Starting Over at Steeple Ridge (Timeless Romance Single Book 3)

by Liz Isaacson

  “What’s going on with you?” Jewel asked.

  “Nothing,” Missy said.

  “You sat with Tucker.”

  “So what? He doesn’t know anyone else in town.”

  “He knows Gladys Bright.”

  “He’s her neighbor.”

  “Do you like him?”

  “Sure, he’s nice.” Missy started to move toward her truck, but Jewel wouldn’t be deterred. Finally, Missy said, “Jewel. It’s nothing. We work together. He didn’t know anyone else. I told him what time the service started, and he sat by me. Big deal,” and kept walking.

  “It is a big deal!” Jewel called after her.

  “No, it’s not!” Missy managed to make it to her truck before she smiled. Sitting with Tucker—holding his hand—definitely was a big deal. She’d spent a day stewing over the fact that he’d been married before and that they hadn’t talked about it like he’d said they would. She’d tried dating the past twelve months, but no one in town had captured her interest—until now.

  As she drove out of the church parking lot, she met a red light and stopped. Am I ready now, Lord? she prayed.

  A distinct impression came that testified to her that she was ready to move on with her life. That she could actually live a life again. A life she wanted. A life she enjoyed. A life worth having.

  A week passed, then two. Tucker didn’t take her to dinner—at least not one that counted as a date. Stopping to buy oats or pick something up for the farm didn’t count as a date, even if they ate a meal afterward.

  When she told him as much, he blinked at her. “They don’t count?”

  “No,” she said emphatically. “You can’t do farm business and call it a date.”

  His confusion was cute, really. “And I suppose all this time you’ve spent teaching me to ride, and showing me how to care for the horses, and revealing your master filing system doesn’t count either.”

  She straightened, the broom she was using to sweep the aisle in the back barn still at her side. “We’re at work. None of that counts.”

  He leaned on his shovel, a mischievous half smile on his face, that delicious beard calling to her to touch. “Well, shoot. Here I thought we were dating.”

  Missy scoffed. “Holding a woman’s hand and buying her pizza doesn’t count as dating if you take her shopping for horseshoes and pay the farm bills at the same time.”

  “I wish I would’ve known those rules in advance.”

  She giggled and pushed her broom against the cement. Swish, swish. “Well, now you know.” Swish, swish.

  “So if I kiss you at work, does that count as a kiss?”

  She froze for one, two breaths and then spun toward him. “There is no kissing at work.”

  “None?” He took a slow step forward, and she scurried behind the broom to use it as a shield, her heart suddenly bobbing in her throat.

  She shook her head, but she couldn’t get her voice to work. Sure, she’d thought about kissing him. Every eligible woman in Island Park had thought about it. She’d have to be a robot not to have thought about it.

  And yes, he’d held her hand on multiple occasions, and they’d worked together in close quarters several times. But now, the devilish glint in his eye spoke of pressing her against the stall wall and kissing her with everything he had.

  Truth be told, she wouldn’t object.

  But if she were playing the honesty game, she was also terrified. She hadn’t kissed a man since Kelton, which meant she hadn’t kissed anyone but him in seven years.

  Seven years.

  “I haven’t really dated since my divorce,” she blurted out.

  Tucker’s step stalled. “I haven’t either.”

  She appraised him, and she appreciated that he didn’t have many barriers in place. She could almost see right into his soul through his eyes, and she marveled at his confidence. “You haven’t? You’ve been divorced for five years.” He’d told her about his ex-wife and how they’d married young, how he’d been foolish to believe he could make something work with someone as pessimistic as Tiffany had been.

  “Wasn’t interested,” he said.

  “And you are now?” She grinned at him, flirting full force.

  “That hurts me,” he teased. “You think I go around holding everyone’s hand?”

  “Yes,” she threw back at him. “You hold Gladys’s.”

  He chuckled, the sound dark and rich and wonderful, like her favorite chocolate. “You got me there. She brings me pies and bread too.”

