for the ranch?”
“What do you mean?”
Bree glanced once, quickly, at Gray, then returned her gaze to her sister. “Shouldn’t we have employees who really want to work at a dude ranch? At this dude ranch? Surely that’s in our best interests. And yet, knowing that Gray wants this position for his own personal agenda, and no other reason, you hired him anyway? Sight unseen?”
“Not exactly unseen,” Rowena corrected, a slight edge creeping into her voice. “We’ve known Gray for years, Bree. But otherwise, yes. I knew, and that’s exactly what I did.”
“Why?” Bree’s one-word question dripped disapproval.
As Rowena prepared to respond, Gray thought he detected a spark of the old firebrand. Her green eyes narrowed, and they seemed to blaze hot inside her thick fringe of black lashes.
“Because he is willing to work for practically nothing, which is about what I’ve got left in the budget. Because a month will get me through the soft opening and give me time to replace him. Because he’s handsome and smart and charming, and the guests will be eating out of his hand.”
“But, Ro, he—”
“I’m not finished.” Rowena’s syllables were crisp and staccato, and Bree subsided. “Most important, I’m hiring him because no one else will. Because I know what it’s like to try to outrun a reputation that got tied to your tail so long ago it feels grafted to you. In a town like Silverdell, that’s pretty darned hard to do.”
Gray watched as Bree tried to swallow her opposition—a self-control that seemed to be something of a struggle. As complex emotions swept across her classically beautiful features, rendering them infinitely more interesting than perfection ever could, his curiosity was piqued.
Though of course everyone had gossiped about their mother’s murder, Gray hadn’t really known the Wright sisters very well. Rowena had been older, too sophisticated to bother with a boy like him, and Bree had always seemed too deadly wholesome to be worth his time. The little one...he couldn’t remember her name...hadn’t registered at all.
Now, though, he sensed layers and textures in Bree’s personality that went far beyond “prissy” or “icy” or “dull.” And layers between the two sisters, too. Undercurrents both deep and powerful—and touchingly human.
He suspected that, at its heart, this mini-confrontation had very little to do with Rowena’s choice for a job as insignificant as the part-time assistant social director...and much more to do with years of unresolved family baggage.
Well, okay, then, maybe he knew them better than he had realized. They all belonged to that sorry club—the children who had survived the unsurvivable and didn’t really know why. Or where to go from there.
A large bird, maybe an eagle, landed somewhere high in the pines over their heads, causing the sunlight to shift as the branches swayed. For an instant, the light seemed to catch on two crystal sparkles at the outer edges of Bree’s cool blue eyes.
Tears? Gray frowned. Was the ice princess fighting back tears?
She blinked, then, and the illusion disappeared. But he was left with a sudden, inexplicable hunger to know her better, to find out more about her.
A lot more.
And...just his luck. He had only four weeks to do it.
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