Claiming His Nine-Month Consequence

He turned away. “You don’t have to explain.”

She glanced at him, her mouth curving with humor. “What is that, reverse psychology?”

“No. I really don’t need to know. I don’t do complicated.”

Ruby’s lips parted. “What do you mean, you don’t do complicated?”

“Just that.”

“How do you have relationships, then?”

“When my relationships get complicated, they end. I don’t do love, either. I don’t even know what it is.”

He sounded almost proud of that fact. “Is that why you broke up with your girlfriend?” Ruby asked. He gave her a sudden searching glance, and she ducked her head, embarrassed at her own curiosity. “Sorry. Everyone was talking about it at the club.”

“No. Poppy didn’t need me to love her. That was one of her best qualities. But her debut film didn’t do as well as she hoped at the festival. She wanted me to fly her to the Himalayas on some mystical experience to seek redemption. I declined. She left. End of story.”

Ruby turned her truck off the highway.

“Where are you going?”

“Star Valley’s expensive. Most of the people who work there can’t afford to live there. I live in Sawtooth.”

“How far?”

“About twenty minutes more.” Turning her truck onto a rough mountain road, she glanced at him. “I heard you have a private jet.”

“I have a few.” His voice wasn’t boastful, just factual.

Her eyes went wide. “A few jets! What’s that even like?”

He shrugged. “They get me where I need to go.”

In Ruby’s one flying experience, traveling to Portland to visit an old high school friend, she’d been stuck in a middle seat in economy, between two oversize men who took her armrests and invaded her space. The flight had arrived an hour late, and her suitcase had arrived twelve hours after that.

Thinking of what it might be like to have one’s own private fleet, she shook her head, a little awed in spite of herself. “I can’t even imagine.”

“It’s no big deal.”

“It must be hell.” Tilting her head, she gave him a cheerful grin. “Your friends must be always hitting you up for rides. Nagging and begging all the time.”

The corners of his lips curved upward. “Actually, they don’t. Most of them have planes of their own.”

That brought her up short.

“Oh,” she said faintly. As she changed gears, her old truck rattled and coughed smoke behind them. “I live just up here.”

Ares turned to look out the window, and unwillingly, her eyes lingered on his silhouette. The hard line of his jaw, the curve of his lips. He was so handsome, she thought. So masculine. So powerful. So everything she was not.

Then, following the direction of his gaze, she saw her neighborhood with fresh eyes. The trailer park was small, tidy and well maintained. Ruby’s neighbors were kind and hardworking, but the trailers looked old and plain, with snow piled haphazardly on the road. The flowers that made the street so beautiful in summer were nowhere to be seen in winter. And her neighbors’ cars, like her own, had all seen better days.

As she parked in front of her own family’s single-wide mobile home, she saw how careworn it had become. But good people lived in this neighborhood. Good people who worked hard. Telling herself she had nothing to be ashamed of, she put her truck into park and turned off the engine. “Would you like to come in?”

Ares’s darkly handsome, chiseled face held no expression. “To meet your sick mother and the little sister who was planning to trap me into marriage?”

“Right. You don’t do complicated.” She tried to keep her voice light, even as her cheeks burned. “I’ll be right back.”

Closing the door solidly behind her, Ruby went into her home. The living room was dark. “Ivy? Mom?”

“I’m in here,” her mother’s voice called weakly.

Ruby hurried into her mother’s small bedroom and found Bonnie propped up in bed, a small television blaring from an opposite shelf. Pill bottles were on her nightstand table, along with an untouched plate of food.