The Black Sheep Heir. Crystal Green

“If I thought so, you wouldn’t be here eating my fancy food. And people who can sit through one of my meals generally call me Lacey. Okay?”

      “Got it.” He felt as if he’d climbed over the tip of a mountain, surpassing an obstacle, enjoying the view on the other side. Even if only a small barrier had been crossed with this woman, it was a victory. Hopefully he’d put an end to her curiosity of the unknown. Hopefully she’d stay away.

      He patted his stomach, as if signaling an end to the supper, but his companion merely sat in her chair, assessing him.

      “There’s not much to me,” he said. “Just a nature lover. Remember?”

      “It’s not that. It’s… Well, my stepbrothers will go nuts when they find out I’m letting you stay here. They’re going to want to investigate.”

      “So don’t tell them.”

      Lacey lifted a finger in the air, her eyes lighting up with a new realization. “You’re more than a hiker. You’re a hider.”

      “I don’t like to be bothered, is all.”

      The words froze in the air, stiffening her posture in the process.

      Lacey started to rise from her chair. “I’ll just leave you alone then.”

      He could imagine her trooping through the snow, back to her mammoth house. Intuitively, he knew no one waited for her back there. Otherwise, why would she be eating dinner with him? The thought of her staring out a window at the empty, blank spaces of silent-night snow made his chest thud with his own sense of isolation.

      “Stay,” he said softly.

      Her eyes widened, and she settled back into the seat with a certain amount of rebellion in her tight movements. Conn chided himself for listening to the angel on his shoulder. Now he’d be stuck dodging more questions from his inquisitive visitor.

      After a pause, she said, “Things have gotten a tad boring since Daisy and Coral Cox moved out a few months ago. Of course, now Coral has her own little place and Daisy married my brother Rick, so…”

      She caught herself, laughing. “My family. I can’t stop concerning myself with their lives.”

      She’d said it with such patent longing that Conn couldn’t help filling the silence with conversation, just to keep her talking and smiling. He’d always been such a sucker for a pretty girl.

      “What do you do with yourself, besides cooking like a dervish, I mean?”

      She brightened. “I run my family’s horse feed business up in Louisville. But, as my brother Matt is fond of saying, I’m a master of delegation. My other brother Rick flies me in his Cessna to the city a couple times a week to take care of business, but things run so smoothly I can do most of the work from my home office.”

      “A corporate type. I should’ve known from the way you handled matters this afternoon that you’re used to being in charge.”

      “Was I terribly overbearing?”

      Conn shrugged, underplaying his first impression of her. A soft bunny with fangs.

      “Not overbearing, I guess. Surely in control.”

      She tilted her head proudly, as if thrilled to project such an image. “Thank you.”

      “Much obliged.”

      Lacey sat up straighter, and Conn couldn’t help feeling good about making her wariness disappear. He didn’t know what exactly he’d said to work that magic, but the glow in her eyes was worth it.

      Even though he wasn’t supposed to give a tinker’s damn.

      The fire flickered and frost shrouded the window, emphasizing the cabin’s cozy intimacy.

      “Can I tell you something crazy?” she asked.

      “I suppose.” Was the romantic atmosphere getting to Lacey, too? Was it convincing her that they knew each other better than they actually did?

      She leaned toward him again, her skin flushed. “This is so…” A hesitation, a stretched second of thought in which she bit her lip, then grinned. “I’m building a glass castle,” she said proudly.

      Conn tried his best not to seem jarred by her statement. He was sure he’d done a decent job of keeping a straight face, but he couldn’t restrain his curiosity. “A full-scale castle? With glass?”

      “It won’t be Locksley Castle, really.”

      “Locksley Castle?”

      She gestured with her hands, conveying her enthusiasm. “You have to see it someday. On the outskirts of the town, we’ve got an actual castle. An incredibly rich East Coast family with ties to European royalty lives there, supposedly, but we never see them. It’s one of those Kane’s Crossing myths.”

      Conn nodded, still not understanding the reasons behind the glass castle, not really even understanding why she was confiding in him, a near stranger.

      Lacey continued, unfazed. “My castle will be large enough to fit in a warehouse. I know—it sounds wild. And when my brothers first found out that I’d purchased land with the old toy warehouse on it, they thought it might be a sound investment. But then they realized I was going to hire an architect and contractors to actually build a glass castle, and they about flipped.”

      “What’s the purpose?”

      “Purpose?” Lacey’s gaze drifted to the fire, as if the flames held pictures of the finished product, the crystalline structure glimmering with every cinder-sparked burst. “I wanted to do something for Kane’s Crossing. Something that might bring the town together. And the Reno Center, a place for orphans, always needs money to help run it. I thought I could build this—I don’t know—spectacle, and people might come all the way to our town and pay to see it.”

      Now the idea made a little more sense. “But…?”

      “Yeah, I know,” she said, waving a hand toward him to brush off his doubts. “Why a glass castle? Everyone asks me before shaking their heads and rolling their eyes. But that’s why I think folks will come to see it. Because it’s so…unexpected.”

      And majestic. Conn wasn’t much into fairy tales and happy endings, but he could imagine a person staring at Lacey’s creation with as much fascination as he stared at the North Star. He could even see someone making a wish on Lacey’s dream.

      Oddly touched and intrigued, Conn bent forward, reaching out to run an index finger over the soft curve of Lacey’s cheek.

      She already had a way of doing this to him—making him not think. It was scary how dumb he got when she was around.

      Her eyes went wide as his finger traveled down her skin to the line of her jaw, to the tip of her chin. Conn, himself, even felt a little startled, his pulse kicking and screaming through his veins.

      Suddenly, he pulled back, standing with such force his chair scraped the floor with a yelp. “Let’s get you home.”

      One of Lacey’s shoulders—the one below the cheek he’d caressed—drifted upward, as if she wanted to wipe away his touch with a brush of her turtleneck but didn’t have the bad manners to do so. Was she angry because he’d been so forward?

      After what seemed like an uncomfortable infinity, Lacey stood to clean the table, and he wasn’t any closer to an answer.

      “I’ll take care of that,” he said, needing to get her out of here and back to the boundary of her own house.

      With a glance that seemed to chastise him for ordering her around, she left the table and retrieved her coat. She moved toward the door, and he followed.

      “Forget it,” she said, opening the door and letting in the night. “I can walk myself home.”

      She left so quickly he couldn’t even thank her for dinner.