Chapter Four
When Lark showed up at work the next morning, she was dressed more casually than she’d been the day before. Dark blue jeans and a button-up top that looked like she’d bought it up at the general store.
Plaid with little silver-rimmed, pearl-centered snaps. Interesting. He couldn’t help but wonder how easy buttons like that would be to pop open.
Quinn redirected his thoughts and walked over to where Lark was standing, about to go into the computer room.
“Morning.”
“Good morning,” she said, her eyes dropping to just below his belt, her cheeks turning pink.
Remembering their exchange from last night, no doubt. She was a sharp woman, that was for sure, with an even sharper tongue. He kind of liked it. He was used to women who didn’t try to challenge him. Women who were a little tipsy and into feeling his muscles, and then some, back at the hotel. Women who got all breathless and wanted him to be rough and dirty and everything they imagined having a bad boy in their bed would be.
He had a feeling Lark would gut-punch him if he tried anything. And for some reason that made her buttons, and the thought of undoing them, more interesting.
There was something wrong with that. Something wrong with him. Well, that wasn’t new news. He’d known there was something wrong with him from day one. So had everyone in his family.
“Yeah, it is. Do you know what you’re doing today?”
“Getting everything online and building a porn fence those little bastards won’t be able to scale no matter how hot the boob-lust burns.”
“Good luck. Teenage boys are highly motivated by topless women. If ever one of them was going to become a hacker, that would be why.”
His eyes flickered down to those buttons again. It wasn’t only teenage boys who were motivated by breasts.
“It might lead to a job opportunity, because trust me, if they can bypass my security measures, then the future is bright in the computer industry for them.”
“You’re that good?”
“I’m going to build the Great Firewall. You’ll be able to see that sumbitch from space.”
“No alcohol. No naked women.” He paused. “We really are bringing them into hell for a reboot.”
“They need it, don’t they?” she asked.
Quinn nodded, trying to get his mind off of those buttons. “Yeah. They do. I wish I’d had a place like this. I might have got my head on straight a little sooner.”
“What was it that made you get your head on straight?”
“Jail sucks,” he said. “That and I wanted a career in the rodeo, which you can’t do from behind bars. You have to be around to ride. You have to be willing to bust your ass, and when you’re busy working hard, you’re too tired to get into trouble.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, I’ve made some mistakes in my life, but trust me when I say most of them happened more than a decade ago.”
She bit her lip like she was trying to keep words from punching their way out of her mouth. Then she relaxed a little. “Well, great. Good for you. Good for you . . . I’m going to . . . build the Great Firewall.”
“Of course.”
She disappeared into the building and he shook his head, turning and heading back toward the house. He had some paperwork to deal with. Having Longhorn turned into a nonprofit meant there were a lot of Is to dot and Ts to cross.
And if his brain was occupied with all of that, then he couldn’t obsess about Lark and her buttons. He had way more important things to obsess about. Paperwork, for starters.
And what Sam would be reporting from Elk Haven Stables.
***
Jill looked around the cabin she would be staying in with her husband for the next week. Courtesy of his dickhead boss. She let out a breath and walked to the far wall of the cabin, then back again. It was a very small space to be sharing with Sam, all things considered.
Like rooming with a stranger. And after twenty-three years, she had no damn idea how that had happened. But she couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a conversation with him. Couldn’t remember the last time he’d looked at her like he even saw her. It always seemed like he was looking right through her.
The front door opened and Sam walked in, his expression grim. “All checked in.”
“Great,” she said.
“Yep.”
She looked at him and wondered when he’d gotten old. He had new lines around his eyes and gray at his temples. And then she just wondered if she didn’t look at him anymore either.
“So, what are your plans for the day besides playing spy games?”
“Nothing. They have horses available. I might go out for a ride. Been a while since I did that.”
“You do that for your job.”
“Not up in the hills.”
“True. Fine.”
“Why, what are your plans?”
She shrugged. “Nothing. I don’t really have them. I might work.”
“Of course.”
She let out a long sigh. “Yeah, whatever the hell that means, Sam. We’re here doing crazy work for your boss, but I get attitude when I say I’m working?”
“You could ride with me.”
