4. Meg
CHAPTER 4
MEG
I t took about thirty seconds to fully realize who was standing in front of her, and it felt like the longest thirty seconds of Meg’s life. Time slowed down to a crawl as her brain tried to process the impossibility standing before her.
Nash? No. No way. There was no way that Nash Callahan had ended up running a ranch . Running a ranch took tremendous amounts of responsibility. Running a ranch took drive , and those were traits that Nash had never had all that much of. This was ridiculous. But the denial burned away pretty quick when the man standing in front of her grew pale and still, looking just as confused and horrified as she felt.
Holy crap, it was Nash. Over the last decade whenever she’d had a fleeting thought of him, she’d still seen him as a gangly teenage boy. But here he was, the fully grown version. His hair was a shaggy mess, overgrown and darker than she remembered. His skin was tanned several shades darker as well, which really was proof that he spent his time outside. A silver scar ran through his eyebrow and down to the top of his cheek. That definitely hadn’t been there the last time she had seen him.
Oh, God. What was she supposed to do now? They were just standing there in silence. Nash’s arms were at awkward angles beside him, as if he’d forgotten how they worked, while the strap of Meg’s bag cut into her shoulder. The bag that was stuffed with clothes and necessities because she was supposed to be staying here for the foreseeable future.
Meg was a nanosecond away from turning around and sprinting back to the truck when Nash finally broke the silence.
“Um, hi.”
Well, that was anticlimactic, wasn’t it?
“Hi,” Meg replied. Every other option right now seemed either ridiculous or just plain awful. Saying hi was a relatively safe thing to do.
“So…” Nash said, seeming to collect himself in slow motion. “You’re the fancy veterinarian, evaluation… person?”
He waved a hand in the direction of Meg’s company truck, the logo obnoxiously large on the passenger door.
“Yep, that would be me,” she said, aiming for a smile and ending up with a grimace. “And you… work here?”
“Uh, actually, I own the place. Technically my brother did too, but he signed everything over to me… Will? You remember Will? But, yeah, just me at the moment.”
He paused his awkward ramble and cleared his throat. Because yes, Meg remembered Will, of course she did. Just acknowledging that though, for Nash to mention the past out loud, brought everything back in a rush. Their friendship, which had seemed unbreakable, eternal even. Her stupid crush that she’d gotten carried away with. Memories of standing alone in the corner of the school gym, hope fading with every unanswered text message.
“Yes,” she said curtly. “I remember.”
She said nothing else because any desire to be nice had fled her body. She wasn’t going to try and fake another smile. She certainly wasn’t going to help along this limping conversation. Nash could struggle and do it himself.
Meg took a few seconds to give a cursory glance around the place. It looked like a postcard, with green pastures and blue skies. There were some horses milling around, a stable, and an old tractor broken down and rusting, and somehow that only added to the fairytale look of the place.
Nash, apparently, had finally found his voice again.
“They, the company, they said you were happy to stay in the main house?” It came out as a question.
Was he giving her an out, an opportunity to turn around and run away? Well, that wasn’t going to happen. The shock was starting to wear off, and in its place was a whole lot of anger that Meg had been ignoring for the better part of a decade. She was here to do a job. If that made Nash Callahan uncomfortable, then that was just a bonus.
“Yep. That’s right,” she said coolly. Nash just nodded as if he were accepting his fate. Meg couldn’t even bring herself to make her face look neutral. She could feel a frown forming with every passing second.
“I’ll show you your room, then,” he said. With that Nash turned to the house and strode off, shoulders hunched. Meg gripped the strap of her duffel bag with white knuckles as she followed him.
Inside it was nice , and she really hated to admit it. She had been expecting the usual run-down old farmhouse, cluttered and dusty and dark. The outside certainly looked run-down, with flaking paint and a few missing clapboards up on the second story. But inside it was clean and neat in the entrance, which shot off to a kitchen and a living room. The windows were open, and the house was bright and fresh with the morning breeze fluttering through. There were even houseplants, adding pops of green around the place.
“Uh, kitchen,” Nash said, pointing a finger towards the mentioned room. “Living room. Downstairs bathroom. There’s one upstairs as well, where my room is. And this…”
She followed him down the short hall to a bedroom just as neat and clean as the rest of the place.
“This is where you’ll be staying. If you want to, that is…”
He snuck a glance at her out of the corner of his eye then looked sternly at the bed pushed up against a wall. He was still giving her an out, she realized, an opportunity to say no thank you and walk straight back out the door. Meg wanted to. She wanted to run from this as fast as she could and not look back.
But then her stubborn streak made an appearance. This was making her feel uncomfortable, sure, but Nash looked like he was suffering about a million times worse. That made up her mind, then and there, to stick around and do her job. She hadn’t done anything wrong. There was no reason for her to be the one running away. And if sticking around meant it made Nash feel like crap, well… spite was a powerful motivator sometimes.
“Thanks,” she said, walking into the room and throwing her bag down with a decisive thud. “This will do great.”
She gave him a smile, lips pressed tight together, and looked him dead in the eye. He was the first to break eye contact, and it gave her a savage little thrill.
“I’ll let you get settled, then,” he said and fled, walking off, and a few seconds later Meg heard the front door open and close. Meg closed her own door and locked it for good measure, sitting on the edge of the bed.
She needed to think, but there were too many things she needed to think about. And before she could think about any of it, she really needed her heart rate to slow down to a normal level.
Nash Callahan ran a ranch. Nash Callahan ran a ranch that she needed to evaluate. She needed to stay on this ranch with Nash Callahan for a couple of weeks, at the very least, ask him questions off her list, see to his animals, and survey the land.
Nash Callahan had blown out of the past and knocked down the carefully constructed walls that Meg had built around herself. Now she felt stripped bare, out in the open, without a single safety line to cling onto.
There had been no apology from him. She’d fantasized about that sometimes, though she would never admit it out loud. Especially in her first few months at college, living in a Texas dorm. She’d imagined him busting through a classroom door and making a grand announcement in front of everybody, falling to his knees and begging for her forgiveness and making it all right. She’d still had enough hope in her that Meg had been willing to forgive him if only Nash would reach out. That was the test; he had to be the one to reach out first. But after the disastrous prom night, she’d never even gotten a text. By the end of her second semester, any chance of forgiving him was gone and her hurt had turned into cool, hard resentment.
Up until now, Nash Callahan had been nothing but an embarrassing memory and one of life’s harder lessons. She’d imagined him falling to his feet, begging for forgiveness. But there had been no sign that he was remotely remorseful; if anything he seemed bent out of shape that she was there, like turning up had been an inconvenience. So Meg didn’t think there would be an apology at all.
And really, when she thought about it, what hurt most was that he probably didn’t even remember standing her up at the prom and saying all of those hurtful things. What hurt was knowing that he had no idea how much she was hurt at all.