Chapter 28 Rowe
Rowe
“Deuces wild, boys!” A small girl with a ball of curly, red hair throws up her arms. “Who’s in?”
Beside me, Pane sighs in dismay. “I may or may not have taught my sister how to play poker.”
Natalie Maddox has taken up residence at a corner table in Sparkle Bar, and is surrounded by Isaac, Ron, and McCauley.
In front of her sits a pile of cash.
This is so not legal. A minor in a bar is even more illegal than trespassing.
At least, I think it is.
I slowly turn my head toward Pane. His expression is a mixture of disbelief and disgust. It’s like his usual scowl can’t figure out what it wants to be.
“This is your sister?”
“That’s Natalie,” he answers grimly.
Natalie looks like she arrived straight from school, as she’s wearing a navy skirt and a blazer with a crest sewn over the right breast. She’s got her legs tucked underneath her, and is leaning over the table, eyeing her cards and the other players like she’s trying to find the weakest link.
She seems to have zeroed in on Ron.
Isaac glances over from his spot at the table, sees Pane, and does a double take. “Be right back,” he says, scooting out his chair and striding quickly over to us.
“She showed up about an hour ago,” he explains to the hotel heir, who storms toward his sister. I can practically see the anger wafting off him in thick waves. Isaac must sense it, too. “Go easy on her.”
He shoots the bartender a hard look before his feet come to a screeching halt at the table.
Natalie looks up and sees Pane, and a grin breaks out across her face. She unfolds from her seat and runs over, throwing her arms around him.
“What took you so long?”
And just as quickly as his anger flared, it melts. Pane hugs Natalie, curling so that his chin touches the top of her head. He squeezes his eyes shut, and for the first time in the last hour, relief washes over his face.
My heart does this little throbby-achy thing as I watch his worry, fear, and angst dissolve.
Natalie pulls away and grins up at her big brother. “I told the boys that if they mess with the bull, they get the horns!”
“She’s killing us,” Ron says.
“This kid’s a shark,” McCauley grumbles in a friendly voice.
“Apparently,” Isaac explains, “the three of us left the party about the same time. Couldn’t find y’all when we did, but we headed over here to play our Wednesday game. About five minutes after we arrived, she showed up.”
Pane’s eyes flare with fear. “How did you get here?”
“I took an Uber from the airport.”
His voice hits the ceiling. “The airport?”
“Yeah. How else was I going to get here? I can’t Uber from New York.”
Pane closes his eyes. It looks like he’s mentally counting to one thousand. When he opens them, the sage green is dark, inky, angry.
“How did you get to Mystic Meadows?” he asks in a restrained voice.
“Oh, that?” She waves a hand. “I used an app to change my voice so that it sounded like Mom’s. Then I called the pilot and told him our destination. Since I didn’t know where you lived, I asked the Uber driver to take me to the busiest place in town.”
Anger fills his eyes as Pane glances down at her. “You’re in trouble, young lady. I don’t even know where to start—the voice app? Stealing a plane? Taking an Uber in a strange town? Natalie, you could have been killed, kidnapped!”
Her gaze drops to her feet, and when she speaks, it’s a whimper. “But I missed you and wanted to see you.”
My heart cracks in two right there. This poor kid, who’s been missing her older brother, moved the earth in order to see him.
“She missed you,” I whisper to Pane.
He looks at me and shakes his head. “Natalie, promise me that you’ll never do that again—any of it. Mom’s got the entire NYPD looking for you.”
She grimaces. “I’m sorry.”
“Stay here, and don’t move. I’m going to let Mom and Stone know that you’re okay. He’s on his way to New York right now to help find you.”
Natalie drags her top teeth over her bottom lip. “Am I in big trouble?”
He backs away and stops. “Mom will decide that.” Her face falls. Pane sees this, and his shoulders slump. “I’m glad you’re all right.” When she doesn’t look up, he bends at the waist until they’re eye level. “Hey.”
Her lids slowly lift. “Yes?”
