Texas Baby. Kathleen O'Brien

looking at Nikki now, she had made a mistake, not fully explaining why she and Chase had agreed to a marriage of convenience. She couldn’t just gloss things over anymore, the way she’d done when Nikki was a child. Maybe, at sixteen going on forty, Nikki was old enough to handle all the facts.

      “Sit down,” Susannah said.

      Nikki looked wary. “Why? I don’t want to hear another lecture about Eli.”

      Susannah moved wearily to the staircase, with its beautiful scrolled banister. She lowered herself onto the nearest tread.

      “Not Eli, Nik. I want to explain about Chase. And I’m too tired to stand up while I do it.”

      Nikki hesitated, but her curiosity overcame her defiance. She plopped down next to Susannah with a heavy sigh. “Okay. Go ahead. Tell me how wrong I am.”

      “You’re not wrong.” Susannah leaned back on her elbows, too tired to care what happened to her expensive party dress. “Chase and I aren’t in love, not the way you mean. We’re very good friends—the best. We always have been, ever since we were kids. You know what a super guy he is.”

      Nikki shrugged noncommittally, which made Susannah smile. Nikki adored Chase, and everyone knew it. He was the only person on earth she confided in.

      “Anyhow, the bottom line is that, because of some weird rules that Grandfather put in his will, I have to get married in order to have any real control of the ranch. And I need control. We’re having money problems. You knew that, right?”

      “Of course. How could anyone not know, the way you always go on about it? What I don’t know is how come. The ranch is huge. And our peaches are like the best anywhere. I don’t know anybody who buys anything else.”

      Susannah thought of all the planning, fretting, investing and pure backbreaking work that went into creating those lush peaches everyone wanted in their pretty cut-glass dessert bowls. But she’d always spared Nikki the details, trying to allow her to grow up carefree, without the worries and obligations that had weighed Susannah down too soon.

      Maybe that had been a mistake, too. Maybe a little responsibility would have been good for her.

      Well, better late than never.

      “It’s a combination of a lot of things, Nik. We’ve had frost two years running. That hurt us a lot. And some of the acres on the west ridge are just about used up. They’ll have to lie dormant for a few years before they can be replanted. Worst of all, though, is that one of our best buyers is in deep financial trouble. They just might go bankrupt.”

      “So? Can’t you find another buyer?”

      “Believe me, I’m trying. But it’s not that easy. There’s a lot of competition. The thing is, we’ve crunched the numbers every way we can think of, and the only answer is to sell some of the land.”

      Nikki’s mouth hung open. “Sell Everly?”

      Susannah put her hand on Nikki’s arm. “Not the whole ranch, honey. Everly has always belonged to the Everlys, and it always will. Just a couple of hundred acres, not enough to miss really. But enough to put us back in the black.”

      Nikki rubbed the pad of her thumb over the glossy pink polish on her index finger. Susannah knew that habit. It meant Nikki was thinking hard.

      She hoped she wasn’t overloading her with too much scary information. There was a mighty fine line between character-building and spirit-crushing.

      “I guess I still don’t understand what this has to do with marrying Chase,” Nikki muttered, staring down at her finger. “Grandfather left you the ranch, right? Can’t you do whatever you want?”

      “Not unless I’m married, and even then my husband gets to make the decisions. You know how Grandfather was. You know how he felt about women.”

      Nikki looked up with a half smile. “Totally chauvinist? Totally caveman?”

      “Yeah, pretty much.”

      Susannah sighed, remembering the fights, the rip-roaring yell-fests as she tried to keep an ornery ninety-year-old man from running the ranch into the ground. Arlington H. Everly had a true Texas-sized ego. No one told him what to do. But take advice from a woman? “Not unless my wits get up and go prancing in the pepper patch,” he’d vowed.

      Tragically, toward the end, it had come to that.

      “Does Chase know all this stuff?” Nikki’s upturned face looked pale, and, although Susannah might be imagining this, she looked a tiny bit older already.

      “Yeah. He knows. He’s doing me a favor. You can see that I couldn’t risk marrying just anyone. They’d get control of the ranch, and…”

      She couldn’t even finish the thought.

      “Anyhow, I trust Chase. After we’ve been married a year, he can sell the acres we need to unload. Grandfather didn’t stipulate how long the marriage had to last beyond that first year. So then we’ll end it, and we’ll go back to being friends.”

      She looked down at Nikki, and to her surprise realized that the girl’s eyes were glistening in the light from the overhead chandelier.

      Susannah felt her heart squeeze. Damn it. She really had screwed up. Nikki must actually have hoped that the “marriage of convenience” might turn into more than that.

      She must actually have hoped Chase might become her big brother for real.

      “Oh, honey, I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you about all this sooner—”

      “Don’t be,” Nikki said roughly. She stood, yanked on the hem of her short-shorts, stretching them out just enough to cover the lacy white underwear. “I don’t care what you do.”

      She headed up the stairs. Susannah watched her go helplessly.

      “Nikki…”

      The girl reached the first landing, then turned furiously, her face set and white. “I’ll tell you one thing, though. You tell me I shouldn’t hang out with Eli. Well, at least we really love each other.”

      “Love?” Susannah rose instinctively to her feet. “Love?”

      “That’s right. And you can say whatever you want about how young I am, or how stupid I am. At least I know how to love somebody. So I guess I’m not as stupid as you are.”