra weight,” she pointed out.

  He nodded. “You might have a point.”

  Ella was acutely aware of every inch of him beside her. She tried not to ogle the beard shadowing his face. She tried not to think about how sexy he looked right now. She tried not to guess at all the things he could say about his tool belt.

  “Okay, the roof. You want the good news or the bad news first?” he asked after he’d downed the lemonade.

  “Always lead with the good,” she said.

  “Your roof shouldn’t leak for a while.”

  “Great!” she said. “So what’s the bad news?”

  “You’re in desperate need of a new roof.”

  Ella laughed. “Do they make used ones?”

  “Ella,” he said in all seriousness, “you have to replace that roof. I’m surprised you haven’t lost half of it by now.”

  That roof could get in line behind the missing kitchen faucet, the sag in the corner of the front bedroom where the wall was separating from the floor, and pig feed. “Well, here’s a surprise,” she said. “I don’t have the money to replace the roof.”

  He glanced over his shoulder at the house.

  “I know,” she said. “It’s a wreck.

  “It’s not a wreck. It’s just old,” he said. “With a little help, you could make this a nice farmhouse again.”

  She didn’t know if it had ever been a nice farmhouse. Her memories of it were very fond, but even so, she could remember wear and tear. Once, a floorboard had come up, and she had twisted her ankle in the gap. “Honestly, Luca, I can’t thank you enough for patching that hole. You’re a godsend.”

  “You’re very welcome. But if you really want to thank me, you can meet me for dinner in town. I’ve worked up an appetite.”

  Ella’s heart began to race. “Town. Three Rivers?”

  “No, Dallas,” he said, his eyes twinkling with amusement. “Yes, Three Rivers.”

  The nape of her neck began to turn warm. Dinner in town sounded so . . . real. “People will think we’re dating,” she said softly.

  “My God, the horror,” he said with mock concern. “How about we go to a taco stand? People wouldn’t think we were dating at a taco stand. That’s a meet and greet, not a date.”

  She smiled. “You’re right. We couldn’t possibly be on a date at a taco stand.”

  “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll ride home, get cleaned up, and meet you there at seven. It’s definitely not a date if I don’t pick you up, right?”

  “That puts it at chance encounter.”

  He slipped two fingers under her chin and turned her face toward him. “And I won’t kiss you,” he said as his gaze drifted to her mouth. “Because if I kiss you, we’re probably almost certainly dating.”

  She felt flush. Slightly overheated and a little loopy. Her eyes fluttered shut as he leaned toward her and kissed her, his lips and the tip of his tongue as soft as marshmallows. All sorts of sparks flared through her.

  Luca lifted his head and brushed her cheek with his thumb. “Deal?”

  “Deal. We’re not dating,” she said dreamily, and ran her hand up his forearm, feeling the muscles beneath her fingers.

  “We will never date,” he agreed, and kissed her neck, sending more little shocks of sparks down her spine.

  “We’re just friends,” she said with a sigh of pleasure.

  “We’re not even friends,” he said, and lightly bit the curve of her neck into her shoulder.

  And then, quite abruptly, he stood up and jogged down the steps and picked up his chaps. “I’ll meet you at the corner of Guadalupe and Blanco,” he said as he put on the chaps, then unwrapped the reins of his horse from the railing. “Know where that is?”

  “I think so,” Ella said. She was still hovering somewhere between the clouds overhead and earth, because Three Rivers had like maybe twenty corners and she knew them all, but she could not think of them at this moment.

  “Seven, okay?” he asked as he swung up on his horse. Buddy trotted down off the porch and stood ready to run alongside.

  “Okay,” she said, and leaned over th
e railing, trying quietly to catch her breath.

  He smiled as if he knew he’d won this round, and then sent his horse trotting through the hole in the barbed wire fence that separated her house from the dormant pasture.

