The Wyoming Heir. Naomi Rawlings

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      Chapter Two

      Mug of coffee in hand, Luke stood at the French doors in his grandpa’s study, looking out over the estate’s immaculate back lawn. To the west, the Catskill Mountains, shadowed in blue and gray, rose over the fields and trees like sentinels guarding the land below. Pretty enough, but not anything close to the untamed wilderness he hailed from.

      He rubbed a hand over his face.

      What was he even doing in New York State, standing in a fancy house that he’d somehow inherited rather than Pa?

      You be careful out there, Pa had told him before he left. Your old codger of a grandfather was awful wily. Wouldn’t surprise me if he found some way to chain you to that wretched estate of his, even from his grave. The tension had risen like an old, unhealed wound still festering between Pa and Grandpa despite one of them being cold and buried. Probably ruined Sam in the few years he had her.

      Not once in his twenty-eight years had Pa said anything good about Grandpa. Luke had about fallen over three years ago when Pa sent Sam off to the man. But the ranch had been no place for a young girl after Blake’s death, and she’d needed to go somewhere.

      Someone rapped at the office door, and Luke turned.

      “I’m here...like you asked.”

      Oh, Sam was there all right. With a face chiseled in granite.

      His boots sunk into some highfalutin gold and burgundy rug as he walked behind Grandpa’s desk. With lions’ heads carved into eight columns and sprawling paws to serve as feet, the desk belonged in a king’s throne room rather than a study and wasn’t something he cottoned to sitting behind. Still standing, he gestured to her. “Sit.”

      Head high, back rigid, she took dainty steps toward a gilt chair with blue cushions that faced the desk. She still wore that lifeless school uniform of a white shirtwaist and navy skirt, the black armband around her right sleeve indicating she was in mourning for a man he’d never met. And yet, she carried herself like a lady. Maybe that was the problem. She wasn’t so much the girl he remembered anymore, but a woman.

      A citified woman.

      He cleared his throat and placed his half-empty coffee mug on the desk.

      She tilted her nose into the air. “You shouldn’t set that on the wood. It could ruin the finish.”

      He lifted his eyes, and their gazes collided. He set his jaw. She straightened her spine. He narrowed his eyes. She raised her chin. Somewhere outside, a bird chirped and a servant called. A door closed on the floor above, and footsteps plodded down the hall. But neither of them moved.

      “Since I inherited this desk, along with the rest of the estate,” he said slowly, his eyes still burning into hers, “I reckon it’s not your concern how I treat it.”

      “You shouldn’t use phrases like ‘I reckon,’ either. It’s most unbecoming.”

      He gripped the edge of the desk and leaned over it. “I’m not interested in being ‘becoming,’ Samantha. I’m interested in settling this slew of money Grandpa left me and taking you home. Where you were born, where you were raised and where you belong.”

      “You can’t make me leave.”

      Figured stubbornness was the one thing that fancy school hadn’t stripped from her. “Don’t you tell me what I can and can’t do.”

      “I can’t tell you what to do? What gives you the right to tell me?” She jumped from the chair, her hands balled into fists at her sides. “I’m staying here and graduating, then I’m going to college to study mathematics and architecture. Because I want to be an architect one day.”

      Her tongue lingered over the word architect, and her eyes burned with a fierce passion. “Not that you’ve bothered to ask why I want to go to college.”

      He didn’t know whether to laugh or bang his head against the wall. At least Sam had something she wanted to do, some reason for avoiding their family—though she’d evidently had the good sense not to mention such a ridiculous notion in her letters to him.

      Had probably told Ma all about it, though.

      A woman architect. Who’d ever heard of such a thing?

      “Well, aren’t you going to СКАЧАТЬ