Page 75 of The Lonely Road

Two hundred and forty units.

A private airstrip on the south end.

The water from Clara’s senior rights, rerouted upstream, would service all of it.

Without that water, the resort doesn’t work. The investors won’t commit. The whole thing dies on paper.

A reluctant smile forms on my face.

I turn the phone toward Mac.

“They’re not after Clara’s ranch,” I tell him with the confidence of someone who’s played on the other side of this equation for the resort builders for years. “They need her water. The resort is permitted, and the investors are in, and the only thing standing between High Mesa and a two-hundred-and-forty-unit luxury resort above Wildflower Canyon is one widowed rancher with the 1948 water rights.”

Mac looks at the map for a long moment, then he picks up his bourbon. “Well, fuck! That changes things.”

“In what way?”

“It means you’re not fighting a water rights case anymore.” He takes a long pull before setting his glass down. “You’re fighting the whole project. Win the water, the resort dies. Lose it—” He doesn’t finish.

“I know.”

He looks at me with the steady, dry gaze of a man who has seen a lot of what money does to people who get in its way.

“Then don’t lose it,” he orders flatly. “You win the case. Cleanly, so there’s nothing to appeal, nothing to challenge, nothing for money to grab onto.”

“Easier said than done.”

He smirks. “Isn’t everything?”

I leave him to his shepherd’s pie and drive home. Mason calls me as I get close.

“Where are you?” There’s a tension in his tone that I haven’t heard before.

“On my way home.”

“I can be there in twenty minutes.”

My pulse gallops at the thought of seeing him. “Good! I’ll be there in thirty. You can wait for me.”

“I’ll shop for dinner at Buck’s then. What do you feel like?”

It’s so domestic, this talk about what to cook and what to eat. My heart bounces against my ribs in happiness. “Something simple.”

“Okay.”

That night, we cook together—another act of household bliss that I once shared with Griffin. But then we never cooked together. I cooked, and he watched. He did help me clean up, though.

We make pasta.

He insists on making the sauce—simple, with crushed fresh San Marzano tomatoes, garlic, and a handful of fresh basil. I make the salad—again, a simple one with arugula and a lemon vinaigrette.

I open a bottle of Pinot Grigio to go with our meal.

“You are unexpectedly useful in a kitchen,” I remark when he sets the table after asking me where the napkins were.

He doesn’t use paper towels as so many do but wants the real stuff.

I like the real stuff—and always have washed and ironed napkins in the sideboard by the dining table.