  A moment later, Ella looked down to make sure she hadn’t actually floated away.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Luca spotted Ella as soon as he got out of the Sombra. She was sitting at a picnic table, her hair down her back except for the bits she’d put up in two knots on the top of her head to keep it out of her face. Her posture was very prim, her knees visible through the rips in her jeans, her hands clasped in her lap. She looked wholesome, fresh, and pretty, like spring, when everything was so colorful and green and you could believe that a new start really was possible.

  But at the same time, she was dead sexy. She was a siren behind a T-shirt and sweater and red Keds. He wasn’t fooled.

  He had to ask himself again how he’d missed her in high school. As a teenager, it seemed as if no girl—or rather, no parts of girls—went unnoticed by him, and yet he couldn’t conjure up much more than a few fleeting memories of Ella Kendall in the background.

  What a fool he’d been. Probably an ass, too, knowing himself as well as he did.

  This was a perfect spring evening with a bit of a chill in the air beneath the long, twisted limbs of the live oaks overhead. Clear globe lights were strung up in the branches to create a canopy of sparkly light. A smattering of potted flowers were scattered around to brighten things up.

  Ella stood up as he walked across the lawn. She seemed slightly nervous, which was different from the slightly annoyed look he’d come to expect from her. What’s this, Ella Kendall? Did you decide it was a date after all?

  “You made it,” he said.

  “You shaved,” she said.

  “A beard can be a hazard when eating tacos. Speaking of which, what’s your taco pleasure?”

  She slipped her hands into the back pockets of her jeans and looked over her shoulder at the stand. “What have they got?”

  “Miss Kendall, you are in for a treat. This is taco nirvana. These guys will put watermelon on your taco if you want it.”

  She laughed. “I definitely don’t want a watermelon taco.”

  “Then let’s check it out.”

  They walked up to the taco stand and perused the menu together, deciding, jointly, that the basic route—meat and cheese, lettuce and tomato—was the way to go. Luca ordered four, plus two beers, and when the man behind the stand turned to the cash register, he saw Ella slip her hand in her pocket. He caught her wrist. “I know you’re not thinking of pulling money out of that pocket on the grounds that this is not a date.”

  “I am,” she confessed.

  “Yeah, well, I refuse to be insulted by a farm girl. I invited you to tacos, and I am springing for the twenty bucks this is going to set me back.”

  “Are you seriously going to make a big deal about twenty bucks?”

  “Huge,” he assured her.

  She laughed. “Okay, cowboy, you win,” she said, and pulled her hand from her pocket, holding up both palms so that he could see she had no money.

  “That’s more like it,” he said, and gathered their food and beer.

  They chose a picnic table right in the middle of the clearing. They sat on top of it, side by side, and watched some kids playing in a bocce ball pit. Ella took a bite of a taco and closed her eyes with a sigh of contentment. “Oh my God,” she said.

  “Didn’t I tell you?” he asked.

  “They’re unbelievable,” she said, and took another bite, filling both cheeks like a squirrel.

  Luca laughed. He liked a woman who could eat, who wouldn’t watch him buy a bunch of tacos and take only a few bites. It made him smile. He was always smiling around Ella, and he seriously tried to think of a time he had smiled quite so much in the presence of a woman.

  He looked away to the bluebonnets in a grassy strip between the park and the parking lot. The bluebonnets brought to mind the spring behind the old Kendall place. A flurry of thoughts about what he could accomplish began to flit through his head. It felt strange to be turning all his attention back to the place he’d spent so much time as a boy, wandering around that spring, just a stone’s throw from the old Kendall place. “How’d you end up at your farm, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  Ella delicately wiped a bit of sauce from the corner of her mouth. “Just did.”

  “Nope,” he said, and put his hand on her wrist so that she couldn’t keep eating her taco. She looked at him with surprise. “You’re preventing me from devouring my taco.”

  “For the moment. Now listen, Ella, I’ve been doing my level best to scale the walls around you to know you. Are you going to tell me anything about you?”

  She pulled her wrist from his grip and took another bite. “I’ve told you things about me. I told you I’m an accountant.”

  “You know what I mean,” he said, and took her wrist once more, lifted her hand, and took a bite of her taco.

  “Hey!” she protested.

