Saving Cinderella. Lilian Darcy

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      “I’m doing fine here,” Jill told him.

      She straightened. He could see a tiny yellow paint chip on her jaw line that his fingers itched to brush away. He remembered all too clearly how soft her skin was in that spot.

      “I know you are,” he answered instead. “You’ve done a great job. I never thought you’d get that far in a couple of hours. But we should pack up now and head back. It’s getting dark out.”

      She blinked. “That late?”

      “Time flies when you’re having fun.”

      “Ha ha.”

      “While we’re clearing up, shall we grab a coffee and talk a little bit?”

      “Sure. About the divorce?”

      “And about the marriage. Square our stories. How much do you want to tell Mom?”

      He went over to a bench at the side of the shed, where there was a sink and a faucet and a propane camping stove.

      “It’s your decision, Gray,” she answered.

      “I’m inclined to keep it simple.” He added water to a kettle and instant coffee granules to two cups as he spoke. “Let’s just say you got in trouble with a contract in Las Vegas that I was a witness to, and now there are some legal papers for me to sign so you can get out of the situation. That’s…kind of the truth.”

      She laughed. “Sort of kind of, I guess.”

      “Okay, I admit it.” He spread his work-roughened hands and gave an upside down smile. “I’m embarrassed to tell my mother that I actually married a woman I hadn’t even met purely because I felt sorry for her!”

      “You didn’t know it would be legal.”

      “Might have done it anyway, under the circumstances,” he growled.

      She raised her eyebrows. Didn’t quite believe him.

      “Well, I’m grateful,” she said. “I’ll never forget how it felt to escape from those other guys, Gray, when I realized they weren’t prepared to go over five hundred dollars and you were.”

      “How’d you know I wasn’t a creep, too?”

      It was something he had been wondering on and off for six months. How they had both known, actually, that it was a good deed on his part. That he was saving Cinderella, not kidnapping her.

      She went still at his question, and her jewel green eyes rounded. “I—” She stopped, and laughed her pretty, golden laugh. “Lord, you know, I never even thought about that. I…just knew.”

      She looked at him and frowned. Her head tilted slightly to one side as if she was tallying his attributes. He met her gaze steadily, but felt self-conscious. He wasn’t sure what she would think about what she saw.

      He was a simple man, big, strong, but with no airs and graces. He wore work clothes six and a half days a week, and he had rough hands like two fresh offcuts of wood. There was no glamour attached to him. He couldn’t be the type she was used to—like the man in Pennsylvania who wanted to marry her, for example.

      “I guess because you were just sitting there quietly,” she said finally.

      “Yeah, I’d just come in for a beer,” he agreed, remembering…

      He had made the journey to Las Vegas in desperation. He wanted to see his older half-brother, Mitch, who was the only person he could think of who might lend him the money he needed to put capital into the expanded. Thurrell Creek, owned by Wylie Stannard for thirty years since he’d won it from Ron Thurrell’s father in a bet, was run down and neglected and in very bad shape.

      If he could put some money into Thurrell Creek, if the weather was kind to him, if he didn’t lose too many calves, then he’d have cattle to sell and could hopefully claw himself up out of the hole the ranch was buried in.

      Why had Dad suddenly bought Thurrell Creek from old Wylie Stannard last December, when Wylie had blown into town from back east, ready to sell? Had Dad stopped to think about quite how much it would stretch their cash flow? Did he have a strategy for making it work?

      Nine months later, Gray still didn’t know.

      By a chilling coincidence, which still sent prickles up his spine whenever he thought of it, Frank McCall had died that same day. He and Stannard and the McCalls’ lawyer, Haydon Garrett, had finalized the purchase of the ranch. Afterward, on his way home, Frank had suffered what would prove to be a fatal stroke, at the wheel of his pickup in Blue Rock’s main street. He’d never been able to talk about the purchase of Thurrell Creek, and how he planned to manage.

      But if Dad thought we could do it, then we should be able to do it. Gray had thought this way in Las Vegas, and he was still thinking this way now. Is it my fault? Was he that much better a rancher than I am? We had a tough winter. We lost more stock than I’d hoped. We had to replace the generator, and we had that fire in the feed store. But Dad was the one who taught me to allow for contingencies like that. Why did he think we could stretch ourselves so thin?

      Gray had not told Mitch any of this when he made his desperate plea for funds. It didn’t change the outcome. Mitch refused to help.

      Sitting defensively behind his desk in his big office in downtown Vegas, Mitch had told his half-brother angrily, “Your father told me to stay out of your lives.”

      “Yes, because—”

      “Now, suddenly, when Frank is gone—” Mitch plowed through Gray’s words “—and you need my money, the money I made in business with my own father, it’s a different story.”

      “It’s not like that, Mitch. Dad spoke in anger that day.” Gray didn’t add his opinion that Frank McCall’s anger had been more than justified after the years of hurt Mitch had inflicted on the family, both before and after his departure from the ranch at the age of nineteen. “You know they both wanted to heal the rift. Mom hoped so much that you’d come to Dad’s funeral. She phoned you. She begged—”

      “It was too late for that,” Mitch cut in, his mouth tight. “Mom’s always been too sentimental. She may believe that anger shouldn’t last beyond the grave, but that’s not my opinion.”

      What could Gray do at this point but accept defeat? He didn’t know which was worse—that he hadn’t found a way to save the ranch, or that Mitch and Louise were still so deeply at odds, with himself, as Frank’s son, locked in the middle. Both facts had his gut tied in knots, and he hadn’t trusted himself to drive after he left Mitch’s office. Had decided to stay overnight, start heading back at first light.

      By that time, it was late afternoon, and he’d wandered into the gaming and entertainment section of his hotel, emotions stretched tight as a fiddle string. He’d fed five dollars into a slot machine, purely for the release of hearing the strident noise as he pulled the handle. He had received six hundred dollars worth of winnings from his last pull with an absent sort of surprise. At least it covered the cost of the trip.

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