Can't Hurry Love by Molly O'Keefe Read Free Book Online

to learn to not talk so much; every time she opened her mouth she just handed out secrets like they were dimes. “I learned a lot of things from my marriage—”
    He lifted his hand just to shut her up.
    “This used to be Turnbull land. Your great-grandfather was the foreman.”
    “I … I didn’t know that.”
    “Your great-grandfather started that leather business and he bought some acreage. And then more. My great-grandfather couldn’t hold his booze, or the land, and he just kept selling it below value. My grandfather tried to buy some back but your grandfather refused. And then my grandfather started selling off more acreage.”
    “None of that is my fault. If there’s anyone you should blame it’s your relatives … not mine.”
    Ah, she’d just leveled him with her upthrust chin. Really, someone should warn her about that foolish courage. She was going to get herself in trouble.
    “Yeah, well, anytime things got tough for a Turnbull a Baker was there with a lowball offer to buy some land, until there wasn’t any left.”
    “So you’re carrying around a hundred-year-old grudge?” She made it sound as if he’d been wasting his life trying to get back this land.
    “I don’t expect you to understand, Victoria—”
    “Stop it. Stop it right there.” All the girlishness was gone, and standing there in her genie bun was one pissed-off woman. She planted her hands wide across the desk and leaned toward him. “I won’t be marginalized, Eli. Not anymore. I’ve spent the last week getting myself a pretty good education in the business of managing this land, and let me assure you, you have no idea what I do or don’t understand.”
    Was it weird that he was turned on? It was. He cleared his throat and looked away.
    “Explain it to me, Eli. Go slow if you want, but I promise, I’ll understand.”
    “My family lost it, your family wasted it—I just want to do right by it. Do you understand that?”
    Slowly, she nodded. His stomach shook with nerves and adrenaline.
    “So you’re here to make an offer?”
    The checkbook stuck in his back pocket and he had to tug it free. “I want to buy back the ten acres of land my house sits on and some of the land adjacent.”
    “Your house is not a problem. But what other land are you interested in?”
    He stepped around the desk up to the map and his arm brushed the bare skin of her wrist. For a second the softness of her skin registered, as well as the smell of flowers under the sharp tang of ketchup. She was a cotton ball of femininity—insubstantial, but sticky. Impossible to brush away.
    The glossy black pile of hair on top of her head seemed precarious and shiny and he had a painful desire to tug it free, to see how she looked all undone.
    He should apologize. Not just for that stunt in the barn, but for everything he’d thought about her. Every ungenerous and cruel comparison he’d made in his head.
    “Which land?” She stared at the map, rubbing at the wrist he’d touched.
    He pointed to the fifty acres across the creek with the big black x across it.
    Well. Crap .
    She stared at Eli’s blunt finger, with the cracked nail and split skin, right smack dab in the middle of the landshe’d leased to the McDougals, and realized she was not a creature cut out for revenge.
    Silent grudges she excelled at. Passive-aggressive snobbery was her specialty.
    Revenge she just didn’t have the stomach for.
    As of ten minutes ago she’d been fine with it. Had relished it even. All week long, she’d gone to sleep each night imagining what Eli’s face would look like when she told him that the land he wanted was gone. But then he came in here and talked about wasted opportunities and wanting to do right, and all the revenge in her heart rolled over on its back and died.
    She stopped rubbing her wrist, the sensation of his touch gone, though its effect on her still zipped around in her blood.
    The storm outside put electricity in the room and it was as if she