Gambling on a Secret by Sara Walter Ellwood Page B

for those horses you bought from Cartwright...” He looked around at the tall grass of the yard. “A lawn mower. Give or take a few small ticket items.”
    By the time he finished with his list, she looked a little green under all her freckles. “Can’t forget those small ticket items.”
    “You sure can’t. The sooner you cut your ties with Ferguson, the better.”
    He looked toward the house. Several of the porch posts needed replacing and the broken and weathered shutters were unsalvageable. The roof looked relatively new, but he’d have to check it for bad shingles. The inside couldn’t be in much better shape. Besides the surface repairs like painting and replacing flooring, undoubtedly there was bad plumbing and wiring, too. He looked back at her. She watched him with intensity again, stirring his blood.
    He glanced back at the house. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to do some of the carpentry work on the house.”
    Her eyes widened. “You would?”
    Would he?
    He took off his hat, only to reset it right back on again, then cleared his throat. “Yeah. I would. I’ll subcontract for anything out of my expertise, and I have a couple of guys in mind to help out with the repairs on the ranch buildings and fencing.”
    “The work you did on Tracy’s salon is beautiful.”
    He slid his gaze away and shrugged. “Like her place, this old house has good bones. Unfortunately, I’ll need tools to do the work. I have some, but not enough. I hope you have a business account with liquid cash or a bank willing to give you a loan.”
    She simply nodded and sighed.
    “Why on Earth did you buy this dump?”
    “I wanted a place I could make my own.” She looked at the ramshackle mansion. “When the realtor showed me the ranch, I knew it could be beautiful.”
    The sun played on loose coils framing her freckled, heart-shaped face and the deceptive youth of her make-up free profile. The rest of her long hair was pulled back into a snarled ponytail. With the overgrowth of spring green, bluebonnets and daffodils tangled around her feet, she reminded him of one of the fairy statues his mother collected.
    Charli peered up at him with an ageless depth showing in her crystalline eyes. She had seen more than she should have for someone so young. He vaguely remembered the kids in the bar last Friday night and their conversation about her not having any friends. What had happened to her to make her so guarded?
    He jutted his chin toward the house. “It was a beautiful place once. Built at the end of the eighteen hundreds, after fire destroyed the original place. The house was white and the shutters and trim were dark red–you know, like a brick color. And the gardens were spectacular until Jock’s mother died about fifteen years ago.”
    “That’s how I imagine the house.”
    The deep intensity of her eyes pulled him in as if he’d walked off the dock into the lake beyond the overgrown yard. He felt things he hadn’t felt for a long, very long, time. Charli Monroe’s appeal went deeper than attraction. What about her intrigued him so damned much?
    When she spoke, her soft voice came to him like a whisper on the warm breeze. “I think of it like a caterpillar–a wrinkly, ugly worm with traces of dull colors on it. But when the worm metamorphoses, it becomes something truly beautiful.”
    As if conjured by a fairy’s voice, a small blue butterfly fluttered by them. It lighted on a spire of bluebonnets. He stared at until it took off in flight to land on another flower. “Like a butterfly.”
    For a moment, he let himself drift back to the day he’d carried Brenda over the threshold of the house he’d built for her, and the dreams that had died when he read her letter two days before the mission.
    In a flash, the memory changed. He stood along the roadside aiming an M-16 at the man behind the wheel of a derelict car. After the man refused to get out, he had ordered his men to surround the vehicle, and the Arab driver