“Not directly,” she says, digging her stubby nails into the denim.
“Well, it all makes sense now,” Crew muses.
Grace prickles a little. “What makes sense?”
With a slight lift of his shoulder, he says, “You’re not the first lost soul Renata Caldwell has tried to save. I’ve made this drive plenty of times.”
“From Minetta?”
“Minetta, Swift, Bellhaven, Ingram—hell, I’ve gone as far as Waco before. All the places your kind like to wander.”
Grace pins him with a look, but his eyes remain on the road. “Mykind?”
“Y’know,” he says, reaching over her to fiddle with the glove box. She pushes back into her seat, trying to maintain as much distance between them as possible as he pulls it open and grabs hold of a bag of sunflower seeds. He hauls the bag out and then holds the open end up to his mouth. With a handful of seeds muffling his voice, he says, “The runnin’ kind.”
It irks her, how he thinks he’s pegged her so well—how she must be a dime a dozen in his eyes, and how this trial is starting to sound more like a charity project. A pity party for the mistreated cowgirl. She considers telling him to stick it where the sun doesn’t shine, because she didn’trunfrom Bellamy Whitlock. She walked away with bloody hands and her chin high. She fought tooth and nail to get far away from Hopeland, almost dying in the process. She rewrote her own history, erasing the Whitlock name from the narrative. Crew must sense some inkling of the tension vibrating under her skin, because before she can throw back her own snide assessment ofhim, he reaches across the center console and offers her the open bag. Grace looks at it, looks at him, then reaches in and grabs a handful of seeds.
At some point, he, too, must tire of the silence, because heflips on the radio and hits the scan button until he finds an old Waylon Jennings song he seems to be okay with. Grace watches him do this, and two things occur to her: One, he may be the only person on planet Earth who still listens to the radio, and two, he has the music taste of a sixty-year-old man. Every few minutes, he rolls the window down and spits out shells, only to quickly refill with another shake of the bag into his mouth. Grace follows suit, happy to have something to do besides stew in her own melancholy.
Around the four-hour mark, she has cottonmouth from the salty seeds and her legs are aching to stretch. She looks around and behind them, seeing nothing but vast, verdant hills and endless blue sky. Sitting back in her seat, she looks over to Crew. “How long till we get to the ranch?”
He smirks as he turns a seed over between his teeth. “You’re already here.”
Chapter 3
Through taciturn statements and grunted affirmatives, Grace learns Halcyon Ranch is just south of two hundred thousand acres. It’s nearly a third of the size of Rhode Island. It has its ownzip code.
“What was it like,” Grace asks, her body angled almost entirely toward the passenger window, “growing up here?”
Crew doesn’t answer right away, doesn’t huff out a humorless laugh like he has in response to some of her other questions. Grace sneaks a glance at him over her shoulder, and he looks pensive. After another beat of silence, he seems to remember himself as he grumbles, “Lotta shit shovelin’ and lawn mowin’.”
Grace refrains from rolling her eyes. “Really?”
“Thought you’d worked on a ranch before,” he says, side-eyeing her.
“This ranch, compared to Braxton…” Grace shakes her head. “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
He grunts and starts to tap his thumb against the steering wheel in rhythm with the George Strait song now playing on the radio. “You get used to it.”
She gives him one last glance before turning back to thewindow, still in awe of the way the hills seem to go on forever. No, she thinks—she isn’t sure she ever could.
Eventually, a structure on the horizon line comes into view. A log cabin at its heart, but in reality, it’s something straight out of one of those fancy architecture magazines. Tall roofs, artful dormers, lined with cobblestone and dark, lush wood siding. All coming together to make a storybook mansion, the biggest and nicest house Grace has ever seen with her own eyes.
“Wow,” she blurts out when they turn onto the quarter-mile-long driveway.
Gravel crunches under the truck’s giant tires almost comically, as if it ever stood a chance against the steel-strong rubber.
“Don’t get too excited,” Crew says. He jerks his chin toward a different house in the distance, one decidedly less magnificent than the one ahead. “You get the job, that’s where you’ll be living.”
It’s a barn—whether it was actually ever used as one before is unclear—with stark-white shiplap, black eaves, and a giantHon the side. Crew doesn’t—can’t—understand how even this barn-turned-bunkhouse would possibly be the nicest place Grace has ever lived. She hasn’t even seen the inside of it, but she knows it’s far and away better than the bunkhouse at Braxton, which was basically a tiny sauna that stunk constantly of mildew and stale armpit. The digs here look spacious and new, built in this century. Probably even air-conditioned, and she’d be willing to bet the mattresses don’t feel like they’re stuffed with hay.
“Looks all right to me,” Grace counters quietly.
A grid of large, well-maintained paddocks spans the area between the bunkhouse and the stables, and it’s obvious already that Halcyon takes better care of its horses than Braxton couldever hope to. They probably grow their alfalfa from the finest soil and have an equine vet on retainer.
They pull up to the house and park next to two trucks identical to Crew’s, all bearing the same flourishingHas the bunkhouse on their driver-side doors. It’s strange to be thrust so quickly into a place where money is clearly not a concern, where everything in sight drips of wealth and prosperity. The awe of it must be all over Grace’s face, because when Crew shuts off the truck and makes to get out, he does a double take after he looks at her. Leaning in to rest his arm on the center console, he says, “It’s just a house.”
Grace barks a laugh, peeling her eyes from the house to gape at him. “I wouldn’t call it a house. It’s a freaking ski lodge.”
