by Alexis Anne
He laughed. “The only reason you’re okay is because you’re an eternal optimist. Someone like me would have crumbled.”
“I’m not an optimist.” I hadn’t been for a long, long time.
“Bullshit.” He looked at me over the tops of his sunglasses before turning his attention back to traffic. “You see the good in every situation. You have faith things will work out. When times are hard you put your nose down and work. I hate to break it to you, Lily, but you’re an optimist.”
He’s said that at the waterfall too. “But I worry.”
“I think optimists are still allowed to worry, babe.”
“She’s not wrong.” I changed the subject without warning. “Meredith. The shit going down with my parents is ugly and you being attached to me wouldn’t be good for business.”
It just wouldn’t. If he thought his sex life interfered with his work then my life would be a catastrophe.
“Let me worry about that.”
I turned in my seat so I was facing him. “But I can’t, Colt. If you’re serious about us then you should know everything before you say you can handle it.” I never wanted to be in the position I was in when I came to Landry Ranch again. Half information, white lies, whatever I called it didn’t matter. Having to explain it did.
It sucked.
“All right. Lay it on me. How bad is it?”
“Maybe we should pull over.”
He arched a skeptical eyebrow. “Babe.”
“Fine. There’s been a string of problems over the last two years. It started with tax evasion.” He winced. “Followed by accusations—that have now turned into law suits—that they intentionally used the Hope Foundation to scam two hundred and thirteen people out of their money.”
“How much?”
This time I winced. “Ten million dollars.”
He let out a low whistle. “That will get you some serious time in jail if it proves to be true. But it doesn’t involve you.”
“There are rumors that I was part of the whole thing. I wasn’t,” I said quickly.
“I know. You don’t have to tell me about false rumors.” To my surprise he pulled off the road and into the gravel. “You’re right. It’s bad. It won’t look good for a guy trying to hold his family company together to suddenly shack up with a woman whose family is accused of scamming people out of money. What?”
I grinned. “You said shacking up.”
He grinned. “I did. I just assumed that at some point, if things kept going well . . . ”
I leaned across the console and kissed him once on the lips. “I like it.”
“Is there more?”
Oh, there was more. But nothing nearly as horrible. “They sold my grandmother’s Oscars. That’s when people really turned on us as a family. I had nothing to do with it. I would have paid for them myself if I’d known what they were doing. And then they sold the remaining film rights. Between that and the scam, no one wanted to touch me. Every studio called me a bad bet.”
“I’d bet on you in a heartbeat.”
And I could tell he meant it. “Luckily Ted did that. He was the one who got me this film about your parents and brought me to your ranch. He’s like a fairy godfather or something.”
Colt busted out laughing. “Why do I get the feeling he’d love being called that?”
Because he would. “So that’s what I’ve been dealing with for the last two years, on top of all the other crap they’ve put us through over the years. That’s what you’d be bringing into your world.”
“It could be worse.” He took my hand and began playing with my fingers. “It’s a volatile time for the ranch. The next few weeks are so important to making it work once and for all. If it all falls together right, I won’t have to worry anymore. It’s taken ten years, but it’s finally working.”
That made me happy and sad at the same time. “Then I’m the last person you should have around. Not yet.”
He threaded his fingers between mine and drew our hands up to his mouth. He kissed each of my knuckles in turn. “I had this fantasy. When I returned to The Westerly I’d have all this behind me. I could call myself a success and be totally open and available to a relationship with you.” He shot me a cheeky grin. “That is, if you showed up.”
“Oh I was going to show.”
“I know. But up in the loft the other night I realized something, Lily.” He said my name so sweetly.
“You’ve been calling me that more and more.” And I loved hearing it.
“Because it’s your name. I don’t want the fantasy anymore. Up in the loft talking about my past, I realized I’m glad you showed up unexpectedly in my life. You’ve seen me at my worst and you’re still here. I want the real thing with you.”
If the car had been any bigger I would have crawled into his lap, but there was no room for anything as romantic as that. A kiss would have to do. So I grabbed his shirt and yanked him to me. “Kiss me, cowboy.”
CHAPTER 19
The next few weeks were pretty magical. Filming continued at a steady pace and in my down time Colt and I developed a pretty deep friendship over whiskey and poetry, emails and long morning walks. We didn’t talk about the past and in retrospect I think it was because were both afraid of upsetting the wonderful place we’d reached.
We should have known nothing stops the inevitable.
“I can’t believe this is my first time in your office.” It was basically the entire fourth floor of the main house. Well, Colt’s actual office was one half, while the other half was used by his small staff of five. I was surprised to learn that Grayson had a desk.
“I guess we just never got around to work.” He moved to the window and pulled up the dark wood blinds.
“You’ve been to the set. You’ve watched me work.”
“Yes, but what you do is interesting. If you watched me work you’d be bored to tears.”
“No angry phone calls?” I whispered loudly.
“Only one or two a day,” he whispered back. “It’s actually a lot of paperwork and planning. Oh and ass kissing. I hate the ass kissing.”
