She looked at me and slow-grinned. “So you think they’re hot, huh?”
“What? No, I was just—” I waved a hand, flustered. “Shouldn’t you be watching the road?”
She finally moved her eyes back to the dirt road, just in time to slow down because we’d come to the gate. “Hold that thought.” She pointed at me. “We’re going to come right back to this.”
Dear God, did we have to? She jammed the truck in park and hopped out to go open the gate. I rolled my eyes and sat back heavily in my seat, looking at the ceiling of the truck. I wouldn’t have agreed to come if I knew I’d be in for a game of twenty questions.
Far sooner than I would have liked, Ruth was back in the truck and we were rumbling over the cattle grate.
“I’ll close it up,” I volunteered before Ruth could lob any other intrusive questions or get out her pointy finger again.
I gulped in a few deep breaths as I closed the gate, and one last deep breath for good measure before I climbed back up into the truck. I hoped that Ruth would have moved on as she pulled back onto the pot-holed road that I thought was generously called a “highway.” It was just a two-lane road.
“So, you and Reece. I’ve caught him looking at you a couple times. He’s cute. If you’re into that big, dumb cowboy sort of thing.”
“He’s not dumb,” I said, a little outraged on Reece’s behalf. “He’s really smart. And good with the animals.”
She raised an eyebrow like I was just making my point for her. “I knew you liked him.”
Well damn, I walked right into that one.
“Let’s not talk about them. We work with them for God’s sake. That’s just…” Immediately scenes of Reece’s body beneath mine, hands clenching my hips flashed vividly through my head. I wiped my hands on my jeans. “Awkward,” I finished lamely.
“Oh, fine,” Ruth said. “Then tell me what it was like where you came from. Let me live vicariously through you.”
Her head swung my way, immediately making me nervous that she wasn’t watching the road. “Unless you’re on the run from something. Did you rob a bank? Commit petty larceny? Breaking and entering? Did you poison a lover?”
“What? Jesus, how long have you been thinking about this?”
She shrugged. “My mom always told me I had an overactive imagination.”
“God, well, it’s not any of that, okay? I’m just a boring, normal ol’ person. I just needed—”
“Needed a change of scenery, blah blah blah.” She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, you said.” She slit her eyes over in my direction, suspiciously.
I shook my head. “What even is petty larceny?”
“The fuck I know,” she said, laughing. She punched me on the shoulder. “Lighten up. You wanna be Miss Mysterious, fine. But I’m an open book. You can ask me anything, I’ll tell you, no problemo.”
“Okay.” I shifted on the truck bench to look at her. “What’s a strong woman like you doing clinging to this ranch when you’re obviously capable and motivated to get what you want when you put your mind to it?”
I still thought it was impressive the way she’d outwitted the twins to keep her small slice of the property—the most important slice, in fact. I just didn’t understand why she’d done it.
“Oh, you won’t dish on your story but then you want me to spill mine?”
I shrugged. “You don’t have to, no pressure. I was just curious.”
She laughed. “I’m just fucking with you. I’m not good with boundaries, if you can’t tell. It’s a problem. I used to be really concerned with doing everything right and not stepping on anyone’s toes. But then Dad was an asshole who screwed over the entire town and almost everyone I knew turned on me, so I stopped giving a fuck.”
I frowned. “So why don’t you leave?”
She scoffed. “And give them all the satisfaction of driving me out of town? Never.” She all but spit out the last word. “This is my home. This land has been in my family for four generations. Four generations. Then last year my dad goes and gambles what should have been my birthright into the ground because he didn’t think a daughter was important enough to save it for.”
I could tell she was seething, even just talking about it. And I felt immediately bad for asking. “Look, I’m sorry. I of all people should know I have no business to pry.”
But she went on as if she hadn’t even heard me. “Yeah, I get it, Mom was the glue holding us together, and when she died it all sort of fell apart. He and I were just going through the motions the past few years. At least I thought we were. I kept trying to get him to listen to my ideas about sustainable ranching but he could not give less of a shit. It’s been working my way for thirty years, Ruthie, it’ll hold out another year just fine,” she intoned, lowering her voice in imitation. “And another. And another. Except it wasn’t. And he just refused to look at the numbers. The only thing he ever wanted to do was be done by five so he could hit up the gambling halls and try his luck with the desperate bar bunnies.”