Page 15 of Hero for the Holidays

Still, she couldn’t come up with a reason that he was acting this way now if not for that.

“There’s no woman.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Then why are you being strange?”

“I’m not being strange. Maybe it just seems strange to you, because you crashed the middle of my workday to check up on me.”

“I’m not checking up on you. I don’t care what you do. But I do care whether or not this is a smart business venture. I don’t want to be done out of it because I didn’t do my due diligence.”

“You were given a chance to invest the same as everybody else. If you’re done out of it, it’s going to be because of your own stubbornness, Fia. And it wouldn’t be the first time.”

That was so dangerously close. Dancing so perilously close to the edge of that knife that they pretended hadn’t damn near gutted them both.

“Yeah. Whatever. I think you may have issues with how far this is from the main road.”

He snorted. “Oh. Little Miss We Just Made a New Road can’t figure out how I’ll handle my problems?”

“You would have to make a new road through your own pasture. Are you going to do that?”

“Come back later. When I have some time to show you what I’m thinking. I have an appointment soon.”

“I may not have time to come back later.”

And then, she heard footsteps running toward the barn. A child ran in. Well, not a child, per se. But a young girl. A teenager. With curly red hair and sharp green eyes that Fia had never seen anywhere but on her sisters.

Or in a mirror.

“Hey, Landry,” the kid said. “Did you know there’s a calf out by the—”

The kid stopped talking and looked at them both. But it was the expression on Landry’s face that made something catch low in Fia’s stomach and hook tight.

Then she looked back at the child.

She had Fia’s coloring. That much was obvious. And the same oval-shaped face. But there was something else, and it wassomething elsethat actually made her the most unnerved. It was the way she was also quite perfectly a small, female Landry King. The way her shoulders were set, the arrogant jut of her chin.

This combination of her and Landry right in front of her was the most undeniable, terrifying thing she had ever seen in her life.

A come-to-Jesus moment she’d been certain she would never have.

Every word, every thought, everything, evaporated within her, leaving behind nothing. Nothing but this hot insistent feeling, a need almost, to run toward that child and pull her into her arms.

The girl, for her part, didn’t seem to be reacting to Fia’s presence, except she stopped talking because there was a stranger in the barn. A stranger when she had only been expecting Landry, who clearly wasnota stranger to her.

“Where’s the calf, Lila?”

Lila.

It was a punch in the gut.Lila.

Lila.

That was a name she had never spoken out loud. Like a pearl beyond price she hadn’t allowed herself to have. And he was saying it. Like it was nothing. And more than that, she knew who he was.

“Lila,” she whispered.

“Fia,” he said slowly. “I’d like to talk to you a little later.”

“The calf is outside,” Lila said, frowning. “I didn’t think he was supposed to be out of the pasture.”

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