The Maverick's Midnight Proposal

Luke felt something inside twist painfully. “Rust Creek Falls isn’t my home, Bella. Not anymore.”

She tipped her chin up and met his gaze squarely. “Of course it is,” she insisted. “And after you’ve spent some time here, you’ll realize it’s true.”

“Bella.” He touched a hand to her arm, hoping the contact might ease the harshness of the truth she needed to hear. “I’ve been living in Wyoming for twelve years—that’s my home now.”

“But you’ve never stayed in any one place for more than two years,” she pointed out.

He frowned. “How do you know that?”

“It’s one of the reasons it took Hudson’s PI so long to track you down. The other reason—” she pinned him with a look “—is that Luke Stockton somehow became Lee Stanton.”

He picked up a cherry tomato and popped it into his mouth, but his sister wasn’t letting him off the hook.

“Why?” she demanded.

Before he could respond, Danny’s cell phone buzzed. “That’s my cue to run,” he said. “Annie went to Kalispell this afternoon for a dress fitting, so I have to pick Janie up from her study group at school.”

Luke pushed away from the table and stood up, offering his hand to his brother. Danny shook his hand, then pulled him in for another hug.

“Stop by anytime,” he urged his brother. “I know Annie will be happy to see you, and I’m eager for you to meet my daughter.”

“I will,” Luke promised.

Then Danny gave Bella a quick hug, too, before he disappeared down the hall.

“Now,” Bella said, turning her focus back to Luke, “answer my question.”

“What question was that?” he hedged, selecting a broccoli spear from the plate.

She snatched it out of his hand before he could lift it to his mouth and held it away from him. “Why were you living in Wyoming as Lee Stanton?”

“It wasn’t intentional,” Luke told her. “At least, not at first. The bookkeeper at the ranch we were working put me on the payroll as ‘Stanton’ by mistake and it just seemed like too much effort to try to correct it. When I moved on, I continued to use Stanton so that I could reference my work history under that name. And, in some ways, it was easier to start a new life with a new name.”

“But why did you want a new life?” she pressed. “Why did you leave?”

He heard the confusion in her question—and the hurt. “It wasn’t an easy decision to make,” he admitted, wanting to explain the past and soothe his sister. “But what choice did we have? The ranch was going to be taken by the bank, and the grandparents didn’t have room to take us all in—and no interest in doing so. As Gramps said, we were legal adults and they had no obligation to provide us with food or shelter.”

Bella’s dark brown eyes filled with tears. “I always suspected that they made you leave.”

“They didn’t make us leave, but they didn’t give us any reason to stay, either. And we thought Jamie, you, Liza and Dana would all be together.”

“After they sent Liza and Dana away—” she swiped at a tear that spilled onto her cheek “—there were times I wish they’d sent me and Jamie away, too.”

“Was it really so bad?” Luke asked.

“Probably not. We had a roof over our heads and meals on the table. But there was no affection. There was rarely even any warmth or kindness.”

“I’m so sorry, Bella.”

She shrugged. “It’s water under the bridge now. Or mostly, anyway. Because it turns out that you were wrong about the ranch.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sunshine Farm doesn’t belong to the bank—it belongs to us.”

“To you and Hudson?” he guessed, because it seemed a reasonable assumption. Bella’s husband obviously had a ton of money, and it was just as obvious he would spend it all to make his wife happy. If the property had been for sale, Luke could imagine Hudson buying it for her without blinking an eye.

But she shook her head. “To you, Bailey, Danny, Jamie, me, Liza and Dana.”

He stared at her, uncomprehending. “But...how?”

“When Dad remortgaged the property to fix the barn and buy the new equipment, he also bought mortgage insurance.”

Luke was stunned. Even at twenty-one, he’d had a pretty good picture of the tight financial situation at Sunshine Farm. He’d heard his parents talking about it in hushed and worried tones when they thought their children were asleep. He’d recognized the strain in his father’s voice, seen it in the lines that furrowed his mother’s brow. He’d listened to them argue about the purchase of secondhand equipment that they couldn’t afford but desperately needed to keep the ranch operating, and he knew that they’d had to remortgage the property. He hadn’t known they’d also arranged for insurance on that mortgage.

He and Bailey and Danny had left because they hadn’t believed that there was any other option. For the past twelve years, they’d worked for other people when they could have been working at Sunshine Farm. Or maybe it was naive to think that they might have been able to keep the ranch going—a difficult enough task when Rob Stockton had been around to oversee the operation. More likely, Luke and his brothers would have run the ranch into the ground and been forced to sell anyway.

“We just discovered that the property had been transferred into all of our names, pursuant to the terms of Mom and Dad’s will, a few months ago when Zach Dalton approached Jamie to see if we were interested in selling,” Bella explained.

“Are you going to sell?” he asked.

“That’s a decision we have to make together,” she said. “All of us.”

“I guess that explains why you’re so eager for a family reunion,” he noted.

“We only found out about the property a few months ago,” she said again. “We’ve been looking for you a lot longer than that.” She smiled again. “And now you’re finally here.”

“Are you sure Hudson doesn’t mind me crashing here? Because I can call Melba Strickland to—”

“No,” Bella interjected firmly. “Hudson doesn’t mind, and no, you’re not staying at Strickland’s Boarding House when you’ve got family here.”

He turned his hand over and linked his fingers with hers. “I missed you,” he confessed, his voice quiet. “All of you.”

“Then why didn’t you ever come home?”

He could understand her confusion. She had no way of knowing that his leaving had been prompted not just by grief over the loss of their parents but by guilt—because he was responsible for their being out on the road that night. In addition to all the other factors, that truth was what had compelled him to leave Rust Creek Falls—a futile effort to escape the daily reminders of the mistakes he’d made.

He owed Bella the truth. After all this time, she deserved to know the real reason he went away. But she seemed so happy to see him, and it felt so good to be welcome. The happy light in her eyes warmed the deepest, darkest places in his soul, and Luke didn’t want to dim that light.

Not yet.

“You know what? It doesn’t matter,” she decided when he remained silent. “It only matters that you’re here now. And—fingers crossed—Bailey and Liza will soon be, too.”

“I don’t know if this helps at all, but the last time I saw Bailey, he was heading to New Mexico with his fiancée,” Luke said.

“Then Hudson’s PI will be heading to New Mexico next,” she decided.

“What’s in New Mexico?” her husband asked, walking in with a couple of flat boxes in hand.