“I don’t want to,” she said. She regretted how shrewish that sounded almost the minute the words came out, but she couldn’t back down. She didn’t want to back down.
He sighed. “That’s fine, Jill. I’ll be back around later.”
He turned and walked back out of the cabin, and Jill let out a long breath. She’d screwed up, again. She felt like she only said the wrong thing with him now. Maybe it was just a testament to how difficult it was to talk to a stranger.
She sat down at her computer and logged in. Her throat dried when she saw she had an email from Jake. She clicked it open and skimmed it. It was mainly about work. About the sales threshold for the month and how everything was going so far.
And then she got to the last line.
I’m going to miss the sexiest woman in the office this week.
She squeezed her eyes shut and closed the email program. That was overt, even for Jake. He was a flirt, that was for sure. And she truly, truly had no intention of ever taking him up on any of his subtle offers.
But she couldn’t remember the last time anyone had called her sexy. She was a forty-three-year-old woman who’d been with one man. She’d given him her beautiful years and had given birth to two children, with the stretch marks to prove it.
So yeah, she was hardly beating admirers off with a stick. Including her husband, who seemed bored by her at most.
She opened up the email again.
Sexiest woman in the office.
Dammit. What was she doing? She closed it again and shut her laptop, pushing up off the desk. Forget work. She would just got for a walk. Try to forget her fight with Sam. And try to forget the email from Jake.
***
“Take a lunch break, Mitchell.”
“Busy,” Lark responded before turning around, and then when she did, the air got pulled straight from her lungs. Quinn. Not shirtless this time, but in a dirty, tight white t-shirt, the edge of his tattoo extending just past the edge of the sleeve.
He was wearing tan Carhartts, low on his hips, streaked with dirt, a tear in the upper thigh that was just . . . distracting. Could she see a hint of skin there, or was it just frayed pant material? She fought the urge to stare. But it was hard.
What was it about him that was so magnetic? Why couldn’t he be a troll?
Evil people should be required to signify said evil in their physical appearance, à la Disney cartoons. At the very least, their laughs should be some sort of sinister cackle.
But Quinn’s wasn’t. Even when he was being a jerk, his laugh was like a low roll of thunder that rumbled through her body and made her feel like a storm had just blown through.
It was lame. Somehow, when she was with Quinn her brain cells reduced by a third.
“You aren’t too busy to eat. I’m not going to let you skulk around grumbling and pretending that I’m a slave driver and unreasonable and trying to kill you. You might want me to be, but I’m not. Lunch. Now.”
She let out a breath. “Fine. No need to get all command-ish.”
“Apparently there is.”
“You aren’t the boss of me.”
A slow smile curved his lips. “Baby, I absolutely am the boss of you. You signed a contract, remember?”
“Then I ought to sue you for sexual harassment. Baby. Good Lord. Next you’ll be asking for a martini and your slippers.”
“Is that your way of calling me sexist?”
“No. You’re sexist. That was my way of calling you sexist.”
“Neatly done. Now come one, there’s a sandwich waiting for you. And I didn’t ask you to make it, so I think that’s a strike against your sexism accusations.” She made a face. “Everyone else is done already.”
Thank God. That might mean he would leave her in peace with her sandwich.
“I haven’t eaten though, so I’ll join you.”
Bastard.
“Neat.”
He laughed, again, that sort of pleasant laugh that was all deep and . . . sexy. Dammit all, it was sexy. “You’re so transparent. I like it.”
“What’s to like about transparency when someone clearly disdains you?”
“Because you don’t like me, but I do unsettle you.”
“In that way the villain in a movie unsettles me.”
“That’s not it.” He held the door to the dining room open for her. The long table was empty, except for two plates with sandwiches and potato chips, one set at the head of the table, the other just to the left.
“Yes,” she said, “yes, it is.”
He sat at the head of the table and she fought the urge not to move her plate down further to put some distance between them. That would be transparent. As was looking below his belt buckle and at the rip in his pants.
She didn’t mind if he knew that she didn’t like him, but she didn’t want him to know that she thought he was hot.
“Okay.” He put his elbows on the table and picked his sandwich up with both hands. “If you say so.” He took a bite of the sandwich, and she found herself watching his mouth.
