Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Lucy stopped breathing when the front door opened. Oh, Lord. It was Mac Denton. As if her humiliation couldn’t be any more acute. As if life had thought all of the sewage it had already rained down on her needed a cherry on top.

Mac Denton was the cherry. And not in a good way.

Well, maybe someday you’ll be cleaning my floors.

Echoes from that long-ago yelling match in the halls at Silver Creek High School sounded in her head.

Well, damn. At this point, she hoped she would be cleaning his floors, because she needed the money and the place to stay, and she did not have the luxury of being picky.

It was her fault for coming back to Silver Creek. She should have stayed back East. She could have. But she’d kept feeling the pull to home. To a chance to start back at square one and figure out what had gone wrong. To take different steps this time.

Of course, she’d also imagined her parents would be happy to see her, but nothing could have been further from the truth.

“Hello,” she said, straightening her shoulders and trying her hardest to give Mac her cocktail-party smile. The one she’d perfected for her husband’s satisfaction during their eight years of marriage. “I’m here about the job. I don’t think you and I spoke on the phone. It was someone else.”

“My sister.” Mac frowned and leaned against the door, his arm over his head, resting on the frame. She couldn’t help but notice that he had matured a little bit since high school. And by “matured,” she meant he’d gotten an impossibly broad, well-muscled chest and well-defined biceps. Not that she cared about things like that.

“Great. Great,” she said. “Nice of her to facilitate this for you.”

“Isn’t it? Why don’t you come in.”

He was looking at her funny. Like he hadn’t recognized her yet, but like he was sure he was supposed to. She was hoping that he wouldn’t get a sudden realization anytime soon, or he’d show her right back out to the front steps and slam the door in her face. And she would deserve it a little bit. But she was hoping in this instance she wouldn’t get what she deserved. She needed something a whole lot better than what she’d earned from Mac Denton, and she hoped he was in the mood to give it.

Lucy stepped inside. It was an incredible house, as far as the structure went. Nothing like the homes she’d gone to with her husband during visits to the Hamptons. Nothing even like the homes of her parents’ friends. This was the home of someone who worked for a living. A man, obviously, since there was nothing superfluous or soft. The only decor had antlers. There were no curtains. No framed art. No rugs.

Just a large, open living area with exposed beams that flowed into a kitchen with slate-gray flooring and gray marble countertops. The view was the only thing that could be called beautiful. Mountains still capped with snow, marbled blue and white in the distance, and acres of green fields partitioned by fences were all she could see.

No buildings. No streetlights. And the quiet—quiet that was impossible to find in Manhattan.

Yes, there were things about Silver Creek she’d missed. Ironically, the very things she’d often hated when she’d been growing up here.

“Mac Denton.” He turned and held out his hand to her, and she held back the I know that was on hovering on her lips.

“Lucy Carter.” It was her married name, and it might just keep him from figuring her out for another few moments. Maybe those few moments would be enough to buy her a little sympathy.

He frowned. “Lucy Carter?”

“Yes.”

He gave a slight shrug and then gestured to the couch. “Have a seat.” She complied, straightening her skirt as best she could and folding her hands in her lap. “Tell me about your previous work experience.”

“I . . . I don’t have any.”

“You don’t have any?” He paused and ran his hand over his hair, his eyes narrowed, his jaw tight. And then he leaned back, a strange half smile curving his lips.

So much for sympathy and anonymity.

“Lucy Ryan. You’re Lucy Ryan.”

***

Mac looked down at the woman sitting on his couch. She looked far too expensive to be applying for a position as his housekeeper. It had been his first thought when he’d seen her. Well, his second thought, after he’d done a little appreciating of her figure and just how the black jacket she was wearing conformed to it.

Right after that was when he’d noticed that it really was an expensive jacket. And that it was odd that a woman coming to him for this kind of work would be wearing an outfit that probably cost more than his entire collection of Carhartts combined.

This knowledge of clothing had been brought to him by an array of ex-girlfriends he’d taken on shopping trips out of town. Shopping trips he’d bankrolled, and happily. Being in the position to do that was his greatest achievement in life so far. He’d come from nothing. And funnily enough, the person who’d spent all of high school telling him how nothing he was was currently sitting on his couch asking for a job.

Interesting.

Lucy Ryan. It all made sense now. He hadn’t recognized her. For one thing, she’d given up lightening her hair. It was all dark now, pulled back into a bun, rather than loose around her shoulders. Her makeup was restrained, perfect, designed to make her look elegant and sophisticated. She looked like a woman now, rather than a girl let loose with Daddy’s credit card.

