Page 2

"He hired me by email," she said. "Maybe he meant to mention it earlier."

"Maybe."

He came up the steps then, because not shaking her hand would have been a thing, and shaking it was less of a thing. His hand was calloused and warm and it swallowed hers, and the warmth of it went straight up her arm and sat down somewhere it had no business being, and she kept her face exactly where it was.

He let go a beat too quickly.

She noticed that too, the speed of it, the way you'd drop something a little too hot to be holding. She filed it next to the stillness, in the place where she kept the things men didn't mean to tell her.

"My father will be in touch about your start date," he said. He nodded once, the way you'd nod at a delivery. "Helen will get you settled. I've got work."

Then his eyes went down her, once — not the way a man looks at a woman, but the way a man looks at a tool he's been handed and already knows is wrong for the job. Soft hands. Soft everything, to his eye, the kind of soft that came from offices and air conditioning and never once having to be hard for a living. They stopped at her feet.

"You'll want different shoes," he said. "Those won't last a week out here, darlin'."

He'd aimed the darlin' the same place he'd aimed the rest of it. Not warm. Not careless. You don't belong here and we both know it.

And there it was. Heat climbed the back of her neck that had nothing to do with the sun. Different shoes. Like she was a city girl playing dress-up. Like he'd looked at her for all of ten seconds and done the math and come up with won't last. She had balanced the books for men who ran companies. She had found the buried clause that saved a client four hundred thousand dollars on page nineteen of a contract three lawyers had already signed off on. And this man had glanced at her shoes and decided he knew the whole of her.

She smiled. It was her best one, the one she saved for auditors. "I'm nobody's darlin'."

His eyes moved over her once more, the jeans, the set of her jaw, the purse she was still holding like a shield. "No," he said. "I don't expect you are."

It took her a second to feel the full shape of it. I don't expect you are. Not I'll keep that in mind. Not even a real apology for the darlin'. He'd looked at her and decided she was exactly the kind of woman no one kept — too sharp, too cold, too much work — and he'd said so to her face inside of two minutes, the way you'd note a fence needed mending.

Then, like none of it had happened, like he hadn't just filed her under temporary to her face: "Day starts at five out here. Helen'll show you the office in the morning." He settled his hat. "See you tomorrow, Ms. Baxter."

It was almost worse than the insult — the way he could be cold to the bone and still, underneath it, simply expect her to show up and do the job. Like the rudeness and the work were two separate ledgers and he'd never once think to reconcile them.

He didn't ask her in. He didn't apologize for his father not being there or for the drive she'd made or for any of it. He turned and went into the house, and he didn't look back at her, and the screen door slammed behind him hard enough that Helen flinched.

Lara stood on the porch holding her purse, and for the first time in three months she felt something that wasn't tired. She would have quite liked to throw her sensible, wrong, city shoes at the back of that man's head.

"He's not usually…" Helen started, and stopped, and tried again. "He just got back from…" That didn't go anywhere either. She looked at the screen door like it had embarrassed her personally, then seemed to remember herself, and reached into her apron pocket.

"Here." She pressed a set of keys into Lara's hand. A worn leather fob, a truck key, a couple of others. "John wanted you to have these. There's a truck round the side. The blue one, it's not much to look at but it runs. It's yours to use while you're working for us. He arranged it before…" She stopped. "Well. Before today. He thinks of these things."

Lara closed her hand around the keys. They were warm from Helen's pocket.

"That's kind of him," she said, and meant it, and felt the strangeness of it land, that the man she hadn't met had thought about how she'd get around, and the man she had met couldn't get away from her fast enough.

"It's fine," she added, because Helen was still looking stricken about the door. "Really."

It was not fine. But it was the right thing to say, and she was so good at the right thing to say.

She walked back down to the rental car and told the driver she wouldn't need him after all, paid him for the wait, watched him turn around in the wide gravel and go. Then she found the blue truck round the side of the barn, climbed up into a cab that smelled of dust and somebody's cigarettes from years ago, and sat for a moment with both hands on a wheel that belonged to the Roystons.

She drove herself back toward town the way she'd come.

The ranch got small in the mirror, the house and the barn and the one dark tree on the rise shrinking down into the enormous gold nothing of the land, and she could still feel the exact temperature of his hand around hers. That was the part she couldn't stand. Not that he'd been rude — she could do rude, rude was easy, rude she could meet across a desk all day long. It was that he'd been an arrogant, dismissive, I-don't-expect-you-are son of a bitch who'd sized her up and filed her under gone by Christmas inside of two minutes — and her body, the traitor, hadn't registered a word of it. Some animal part of her had clocked a still-faced, slammed-door, hand-too-warm man who thought she was nothing, and gone yes anyway.

That was the whole problem in one sentence. It had always been the whole problem. Her head could file a man under no and her body would keep right on saying please.

She had come to West Texas to get away from exactly this. From men. From wanting them. From the particular brand of her own judgment that lit up like a struck match every time the worst possible person walked into a room. She had a flawless record. She had never once wanted a man who was good for her. She'd wanted the one with the still face and the closed door, every time, and she'd told herself every time that this one was different, and she had been wrong every time, and she had the scars filed and dated to prove it.

Soluno was supposed to be the cure. A small job in a small town at the literal end of the map, the far edge of the Permian Basin where the highways ran out of reasons to keep going, where the whole point was that there would be nothing here she could ruin her life over.

She'd been on the property eleven minutes.