“Fine,” she blurted. “I’m not pregnant. But I could be. One day.”
He exhaled heavily, partly from relief, partly from irritation.
“Maybe we could get to work on makin’ it a reality,” she suggested sweetly.
He shrugged out of his coat and reached to put it back on the hook. “Look, Leah. I’m sorry you drove all this way, but—”
Leah squealed. “Oh, no. I spilled it.”
He turned to find her standing beside the island. Beer had poured down her shirt and was dripping onto the floor.
Her gaze cut to him, and he could tell she was making sure he was looking.
“It was an accident, Stone. I was just…”
Accident, my ass.
“I was reaching…”
Stone sighed when she let that sentence die off, too. Leah couldn’t even come up with a decent lie. She’d always been that way, and he honestly wasn’t sure why. She resorted to bending the truth to get attention. When someone was telling a story, she had to have one of her own—bigger in scale, more dramatic. It was one of the reasons people kept her at a distance. That and she treated most people like they were beneath her.
I’ll have you know that Stone won’t ever run my Daddy’s ranch. Or any ranch, for that matter. Not without me. He’s an outsider. A nobody. If he expects to make it in the cattle business, he needs a name backing him. I’m his best shot at ever makin’ somethin’ of himself.
And what exactly do you get out of it?
I’ll have a man who’ll do exactly what I tell him to do.
Unlike what Leah told Reilly, Stone had never been under her thumb. At times, he allowed her to think he was, but the truth was, he’d merely looked past her arrogance and haughty indignation, and he’d befriended her despite her irritating need to embellish the truth. She was irritating most of the time, but now and again, she would surprise him. For a little while, he’d even liked her.
“Do you have a shirt I could borrow?” she asked, already unbuttoning hers.
“Go on,” he said, pointing toward the hallway. “My bedroom’s on the right.”
“Thank you.” Her voice dripped like honey.
While she sauntered off to change her shirt, Stone grabbed paper towels to clean up the spilled beer.
Too bad Bounty didn’t make something to clean up the mess that was his life.
***
“I have nothin’ to say to him,” Stevie told Nico, wondering why he wouldn’t just listen to her.
She’d told him a dozen iterations of that statement since he insisted on going to Stone’s and taking her with him. She didn’t want to go. She wanted to sit at home and pout for a little while. She could address the stupidness of this day tomorrow when it was behind her, and she could actually think about it without the red haze that clouded her vision.
“Well, I do.”
“What?” She stared at him as he drove toward Stone’s. “What do you want to say?”
“I’ll know when we get there.”
“Meaning you have no idea.” She huffed, crossing her arms over her chest. “And what if he’s already gone?”
“He’s not leavin’.”
“You know this for a fact?” she snapped, hating that she was so angry.
“Yes.”
