The Rancher’s Fake Fiancée (Billionaires of Evergreen, Texas #15)

Chapter One

OKAY. SO HERE’S A THING I know about myself: I’m not a woman who gets into strange trucks.

I want that on the record before I tell you what I did, which is get into a strange truck.

In my defense, it was a very large truck, and it belonged to a man named Loukas Karalis, and eighteen years ago Loukas Karalis stood up in a lecture hall full of people and announced that no one alive could ever love me.

So really, getting into the truck was an act of tremendous personal growth. Most women would’ve set it on fire.

The ranch hand who came to fetch me couldn’t have been more than nineteen. He tipped his hat and called me ma’am and told me, going pink, that Mr. Karalis was expecting me for lunch and was, and I’m quoting this poor sunburned child word for word, “not real comfortable waiting.”

Not real comfortable waiting. As though waiting were a thing that happened to other people, as though Loukas Karalis had ever once stood on a platform in his life and watched a train pull out without him on it.

I should’ve said no. I had a whole speech ready, and it was a good speech.

I got in the truck.

Look, I’ll explain. You’re going to need context, otherwise this just sounds like I’ve got no spine, and I’ve got loads of spine, I’ve got an excellent spine, ask anyone.

Eighteen years ago I was twenty-one and idealistic and taking a business ethics class purely to fill a requirement, and a smug second-year named Loukas Karalis stood up and argued that marriage was a financial merger and anyone who married for love was, in his exact words, subsidizing their own poverty with feelings.

I argued the opposite. For ninety minutes.

The professor was delighted. I thought I’d won.

Then, while everyone was packing up, Loukas leaned across the aisle and told me, very pleasantly, that he finally understood why I’d never been seen with anyone, since no one alive could fall in love with a shrew.

So I told him I finally understood why all his girlfriends were rumored to be on retainer, the only way to keep a woman near him being to pay her by the hour.

And then we didn’t speak for eighteen years, which suited me fine. Great. Perfect. Couldn’t have planned it better.

I’ve thought about him approximately once a day for those eighteen years though, and speaking of things I keep to myself, that’s the real reason I got in the truck, and it’s nothing to do with old grudges.

It’s everything to do with the four red notices currently fanned out under a magnet shaped like a roadrunner.

Electricity. Water. The feed supplier who’s stopped, very politely, returning my calls.

And the big one, property tax, the number that wakes me at three in the morning and sits on my chest like something with talons.

I run a raptor sanctuary out in the Hill Country.

Forty acres of recovering hawks and owls and one extravagantly resentful red kite named Sergeant, who’s hated me personally and by name for six years.

There’s a flight enclosure with a north wall that won’t survive another winter.

There’s an education program for school groups who pay nothing, on purpose, the entire point being that they pay nothing.

And there’s, under all of it, a low permanent hum of money-terror that I wear like a second, itchier skin.

In about six weeks, barring a miracle I can’t afford and can’t quite let myself imagine, I’m going to lose every bit of it.

So when the richest man in South Texas sends a truck to my gate, I do the math.

The math is humiliating. The math wins.

So I’m off to see the wizard. I mean the wicked. I mean an old college friend. Yes. Let’s go with that.

I brace myself on the long drive in for a glass tower, something cold and tall and pleased with itself, the architectural version of that lecture-hall smirk.

What I get, when the truck crests a rise and the land opens up the way it does out here, all at once and bigger than seems strictly necessary, is a ranch.

A working one, and I know the difference.

I’ve spent my whole adult life learning to read a piece of land the way other women read a room.

This isn’t a rich man’s stage set with a rented longhorn for atmosphere.

The fences are tight and honest. The stock tanks sit where the water actually wants to go.

Out past the barns a red-tailed hawk’s riding a thermal in slow professional circles, not wasting a single wingbeat, and I feel myself go quiet inside the way I only ever go around the birds, and for one disloyal second I forget I’m here to grovel to a man I hate and just watch her ride.

Then I remember whose sky she’s riding over, and I go back to hating him, which is firmer ground anyway.

The house is long and low and built of pale local stone that looks like it grew up out of the ground instead of getting trucked in, and it’s got the absolute nerve to be beautiful. The nerve to make me want to walk its rooms and stay.

I price it on reflex, the way being broke turns you into a permanent appraiser who can’t look at a lovely thing anymore without running the meter.

The meter on this house sails straight past my entire operating budget without slowing down. A week of this place would re-roof my barn. A month would buy the back forty I’ve wanted for six years, where the harriers hunt come fall.

Stop it, Sensible Blythe says, and she’s right, this arithmetic only ever ends in the same place, which is wanting things, and I gave up wanting things a long time ago, for reasons I keep behind a locked door and don’t hand out to ranch hands or billionaires or anyone else.

And then the front door opens, and there he is, and eighteen years has done absolutely nothing to the man except, infuriatingly, improve the inventory.

Still black-haired, though there’s a thread of silver at one temple now that I refuse to find distinguished.

