I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel, looking at the hunk who was on the porch. I noticed he’d avoided the broken floorboard. He stared at me, his eyes hard and unflinching. Recognition flared in them; did he remember me from the beach? Did he think I was still trespassing?
Unfolding my legs from the car, I put on my best strut as I closed the distance between us. My first words to him had to be something memorable, something intoxicating, something to make him think the dirty thoughts. His eyes strayed to my legs as I strode purposefully toward him, clad in short denim cutoffs and recently cleaned boots. And a bandage. Aw yeah.
Now standing at the bottom of the steps, I licked my lips as I appraised him. The seduction of Hank begins with the words . . .
“I see by your buckle your name’s Hunk. I mean, Hunk. I mean, f**k, Hank. Crap.”
He looked confused. Not amused.
Birds chirped. Wind blew. Hank stared. I? Sweat. Aw yeah.
Deciding to pretend I’d not spoken at all, I stared back at him, determined not to say anything.
“So, you’re Hank, right?”
Way to go, Viv.
He nodded.
Mmm. Nodding was the best. I wasn’t going to say anything else.
The pressure of his silence built.
“I’m Viv Franklin.” Sigh.
He just continued to stare, and I wondered if I had Hungry Man breakfast on my face. So much for the seduction of Hank.
“So anyway, I’m Maude’s great-niece. Did you even know I was coming out here?”
“Mm-hmm.”
He speaks! I mean, he hums!
“Great. Okay, so . . .” I trailed off. Nothing. “Yesterday, when we were on the beach? And you said, you know, get the hell off the beach?”
“That was you?”
Okay, I’m a pretty girl. A tough kind of pretty, with the tats and the piercings, but I have a great face and not smallish boobs. Not to mention I was dragging a shit piñata behind me through the sand when we met. So overall, pretty memorable.
But not to Cowboy Hank. This was going to be a tougher nut to crack than I thought. Good thing I liked a challenge.
“Yep, that was me. This is my place now. I mean, I don’t know if I’m keeping it for sure, lots of work to be done, and I haven’t really seriously considered the implications of actually moving here from Philadelphia, but I’m thinking about it. What is it you do here, exactly? I heard you oversee things, but what does that entail? Does it mean—”
“You sure talk a lot,” he mused, hooking his strong hands through his . . . gulp . . . belt buckle. Mmm, I did love a man who wasn’t afraid of a buckle.
“I don’t normally.” I moved to the side to get out of the sun, and now he was in silhouette. Christ, his outline made me want to lick things. “Anyway, you want to come in?”
“Nope. Just here to feed the horses. I’ll be back tomorrow,” he said with a frown, turning toward the barn.
As he passed me I caught a whiff of his cologne. Spicy and manly. I suddenly sneezed.
“And stay out of the barn, you’re making the animals nervous.”
I stood there, evaluating and assessing. This guy was turning me into an idiot! Like, a simpering girly girl who couldn’t handle herself around a mountain of man flesh, not at all how I normally was around men. But ooooohhhhh. Maybe this was supposed to be how it was? Like, in a good romance novel the heroine was always affected by the hero. Okay, so, reassess. Reevaluate. The cowboy wasn’t going to fall in line. That’s what happened, though, right? It couldn’t be too easy, or romance novels would just be little pamphlets. There’d be some conflict in this story. Challenges. But no more word vomit hopefully.
I slunk back into the house, avoiding the broken floorboard.
I also avoided the backyard, although I watched from the windows in one of the guest rooms upstairs. I watched Hank move across the yard, feeding the horses and watering the chickens, which squawked gratefully. As I worried the cameo around my neck, I observed the cowboy in his natural element. He liked to work with no shirt on, which seemed so perfectly right and not at all beefcake. I mean, it was warm this morning, almost seventy degrees . . .
Once he left in his truck, a great manly beast of a thing, clouds rolling in great waves of lusty dust in his wake, I went to work. I wasn’t quite sure how to tackle all the junk. It was a bit sad, actually.
Maude had grown up in this house, where she’d lived her entire life. The house had been in the family for more than a hundred years. When the first generation of my family to branch off the Philadelphia trunk had traveled here so many years ago, what would become the town of Mendocino was still a small settlement. It was composed mostly of families from New England, so the style of homes reflected what these pioneers brought with them: Cape Cod, Victorian, picket fences, and cottage rosebushes everywhere.
She’d lived here when her mother died, and had never left to create her own household. Families had visited over the years; aunts and uncles and cousins and their children had filled this house with laughter and tears, suppers and tea parties. But in her last years, Aunt Maude had withdrawn.
As I began to sort through the clutter in one of the spare bedrooms, I discovered a trove of Maude’s paintings. Mendocino had once been an artist colony, and she’d signed and dated every one, starting back in the fifties. I knew I’d get lost if I started looking through them with any kind of order at this point, so I tucked them back into the closet until I could spend more time examining them.