Page 85 of The Honorable Texan
“He’ll come around, give him time,” Leo told her.“Meanwhile, you’ve got a job and a place to stay while your face heals.We all have hard times,” he added gently.“But we get through them, even when we don’t expect to.Give yourself time.”
She smiled.“Thanks,” she said huskily.“You really are a nice man.”
“Nice, clean, sober, modest and incredibly handsome,” he added with a wicked grin.“And I haven’t even gotten to my best points yet!”
“Compared to your brothers,” she began, “you—”
The door opened before she could hang herself, and Rey shoved a cup of coffee at her before he handed the second one to Leo.
“It’s hot,” he told them as he slid in and took the soft drink out of his jacket pocket and put it in the cup holder.
“Cold caffeine,” Leo said, shuddering.“Why can’t you drink coffee like a normal man?”
“I drink coffee at breakfast,” Rey told him haughtily.
“So do I, but you don’t have to have rules on when to drink it!”
Rey started the engine with a speaking glance.
“See that look?”Leo indicated it to Meredith.“When he looks like that, you’ve already lost whatever argument you’re in the middle of.We call it ‘the look.’I once saw him break up a fistfight with it.”
“I don’t plan to argue,” Meredith promised.
Rey gave her “the look,” and it lingered before his attention turned back to the windshield.
Meredith sat back against the leather seat and wondered suddenly if she wasn’t making the biggest mistake of her life.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Hart Ranchwas almost as Meredith had pictured it, with neat wooden fences concealing electrified fencing, improved pasture land and cattle everywhere.There were also pastures with horses, and there was a barn big enough to store a commercial jet.But she loved the house itself, with its graceful arches reminiscent of Spanish architecture, and the incredible number of small trees and shrubs around it.In the spring, it must be glorious.There were two ponds, a decorative one in the front of the house and a larger one behind the house in which a handful of ducks shivered in the November sun.
“Do you have goldfish in the pond?”she asked excitedly as Rey stopped the car in front of the house on an inlaid stone driveway.
“Goldfish and Koi,” he answered, smiling reluctantly at her excitement.“We have a heater in the pond to keep them comfortable during the winter.There are water lilies in there, too, and a lotus plant.”
“Does the other pond have goldfish, too, where the ducks are?”she wondered.
Leo chuckled.“The other one is because of the ducks.We had to net this pond to keep them out of it so we’dhavesome goldfish.The ducks were eating them.”
“Oh, I see.”She sighed.“It must be beautiful here inthe spring,” she said dreamily, noting the gazebo and the rose garden and stone seats and shrubs around the goldfish pond.
“It’s beautiful to us year-round,” Leo told her with lazy affection.“We all love flowers.We’ve got some more roses in a big flower garden around the back of the house, near a stand of pecan trees.Tess is taking courses in horticulture and she works with hybrids.”
“I love roses,” Meredith said softly.“If I had time, I’d live in a flower garden.”
“I suppose cleaning rooms is time-consuming,” Rey murmured sarcastically as he got out of the car and went in the front door of the house.
Leo glanced at her curiously while Rey was out of earshot.“You clean rooms?”
“I don’t,” she told him with a sharp grin.“But I’m living down to your brother’s image of my assets.”
Leo pursed his lips.“Now, that’s interesting.You sound like a woman with secrets.”
“More than you’d guess,” she told him heavily.“But none that I’m ashamed of,” she added quickly, just in case he got the wrong idea.
“Rey doesn’t like you, does he?”he murmured, almost to himself.“I wonder why?It’s not like him to pick on sick people.”
“I’m not sick,” she assured him.“I’m just battered, but I’ll heal.”
