CHAPTER TWO

      IT WASN’T EASY for her to stare down the man with whom she’d made her awkward sexual debut, but Nicky managed it. It helped that Garrett wasn’t exactly giving her the smoldering looks he had the night of said debut. In fact, once he got past the initial shock of seeing her, he started glaring.

      All in all, he was a good glarer, too. Sharp, precise and with a smidge of I’m in charge here so get lost.

      Nicky hadn’t seen him in seventeen years, not since they’d graduated from high school, but he hadn’t changed that much. By some measures anyway. He still had the thick dark brown hair that looked as if he’d just climbed out of bed after having sex. The same sizzling blue eyes that coordinated well with the smoldering looks. But there was something different about him, too. Something she knew a little too well.

      Life had smacked Garrett Granger upside the head with a proverbial two-by-four. She recognized the world weariness, the impatience. The slight F-you attitude.

      “My mother was wrong to give you that lease,” he growled. Speaking had to be hard with his jaw muscles that tight.

      “She signed it,” Nicky pointed out, and she took the lease from him because he looked ready to vaporize it with his glare. She had other copies, but she didn’t want to have to go back to San Antonio to get them. That would mean a forty-five-minute drive.

      He cursed. Stopped. And Nicky thought maybe he’d remembered that he was the “nice” Granger brother, but she followed his gaze over her shoulder where she spotted her daughter, Kaylee, who was coming out of the bedroom that Nicky had just been cleaning.

      “Gar-if,” Kaylee greeted. She went to Garrett as if they were best buds and took his hand. “See my room.”

      “How do you know my daughter?” Nicky asked at the same moment, Garrett said, “This is your daughter?”

      Nicky nodded. Garrett gave her another dose of stink eye that he thankfully didn’t aim at Kaylee. Because if he had, Nicky would have let her own F-you attitude kick in, and she would have shown him the door. It didn’t matter that he was a Granger because he wasn’t her landlord. His mother, Belle, was.

      “I met Kaylee outside earlier,” Garrett snarled. “She was poking a stick in a cow pie.”

      Nicky groaned, immediately tugged Kaylee away from Garrett and checked her daughter’s hands. There was no visible poop, but she’d need the hand sanitizer. She should buy stock in the company as often as she had to use it.

      “I thought Mrs. Ellery and her sisters were watching her,” Nicky explained.

      Later, she would need to give Kaylee a lecture about cow pies and staying closer to her since the Ellery sisters apparently weren’t the stellar babysitters they claimed to be. Ironic since they were named for various goddesses of protection: Aradia, Diana and Hera.

      Kaylee led Garrett back to the room. “It’s pink,” her daughter declared.

      It wasn’t. Well, except for one dust-coated doll in a pink dress sitting on top of the chest of drawers. Everything else was gray, drab and probably festering with mold and things Nicky didn’t want to identify. She’d need the full year of the lease just to get the place clean.

      Garrett looked around, managed a semi nod and equally semi smile for Kaylee. “You can’t stay here,” he added to Nicky.

      Nicky made a show of running her hand like a magician’s assistant over the lease. “This says differently, and I should know because I drew up this lease myself. Since I’m a lawyer, I can promise you that it’s all in order.”

      That seemed to distract him or something, and he gave her a funny look. “You’re a lawyer? You said you were going to be a doctor.”

      Nicky gave him a funny look right back because she was surprised he had remembered that. “My plans changed. I learned the hard way that I tend to vomit at the sight of blood, guts and bones.” Not a very professional reaction, and her instructors agreed. “I see you’ve become what you’ve always said you’d be—a rancher. But you’re also a business owner. Granger Western.”

      Or Cowboy Mart as most folks called it since it sold Western supplies in bulk and at a discount.

      Nicky guessed that the business was making the Granger clan even richer than they already were. Especially now that they’d worked through the kinks of a recent setback and investigation.

      “My sister, Sophie, runs the business,” he provided.

      She listened for any hint of his disapproval about that. There wasn’t any. Interesting because she’d read an article about a codicil to his father’s will that had ousted Garrett and turned the reins of Granger Western over to Sophie. Things like that could tear a family apart, but it appeared there’d been no tearing involved in their case.

      Apparently his idea of “small talk” was over because Garrett took the lease back from her and pointed to the bottom line. “My mother doesn’t have permission to sign this. The ranch belongs to my brother.”

      “Roman.” She nodded. “Yes, he owns the ranch, but he doesn’t own this house. I researched it, and according to your great-grandfather’s will, he left the house itself to his wife who then left it to your grandfather. He left it to your father, and since your father didn’t stipulate in his will who was to inherit the house, ownership passed to your mother.”

      The look he gave her could have flash melted sand, and it had no sexual components to it whatsoever. Not that she’d expected anything sexual from Garrett. After all, he’d rid her of her virginity and promptly dumped her. Still, it was impossible for him to be completely nonsexual since he was still physically hot.

      “I’ll have my lawyers look into the will, too,” Garrett added, “because I can’t believe my father didn’t spell that out.”

      Neither could she, especially since his father had apparently spelled out everything else. It was possible he’d simply not cared enough about the place to bother with it. In fact, judging from the state of disrepair, none of the current Grangers had cared much about it.

      Unlike her.

      Just like that, the bad stuff came. Memories that Nicky wished would die the death they deserved. But at the end of that memory tunnel was this place.

      This house.

      She’d escaped to this place too many times to count.

      That was something the Grangers didn’t know. But she’d used it to recoup and in some cases to heal, mentally and physically. No way, though, did she want to share all of that with Garrett. It was one of her many secrets, but if she was labeling them, that was secret number one.

      Apparently,