Texas Baby

Maybe that had been a mistake, too. Maybe a little responsibility would have been good for her.

Well, better late than never.

“It’s a combination of a lot of things, Nik. We’ve had frost two years running. That hurt us a lot. And some of the acres on the west ridge are just about used up. They’ll have to lie dormant for a few years before they can be replanted. Worst of all, though, is that one of our best buyers is in deep financial trouble. They just might go bankrupt.”

“So? Can’t you find another buyer?”

“Believe me, I’m trying. But it’s not that easy. There’s a lot of competition. The thing is, we’ve crunched the numbers every way we can think of, and the only answer is to sell some of the land.”

Nikki’s mouth hung open. “Sell Everly?”

Susannah put her hand on Nikki’s arm. “Not the whole ranch, honey. Everly has always belonged to the Everlys, and it always will. Just a couple of hundred acres, not enough to miss really. But enough to put us back in the black.”

Nikki rubbed the pad of her thumb over the glossy pink polish on her index finger. Susannah knew that habit. It meant Nikki was thinking hard.

She hoped she wasn’t overloading her with too much scary information. There was a mighty fine line between character-building and spirit-crushing.

“I guess I still don’t understand what this has to do with marrying Chase,” Nikki muttered, staring down at her finger. “Grandfather left you the ranch, right? Can’t you do whatever you want?”

“Not unless I’m married, and even then my husband gets to make the decisions. You know how Grandfather was. You know how he felt about women.”

Nikki looked up with a half smile. “Totally chauvinist? Totally caveman?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

Susannah sighed, remembering the fights, the rip-roaring yell-fests as she tried to keep an ornery ninety-year-old man from running the ranch into the ground. Arlington H. Everly had a true Texas-sized ego. No one told him what to do. But take advice from a woman? “Not unless my wits get up and go prancing in the pepper patch,” he’d vowed.

Tragically, toward the end, it had come to that.

“Does Chase know all this stuff?” Nikki’s upturned face looked pale, and, although Susannah might be imagining this, she looked a tiny bit older already.

“Yeah. He knows. He’s doing me a favor. You can see that I couldn’t risk marrying just anyone. They’d get control of the ranch, and…”

She couldn’t even finish the thought.

“Anyhow, I trust Chase. After we’ve been married a year, he can sell the acres we need to unload. Grandfather didn’t stipulate how long the marriage had to last beyond that first year. So then we’ll end it, and we’ll go back to being friends.”

She looked down at Nikki, and to her surprise realized that the girl’s eyes were glistening in the light from the overhead chandelier.

Susannah felt her heart squeeze. Damn it. She really had screwed up. Nikki must actually have hoped that the “marriage of convenience” might turn into more than that.

She must actually have hoped Chase might become her big brother for real.

“Oh, honey, I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you about all this sooner—”

“Don’t be,” Nikki said roughly. She stood, yanked on the hem of her short-shorts, stretching them out just enough to cover the lacy white underwear. “I don’t care what you do.”

She headed up the stairs. Susannah watched her go helplessly.

“Nikki…”

The girl reached the first landing, then turned furiously, her face set and white. “I’ll tell you one thing, though. You tell me I shouldn’t hang out with Eli. Well, at least we really love each other.”

“Love?” Susannah rose instinctively to her feet. “Love?”

“That’s right. And you can say whatever you want about how young I am, or how stupid I am. At least I know how to love somebody. So I guess I’m not as stupid as you are.”

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