  “She does what?”

  “Oh, did I not tell you that?” He ducked his head so that the brim of his cowboy hat hid his eyes. She couldn’t help her growing attraction to him when he did simple things like that. “Chocolate pie and honey wheat bread.”

  “I think I’m going to need to have a talk with Gladys.” Missy giggled, her joy morphing into a squeal when Tucker swept her off her feet and twirled her in a circle. When he righted her and gazed down into her eyes, she thought he’d kiss her despite her rules.

  “Please don’t talk to Gladys,” he said, his voice husky. “There’s nothing between us. It’s just pie.”

  Missy tipped her head back and laughed, her hands automatically snaking up to Tucker’s neck. “All right,” she said. “I won’t mention anything to Gladys.”

  “Good.” Tucker stepped back and retrieved his shovel from where he’d dropped it. “Besides, it’s not like I was cheating. Apparently, we haven’t even been out once yet.”

  “True,” Missy said.

  “So, are you free for dinner tonight?”

  “Sure, anytime after six. You should run your errands first.”

  He growled—a deep, sexy sound from the back of his throat—and she dissolved into laughter again. The sound mixed with the swish, swish of the broom as she got back to work.

  Tucker didn’t kiss Missy that night. He wanted to, badly. But he didn’t. He didn’t want their first kiss to happen on their first date. That didn’t feel small town to him, and he wanted the small-town experience.

  How was he supposed to know that he couldn’t mix business with pleasure? In New York, everything was blurred. He had business lunches, and business parties, and he moved seamlessly from work to play and back at all hours of the day or night.

  But out here, at least for Missy, things were much more compartmentalized. So he took her to the Pizza Palace, and held her hand as they walked down the street, and asked her questions about horseback riding—and finally, her ex-husband.

  She tensed and took a few steps before she seemed to breathe again. “Kelton was …” She shook her head. “He wasn’t a nice man.”

  Tucker squeezed her hand and drew her a half step closer to him. “And how did someone as kind as you wind up with an unkind man?”

  “He saved his cruelty for after we were married, behind closed doors.”

  Alarm welled in Tucker’s gut. “Did he hurt you?”

  “Yes,” she whispered. “Only verbally, though. He never hit me.”

  “Doesn’t make it okay.”

  “Or less hurtful.” She held her head high as she walked, and Tucker admired the strength in her. “I went to therapy for a year, but sometimes his words are still there. Still haunting me. Still trying to convince me I’m not worth very much.”

  Regret raged through Tucker, and he slid his arm around her waist and drew her into his side. “I’m sorry.” He pressed a kiss to her forehead, wishing he could’ve been there to protect her from that pain in her life. “I think you’re wonderful.”

  “You’ve known me for three weeks.” She nudged him with her shoulder.

  “I’ve worked by your side for ten hours a day, seven days a week,” he said. “It’s almost like, oh I don’t know, six months’ worth of time.”

  She didn’t agree or argue, and he led her back to his truck. Drove her home. Walked her to her porch, where once again, the blanket of stars overhead created the near-perfect background for a goodnight kiss
.

  Missy looked up at him with hope and desire burning through her sea glass green eyes. “Well, good night,” he said. He drew her into a hug and released her before he lost his resolve and kissed her.

  As the weeks passed, he became quite adept atop a horse. He’d chosen a tall black stallion that he owned as his riding horse. Licorice—another food name, Tucker noted—had a gentle demeanor, and Tucker liked learning how to ride.

  He could bathe a horse as fast as Missy now, and he could get the farm unlocked and feeding started without help. He knew how to run the farm from behind a desk, but he hated that part of it. So he’d asked Missy to do it, and she said she’d done it before and could keep on with those administrative tasks.

