Page 9

"You said I move fast." She came around the desk, because she was done being talked down to from across a piece of furniture. "I do, actually. I'm an accountant. I move fast through accounts receivable. Yesterday I moved fast through a fridge and a phone and two children who hadn't eaten because the adults who love them were standing in a hospital hallway. If that reads as opportunism to you, Mr. Royston, I'd gently suggest the problem isn't my pace."

For a second he just looked at her, and she had the small fierce satisfaction of watching a man recalculate.

"And for the record," she added, "if I were going to angle for something, I'd aim higher than a filing system held together by rubber bands and prayer. I have standards."

Something moved behind his face — she'd have called it doubt, in another man, the first hairline question of whether he'd got it wrong. For half a second she thought he might even laugh, or apologize, or at the very least put down the accusation he was holding.

He did none of those things. He picked his hat back up off the desk instead, and the shutter came down, and he was gone in every way that mattered before his boots had moved.

"Wade'll show you the place," he said. "The layout, the outbuildings, where things are. You ought to know the ground if you're going to work here." A beat. "I've got too much on today."

And he walked out. Didn't wait for her to answer. Didn't look back. She heard him cross the yard and say something short to someone, and a few minutes later, through the office window, she watched him swing up onto a big bay horse — and there was the unfair part, the part she hadn't braced for, which was the easy animal way he sat it, all that height and temper gone fluid the second he was in the saddle, a man entirely at home in his own body on his own land. He rode out toward the far fences without once turning his head toward the house.

She watched him go longer than she needed to.

He accused you of being a gold-digger ten minutes ago, she reminded herself.

Her body took the reminder, set it aside, and went right on watching the line of his back getting smaller against all that land.

Wade turned out to be about sixty, bowlegged, sun-cured to the color of a saddle, with a mustache that had its own zip code.

"So you're the one saved the day yesterday," he said, by way of hello. "Stayed late, helped Helen, ran the whole circus while the family was at the hospital. Word gets around. Helen says you fed those babies and never once looked like you were doing anybody a favor."

"I'm told that makes me a gold-digger," Lara said.

Wade barked a laugh that startled a barn cat off a fence rail. "He say that to you? This morning?"

"In so many words."

"Lord." He shook his head, delighted and disgusted in equal measure. "That boy could find a storm cloud in an empty sky. Don't take it personal. He aims it at everybody these days." He tipped his head toward the yard. "Come on. I'll show you the place before he decides I've got nothing better to do, which I do, but a tour's a tour."

"Does he usually accuse the new hire of fraud on day two, or am I special?"

"Oh, you're getting the deluxe treatment." Wade set off at an ambling bowlegged pace and she fell in beside him. "Most folks he just ignores till they quit."

"Something to aspire to."

"Stick around. He grows on you." A beat. "Like a fungus, but still."

He showed her the place.

And the place, it turned out, was enormous. Not a ranch the way she'd have drawn one, a house and a barn and a fence, but a whole working world. Two barns. A long bunkhouse where the hands stayed. Sheds full of equipment she couldn't name. A round pen where a younger man was working a nervous-looking horse in patient circles. Cabins set back among the trees, one of them with a truck out front and a pair of boots drying on the step. Pens, troughs, a tractor older than she was and apparently beloved. Cattle out past all of it in numbers that stopped meaning anything. Wade named it all as they went, unhurried, fond, the way you'd introduce family.

"That one's Chase's place." He nodded at a cabin as they passed. "Middle boy. Works the land alongside Dean, lives out here, steady as they come. Good kid." He chewed on something invisible. "That one's Jett's." A second cabin, shut up, no truck. "He'll be off at the mine. Don't get me started."

"The mine?"

"Works for his uncle." Wade's mustache conveyed an entire editorial. "Family business that ain't this family's business, if you take my meaning. He drives out every morning and comes back every night and nobody says a word about it at supper, which is its own kind of saying a word about it." He shrugged. "Good kid too, underneath. They're all good kids. They just don't make it easy."

They just don't make it easy. She was starting to think that was the official motto of the entire county.

"Then there's Remi — youngest, and the only girl, God help her. She's got rooms up in the main house, but she's off with friends just now, gallivanting." He said gallivanting with enormous approval. "She'll be glad of you, I'd guess. Another young woman about the place. It's a lot of cattle and a lot of brothers out here and not much else for a girl her age." He glanced at Lara. "She'll talk your ear clean off. You'll like her."

"And that," Wade said, stopping, "is the prettiest thing out here, and don't let the boss hear me say it, because he thinks it's the cattle."

They'd come up a low rise, and from it she could see the whole spread laid out below — the house small and white in the distance, the barns, the tracks running between them like veins, and beyond it the land going gold and on and on to a horizon that had no business being that far away. A single big tree stood on another rise, dark and alone. Somewhere out there, a smudge against the sky, the bones of an old structure she couldn't make out.

"Six generations," Wade said, quieter now. "Same family, same dirt. You don't see that much anymore." He looked at her sideways. "Reckon you'll stay?"