“Were you raised in a barn?” she asked, picking her own sandwich up and keeping her posture straight and her elbows very much not on the table.
“Nope. In a f*ckin’ mansion.”
“Lies,” she said.
“Truth.”
“What were you, the stable boy?”
“As much as my dad would have liked that? No.”
“Uh . . . I thought you were all . . . you know, you seem like . . .”
“Like I’m not from an affluent background.”
“Well, yeah. And you said you had a rough . . . time.”
“I did. But most of that was my own fault. You know, it’s pretty easy to think you’re invincible when your parents pay for everything. And I really enjoyed making their lives hell while they footed the bill. Then I left home when I was seventeen and found out that life is a lot harder than I realized.”
“You had a family and you just left?”
“Complicated,” he said.
“Are your parents still alive?”
“My mother.”
“Do you ever see her?”
He swallowed. “No. I haven’t talked to anyone at home . . . it’s been more than ten years. I didn’t go back for my father’s funeral.”
“That’s not complicated at all. That’s stupid.”
“What?”
“It’s stupid. Both my parents are dead. I couldn’t talk to them if I wanted to, and you have no idea how much I want to sometimes. But I can’t. I never can again. And you can. You could call your mother and talk to her, but you don’t. You could see your whole family anytime and you don’t. You missed your own father’s funeral.”
“My family aren’t worth visiting, how about that?”
“I’m sorry, did you not just tell me that you were a jackass who did everything you could to make their lives hell?”
“Repaying the favor. Don’t talk about what you don’t know about.”
“So, tell me about it.”
“Why?” he asked.
Why indeed. She shouldn’t care. She shouldn’t be letting this make her mad, but she was. It was her trigger, and Quinn wasn’t the first person to be on the end of one of her blazing “call your mother” rants.
Because she’d been a child when she’d lost her mother, and all through her life, especially when she’d hit puberty and had been stuck in a house with only men, and then only men and her brother’s psycho thank-God-now-ex-wife, she’d wanted her mother back so badly her whole body had ached.
And there were all sorts of people who resented their mothers. Resented their caring and their hovering.
She would trade anything to have that.
“Because,” she said. “We’re both here. We have to eat lunch. We already don’t like each other. Some people would promise not to judge. But I will. I’ll judge you basically no matter what because I already don’t like you. But at least I’m being up front about it.”
“Fair enough. Fine. I’m a bastard.”
“Yeah, we’ve met. Tell me something I don’t know.”
He shook his head. “Nope. You misunderstand me. I’m a bastard. The product of my mother’s illicit affair with, of all people, the gardener. At least it wasn’t the pool boy. We almost avoid clichés this way.”
“And you know that for sure?”
“Everyone does. But no one says it. Let me tell you about my family, since you want to know; and feel free to judge them too, since you’re in a judgmental mood.” He put his sandwich on the table and leaned back in his chair. “Blond. Fair. Extremely conscious of heritage and blood. Both of my parents—and I say parents in the loosest sense, as my father, the one I was raised with, is not my father—are descendent of America’s first families. I’m the youngest. My brothers and sisters are all blond-haired and blue-eyed, clearly from that fine lineage my father is so proud of.” He smiled. “I’m not. Or did you need that spelled out for you?”
She looked at Quinn, at his dark eyes and hair, skin that was a deep olive color. “Just because you don’t look like them . . .”
“It’s more than that. My father knew from the moment I was born that I wasn’t a Parker. To avoid scandal, he gave me his name and he never said a thing, but everyone knew, Lark. Everyone knows. My parents’ friends knew. My brothers and sisters knew. It was my brother that told me for sure. Because he knew about the affair. And when he told me that . . . well, there was no more doubting, not even a little bit of it. I’m not a part of my dad’s precious brood. Not one of the pureblood wonders who can trace their line to Plymouth Rock. I’m my mom’s midlife crisis. The one she had to look at every day until she just decided not to look too closely.”
“Quinn . . . I don’t . . .”
“Because it’s complicated, right?”
Lark swallowed hard. “Yeah. Okay, that’s a little complicated.”
“I’m sorry your parents are dead, Lark. I’m sorry you didn’t have them growing up. But mine were alive, and I didn’t have them growing up either. Not the way you should have your parents.”
