betrayal and death.
He hadn’t seen her in nearly a dozen years. He’d heard she was back in town, but, like Zander, Trent had assumed she’d know better than to call.
He and Susannah had little enough chance of making this marriage work without throwing Missy into the mix. You might as well dig up an old corpse, toss it onto the table, then ask everyone to enjoy their meal.
He bent over, set the choke on the chain saw. He gave the cord a yank, perhaps a little harder than necessary. Eli was watching him again, as if the boy hoped Trent would have trouble getting the tool started. But the chain saw zoomed into life, its teeth circling furiously, like a mad dog snapping, eager to chomp into something and tear it to shreds.
Trent climbed the ladder, careful not to ascend any higher than he needed to. Heights and chain saws didn’t mix. But the limb was farther up than it appeared from the ground. Mildly irritated, he put one foot on the fourth step, then reached out with the chain saw and let it sink into the brittle, sapless limb.
The wood cracked, split and tumbled to the ground before the blade sank even halfway through it. It had been ready to go, that was for sure. He needed to get all this dead wood out of here before the summer storms started, even if it meant delegating some of the paperwork at the Double C.
He glanced at the tractor, just beyond the tree’s branches. Eli was gone, the little slacker. Trent scanned the yard, his gaze ending at the back porch. He was surprised to see a man standing there. Would Eli really dare to—
But it wasn’t Eli. It was Doyle. Dapper as ever, the lawyer posed like a GQ model, one foot cocked up against the white scrolled balustrade. His gold silk tie and handkerchief matched his hair.
Somebody should tell the fool that women didn’t like their men to be prettier than they were.
Richard held a cocktail in his hand, a signal that the business part of his visit was over. Though Susannah must have provided the drink, she was nowhere in sight.
The porch was about twenty yards away, so it was hard to be sure, but the lawyer seemed to be staring up at the tree where Trent was working. And his handsome face seemed hard, set with hostile intensity that almost exactly replicated the anger Trent had glimpsed on Eli’s face earlier.
Trent sighed. This could get old.
None of the men in Susannah’s life trusted him. And they were jealous as hell. Okay, fair enough. He got that. The green-eyed monster wasn’t exactly a stranger to him, either.
But too bad. Trent was her husband, at least for the next year, and all the wannabes, the sycophants and the stuffed shirts she’d passed over when making her choice would just have to deal with it.
Suddenly, Doyle raised his drink in a stiff salute.
“Afternoon, Maxwell,” he called. He sipped the drink, then smiled. “Better watch your step up there.”
“Yeah.” Trent nodded. “Thanks.” But he felt irrationally irritated. Naturally, Doyle thought cutting trees was dangerous. It was real physical labor, as foreign to the pencil pusher as scaling the craters of the moon.
Or was Trent just regressing again? Resenting the rich boys who never smelled like wood chips…or sweat?
Get over it, Maxwell, he told himself. That chip on his shoulder was every bit as pointless as Doyle’s gold silk pocket square.
He held the chain saw above the next limb, then let it fall slowly, the blade slicing into the wood, sending off chips like sparks from a diamond cutter’s wheel. But this branch wasn’t completely dead. It resisted, and Trent had to put muscle behind it. He leaned over, adding his other foot to the fourth step for balance.
And suddenly, without any warning he could hear over the roar of the chain saw, the step gave way, the old bolt pulled away from the frame and the plank jackknifed right under his feet.
As he felt himself go, he somehow had the presence of mind to release the chain saw. It died immediately and dropped, whining, like a missile to the ground.
The millisecond after, Trent’s whole body did the same.
CHAPTER FIVE
IT WAS TWO IN THE MORNING. After a long evening poring through payroll records, Susannah yawned while she roamed the first floor, checking dead bolts and turning off lights.
As she passed the staircase that led down to the wine cellar, she heard a strange scrabbling noise deep in its shadows.
For a moment, she felt the hair on the back of her neck rise. The wine cellar had been her grandfather’s last folly, a ridiculous expenditure better suited to the millionaire rancher he’d once been than the struggling, debt-ridden peach farmer he’d become.
She used the front part of the cellar now for preserves, and the occasional bottle of peach wine. The back half, beyond the wrought-iron wine door, had become a mess of storage and clutter. Boxes of sentimental junk, yard games, canopies and chairs that came out only for parties, furniture too broken to sit in but too fine for the dump.
Her grandfather’s ghost would be appalled.
Luckily, she didn’t believe in ghosts.
But she heard the noise again, so it hadn’t been her imagination, either. It must be Trent down there, rooting around in the dark. She wondered why, then remembered that she’d mentioned she needed to dig out the tents and get them cleaned for the peach party.
She hadn’t been hinting for him to do it. Had he thought she was? It wouldn’t have crossed her mind to ask him to lug anything so heavy, not after taking that hard fall this afternoon.
She felt a nip, like a small bee sting of guilt, deep in her conscience. She hadn’t even properly thanked him for his work on the trees, much less offered any TLC for his injury. Pitching in on odd jobs at Everly was above and beyond anything their “agreement” required of him. And things were such a mess around here that she was deeply grateful for any extra help from anyone.
She just hadn’t known how to show it without feeling vulnerable. Only anger felt truly safe, and she hadn’t had the courage to retreat from it, even when he clearly deserved better treatment.
Relations between them were obviously going to remain complicated, but that didn’t absolve her from the obligation to show decent manners. She made her way down the stairs quickly. She had on only a nightshirt, but it was old and grubby, and no one could construe it as a come-on.
“Trent? Please don’t bother with the tents tonight. They weigh a ton, and you shouldn’t—”
To her surprise, he was sitting at the center tasting table, with a bottle of peach schnapps and a shot glass laid out before him on the recycled-wine-barrel surface. The recessed lighting her grandfather had installed overhead picked out blue-black diamonds in his hair, but the rest of him was mostly in shadow.
“Oh.” She stopped at the foot of the stairs. “I’m sorry. I thought you might be trying to find the tents.”
“No.” He lifted the bottle and topped off the glass. “Just stealing a little home-made painkiller. If I took the stuff Doc Marchant left, I’d be a zombie tomorrow.”