“What exactly brings you here to apply for this job? Did you lose a bet?” Maybe against someone who had a long memory of just what a bitch she’d been in high school. To him in particular.

Your mother cleans my floors, you know.

He’d hated her. And all of her friends. Because he really hadn’t wanted to care that he and his family were on the bottom rung in terms of respectability, and most days he didn’t. But the days he did, the days he went home with his skin crawling with humiliation, usually involved Lucy Ryan and her acerbic tongue.

She lifted her chin, straightened her shoulders. “No. Strange as it may seem, I’m here to apply for a job because I need a job.”

“Why do you need a job?”

“I’ve grown accustomed to sleeping with a roof over my head. I’m also quite fond of eating, so I thought I would take steps to assure it continued.”

This Lucy was a very different Lucy. She was brittle. Like a thin sheet of ice. Cold, hard and very delicate. He had the feeling that if he pushed too hard she might break. Ten years ago he would have liked to watch her break. Would have relished the revenge. It felt different now.

Not as sporting, since it seemed like life might have taken enough potshots at her already.

He wasn’t really sure he wanted her in his house. Wasn’t sure he owed her anything. In fact, in a lot of ways, it would be a kindness if he sent her somewhere else. So that there wouldn’t be any temptation to enjoy the reversal of fortunes.

He should tell her to go. And he opened his mouth to do just that, but different words came out instead.

“That I can help you with. If I decide to give you the job, I’ll pay you well. You get a place to stay, and since you’ll be cooking for me, there will be food for you as well.”

“I get to . . . eat with you?”

“You get to eat my food,” he said. He wasn’t quite prepared to sit down at a table with her, but then, what was he going to do? Send her to eat outside? That was just a dick move. “With me, of course.”

“That’s really generous,” she said, subdued.

“Not exactly. It seems like it would be a waste to do anything different. You’re already cooking.”

Lucy grimaced internally. Oh, yes, cooking. She would be cooking. Which she only had a remedial knowledge of, and even less firsthand experience with. Unless building a menu for a caterer counted.

“Of course,” she said. She was determined to fake her way through this. She wasn’t stupid, and she could work darn hard if she had to. She was sure she could. But when she’d seen the ad in the paper for a housekeeper at a ranch, with room and board in addition to pay, she’d known she wouldn’t find anything better.

Not with her limited skill set. She’d quit college when she’d met Daniel, four years her senior and ready to marry her and get on with making a place in society.

“I have to ask what brings you back here.”

Of course he did. “Go ahead,” she said.

“What brings you back here?”

“I was tired of the urban lifestyle. New York is a little crazy for me.”

“And your husband is . . . ?”

“In New York. And he is my ex-husband,” she said. It was such a relief to say that. Such a relief to have it be true. She’d met Daniel and fallen for him in almost the same moment. Their entire courtship had been a blur. Unfortunately, their marriage hadn’t been quite so blurry.

She’d felt every day of it. All two thousand, nine hundred and twenty days of it. Eight years of wedded non-bliss.

No, she supposed that wasn’t fair. She’d been happy for a while. Happy until she’d really started to understand that the reason she was starting to feel so inept, so stupid, so ugly, was that every day her husband chipped away at more and more of her self-esteem. His words eating at who she was like acid.

By the time she’d realized it, he had completely changed the way she’d seen herself. She’d been so far down, so far removed from the woman she’d been when she’d met him that she feared his words had turned her into that new woman forever. The woman who would never be anything without him.

Well, she was going to prove him wrong. Or herself, since, in the end, she’d really started to believe that what Daniel said was true.

“Sorry to hear that,” he said.

She sniffed and looked down at her nails. “Well, it was for the best. We grew apart.” An innocuous and somewhat untrue statement. There was so much more to it than that. But there always was. And she wasn’t dragging her skeletons out of the closet for Mac Denton’s amusement.

She would be enduring humiliation enough here; she hardly needed to add to it.

“Is that so? Too bad they don’t cover ‘unless we grow apart’ in marriage vows.”

She tried not to wince visibly. It was, she found, very easy for other people to pass judgment. She tried to think of all the times she’d been guilty of doing the same. “It’s not a popular one at ceremonies,” she said. “Tends to dampen the mood.”

“I imagine.” He looked at her, blue eyes assessing. “Lucy, you don’t have any job experience at all, do you?”

“Well, not as such. But I did organize a great many events at my husband’s family estate. Big events for hundreds of people. That required exceptional organization skills and the ability to work well with an array of different people.”

“I’m not a big one for organization, and I don’t really have an array of people at my ranch, so I’m not sure if this is the place for you.”