Still built like a closing argument I’m going to lose on points.

He’s traded the classroom arrogance for something quieter and frankly worse, the kind of stillness money buys, where a man doesn’t raise his voice or cross a room, he just stands in his own doorway and lets the world rearrange itself around him.

Dark jeans. Boots that have actually been worn. A shirt with the sleeves pushed up his forearms.

He looks like he belongs to this land, like the stone made him too, and it’s the single most annoying thing I’ve seen in eighteen years, and I once watched Sergeant refuse food for three days purely to spite me.

“Blythe Vergara,” he says slowly, and my name in his mouth comes out half-tasted, the faint Greek of it sanding the corners off the syllables. “You came.”

“You sent a truck and a very nervous child to fetch me.” I’m climbing down before the ranch hand can come around and help, the way I climb down from my own truck a dozen times a day, and I’m not about to start needing assistance now, in front of him, of all the insufferable men ever assembled.

“It seemed rude to make them drive back empty.”

And then he looks at me.

I mean he really looks, the way you’re absolutely not supposed to look at a woman you’ve summoned like a contractor coming to quote a fence line, a slow, unhurried drag of those black eyes that starts at my dusty boots and travels all the way up, taking an inventory of its own.

And by the time his gaze gets back to my face it’s gone a shade darker than it’s got any business being at noon on a Tuesday with a hawk watching.

I want this to disgust me. I want it more than I’ve wanted anything in a while, since disgust I could work with, disgust would let me get back in the truck with my head high.

But what actually happens is that my pulse picks up a beat nobody cleared with me, and some idiot girl I evicted nineteen years ago picks the lock on her room and presses her face to the window and reports that he’s still looking, he is, he’s still looking.

Don’t look, Sensible Blythe warns.

But I do. I look back. That’s the trouble with this man, it’s always been the trouble, he says a thing in that voice or aims those eyes a certain way and waits to see if it gets under my skin, and the genuinely humiliating part, the part I’d deny under oath, is that it does every time, and I’ve never once in eighteen years had the sense to pretend it didn’t.

Hate him, I remind myself, since hating him is the one renewable resource I’ve got. I’ve hated him with real discipline for almost two decades and I’m not handing that over now for a man in worn boots standing in a doorway he probably had imported.

“You’d better come in,” he says, stepping back to let me pass, and as I cross in front of him the heat of him reaches me across the last foot of Texas air and does something completely unforgivable to the backs of my knees.

“There’s lunch set for us on the west porch.

You’ll want to see the view before I ruin your afternoon. ”

The walk through his house is supposed to make me feel small. That’s what these places are built to do, all that pale stone and quiet money, engineered to remind a woman in dusty boots exactly how far out of her depth she’s wandered.

Only it doesn’t go the way it’s supposed to.

Loukas sets a hand at the small of my back, light as anything, just enough to steer me through a doorway, and a girl appears from nowhere to take the canvas jacket I’ve been clutching like a shield, and she carries off my twice-patched jacket as though it were worth the careful way she folds it over her arm.

On the porch there’s a chair already pulled out for me, angled to the view. A glass of iced tea sweating gently beside the plate. Unsweet. With a wedge of lime.

Which is exactly how I take it.

Which I’ve told no one on this ranch.

I stop in the doorway, completely undone.

I came braced for cruelty and contempt and the old familiar smirk, and what’s been laid out instead is care, the specific, itemized care of a man who found out how I take my tea and which side the light would sit in my eyes, and had a chair turned just so before I ever crested the rise.

Nobody arranges a chair for the bird lady. Nobody has, not in twenty years of my being the woman who arranges the chairs for everybody else. And I stand there in my twice-patched dignity and feel something in my chest tip dangerously toward a warmth I can’t afford and didn’t budget for.

He pulls the chair an inch farther out, which is somehow the last straw, and I drop into it before he can watch my face do the unforgivable thing it’s threatening to do.

“You assume you can ruin it,” I say, reaching for the tea like it’s a railing.

“Blythe.” He says it almost gently, and the gentleness is somehow worse than the smirk ever was. I’ve got armor for the smirk and none at all for this. “I’m about to offer you the only thing in the world you want. Of course I can ruin it.”

I wait. There’s nothing to do with my hands or my dignity but wait.

“I need a fiancée,” he says, as plainly as a man might mention needing a ride to the airport.

“One week. There’s a journey ahead of me, and a great many people I’ve got to make it in front of, and I need a woman on my arm they’ll believe I chose.

You wear a ring. You let them photograph the two of us looking insufferably in love.

And at the end of it you go home with enough money to close that north wall, settle the county, and pay every invoice in that kitchen drawer twice over.

No one ever has to know it wasn’t real.”

For a second the words won’t mean anything. They refuse to arrange themselves into any shape that includes me.

A fake fiancée. His. Hired by the week. Paid to be adored, in front of an audience.

The one thing I gave up letting myself want, held out to me at last, by the one man on earth I can’t afford to take it from.