“I’m sorry.” Lara clasped her hands together, hoping this wouldn’t turn out the way it had so many times before. “I shouldn’t have tried to look at that photograph. It’s . . . I . . .” How could she possibly explain the all-consuming need toknowthings?
“Your curiosity gets the best of you,” he said, those dark eyes watching her.
Lara blinked. No one had ever understood, at least not immediately. Josie had come the closest, seemingly accepting the facet of Lara’s personality that got her into the most trouble. “It’s my most terrible shortcoming. It’s why I left home and came here.” She stopped speaking and bit down on her lip. She hadn’t shared that fact with anyone beyond the family here at the ranch.
He nodded, appearing to be unfazed at this confession, and Lara felt immediately that her secret was safe with him. “We all have our own reckonings to face.”
She searched his eyes, that curiosity roaring to life in the back of her mind. What sort of reckoning did Mr. King expect to face?
He didn’t look away, even as she searched for his secrets as if they might reveal themselves in those dark eyes.
Finally, he drew his gaze toward his horse, and Lara’s breath flooded her lungs. How did this man have the power to make her stop breathing?
“Shortcoming though it may be, I have to admit that I admired the way you filched those mortgage notices from that banker,” he said with a chuckle, although his eyes remained on Trip.
Something about his warm laugh made her relax. “No one’s ever found amusement in my . . . inability to leave well enough alone.” Her family here was more tolerant of the scrapes she found herself in—far more so than her own parents had been. Yet no one had ever laughed like Mr. King.
“I doubt there’s been much to laugh about around here in a while,” he said, raising a hand to stroke Trip’s neck but turning his eyes toward her.
“You’d be right about that.” The lack of rain had kept her cousins up night after night. She and Belle often heard them talking into the wee hours of the morning, discussing options—some of which she’d like to forget had ever been mentioned.
“I imagine this place was quite the operation a few years ago.” Mr. King leaned against the stall, his arm resting on top of the door.
Lara gave him a wistful smile. “I wish you could have seen it as I did when I first came here. Green grass, as far as I could see in all directions. The North Platte was wide and full and fast, not that sad trickle of mud it is now. The ranch had so much livestock that George used to worry they wouldn’t find enough men to round them up come fall. They’d hire on so many ranch hands that some of them had to set up tents out beside the bunkhouse. Josie refused to let Belle and me walk by there.” That past annoyance was now a distant memory.
“It’s a miracle they’ve kept the place going,” Mr. King said.
“It hasn’t been easy.” Lara paused. Was this the season when things would turn around for them? First, the water machine came to town. And now they’d hired on Mr. King. “But I have great hope for the future. Thank you for offering to work here. Before you, and before the water drill, I’d feared we might lose everything.”
“That won’t happen.” Mr. King spoke as if he could know what would occur in the future.
“It is still a possibility,” she admitted. “If we can’t come up with that last dollar. Or if the machine can’t find water here and the rains don’t come this summer.” As much as she hated to speak those thoughts out loud, it was no use pretending that everything was suddenly fixed. Or that Mr. King could count on true employment here in the future.
He shook his head and then leveled that unnerving gaze at her. “This place was your second chance, right?”
Lara swallowed. Why had she told him about having to leave Ohio? He was essentially a stranger. And yet, she didn’t recant her words. Something compelled her to continue to be honest with him. “It was. It is.”
Mr. King nodded, as if he were considering her words. His eyes were shadowed, as if there were something deep inside him that he didn’t yet feel he could trust her with. And then, without a word, he reached for the hat he’d hung over the top of one of the stall posts. He placed it on his head, cocking it at an angle she was certain he knew made him look particularly roguish.
“It’s my last chance too.”
And then he was gone, leaving her to ponder his words in the cool darkness of the stable.
By the time Lara got hold of herself and began to walk back toward the house, she knew three things for certain.
One, Mr. King was a man with a secret.
Two, she yearned so badly to know exactly how dangerous that secret was.
And three, if she had any sense at all, she’d stay far away from him.