“Mac,” she said, her voice trembling a little bit, to her utter horror. “Please. I need this job, and I haven’t got a hope in hell of getting hired anywhere else, you know that.” If she’d had any pride left at all it would be in pieces on the floor right now. But she didn’t think there was any room for pride in this situation. She was desperate. Simple as that.

“You haven’t got a hope in hell of getting hired here, sweetheart. Given our history, it took some pretty serious cojones for you to come up here asking at all.”

“I didn’t know this was your ranch.”

“No, I imagine you didn’t. Bet you thought us Dentons would never crawl our way out of the gutter.” Again, she fought hard to keep her expression composed. Every interaction she’d ever had with him before had been negative. And it had been because of her. Hearing her own words turned around like this . . . it was humbling. And she hadn’t thought it was possible to be more humbled than she was. “Well, my parents haven’t. Oh, they’re kept comfortable by Carly and me. Physically. We can’t do anything about their emotional well-being. They’re still putting on Silver Creek’s favorite soap opera. But as far as Carly goes, as far as I go, we’ve moved up in life a little.”

“As you can see,” she said, nearly gagging on the words, “I’ve moved down a bit.”

“Go on, Lucy, why don’t you go ask Mommy and Daddy for a bailout.”

“You don’t think I tried that first?”

That stopped Mac short. “They wouldn’t help you?”

“No. They figure if they refuse to help me I’ll have no choice but to go back to my husband. Where I belong. They think I won’t be able to make it by myself. And so does he.”

“I don’t know a whole lot about the guy you ended up married to, but isn’t he loaded?”

“Big-time loaded,” she said. It felt good to say something like that. To say something that felt more genuine, and not so stiff and formal.

“And why isn’t he now half as loaded as he was before? Shouldn’t you have walked away with something?”

“I signed a pre-nup. Which I thought was silly, because—we were getting married for life. But it was for our protection, you see. Mine too.” She bit the inside of her cheek and tried to keep back the tears of frustration that were building. “Because I instigated the divorce, I didn’t get anything.”

“But you did it anyway?”

“My sanity was worth more than money.”

“And you thought your parents would help you land on your feet.”

“Well, yes. I did. More fool me.”

“And now you think I’m going to help you land on your feet?”

She tilted her chin up, every cruel and hideous thing she’d ever said to him ringing in her ears. “I don’t expect you to give me anything, Mac Denton. I just want to work.”

“You happy to scrub my floor, princess? If I recall, just being the son of the woman who cleaned your kitchen was enough to make me dirt beneath your pretty heels.”

“I’ll do whatever I have to.” She tried to ignore the shame that was slowly creeping over her.

“Now that’s a real interesting thought, darlin’.” His voice was deep, and if she wasn’t imagining things, and she was sure she wasn’t, laced with innuendo.

It should have made her angry. Should have shocked her. Upset her.

It didn’t. Instead, it sent a little shiver of deep, unending longing through her. She recognized it, because longing for things out of her reach, things she couldn’t have and shouldn’t have, was something she did all the time these days.

She looked up at him. “I’ll do whatever you want.”

Well, hell. This entire encounter was starting to sound like a porno. He had a gorgeous woman in high heels applying to work for him and promising to do whatever he wanted. Now all that was left was for her to show him her qualifications.

Rather than turning him on, that thought only made him feel dirty. He wasn’t into taking advantage of women; not in the least.

And while his body wasn’t immune to Lucy Carter née Ryan, the thought of taking that anything you want offer and twisting it to suit his physical needs made him feel sick inside.

He just wasn’t that particular brand of bastard.

Now he was the brand of bastard who enjoyed the thought of Lucy scrubbing his floors. To enjoy watching her slum it for a while. Yeah, he was that much of a bastard, and he was self-aware enough to admit it.

And then when she was done playing at being a big strong independent woman and went back to her husband, fine. But in the meantime, he would enjoy watching the princess of Silver Creek get her hands a little dirty.

And just like that, his decision was made.

“All right, Lucy, when can you start?”

“Now?” she asked, her eyes wide, as though he’d shocked her completely with the question.

“Now?” he echoed.

“Well, I’m basically homeless until I start this job.”

Well, now, that did make him feel a little like an ass. “Not anymore. Come on out back with me.” She stood, clutching her handbag in front of her. He looked down at those long, shapely legs, and further still to her shoes. “I don’t know how those are going to survive the mud.”

“I’ll be fine,” she said.

“All right then, this way.” He started to head out of the living area and toward the kitchen, but he noticed Lucy was still sitting on the couch, dark eyes wide. “Are you going to follow me?”