Page 84 of The Holiday Heartbreaker

Brody didn’t like that at all, even though he had no right to dislike it.

“Good to meet you,” he said, tipping his hat rather than taking the ten steps it would take to go shake her hand. The kids had piled into the house, but the adults were standing around outside.

It was clear that Ashley and Carter felt no need to see the house that Benny lived in.

“Yeah,” Elizabeth said. “This is the place. And... Down there is where we do the work.”

“It’s lovely,” Ashley said. “It’s huge. It takes like ten minutes to get back here off of the road.”

“Each parcel of land is 13,000 acres,” Brody supplied. “Been in the family for generations.”

“Was that those early you-can-have-as-much-land-as-a-man-can-walk-in-a-day rules? Or piracy?” Carter asked, laughing at his own joke.

“You know,” Brody said, “I’m not really sure.”

Elizabeth suppressed a laugh when he said that.

“Everything’s going good here?” Carter asked.

“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “It’s great. As you can see. Adorable house, beautiful scenery. Couldn’t ask for better. Benny has tons of room to play. It’s really... Really something. The school is a little one-room building that kind of sits between the different ranches, and there are quite a lot of kids there.”

“He told me a little bit when we had our phone calls,” Carter said, clearly unwilling to let her think that he was completely out of the loop.

“I don’t know what’s taking them so long,” Ashley said.

It had been like five minutes.

“I can go get them,” Elizabeth said.

She ducked into the house, leaving Brody out there with Ashley and Carter. They really were a well-matched couple, and he could see how Elizabeth had fit into that life. But even though she still dressed the part, there was just something a lot more vibrant about her.

It was almost like she tried to hide it. Hide it behind a facade a lot like theirs. Because she had spent a long time trying to fit in that world, he supposed.

“So, you’re her...boss?” Carter asked.

“Her friend,” Brody said.

And he could see Carter’s jaw firm up.

Oh yeah.

That guy knew a little masculine competition when he saw it. Brody had a feeling, though, that his reaction wasn’t really about Elizabeth so much as it was about Benny.

Or, hell, maybe it was about Elizabeth. She said that she hadn’t been with anyone since her divorce. It was probably really comfortable for a guy like him to have moved on but have his ex-wife just hanging around being Mother of the Year and nothing else. Yeah, he imagined that on some level, Carter enjoyed that.

Carter, he couldn’t help but notice, was about four inches shorter than he was.

Petty, maybe. But, just true. Other men didn’t like how tall Brody was. They took it as a threat.

Good.

Elizabeth returned a second later with Benny and the other three kids, two of whom were identical.

“Super cool,” one of the boys said.

“Yeah,” said the other one.

And they all began to run toward the SUV.

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