“I love you, and I’m relieved that you’re safe.”
A cheeky smile spreads across her face. “What else?”
“And I’m glad you’re here.”
“I knew you would be,” she announces, throwing her arms around his neck.
He lifts her into the air and holds her tight. When his gaze flickers up, it finds me. My heart convulses at the sight of big, mean Pane Maddox melting like a Popsicle for his younger sister.
“Natalie, there’s someone I want you to meet.”
Now my heart’s thundering because Pane hasn’t taken those knee-quaking green eyes off me for several long luxurious seconds, making me feel like I’m the only person who exists in his great big world filled with hotels and important people.
My throat shrivels. For some reason, this feels very heavy, very large, like a momentous occasion.
He lowers her, and Natalie’s feet lightly touch the floor. “This is Rowe Wadley. We’ve been working together.”
Natalie sizes me up. Sharp green eyes that match her brother’s silently pick me apart. After several seconds, she pulls away from him and approaches me.
“So this is Princess Pain-in-the-Butt?”
My gaze snaps to Pane, who suddenly looks very guilty. I fold my arms. “What’s that?”
He coughs into his hand. “It’s nothing. Natalie,” he emphasizes, “Rowe owns piggycorns.”
She flaps her hands up and down with glee. “Piggycorns! You own them! Pane’s told me so much about the creatures. I want one. I want three! I want to see them.”
At this point, I can’t help but giggle at her glee. It’s absolutely deliciously contagious. “You’re welcome to meet them.”
“Natalie, you coming back to play?” McCauley calls out.
“Coming!” She starts to move off, but then runs up to Pane and hugs him again. “I’m so glad to see you.”
Then she grabs me by the hand and drags me to the table. “Come on. Let’s play poker!”
I laugh as she pulls up an empty chair. “All right. How do you play?”
Natalie wins just about every hand, even beating her older brother.
Pane plays with a grim expression on his face.
He’s angry about Natalie running off. But once we’re deep in the game, he asks her about school, who her friends are now, if William somebody is still pulling her hair every chance he gets.
If so, Pane threatens to make William disappear.
At that, Natalie laughs.
I do, too, though I wonder if, deep down, Pane is serious.
He probably is.
Watching them together softens something in me. When Pane brings back empanadas and Natalie ends up with some on her cheek, my heart just about explodes when he dabs a napkin to her face and cleans it off.
After playing for an hour, Pane tells her that it’s time to go home. The plane has returned to New York, and his mom is arriving tomorrow to retrieve her.
“On a scale of one to ten, how mad is Mom?” she asks when we’re in the truck.
“She’s glad you’re safe,” he says.
“So that means she’s at an eleven on the anger scale.”
There’s a stretch of silence before Pane says, “You’re going to be grounded. You knew that would happen.”
“I hoped maybe we could skip that part.”
He sighs. “You disabled Greta’s phone so that no one could reach her. What did you think would happen?”
“That I would stay here with you for the next month. There’s a boarding school only an hour away.”
Pane taps his strong fingers against the steering wheel. “I’m not . . .” He doesn’t finish his sentence, but I know what he’s going to say: I’m not going to stay here. Those are the words that almost slipped from his mouth.
But instead, he replies, “Mom would never let you leave New York. You know that.”
“One can always hope,” she says brightly. “And as for Greta, it’s her book club night. She always has her phone turned off anyway so that she and her friends can discuss their sex books.”
“Natalie,” Pane snaps. “What are you . . . How do you know . . . Never mind. Don’t say that word ever again.”
I can almost hear the grin in her voice. “You mean sex?”
I bite the back of my hand to keep from laughing.
Pane, however, is not laughing. He looks like he’s about to have a heart attack. “You’re too young to use the word, let alone know what it means.”
“Please, Pane. I know all about how babies are made.”
“Can we please just end this conversation?”
Before either of them can embarrass themselves—or me, for that matter—I pipe up, “Oh, look. We’re here.”
