Fake Marriage Box Set

While Lacey crossed to the paddock to work with Elroy, I went back to the stables to get them in order. After several hours of scrubbing, spraying off surfaces, and laying down freshly-cleaned stall mats in each of the horses’ booths, I was ready to start in on the grooming.

At home, we washed our horses on alternating Fridays, depending on how hard they’d worked over the prior week. I meant to do the same thing here. It took most of the day, with Elroy going last after he was done training. By the time I finished with the playful little quarter horse, it was dinner time. I fed and watered them, then put them in their stalls for the night. The horses had warmed up to me, which I’d expected. I’d always been easy around horses. I liked them better than just about every human I’d ever known besides Daddy and Kasey.

I walked up to the house under a darkening sky. Pete was sitting on the porch the way he always was when I arrived in the morning and left in the evening. He’d told me to come up before I left to get my wages for the week. I was proud of how hard I’d worked this week. Being away from the farm life for the four years I was in school in Austin had been hard. The summers, winter breaks, and occasional weekends back home in Round Rock were the only things that had kept me sane. I needed this the same way Daddy needed it.

“Good job this week, Emma,” Pete said, grinning up at me as I stood over his chair. He handed over an envelope of bills that I'd tucked into my back pocket without counting. I trusted him not to cheat me. He wasn’t wearing his hat, and his black hair was fluffy on his head, blowing around in the strong breeze. I wanted to flatten it, but that definitely wasn’t my place.

“Thanks,” I said. “I like it here.” And, I did. I wanted him to know that.

“I’m glad to hear it.” He watched me for a moment, his blue eyes doing that digging thing they were good at, like he was trying to get inside my head. “Next week, I want you to start having coffee with me before you start for the day. I want to get to know you. What makes you tick.”

I pressed my lips together, not sure I wanted to let him in any more than I already had, but nodded anyway. He was my boss. If he wanted to drink a cup of coffee with me in the mornings, what could it hurt? And it might not be so bad learning more about him. As much as Lacey teased him to his face, she sure did praise him enough behind his back.

“Okay,” I said.

His smile grew, and I felt a little tingle at how happy I’d made him just by agreeing to drink some coffee with him. Before it could go much further than that, I told him goodnight and escaped to my car.

Chapter Eleven

Pete

Monday

Coffee wasn’t enough, I’d decided over the weekend. I needed more. As long as we were on the ranch, Emma would never relax enough around me to really open up. I needed to take her somewhere else, shake things up a little by getting her out of her element.

I waited for her on the porch before sunset. She’d arrived earlier and earlier last week, finally getting to the farm an hour before the sun rose on Friday. It wasn’t even six o’clock when she came up the driveway in her little sedan, the headlights cutting through the hazy dark.

“Stay,” I said to Riley, who obediently didn’t move a muscle as I got up and walked out to Emma’s car.

“Morning!” I said.

She turned quickly, gasping at my sudden appearance. “Morning. I didn’t see you.”

“Let’s go out for breakfast before we get started with the day’s work. There’s a place I like in town.”

She watched me, her eyes too dark to read in the lack of light…not that I’d ever been able to read them in full sunlight.

“Don’t worry,” I said with a smile. “I won’t take it out of your pay!”

She didn’t laugh, but she nodded. She seemed smaller without her hat on, like she’d shrunk five inches overnight. “Okay.”

We drove to town in my truck. The ranch was only a fifteen-minute drive from the western edge of Round Rock, which was where the Texan was, an old diner that had been serving the same country dishes since before I was born.

“They open at six,” I said as we pulled into gravel parking lot. I’d kept the conversation going singlehandedly the entire way. Maybe this hadn’t been the best idea, after all. She seemed tenser than I’d seen her all week. I climbed out of the truck and waited for her to follow me. If the food at the Texan didn’t warm her up a little, I didn’t know what would.

I held the door open for her, enjoying the sweet vanilla scent of her as she walked by and the tickle of her auburn-tipped hair as the wind blew it across my outstretched arm.

“You have to meet the old timers,” I said. We walked over to the round table in the corner, all but one chair taken. The old guys called out to me as we approached. The leader, Big Tom, took a good long look at Emma.

“Hey, Petey,” he said, smiling up at us. “Come join us.”

“I can’t this morning, Big T. This here’s Emma. I just hired her last week. She’s my breakfast date for today.”

I looked over at Emma. Her cheeks were blazing red, but the rest of her face was serene and unaffected as usual, her pretty mouth pressed into a thin line. Had I embarrassed her in front of the guys by calling this a date?

“I’ll catch up with y’all tomorrow morning. We’re gonna get something to eat before heading back to the farm.”

We sat down at a booth and grabbed the menus already on the table. While Emma’s eyes were averted, I took stock of her thick hair pulled back into a ponytail and tousled by the wind, the deep v of her t-shirt plunging down from the bottom of her long neck to the tops of her rounded breasts. My eyes darted to my own menu as soon as she looked up at me.