Can't Hurry Love (35 page)

Victoria nodded, and like a scared little girl, she ran away.

“What exactly do you expect me to do?” Eli asked Ruby on Wednesday morning. He wiped the cream off Patience’s belly and pulled his hair away from her teeth, wincing when some caught. “She told me to stay away.”

And he had for two days now. Today he was going to paint the inside of his barn.

The inside.

All so he wouldn’t go charging down there like some … woman, demanding to know what was wrong.

“And you listened?”

“Christ!” He tossed the ultrasound wand and it clattered onto the cart. A thousand dollars’ worth of equipment and he didn’t give a shit. “I don’t know how these things work. She asked me to stay away and was pretty damn emphatic about it. I’m just trying to do what she wants.”

“Oh Lord, that woman is so turned around by those bitches, she doesn’t know what she wants.”

“What bitches?”

“Those friends of hers from New York—”

“Wait … her friends from New York came?”

“Well, you can’t really call them friends.”

“She wasn’t going to invite them.” Cannibalistic, she’d called them. They’d kicked her when she’d been as down as a person could get. They were at that ranch? Hurting her more?

“They saw the ad in the
Times
. They brought their kids. Their husbands. Golf bags. It’s a disaster. Celeste is handling them at the moment. Victoria’s working in the greenhouse, finishing up all the party details, but it’s getting strained around the spa.”

“What can I do?”

“We need someone to occupy the men and kids. Spas are no place for boys, and the whining is making everyone nuts. They need to
do
something. Get dirty.”

Well, hell. It was a ranch. There was plenty of stuff that needed doing, and most of it could get a kid dirty.

He checked his watch; he’d need to call in a few guys, a couple of favors. “I need you to call your dad and get some of his beer. Pack us a lunch. I’ll be there in an hour.”

When Victoria got back to the ranch after picking Jacob up at camp, the front yard was a dust cloud of activity and all she could think of was how Renee was going to complain about that.

“What’s going on?” Jacob asked, leaning over the dashboard.

Something terrible, no doubt. But then she saw Eli’s horse trailer and his truck.

And there, up on the porch, talking to Bill, was Eli.

Her body lost its skin. Its bones. She was a puddle of goo in the front seat of her father’s El Dorado. It had only been a couple days, but it had felt like years.

Eli looked so masculine up there talking to soft-handed Bill. He looked the way a man should look. A little rough, a little wild, but comfortable in his skin, his frayed denim.

I’m sorry I said those things to you
, she thought.
I love the way you smell and how hard you work, and how all of that has made you the man you are
.

“Eli!” Jacob cried and flew out of the car.

Eli
, her heart echoed, and she gathered herself as best she could before following her son.

“Hi there, Eli,” she said, sparing a glance for Bill, whose eyes seemed a little too interested in the low V of her T-shirt. The lace edge of the camisole was supposed
to be down there somewhere making things modest, but it had gotten skewed in the car.

Eli noticed Bill’s attention and stood up a little straighter, his body brushing her arm, making her skin sizzle with awareness. With want.

“What’s … what’s going on?” She crossed her arms over her chest, pulling away from the contact. Eli’s face was all strange, his smile on crooked or something.

“Well, I’ve got those fifty head of cattle up on the high pasture. I need to get them down to the low pasture, and I heard you had a bunch of men here who might be able to help.”

She stared, gobsmacked. Was … was this a joke?

“See?” Bill pointed at Victoria’s face as if that was the proof he’d been waiting for. “I told you that was ridiculous.”

“I can help!” Jacob yelled. “I can totally help, can’t I, Mom?”

“I want to help, too!” Liam said, and the little circle of boys that had gathered around Jacob when he got out of that car all piped up, hands in the air as if they were waiting to be chosen for the horse-riding team.

“The more help the better.” Eli reached out and tousled Jacob’s hair, holding his head for a second. “Missed you, bud. How was camp?”

“Great. I learned how to canoe.”

“Good thing to learn. Can you teach me?”

“Yeah!”

Victoria shut her mouth, biting her tongue for composure.

“You can’t just take my son horseback riding,” Bill said. “He has no experience.”