  She taught horseback riding lessons and after-school camps. She fed horses and interacted with the patrons as they came to drop off or pick up their animals. It was exhausting work, and Tucker had hired four cowhands to come help with the horses, the planting, and anything and everything on the farm. He’d bought furniture for the two-story house on the property, and the men would bunk there.

  By the time June arrived, so had the heat—and the end of Tucker’s patience. He wanted to take his relationship with Missy to the next level. He’d been taking her to dinner, and movies, and on walks in the park. He’d hung out at her house, and they’d spent several weekend afternoons with Gladys.

  “Let’s take the horses into the woods for a picnic,” he said one Saturday morning near the middle of the month.

  Missy glanced up from the desk, where she was working on something he’d probably hate. “Today?”

  “Yes, today.” He swept his hand toward the small window behind her. “Have you seen the sky today? It’s never this blue in New York City.”

  She smiled and dropped her eyes back to the paperwork. “I’m sure it is.”

  “Come on.” He crossed the room and sat in front of her. “I’ve got to get off this farm for a while. Just a couple of hours.”

  “You have food for a picnic?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do.” He hadn’t left any plans to chance. “And I can saddle my own horse now. I’ll do yours too, and then we can go.”

  “I need to finish this application.”

  Frustration pooled behind Tucker’s words. “Fine. Come find me when you’re ready.” His cowboy boots made angry punctuation marks on the floor as he walked out. All too soon, hers caught up to him.

  “Are you mad?”

  “No.”

  “Yes, you are.” She tugged on his arm to get him to stop. “That application is for our junior riders. If I don’t get it in by Monday, they can’t participate in the show.”

  “That’s two days from now.”

  “We have the new staff coming this afternoon for a meeting, remember?”

  “Yeah, that’s this afternoon. Plenty of time for lunch in the woods.”

  She searched his expression, and she must have found what she was looking for, because she said, “You’re right. Let’s go.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.” She smiled and added, “Race ya to see who can saddle their horse first!” She took off before he could even agree, and he shook his head at her playfulness even as it allowed him to open his heart to her just a little bit more.

  An hour later, with trees surrounding them and their horses snacking on grass nearby, Tucker spread a blanket on the ground. He passed Missy a sandwich and placed a bag of chips between them. “Gladys made her famous potato salad.” He pulled out the container and two spoons. “It really is magnificent.”

  Missy giggled, and the sound had wormed its way straight into Tucker’s heart over the past several weeks. “Magnificent? Who talks like that?”

  “Try the potato salad,” he said. “Then you will.” He grinned and bit into his ham-and-Swiss sandwich. They ate with a symphony of breezes surrounding them. Tucker enjoyed the silence; it filled his soul to the brim, refreshing and rejuvenating him.

  When he finished, he lay down on his back and stared up at the treetops. “I love Vermont,” he said. “It’s so beautiful here.”

  “Cities can be beautiful too.”

  “There’s something magical about them, yes,” he said. “But there is nothing like this there, not even in Central Park.”

  “Is that why you moved here?” She’d asked him several times over the weeks why he’d bought Steeple Ridge Farm, why he’d chosen to come to Island Park. He’d always put her off with some answer about needing to get away from the pressures of city life. While that was true, it wasn’t the whole truth, and Missy seemed to know it.

  “Sort of,” he said. “I’d … lost myself in New York City. I was the guy everyone knew, everyone wanted to be, but I looked in the mirror one morning and didn’t recognize myself. Didn’t know who I was.”

  She snuggled into his side, and he draped his arm around her shoulder and pulled her closer. With her cheek pressed against his pulse, he said, “I needed to start over. So I sold everything I had and bought Steeple Ridge.”

  “And a house in town.”

  He might as well tell her who he was. She needed to know anyway. “Yeah,” he said. “And a house in town. And a new truck.” He gazed into the sky, stealing strength from the vastness of it. “Missy, I wrote and developed the easiest, most popular interface to create digital apps.”

  She gave him the courtesy of a few moments of thought. “Was that English?”