“Thank God,” he mumbles.
I glance at him, but his gaze remains laser-beam focused on the road. His jaw flexes and unflexes, and it takes everything in me not to openly stare at the straight line. His entire profile, all of it, looks like it was painstakingly chiseled and then splashed with a golden glow.
My goodness, but he is gorgeous.
“Piggycorns,” Natalie squeals. “Stop the truck, Pane. I want to meet them.”
He stops just inside the gate. Natalie practically catapults from the cabin, racing to their enclosure. The piggies smell a new friend, and they stampede to meet her. They run in a pile, bumping and shoving, falling and sliding, until they reach the fence.
They stand on their back legs, noses up, openly begging to be pet.
The piggies in back, the ones who were a bit slower, push forward, wedging themselves into all the nooks and crannies the others have left open, pawing until they find a spot and joining the whines of the ones who reached the fence first.
A dozen pigs paw and snort, each of them clambering for Natalie’s attention. She breaks into a fit of giggles.
“I love them!”
She reaches in, touching a horn here, a chin there. The piggies drink up the attention, jumping and pawing like a pack of puppies.
“Can I go in with them?” she asks me.
Pane slams his door shut and I turn to him. “She wants to go in with them.”
He nods, brooding, and I open the gate. Natalie walks in and sinks to her knees. Piggies climb into her lap, lick her chin, wag their happy little tails at the attention. Meanwhile, Natalie laughs and laughs, loving it.
I sidle up next to Pane. Dark, annoyed energy is wafting off him in big, thick chunks.
“You know, I should be charging you for this.”
He looks over and one side of his mouth ticks up half an inch. For as relieved as he is that Natalie’s been found, he’s pissed off that she pulled the stunt that she did, and rightly so.
He folds his arms. “How much would you charge?”
“Oh, I don’t know. How much do you think Princess Pain-in-the-Butt would like to rake in?”
He points at me. “I can explain.”
“Can you? I would love to hear all about her. I’m especially intrigued about the part where your sister pegged me for this princess. It makes me think that you have a nickname for me.”
“First of all, it was originally Princess Pain-in-the-Neck, but somewhere along the line, Nat changed it. It’s a story that I made up.
” He rubs a hand down his tired face. “I tell her a story every night before bedtime, you know that. When I arrived here, everything was so last minute that I didn’t have a book ready.
Or I did, but my phone was confiscated by my mother. So I made one up.”
“Uh-huh,” I reply, doing my best to sound ticked.
“Secondly”—he leans a hand on the truck’s hood—“when I first showed up, you have to admit . . . you were a real pain the ass.”
“And you have to admit that you were more than just slightly arrogant. In fact, if someone had asked me to describe you, I probably would’ve named you Prince Arrogant Ass.”
He tips his head back and laughs. When his gaze drops back down to mine, his eyes brim with mirth. “I suppose I deserve that.”
“You sure do.”
He extends his hand, palm up. “I think we’ve come a long way, don’t you?”
I slide my hand over his, shivering through the sparks that ignite on my flesh when we touch. “I guess we’ve come a long way.”
“You guess?” he teases.
I shrug. “I mean, maybe.”
His hand tightens on mine. “I think it’s more than a maybe.”
“Maybe.”
“I know it’s more than maybe.”
A nearby tree extends a branch and shoves me toward Pane. It does the same to him, closing the space between us.
Our gazes snap tight, and thoughts of Pane being worried for his sister seize hold of me. The worry, the love he has for her—all of it clouds my brain. I’ve never seen him so emotional, and it’s . . . it’s moved me.
“Are you two going to kiss?”
I jump back. Natalie’s standing inside the fence, holding a pig to her chest as the others paw at her legs, vying for attention.
Pane takes a step away, and with him, all the mystical energy dissolves. “Let’s get you cleaned up and ready for bed.”
“Wait.” I grab his arm. “There’s something we should do first.”
“What’s that?” Natalie asks.
I quirk a brow. “Have you ever made a light angel?”