Chapter 5 #3
He went around the side of the cabin and found her sitting on the creek bank with her feet dangling in the water.
She had on a ridiculous floppy hat and a pair of big red plastic sunglasses, reminding him of vintage photographs he’d seen of Hollywood starlets.
He stopped to surreptitiously watch her and despite himself enjoyed the scenery.
She looked like a cover shot for Life magazine.
Sensing his presence, she flicked her head and caught him staring. She pushed the sunglasses down her nose and stared back without saying a word.
“My mom’s looking for you.” He hiked over to her spot and sank down beside her.
“Why? Because if there’s more bad news, I don’t want to know about it.”
“She didn’t say. Publicist-client privilege. But she’s worried about you.”
She turned her head and looked at him. “I think she’s the only one in the world who is.”
He couldn’t tell if she was telling the truth or just feeling sorry for herself. He didn’t have time for either but continued to sit there, anyway.
“You should call her.” He pried off his cowboy boots, slid off his socks, rolled his pant legs up, and dropped his feet into the creek. The water was colder than he expected, but it felt good in the heat.
She nodded but didn’t make a move to get her phone. “Who were the women in the red truck? I saw them drive toward the gate a little while ago.”
“Farmers. They want to lease some land from us to grow flowers and sell them from the ranch.”
“As part of the business plan Aubrey and Charlie have?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Flowers are nice, but they’re not going to turn this place into a destination.”
“Who said anything about turning Dry Creek Ranch into a destination?”
“I thought that was part of the plan.” She lifted one foot out of the water and Sawyer watched her wiggle her toes.
Her nails were painted bubblegum pink. A little cutesy for a woman who ran a multimillion-dollar enterprise, but for some reason he found them hot—and he wasn’t usually into feet.
“Not my plan,” he said. “I just want something that will bring in a steady income in addition to the cattle.”
“And you think flowers will do that?”
No, he didn’t. “Maybe. They just graduated from ag school and they need land. We’ve got it. It’s a win-win.”
Gina didn’t say anything, just continued to nod her head. But she was skeptical. Sawyer could see that.
“What would you do?” he asked her.
“It depends what your objective is. If you’re just looking for pocket change, a flower shop might do the trick. But according to what you told me, it sounds as if you need a steady flow of income. Significant income, right?”
He didn’t want to go into any more financial details about Dry Creek Ranch with her. Truthfully, he was tired of talking about money. Lord knows he and his cousins had been going around and around about it since the day the lawyers had read their grandfather’s will and trust.
“Why’s my mother the only one who’s worried about you?
” He was violating his don’t-ask, don’t-care policy with her.
But surely she had family and friends who realized how precarious her situation was and cared about her.
Even though she’d made her own bed—so to speak—it did leave her business on shaky ground.
Take Paula Deen. The celebrity chef had never fully recovered after her fall from grace. There was no reason to believe Gina would, either.
“My mother’s dead and even if she were still alive, she’d say I was ultimately destined to be a failure.”
Sawyer drew back. “Mommy issues, huh?”
Gina let out a mirthless laugh. “Big-time. I was adopted at birth and a great disappointment to Sadie DeRose. I wasn’t beautiful enough, popular enough, smart enough, social enough to meet her expectations.
She thought she and my father had found the perfect mother to birth the perfect child.
And it turned out that I was merely average. ”
Sawyer thought she was far from average. By anyone’s standards she was a huge success. And beautiful. He might not like her, but any objective person could see she was someone special.
“What about your father?”
“Gino?” Her face lit up. “He adored me. Unfortunately, he died when I was nine.”
“The Gino DeRose?” Sawyer didn’t know why he hadn’t put the connection together sooner. DeRose. The man was a legend in the film industry. A director whose body of work had changed the face of foreign cinema. “Wasn’t your mother an actress?”
She bobbed her head in a combination that was part-nod and part-shake. “Besides a few roles in my father’s films, she never really broke out. By the time I came along, she’d all but given up. I was her great hope.”
“Did she at least get to see your cooking show?”
“In its very early iteration. I don’t think she understood the cultural phenomena of FoodFlicks. I may as well have been a car show model to her.”
Sawyer suspected as many people watched FoodFlicks as they had Gino DeRose’s films. Perhaps even more. “What about your various business ventures? She must’ve been proud of those.”
“Most of it came later…after she’d passed. It doesn’t matter. It wasn’t her dream for me. She wanted me to be what she couldn’t be. A movie star with a shelf full of Oscars and a face like Angelina Jolie.”
He turned to her, tilting his head to one side to take a long look. A thorough look. “You have a good face, Gina. I’d take your face over Angelina Jolie’s any day.”
She leaned back, rested on both elbows, and studied him as if she was waiting for the punch line to a joke. When none came, she said, “That’s the nicest compliment anyone has ever given me. You know what, Sawyer Dalton? You’re okay.”
“Right back atcha.”
They held each other’s gaze and moved close enough so that their legs were touching. The heat between them was palpable.
For a long while they didn’t talk, letting the sounds of the creek fill the silence. In those quiet moments he wondered about Danny Clay. Hadn’t Clay ever told her she was irresistible?
Sawyer wanted to ask, but resisted. They were having a moment.
A weird moment, but he didn’t want to disrupt their tentative cease-fire.
Why was a whole other story. One that he was going to put on the back burner while he enjoyed the sun, the creek, and the pretty woman sitting beside him.
Even if she was a natural-born disaster.