  “I’ll eat the whole damn thing if you keep dodging me,” he warned her.

  “Fine,” she said, and pulled her hand and taco back. “But I should warn you, my life is not a happily-ever-after kind of story. Can you handle it?” She said it teasingly, but she glanced at him from the corner of her eye, as if she was worried he couldn’t.

  Luca snorted at that. If she only knew. “Trust me, I can handle it.”

  “Really?” she asked, and with the back of her hand, brushed a bit of hair from her cheek. “I’m not talking about being poor. You’ve had it easy, Luca. Easier than I have, is all I’m saying.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he said. “Who made you judge of easy? You don’t know much about my life either,” he said in all seriousness. “Okay, yes, my family has a lot of money and land.”

  “And businesses.”

  “And businesses,” he conceded. “That’s the easy part. But that doesn’t mean my life has been charmed. And even if it had been all unicorns and ice cream, I can take whatever it is you want to tell me, Ella. I want to know. I’m dead serious—I want to know you. I want to understand you.”

  Her eyes moved contemplatively over his face. “Okay,” she said, nodding. “Just remember, you asked.”

  “What, are you a cannibal or something? Hiding some bodies out there?”

  “It’s not that bad. But ending up at that rundown farmhouse is a full circle for me. I started there. It was my first home—I mean, at least to my knowledge. I don’t really know, to be honest. I remember a time my mom and I lived with her parents, and my earliest and most enduring memories are of that house. But did I live there as an infant? I don’t know.”

  How odd to think of her on that farm when he’d been running around on the fringes of it. “I was running around that house when I was a kid. How long were you there?”

  She took a drink of her beer. “I was about six when child protective services removed me.”

  She said it so casually that Luca was momentarily startled. He knew she’d been in foster care, but he hadn’t really thought about how she’d ended up there. Or when. Six years old? When he was six, he’d been wrestling Nick for control of the toy wooden rifle their grandfather had made them. “Why?” he asked.

  “My mom got into trouble. She had a drug problem. And my grandpa was really sick, so my grandma couldn’t take care of me and him. My grandma came to visit me at first, but I guess my grandpa needed all her attention. She stopped coming after a while, and then, the next I knew, she had Alzheimer’s.”

  Luca stared at her. The emotion was gone from her voice. “You were in foster care all that time?”

  “Until I was eighteen. A children’s home at first, then different families. I never went home again.” She shrugged. “And then one day, th
is guy walked into the Magnolia with some papers.” She suddenly smiled. “Funny how something happens, and you can finally believe in those miracles everyone is always talking about.”

  “A miracle?”

  “That’s something a caseworker said to me once.”

  “Okay, hold up,” Luca said, and shifted so that he was turned toward her. “You’re going to have to start over so I can keep up.”

  She looked at him with her spring blue eyes, and he could almost see the internal debate about how much to tell him. But then she said, “Once, when I was maybe twelve, the state moved me to another foster home. My third or fourth, I don’t remember that or why I had to move, but that’s just the way it was. Anyway, I had to leave my blue bike and Tamir behind.”

  “And Tamir is . . . ?”

  “Another foster kid in the same home I was in. He was five. So cute,” she said, smiling. “I adored him. He was my shadow.” Her eyes shone with delight. “I remember we were outside playing—I was pulling him around in a wagon attached to my bike. This woman pulls up, and she had a puff of gray hair and so many bangle bracelets that they sounded like wind chimes. She’d come to get me, and I didn’t even know I was going. But sure enough, my bag was packed and ready at the door.” She glanced down. “It was horrible, to be honest. Tamir didn’t understand. I didn’t understand.” She shook her head and looked off to the bluebonnets for a moment.

  Luca was appalled by the image her words had painted in his head. His heart ached for those two children.

  “Anyway, this woman was trying her best to console me, and she said, ‘Well, things happen for a reason, and although it seems terrible now, something good will come of it.’” Ella rolled her eyes. “She said, ‘Sometimes, Ella, you just have to believe in miracles.’” She snorted. Then took another healthy bite of taco.