“No you don’t.”
He blushed. “True. When it comes to you.” He took my hand and led me around. The office was spacious but dark. Dark woods, dark red rugs and curtains. Oddly, I had never pictured Colt as a red.
“Who decorated your office?”
“What do you mean?” We stopped beside a large grandfather clock that I could not imagine Colt intentionally picking out.
“Someone chose the curtains, the rugs, the desk . . . who was it?” I stopped at a large saddle. It was clearly old by the way the leather was worn. It had intricate designs carved into it and a white hat laid over the horn.
I was willing to bet these were his father’s and this office hadn’t changed a bit since it became Colt’s.
“It’s just always been this way,” he shrugged.
Bingo. “You just don’t strike me as a guy who likes red.”
He started laughing.
“What?”
“Seriously?”
I was lost. “What’s so funny?”
He took a step toward me and grabbed a lock of my hair. “When we met you were a redhead.”
Oh. So maybe he did like a little red in his life. “Do you miss it?”
“Sometimes. I like you no matter what your hair color is, but the red was fun.”
Duly noted.
I stopped in front of a framed poem that hung behind his desk.
Be bold.
Be dogged in your pursuit.
Be the wind that blows
* * *
The leaf gets blown and knows not where it goes.
No author.
“Who wrote that?”
He didn’t answer.
“And all the other poems you keep sending me. Who wrote those?”
He still didn’t answer.
“Colt, they’re beautiful and meaningful. I just want to be able to go buy the book.”
He’d drifted away from me while I read and now he was on the other side of the room. “That was written by my dad. I’m not sure if it’s a poem or a mantra.”
“But you had it framed?”
He nodded. “It was what he instilled in me. It’s what I want this company to be. We’ve been the leaf for the last ten years. It’s time to be the wind.”
He was so close.
“Who wrote the other poems, Colt?” There was a strange tension in the air. Something magical but also desperate.
“I did.”
“You? You said you didn’t think you could ever write poetry.” The silence became deafening as neither of us moved or spoke. I wasn’t breathing and I didn’t think he was either.
“I never had. But then I met you and we talked about poetry and you said that you wrote it sometimes. When I got home and I couldn’t get you out of my head I knew I needed to do something. I saved them in my inbox hoping you’d send me a message one day.”
“You wrote them?”
He shoved his hands into his pockets and shrugged. “You make it surprisingly easy. And then you showed up . . . and I just keep writing. They’re all for you.”
My knees went a little weak at that. I mean, who doesn’t dream of a man writing them poetry? “Colt.”
“Do you like them?”
Did I like them? Was he insane? “They’re beautiful.”
He smiled. “Let me take you somewhere, if you have time.”
I’d go just about anywhere with him right now. “Of course.”
He shucked off his blazer and discarded his tie, rolling up his shirtsleeves. Then he toed out of his wingtips and replaced them with cowboy boots from the closet.
Then he put on his cowboy hat and I about died. He hadn’t worn it since I’d been there. But seeing him now, half business, half cowboy? He was sex incarnate and as quintessentially Colt as he could possibly be.
“Where are we going?”
He winked as he took my hand. “Trust me.”
* * *
WE RUMBLED through the pasture in an old army Jeep with the windshield folded down and a shotgun strapped to the side. “This is what I love.”
And I had to admit Colt looked really at home at the wheel. We were on his side of the ranch, the part he owned as the current Landry. Up until this point I’d spent all of my time on the side owned by the company. On the sets and in the fields we were using for shooting.
“What drives you, Lily?”
“Right now? You.”
That got me a laugh. “I meant to act. I can see how hard you’re working and how much it means to you. Where does that drive come from?”
“From inside,” I said simply. “It’s what I do. I’ve been acting out stories for as long as I can remember.”
And from every actor, painter, and writer I’d ever met who was as driven as I was, it was because those stories erupted from inside us, demanding to be let out in whichever form we were capable of telling them.
“I think it’s more than that.” He shifted gears and brought the Jeep over a rise and down a hill toward a second set of fields. “You see that building on the horizon?”
Probably a good mile or two away, up a much higher hill, sat a large brown building. It was the same adobe architectural style as Colt’s house. “Yes.”
“That’s the Landry Museum of Art and Music. It’s always been a very artistic community out here. There’s even an artists commune. My great grandmother was one of their original members. My great grandparents were an interesting couple. She was an artist through and through. Art was her life. She was famous for her paintings but she sculpted and did photography as well. She refused to marry my great grandfather for years, which drove him nuts. He was . . . well he wasn’t an artist,” Colt chuckled.
“He was like you,” I guessed.
“I guess you could say that to an extent. He was a cowboy. The Landry Ranch had been in his family for decades. He raised cattle, slept under the stars, and was a smart businessman. But there wasn’t an artistic bone in his body.”
Unlike Colt the poet. I still couldn’t get over that. My body hummed with warmth every time I thought about what he said. I wrote them for you.