“Quinn . . .” She bit the inside of her cheek and searched for words. For advice. But what advice did she have to give a man who was a) an a*shole and b) more than a decade older than her? He’d lived more. Seen more. And he’d dealt with things she couldn’t even imagine dealing with.
Her parents had been so rock solid. A wonderful couple. Her father had cherished her, and her mother. Quinn’s father hadn’t really been his father. His mother hadn’t liked him because he reminded her of her sins.
And then there was all the living he’d done since leaving home—and she was still in her childhood bedroom. Yeah, anything she said would be laughable. And she wasn’t sure why she was even compelled to try.
She wasn’t sure why she cared at all. Why it made her chest ache a little bit to think about a boy born knowing he didn’t belong, and treated like he didn’t every day of his life.
I’m bad blood.
He’d said that to her once. Was that what he thought? Really? That he was born wrong? Born bad, and there was nothing else he could ever be?
“I don’t know what to say,” she said. “I was going to offer advice but it would be stupid and trite. I don’t have any. But that—it sucks, Quinn. You shouldn’t have been treated that way.”
“Sins of the father visiting the son. Or in my case, sins of the mother. That’s life, Lark. It’s my life, anyway. You did ask.” He leaned back over the table, elbows firmly planted on the surface. “And I’ve committed more than my share of sins. I’m not paying for hers anymore. And I’d rather not pay for the sins of someone else. Of whoever’s responsible for your brother’s accident.”
“So it’s back to that.”
“Yep. Because that’s the thing that I’m paying for now. I’ve done a lot of things, but I did my time. I went to jail for driving like a drunk a*shole when I was sixteen, and I deserved every moment I spent behind bars for it. Went back again for stealing from a Minute Market later that same year. Just thankful I wasn’t tried as an adult either time. I’ve had more hangovers than I can count, and got the hell kicked out of me by a guy whose wife I was screwing around with. Though that was an accident. Not the screwing. I didn’t know she was married. Either way, I’ve earned a lot of consequences and taken every damn one on the chin. But I am not paying for something I didn’t do. I spent too much of my life that way already.”
He stood from the table and she stood too, vaguely aware that she’d only taken a couple bites of her sandwich. Not really caring.
“Quinn, I don’t even know what to say to that. I don’t know you. My brother is one of the best men I know. And I don’t think he would lie, ever, about something like that. He has to know. He has to.”
“I don’t pretend to be nice, Lark. I don’t pretend to be decent. So if I say I didn’t do something, trust that I didn’t. I could give you my long list of transgressions, and it’s long, but that’s not on there.”
It was hard not to believe him. Now that she felt like she knew him—which was stupid, she didn’t, they’d talked for ten minutes—it was hard not to believe he was telling the truth.
Because she genuinely believed the man standing in front of her would cross his muscular arms across his chest and admit, with defiance, that he’d done it if he had.
She pushed that thought aside and put her hands on her hips. “So, okay, you say it’s all legit, so I’m supposed to report back? Is that what all this is about?”
“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe I’d take that. But would you give it?”
“No. I’m not going to go tell Cade I believe a stranger’s word over his.”
“Am I a stranger?”
“Yes.”
“We just ate our second meal together. I told you about my childhood. You yelled at me. We’re practically a couple.” He took a step around his chair and toward her, dark eyes trained on hers. “The only thing I haven’t done is kissed you.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Would I still be a stranger if I kissed you, Lark? Or would you feel like you knew me a little better?”
“You would be punched. In the face. That’s what you would be,” she said, taking a step back.
“Would I?” He extended his hands and brushed his knuckles over her cheek, the edge of his thumb brushing her bottom lip. “Well, can’t say I’m in the mood for that.” He dropped his hand. “We’ll have to stay strangers then.”
He turned away from her and she pushed her hand, which was shaking, through her hair. “What’s your game, Quinn?”
“I’m not playing a game. I want my life back.”
And underneath those words, she heard the unspoken threat. That he would do whatever he had to in order to accomplish his end.
Good thing she was so determined not to be his means to that end. Yes, she was. That meant no sympathy, no more talking. And definitely no kissing.