“Dad!” Liam groaned.

“Well, you don’t, son. And I don’t know who the hell this man is.”

“He’s our neighbor,” Victoria jumped in, unwilling to
listen to one negative thing come out of this man’s mouth about Eli. “And he’s a good man.”

Bill’s shrewd eyes narrowed on Victoria. “Excuse my bluntness, but your track record suggests you don’t know a good man from a crook.”

You’re right
, she thought.
You’re so right; I have no idea what I’m doing
.

And she couldn’t even defend Eli, who was worth ten of Bill. That’s what a mess she was, how miserly her spirit.

Eli’s brows slammed down tight on his eyes and Victoria put her hand over his arm. The last thing she needed was for him to try defending her honor.

“Do you think I would do anything to put my son in danger?” she asked.

After a tense moment, Bill shook his head.

“It’s a nice safe trail up to the pasture, and the hands, Phil and Jerry, will do most of the work. Your boys will just need to hold on,” Eli said. “And if you don’t believe me, perhaps you should accompany your son.”

“Yeah!” Liam cried, and Victoria knew how starved these boys were for their fathers. The same way her son had been starved for his father, desperate with hunger for his time. For his attention. For scraps of affection. “Come on, Dad. Come. It will be awesome.”

It would take a heartless bastard to ignore the appeal in Liam’s eyes. Bill was a lot of things, but heartless wasn’t one of them. He smiled into his son’s beaming face.

“All right. Let me get Gary and Robert, and we’ll meet you back out here in ten minutes.”

“You’ll need sweatshirts or something,” Eli said. “It’s cold up there.”

Everyone ran into the house and Victoria turned to face him. Her heart, her body, her everything panted for him.

“What are you doing, Eli?” she asked.

“Well, Ruby said things were going pretty rough over here and since I’ve got a stake in this thing succeeding, I figured I ought to pull my weight.”

After all the things she’d said to him. After the way she’d treated him. Gratitude nearly choked her.

“Thank you.”

He looked into her eyes the way he always did, as if he were taking inventory of her heart, seeing what she needed. “You’re welcome.”

He touched her cheek and she sighed into his hand, took a moment with his touch, feeling all her shelves get restocked, all her broken pieces get reassembled.

She caught sight of Renee at the door and stepped away, her cheeks on fire.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Renee said, malicious delight coating her words.

“You’re not interrupting anything,” Victoria said clearly.

“I haven’t seen you here before.” Renee held out a limp hand toward Eli, her tennis bracelet practically falling off her thin wrist. “Who are you?”

God bless him, Eli didn’t take her hand. “Help,” he said, unsmiling, as if he knew this was the source of Victoria’s trouble. Men liked Renee upon seeing her, she glittered under their attention like a diamond, but not Eli. He just stared at her with distaste.

“You’re the one taking the boys out?” she asked. “Some kind of trail ride?”

She made
trail ride
sound like it was a trip through the sewage treatment plant. Eli nodded.

“Do you want me to sign a waiver of some kind, or insurance … a permission slip?” she asked, her eyebrow arched at Victoria. “It’s not that we don’t trust you …”

But she didn’t. And why would she?

Victoria felt every one of her husband’s failures like stones against her body, most of which she deserved.

And she wondered if Eli could feel her failures the way she did, a physical pain he had nothing to do with and had done nothing to warrant.

She was so relieved when Celeste showed up.

“Come on inside, Renee,” Celeste said, opening the door. “We’ll get this all squared away.”

Once Eli got the men away from the ranch and confiscated their damned cell phones, things got … pleasant. The sun was bright, the air cool. It was a good thing he’d borrowed those extra horses and dogs. He’d been hoping the fathers would come, but he’d known it wasn’t a sure thing.

The dogs ran ahead of the horses as if they couldn’t believe their luck to be out on a day like this. The boys were sort of like that too, preening under their fathers’ attention.

The fathers, though—they handled their sons as though they were sticks of dynamite or talking frogs or some other kind of scary mystery. They kept looking at the boys like they’d never seen them before, like they’d just popped up riding alongside them.