  He stroked his fingers down her arm to her elbow and back to her shoulder. “That’s how I felt most days.” He chuckled. “But seriously, if you wanted to build an app for say, your business, or a horse show so people could easily access the schedule, the list of participants, and the outcome, you’d buy a piece of software to help you do that. That way, anyone can build an app without any prior computer science knowledge. Are you with me?”

  “I think so.”

  “Well, I invented and developed that software. It’s used in over ninety percent of the apps you use on your phone, your computer, your tablet, everything.”

  “So you’re rich.”

  He exhaled, the moment drawing into a long pause as he searched his feelings. He trusted Missy. She’d never expressed much interest in his money before, and he couldn’t assume she’d care now. But he suspected she would. Most women did, and that was the number one reason he hadn’t dated in the city.

  “I sold my company for just over twenty-five billion dollars.”

  She sputtered as she pushed on his chest to lift herself off him. “Billion? With a B?”

  He shrugged, which he knew would annoy her. He added a playful smile to the mix when she pressed her lips into a flat line. “It’s just money.”

  “Twenty-five billion dollars.” She scanned their surroundings as if a unicorn would appear. She’d probably believe that more than she believed him right now. “So you’re a billionaire cowboy.”

  “Just because I wear the boots and hat doesn’t make me a cowboy.”

  She scoffed and kept eye contact with him. “You work hard on the farm. You know how to do everything now. You’re definitely a cowboy.”

  “Is being a cowboy a good thing?”

  Missy’s eyes took on a new edge. “I think so.”

  Desire dove through Tucker. “So we’ve been out several times now, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Is this a date?”

  She cocked her head to the side, the end of her braid slipping onto her bicep. “I suppose so.”

  Tucker didn’t wait, didn’t ask another question. He slid his hand to the back of Missy’s head and guided her mouth to his. She kissed him back with as much passion as he felt roaring through his own system. Kissing Missy was like experiencing fireworks for the first time, and as they snapped and popped between them, Tucker deepened their kiss and knew he was ruined for life—no other touch could be this sweet, this superb, this spectacular.

  Now that she’d kissed Tucker, Missy couldn’t seem to stop. She kissed h
im, and kissed him, and kissed him, until her lips felt swollen. And still she lay in his arms; the delicious scent of his cologne, the salty taste of his mouth coating hers, and the way his fingers combed through her hair were magical.

  He’d taken out the tie and undone the braid in her hair several minutes ago, and it was one of the most sensual things Missy had experienced in a long, long time. She traced her fingertip along the edge of his ear and down into the hair along the back of his neck, a sigh passing through every muscle in her body.

  Tucker chuckled, and she settled her face into the hollow of his throat, his strength almost overwhelming her.

  “I don’t believe you haven’t kissed anyone in a while,” he whispered. “You’re well practiced.”

  She swatted his chest playfully. “You weren’t half bad yourself.”

  “Half bad?” He shifted, and she lifted herself off his chest to look into his eyes. “I guess I better try again,” he said, leaning up to touch his lips to hers once more. Fire raced through her mouth. “I can’t be labeled as half bad.” He stole her giggle as he kissed her again, and when he pulled away, he was anything but half bad.

  By the time she put enough distance between them to get packed up and on her horse, she worried they’d be late for their meeting with the new cowboys.

  “It’s fine,” Tucker said when she mentioned it. “They live right there on the farm. When we get back, we’ll talk to them.”

  She nodded and fell silent, letting the breeze in the birch leaves do all the talking. She tried to avoid hearing him say twenty-five billion dollars, but the words echoed through her mind on a constant loop. The food she’d eaten an hour ago felt like broken bricks in her stomach. She couldn’t even look at Tucker. Somehow him being filthy rich made him absolutely unattainable.

  And yet, he still seemed to like her. Over the weeks, he’d definitely shown interest in getting to know her better—if him showing up on her doorstep with pizza or bringing her a single pink rose on a random weekday said anything.