Run To You by Rachel Gibson Page B

warm glow. “Thank you.”
    “You’re welcome.” Naomi set the bottle on the table and looked from Stella to Beau, then back again. “Never?”
    Stella didn’t usually talk about her personal life with people she didn’t know. Some of it was embarrassing, but no doubt Beau had plugged her name into some super-secret spy software that he’d bought along with his flashbang, and he already knew everything about her. The good, the bad, and the ugly. He’d probably seen her third grade report card and the balance on her Victoria’s Secret credit card. Beau would know if she was omitting, fudging, or outright lying. “Well, technically, I suppose I have been on the ranch,” she said as Naomi took her seat. “I was conceived there.” She reached for her glass and smiled. “Obviously, I was too young to remember the event. Thank God.” No one laughed at her little joke, but she thought she was pretty dang funny. She took a drink and looked over the rim into Naomi’s calm gaze. Curiosity lined her brow as she patiently waited for Stella to continue. “Sadie’s mama died when she was five, and my mother was her nanny.” Stella set the glass back on the table and decided just to share the short version. “To make a short story even shorter, my mother grew up really poor,” she said, repeating what she’d heard too many times to count. “From the time she was able, she worked at the Super 8 and El Sombrero. The only way out of her family’s house was to marry one of the neighborhood boys and have five children in as many years.” She gathered her hair at the back of her neck and pulled it over one shoulder. “She wanted something different and answered an ad placed by a nanny agency. Her first placement was on the JH Ranch, in the Texas panhandle.” She thought of the old photograph of her mother that Abuela had taken the day she’d left for Texas. In the faded photo she’d looked so young and pretty, and excitement sparkled in her eyes. “She worked at the ranch for three months when she discovered she was pregnant.” She still couldn’t picture her young mother and grouchy Clive Hollowell knocking boots. “When she told my father, he sent her back to New Mexico and paid her to stay there.”
    Naomi sucked in a breath. “Your mother must have been devastated.”
    “As my grandmother says, Fue por lana y salio trasquilado . She went looking for wool and came back shorn.” Good Lord. The wine was doing more than casting a warm glow if she was really quoting her grandmother. Abuela had a million sayings and wasn’t afraid to use them. A million annoying myths and legends and rules that she wasn’t afraid to share.
    “Sometimes I don’t understand men.” Naomi was clearly appalled. “How could a father do something like that?”
    Stella didn’t know which was worse. That her father had slept with the help, or that her mother had slept with her boss. That her father had slept with a girl thirty-five years younger than he, or that her mother had taken one look at Senor Hollowell and had seen a big house and lots of money. “I didn’t really know him. I only saw him about five times in my life.” While her mother had gone looking for wool, she hadn’t exactly been shorn. She didn’t get the big house, but she got a nicer house in a nicer Las Cruces neighborhood. She didn’t get Clive Hallowell’s millions, but she got enough money to support her and her family. Stella wouldn’t say her mother got pregnant on purpose, but she wouldn’t call it an accident, either.
    “Is that it?” Naomi asked.
    The last time she’d seen her father, she’d been eleven. She’d wanted desperately for him to like her, but he hadn’t. “He brought me porcelain horses once. I played with them until their legs broke off.” That sounded so pathetic that she might have blushed if not for the pinot. She wasn’t that little girl anymore who desperately wanted her father and sister to love her. She hadn’t been