Bill, as if to compensate for his insecurities, started acting like John Wayne, as if he’d been born on a horse. Which had made it so gratifying when Lucky had shied away from him, making him stumble as he mounted.

Lucky did not suffer fools.

But the man had calmed down some and was pointing out a hawk making high circles in the blue sky. Liam, his son, was a nice boy. He kept his wonder-filled eyes fixed on his dad in case he vanished.

Eli remembered being a kid and feeling that way, before things got so bad. His mother had been right: he’d
been his father’s boy all along. Following the old man around like a dog looking for a treat, a scratch behind the ears, anything.

The realization was a sour one. Sad.

“You got a plan here?” Jerry asked as he rode up next to him, frowning at the line of people making their way up to the pasture. Jerry would not have been Eli’s first choice for this kind of work—the man was as sour as a crab apple, but he’d been available. “I mean, the dogs can get those cattle down to the low pasture before this crowd even gets up there.”

Eli glanced at the sun and then back at the ranch. They had another hour ahead of them, two hours if they came back at this same pace.

“We’ll go up and have lunch.” Ruby had given him bags of food, which he’d strapped on Phineas’s back. The beer was in a cooler bag on top. It was his ace in the hole. “Come on back after.”

“Biggest waste of time I’ve ever seen,” Jerry grumbled, riding ahead to where one of the kids had dropped his reins and his father was about to fall off his horse getting them back.

“This is fun, Eli,” Jacob said, beaming like a bag of lightbulbs as Eli rode up next to him.

“You think so?”

“Totally.”

“These … ah … these boys being nice to you?” Eli didn’t want to put too fine a point on his feelings, but he would leave a kid out here all night if he so much as looked at Jacob funny.

“They’re fine. I don’t think they know … you know … what my dad did.”

Eli squinted into the sun, knowing without a shadow of a doubt that Tori would hate for him to talk to Jacob about the Ponzi scheme, but his feelings for the two of
them overrode her fears. And he had to figure out what was going on here. Why she was hiding herself away.

“Do you know what your father did?”

“He stole from a lot of people and then killed himself. Everyone got really mad at my mom, like it was her fault and she had to try to make things right.”

He remembered how Tori had told him months ago that she’d been a guest in her own home. How in some ways she’d suspected what her husband had been up to, and that her suspicions and her failure to act on them had been reason enough for her to take everyone’s punishment.

And man, wasn’t history repeating itself.

It didn’t take a genius to see that Renee and her crowd were here with whips in hand and Tori was hiding away because she thought she deserved to be their whipping post.

And he had the sinking feeling that he wasn’t going to be able to convince her otherwise.

chapter

25

The moon hung
big and fat over the greenhouse, where Eli found Victoria sitting in Tara Jean’s old office chair among the party supplies they’d stored in here for Saturday night. The moon filled the place with icy white light, making things look different, playing with his perceptions.

Eli put a bottle of beer down on the desk.

“Thought you might need a drink,” he whispered, wishing he could kiss away every line on her face, every sadness in her eyes.

“Way ahead of you,” she murmured, lifting up a tumbler a quarter filled with amber liquid.

“The trail ride went well,” he said, pulling up an old stool and sitting on the edge of it. He kept a wide berth, sensing the land mines around her.

“I heard.”

“Some of the other guests came over and asked if they could do it tomorrow.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for coming back after what I said to you. I was so out of line—”

“I understand.”

“Really?” she asked.

“Everyone freaks out sometimes, Tori. It’s okay.”

“I don’t deserve that,” she whispered. “I don’t deserve you.”

Now, this was getting troubling, because the woman
he loved was slipping away and if he didn’t find a way to stop it, he’d lose her.

“I’ll tell you what you don’t deserve. You don’t deserve to be sitting on the sidelines while everyone else is out there working on your vision.”

“I’m working,” she snapped. Her eyes crackled and he rejoiced at the glimmer of the Victoria he knew and loved. If only he could tease more of that out, get rid of this ghost that plagued her.

“You’re hiding.”

“It’s for the best, Eli. For everyone.”

“How in the world is you hiding in here for the best?”