Free Redneck Romeo: A Red Hot Valentine Story by Randi Alexander Page B

her shorts. “Really
great.”
    “You do, too. She barely resisted checking out his wide
shoulders and narrow hips again. Then his words struck her. He’d missed her? “I
missed you too, Nick.” It felt so good to tell him.
    “You didn’t even say goodbye. What exactly happened?”
    The pain of that day knifed into her soul. “I thought you
knew.”
    He shook his head. “My parents wouldn’t tell me. I went on a
rant when I came home that night and you were just gone. But they wouldn’t say
what happened.”
    Her mouth went dry. This wouldn’t be easy. “Your father
caught my dad stealing.”
    A wrinkle formed between Nick’s eyebrows and his jaw
tightened.
    “He fired my dad on the spot and had the ranch hands clean
everything out of the foreman’s house.” She could see it happening as if it had
been yesterday. Too shocked to cry, she’d stood in the September sun watching
her life disintegrate. The third time in five years her father’s ‘problem’ had
forced them to move.
    “I’m sorry, Genny. I didn’t know.”
    She nodded and tamped down the grief that threatened to
overwhelm her. “Mom couldn’t take it anymore. This was the third job Dad had
been fired from, and she wanted out. She went to your father for help.”
    Nick looked like he was having trouble assimilating all
this, but she forged on.
    “Your father was very kind. He gave her a loan to help her
get a new start, gave her one of the old ranch trucks, had the hands pile our
things into it, everything except Dad’s clothes.” Her father hadn’t contested
the termination, hadn’t fought the eviction, but worse, hadn’t said a word as
her mother loaded Genevieve in the truck and drove them away. He’d just stood
there as if he’d been expecting it all to happen.
    “Dad did all that?” His voice came out soft. “I wondered
where that truck disappeared to.”
    Genevieve blinked to keep the tears from falling. “He was a
good man.” She smiled gently. “Still is, from what I heard in town.”
    “He and Mom have a little place in Harlingen.” Nick shrugged
his eyebrows. “They threaten to stay there permanently unless Rory and I start
having grandkids for them.”
    “Rory.” Nick’s little brother had been ten that summer. Nick
had found clever ways to ditch the boy so the two of them could be alone. A
smaller replica of Nick, he’d inherited their father’s black hair instead of
their mother’s red. “How is he?”
    “Good. Still single. He built a house on the back forty and
we run the ranch together.” His hand slid to her shoulder. “But what happened
to you after you left here?”
    She’d cried nonstop until they’d crossed the Texas border,
locked herself in the bathroom of the hotel they stopped at, and moped through
the state of Colorado. “I begged Mom to stay in the area so I could finish
school.” And be with Nick, but she hadn’t said that to her mother. “She wanted
away from Dad, so we went north to Colorado, to her family. We did well there.
She remarried, I have stepsisters, and…” A smile curved her lips. “I’m
teaching.”
    “You are? Good for you. That was always your dream.” He took
a breath. Taking in her scent? “Still in Colorado?”
    She caught his, too. Fresh air and pine. Her belly jittered
with awareness, twice as potent as it had been when she was fifteen. “Yes, I’m
at a two-year college.” She glanced out the screen door. “This is my first trip
back to Texas since we left.”
    He paused. “The funeral?”
    “He didn’t have one. He had no one, and I guess he liked it
that way.” A wash of sorrow for the way her dad had ignored her turned to pity
for the lonely way he’d lived. Yet, he’d chosen his solitude. She’d had her
father’s ashes shipped to her in Colorado, and she and her mother had buried
them in a small corner of a cemetery. “But he left everything to me when he
died.” She looked at the box on the counter.
    “So what’s in it?” He tipped