Her attitude.
That who-do-you-think-you-are thing. That—what was the word? That hauteur. She was the lady of the manor; he was a peasant.
The duchess, looking down her nose at a lesser mortal.
Nick snorted.
Her, a cook?
“Right,” he muttered. And he was the count of Monte Cristo.
She hadn’t even checked out the kitchen. Wouldn’t a real cook want to see what she was going to be working with?
Not that there was all that much to check out.
The kitchen was pretty much the same as it had been when he was growing up, meaning it was probably also the same as it had been for decades before that. A huge room with a cranky six-burner gas stove, a freezer chest big enough to hold the butchered and packaged parts of a couple of deer and, with luck, even an occasional moose, a refrigerator that clanked and groaned like a creature in pain, all of that offset by a battered pine worktable made by some forgotten Gentry a century or so ago.
His old man had never made any changes to the kitchen or anything else, not after Mary Gentry died.
“What we got here is just fine,” Latham would growl if anybody was dumb enough to suggest something might be improved.
If the place had been going downhill back then, it had been racing to the bottom since Nick had taken off twelve years ago.
He’d tried to help, sending increasing amounts of money to his old man as his earnings went from good to substantial to incredible. But he’d never returned home; how could he possibly have known that his father had let the place fall into such bad shape? The conditions of virtually everything had come as a shock when he’d come back a year ago for Latham’s funeral.
The second shock had been discovering that Latham had cashed all the checks Nick had sent, put the money into a separate account at the bank and not spent a penny of it.
“Bullheaded old SOB,” Nick had growled to John Carter, his father’s attorney.
“Takes one to know one,” the normally laconic Carter had muttered.
Nick had thought about arguing the point, but what for? He and his father had parted when Nick turned eighteen.
That had changed only the physical distance between them. From his wife’s death on, Latham, always a taciturn man, had pretty much ignored his son. He’d made sure Nick was clothed, fed and schooled; beyond that, he’d paid little attention to him.
After Nick was on his own, their only contact had been an occasional telephone call.
If Carter wanted to lay that off on Nick, use it as an excuse for why his client had let the Triple G move toward compete ruin, so be it.
And, Nick thought as he brought his chair forward and folded his hands on the desk, what did any of that matter now? His father was gone; the Triple G was his, and the only thing he was interested in was getting it ready for sale.
This was hardly a place of happy memories. Why treat it as if it were? Nothing that had happened to him in the years since he’d left Montana had changed his mind about ranches and ranching and the Triple G.
His fans would not have believed it, of course. His agent, his manager, the directors he’d worked with had all helped him cultivate the image of a hard-nosed loner, a modern-day cowboy adrift in a danger-laden urban landscape
.
It sold a lot of tickets. And attracted a lot of women.
Nick’s mouth thinned.
But not anymore.
The accident had changed everything.
He had no interest in women.
Really? his hormones said.