He wasn’t sure. But he knew now that he needed to come clean with Karly and tell her that he owned the ranch before things progressed any further between them. Karly was intelligent and she’d already started questioning why he kept taking advantage of the mysteriously absent ranch owner. It was just a matter of time before she figured it out or someone unwittingly told her.
And the worst part of all, his reasons for keeping it from her were making less sense, even to him, with each passing day.
* * *
Karly sat at the library table in the log mansion and looked around at the volumes of books on the shelves lining the room. The owner’s tastes were eclectic and included ranching manuals, nonfiction, autobiographies and novels by some of the most popular, bestselling authors of the past one hundred years.
As she continued to look around, she couldn’t help but smile. Unlike a lot of home libraries, which felt gloomy and heavy with the knowledge of the ages, the room felt cozy and extremely inviting. So much so that she could imagine herself spending endless hours on a rainy or snowy day curled up with a good book and a warm, comfy afghan on the big leather sofa in front of a crackling fire in the stone fireplace.
She rose to her feet and walked over to look out one of the windows at the surrounding mountains. Now that she’d visited the ranch, she could understand why Blake had told her he couldn’t leave Wyoming for life in a bustling city. The land was beautiful and although she loved the green beauty of both the Cascade and Olympic Mountains, she couldn’t look out any of the windows in her apartment and see them. If she wanted to enjoy the lush scenery, she had to take a ferry across Puget Sound or drive out of the city to the thick forests beyond.
But here on the Wolf Creek Ranch, every window had a spectacular view of the Laramie Mountains and experiencing nature took little more than walking out the door.
She sighed. When she had returned to Seattle after their whirlwind courtship and wedding, she had reasoned that living so far from a city would eventually end her and Blake’s marriage the way it had with her parents’. She’d even convinced herself that she was doing what was best for both of them—that there would be less emotional pain by ending it so early in the union than there would be a few years down the line.
But she had to admit that although most of her conclusions made sense, they weren’t her only motivation for insisting on a divorce. The main, most compelling reason that she’d refused to move to Wyoming with her new husband had been due to fear—not that he would fail her, but that she would fail him.
She had been afraid she would eventually feel about Blake the way her mother had felt about her father. And that was something she wasn’t going to let happen. She cared too much for him to blame him for things he had no control over.
Martina Ewing had become a bitter, resentful woman once she returned to New York and learned she had lost her place in the world of high fashion. Until her death just a few years ago, Karly’s mother had blamed Karly’s father for the loss of her career, her unhappiness and just about everything else unpleasant that happened in her life. She still managed to find fault with him, even though he’d passed away not long after they divorced. Karly sometimes wondered if her mother had even blamed him for leaving her saddled with a child to raise.
But in Karly’s attempt to protect Blake from the possibility that she would turn out to be as unreasonable as her mother, had she allowed her fear to deprive them of a real chance at happiness?
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Blake asked, wrapping his arms around her waist and pulling her back against his solid chest.
Startled, she jumped. “I didn’t know you had returned to the house.”
After they’d finished breakfast, he had given her his laptop and driven them over to the mansion to set up her workspace in the library. Once he’d made sure the internet connection was the speed she needed, he’d told her he was going out to see that the indoor arena’s floor had been properly prepared for the training of a new stallion and left her to familiarize herself with his computer and to download a couple of programs she would need to do her job. But she suspected that had been an excuse to give her the time and space to think about the direction her visit had taken and what she wanted to do about it.