The Heartbreaker of Echo Pass - Maisey Yates Page 0,24

he knew would take them to the creek.

“What is this one’s... What is my horse’s name?” He could have laughed at the way she asked that.

“That’s Carl,” he said.

“Carl?”

“Are you maligning his name?”

“I’m not maligning his name. But I do question it.”

“He came to me with that name. I went ahead and kept it as it was to minimize confusion.”

“Well, that makes enough sense, I guess.”

“I don’t care if it makes sense to you or not, Iris. Anyway, why can’t a horse be named Carl?”

“I don’t know, it seems silly.”

“Maybe the horse thinks it’s weird you’re named after a flower.”

“See? Mean.”

He felt a smile curve his lips. “Not mean. Honest. I don’t have the energy to lie to people.”

Another funny thing. Because Griffin Chance, back in his heyday, would have smiled and lied to smooth over just about anything. He hadn’t been too shady, not as much as many people in his profession were, but if there was a situation that was difficult, he was more than willing to spread a little frosting over the details to make sure that he obscured the reality of the situation. Development was a hard game. And things were bound to go wrong, and landowners were volatile. Investors were always breathing down his neck. The one thing he was very good at was putting a smile on his face and BSing his way through a potential catastrophe.

And typically, he could make sure that it didn’t turn into one.

But making sure that nobody ever saw him sweat was one reason he’d gotten so good at what he did.

Was one reason he had so much success.

He’d blown off steam at his ranch, at home, where he’d been himself, and he’d put his suit on, and put his businessman face on, whenever he needed to.

Now, the very idea of engaging in that kind of nonsense made him want to lie down, go to sleep and never get back up.

It was stupid. He couldn’t see the merit in it, not anymore. It just... It didn’t feel like him. Those memories didn’t feel like him.

Not just another life. Another person.

“I guess that’s a good thing,” she said. “I don’t think that I would lie to people.”

“What do you mean you don’t think?” The trail dipped down, and he leaned back on the horse, as the animal navigated the incline, stepping carefully around the rocks that came up out of the hard ground. He turned back to look at Iris, to make sure that she was all right. She seemed to be handling it gamely, and he felt like her claims of not being a horse girl had been greatly exaggerated.

She was doing just fine.

“I’ve never had a real job.” He could almost feel her regretting that statement, the force of her embarrassment hitting him like a wave. “I guess I shouldn’t say that to the man who is banking on collecting the profits from my business.”

“Maybe not,” he said, laughing. “But you know, I admire your honesty.”

“Okay. So I’ve never had a job outside of my house. You know, like I said, I’m kind of the... The cook. For the ranch. Not a housewife.” She made a small gagging sound. “Obviously. Because I’m not anyone’s wife. But you know. It’s actually like a job. Or, it was. Because we kind of ate communally as a family still, and now we do that less. And now it’s Sammy’s kitchen. My sister-in-law.”

“Right. So you kind of got edged out.”

“Yes. But I guess... I haven’t had much of a social life. I haven’t had a lot of situations where it had to be tested. I had friends, don’t get me wrong. But it’s gotten really difficult. I had friends in high school, and a lot of them went away to college, and I couldn’t.” She didn’t elaborate on that, but he imagined it had something to do with money. In the world he’d grown up in, college was a given. An expected thing. But he’d learned that wasn’t the case everywhere.

“Some of my friends came back, some never did. Some got married right away and started having children. You know, I have friends with kids in middle school. And that boggles my mind.”

“Right,” he said. His chest felt tight just then.

“But you know, that makes it harder to maintain friendships. Because they are busy. And they’ve made new friends from parent groups, and things like that. And I don’t work outside of my house, and I don’t have a built-in group of