“Oh.”
“It was dumb.”
“No, it’s—” She shook off the distraction. She was dim enough to start falling for the carelessly casual idiot, but she’d never ever be dim enough to make the mistake of telling him. Not to mention that her employer’s fury would be dreadful to behold. “Okay, so your mom went to Sweetheart to help—what? Save the town?” At his glum nod, she continued. “And your brother sold a bunch of farms to the bank, thinking it’d help her, but for whatever reason it made the problem worse? Okay. And then she cut off his funds.”
“Well, yeah, that’s apparently the deal, but—that can’t be true. He either got it wrong or it’s his sad-ass idea of a joke. My mom wouldn’t do that. Not to him.”
Oh you poor idiot. “Or you just don’t want it to be true,” she suggested quietly. “Because if Blake doesn’t have money, he can’t help you. If Blake doesn’t have money, it would explain why you don’t have money. Not because of a screwup, or an online mishap. You’d really be broke. You’d really be stuck here indefinitely.”
He just looked at her.
“And if he disobeys … the nuclear option?”
Rake shuddered so hard, the bed shook. Interesting, she thought. Even the thought of imminent, permanent poverty didn’t make him shake like that.
“This is going to sound like I’m being a smart-ass,” he said at last, looking at her with that blue, blue, blue gaze, “but will you please hold me?”
“Oh.” She swallowed. No. Absolutely not. Don’t be ridiculous. Once you have sex with some random bim, you’ll feel better. “Sure.”
He slowly leaned over until his head was resting on her shoulder and, bit by bit, he relaxed, until he was pressed to her side like a sexy lamprey. She eased them back and put her arm around his shoulders, and they lay on her bed hip-to-hip and stared at the ceiling. It should have been awkward.
It wasn’t.
Which was bad.
Really very, very bad.
Twenty-eight
Okay, so. Blake had gone insane, which was bad. Very, very bad. But he was in bed with Delaney, which was the polar opposite of bad. Sure, they weren’t having sex. They weren’t even naked, or breathing hard. And she was a little stiff—even in a bed! Did she have excellent posture 24/7?—and her long, bony arm was slung across his shoulders in a way that was actually a little uncomfortable.
And it was fucking glorious.
“Thanks,” he said after another long minute where they both hoped the other would say something.
A small sigh. “S’okay.”
“It’s awkward, isn’t it? It’s okay to say.”
“No, no.”
“Delaney.”
“It’s awkward.” She giggled; he loved when she did that. How someone so tall and competent and no-bullshit and not giggly could make that sound was an awesome, endless mystery. “It’s a little awkward. But I don’t mind if you don’t.”
“I absolutely do not mind even a little tiny bit,” he said, and didn’t think he’d ever been more serious about anything.
“Okay, then. And listen, you’ll—huh.”
Rake groaned. His phone was rattling again. He’d gone from not being able to wait for a new phone to never wanting to see it again. He eased out of Delaney’s awkward half embrace and scooped the thing up.
“More long yet cryptic texts from your twin?”
“‘Long yet cryptic’ is the perfect description and I’m stealing it and using it to refer to Blake forever.” He scanned the thing and showed her, and she frowned at the sight of it.
The deepest darkest depths of Hell await you, little brommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm Text sent 7:45 P.M.
“Huh. Did he break the thing?”
“Never. Blake doesn’t break things. He doesn’t even drop them. His question, when I dropped my first phone and it broke, was, ‘Why did you drop it? How could you not anticipate it would break?’ Like I did it on purpose. Like it was a conscious decision. That’s what a tight-ass he is.”
She didn’t say anything, but her expression was eloquent. Time to set her straight. “Hey, I get it. I’m self-aware, kind of. I drink too much and party too much, and have just the right amount of sex”—he ignored her snort—“and am awful in all the right ways—”
“Oh my God.”
“—but I don’t deliberately drop phones. I’ve adored and respected all my phones. Until today.”
Delaney sat up and handed it back. “Damn. If I’d thought your getting texts would be this interesting, I’d have floated you a loan the day you got to Venice.”
“Sure you would have,” he sneered. “Ha! You’d never renounce your slave-driving ways.”
“You’re right.” She gave him a long look, then leaned in. Why? What was she doing? Who could she be leaning toward? If it was any other woman, he’d assume she was going for a kiss and he’d be delighted or freaked, depending. But this wasn’t any other woman. He probably had pink Easter grass in his hair or something, and she was getting close to brush it away. “Listen, Rake, I’m sure things with your brother will resolve themselves. Y’know, one way or the other. But in the meantime—”
“What is this now?” His phone had buzzed again, but a picture this time, not a text. He stared. And stared more. Then handed the phone to her. She took one look and started to laugh.
“What is it?”
“Oh my God. I gotta meet this guy.”
“Don’t even joke about that. You two must never lay eyes on each other. It looks like—but … no. No, right? Right.” Pause. “Is it?”
“It is,” she gurgled through giggles. “For whatever reason, your big-city brother—trapped on a North Dakota farm—has taken a picture of a pile of horse shit and texted it to you.”
“So that’s why they call them ‘horse apples.’”
“That’s why they call them horse apples.”
He collapsed back on the bed. “For this I worked my ass off. For this I stuffed baskets until the fake Easter grass wore my fingers to the bone! Knock it off! None of this is funny!” But he was giggling, too. Christ, what a day! What a week! Well, not quite a week. But “What a six days!” sounded dumb.
“Trust me,” Delaney was saying, “that’s what it is.”
“Yeah, you worked on a dairy farm when you were a kid, right?”
“Yeah.” Her giggles tapered off and she was looking at him in a new way, one he found he liked—a lot. It was scrutiny, which he was used to, but it was good scrutiny, like she’d expected to see something she didn’t like but was pleasantly surprised. “Yeah, it was one of the best times I ever had. You were paying attention, huh?”
“Sure,” he said, and didn’t elaborate. The truth—that he paid attention to everything she said, that, if anything, he wished she’d talk more about her “eventful childhood”—would sound fake. Or, worse, creepy. “It’s why you keep trying to score milk at dinner.”