“He wanted tradition. Marriage, settling down and babies. She wanted to defy tradition.”
“You’re both of them.” I smiled. “I’m guessing he won out.”
“Sort of. She agreed to marry him and move into his house, but he agreed to never contain her. When she died he was so heartbroken he built that museum to honor her memory. Over the years the endowment has grown right along with the museum.”
Their love made so much. Including the man beside me.
“I always wondered how your family business grew in so many different directions.”
“The ranch is the heart and soul of everything. The winery was a natural extension of that and has become a significant moneymaker for us. The museum has always supported itself and provides a lot of goodwill with the community. But the ranch is what has been floundering and having the heart pull everything else down has been a drain on the entire company.”
“Your father?”
“Was sick for a long time.” He pulled the Jeep up along the edge of two fields and stopped, cutting the engine and turning in his seat to face me. “It was lung cancer and yes, he smoked heavily his entire life. He fought it for a while, but he lost. And in those years he made some bad choices in an attempt to turn what was a stable business into more. He wanted to give me more time. He did the opposite.”
“And no one else could take over?”
He shook his head. “This is a family company. Always has been, always will be. Dad was an only child and Christina was already deeply entrenched in her career, getting ready to run for office. Asking her to take on the company would have been too much. We have never been publicly traded. We don’t have a board or stockholders that aren’t members of this family. I knew I could do it, so I did.” He looked over my shoulder. “Come on. I want to show you something.”
I took his hand as we wandered through the fields. The sunlight was long at this point in the summer and had a golden glow that turned everything the same shade of yellow. “Where are we?”
He turned another corner and beyond the field I could see a magnificent garden. “It’s a ways away from the house, but here we get the best mix of sun and rain. This is the family garden.”
Fifteen different boxes brimmed with vegetables of different varieties. “This is where you would go everyday and get in trouble for eating, isn’t it?” I laughed, thinking of a young Colt, covered in tomato juice, getting reprimanded for raiding the garden.
“Yep. Mom and our chef, Mrs. Le Claire, would get so mad. Sometimes they’d have to change recipes and dinner plans because I’d eaten everything.”
“You don’t talk about your mom.” And she hadn’t been by for the summer despite the rumor she spent part of her year at the ranch.
“That’s a difficult relationship.” He plucked a dark berry from a bush. “She still hasn’t forgiven Dad for dying.” He popped the berry in his mouth while I waited for more. “You know their story.”
“Do I?” I wasn’t sure where fiction met reality in the script.
He plucked several more berries and offered them to me. “They’re not too sweet. I promise.”
He remembered our conversation at the waterfall. My heart beat a little faster as I realized just how much Colt had absorbed, how much he cared. “Thank you.” I took the berries and tentatively took a small bite. The flavor burst over my tongue, but in a pleasant, lovely way that made me crave more. “It’s delicious.”
He smiled. “They took a lot of liberties in the script but the story is true. Dad met Mom one summer when she came to the ranch with a family friend. They were here to make a deal for our cattle. Mom’s from a pretty prominent political family, as you know, and she’d never spent time around horses. They fell in love while Dad showed her how to break a ho
rse. They eloped. Her parents went ballistic and tried to get it annulled, but they fought it. Her parents even tried to ruin the ranch to force her to come home.”
They were some pretty emotional scenes to play, I could only imagine how intense they were to live. I popped the last berry in my mouth, watching Colt move from box to box, checking each plant. He was so natural out here. He looked like he was home.
And that made my heart ache. He belonged here, not in an office worrying. “The movie ends with them saving the ranch and you and your sister running through the fields. What happened after that?”
He waved me to his side and I went very willingly. I loved the feel of his strong arm around me, holding me up as if nothing could ever shake us. “Mom loved the ranch, but not the business of it all. It drove her nuts. Besides, it was always Dad’s.” He brushed my hair back and cupped my face. “She worked for my uncle when he was in office and now she helps run the staff for Christina. She’s much better suited to politics than ranch life. She’s not here this summer because of the movie. She can’t stand to be around it.”
She must have really loved Colt’s dad. “She’s heartbroken.”
He nodded slowly, his eyes dropping to my lips and back up to my eyes. “I finally understand how losing someone can destroy you,” he whispered. “I used to be really mad at her for refusing to help with the ranch, but now I know. She couldn’t. Her heart couldn’t take it.” He kissed me, then pulled back, his eyes locked on mine. “I’ve forgiven her but things are still strained.”
“I understand strained.”
He grimaced. “I know I don’t have a right to say this yet but, they have no place in your life, Lily. Your parents aren’t good people.”
I really didn’t know how I felt about that.
“The things I’m feeling for you Lily, they’re big things.” He brushed a hand through my hair, his other pulling me closer. “And it makes me want to remove all the bad from your life. I want . . . ” his voice fell away as his eyes searched mine.
“You want what?” I felt like the world was slipping out from under my feet even though I knew they were firmly planted on the ground. I was so caught up in the moment, in Colt, in wanting this.