Leaving Necessity
Authors: Margo Bond Collins
Leaving Necessity
Margo Bond Collins
Leaving Necessity
A Contemporary Western Romance
Copyrigh
t©
2016 by Margo Bond Collins
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval systems, without prior written permission of the author except where permitted by law.
Published by Bathory Gate Press
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead is coincidental and not intended by the author.
* * *
About
Leaving Necessity
Can they strike love again?
At nineteen, Clara Graves left Necessity, Texas, to try to heal her broken heart. She swore she would never come back, and she's kept that promise. Until now. When she returns for her uncle's funeral, she inherits a small oil company that may keep her tied to Necessity for a few days longer than she expected. But as soon as she can close or sell the business, she’s pointing her boots toward greener pastures.
To this day, Mitchell MacAllan regrets letting Clara go without a fight. But his whole life was in Necessity, and leaving town wasn’t in the cards. As the foreman of Aerio Oil and Gas, he works hard to keep the townspeople employed and maintain the business, despite a recent downturn in petroleum prices.
Now Mac has less than a week to convince Clara that she should give Aerio a chance, and maybe even forgive him in the meantime. Otherwise, she will once again be leaving Necessity—and taking his heart with her, this time for good.
* * *
Clara Graves stood on the side of the deserted Texas road and, with one pointed toe of her red, high-heeled Manolo Blahniks, gave the flat tire on the rental car a hard kick.
For the third time, she held her cell phone up in the air, hoping it would tell her something other than
No Service
.
No such luck.
Of course.
And all I’ve managed to do is hurt my toe.
The late spring sun was setting, the beauty of the orange streaks across the sky capturing Clara’s attention just long enough for her to register that it would eventually get dark.
She pulled her long blonde hair back into a ponytail with one hand. Then, blowing out a breath, she let the curls drop back down past her shoulders.
“Fine,” she muttered to herself. “I’ll change the tire my own damn self.” She shook her head. Not even five hours back in the state, and already she had completely lost both her cool and her grasp of basic grammar.
She did, however, remember how to change a tire, even if it had been years since she had done it.
Don’t think about the last time. Don’t think about it. Don’t.
She couldn’t help it. Even as she traded her pumps for a pair of running shoes—her boots were probably still in the closet at Uncle Gavin’s—and moved her suitcase to the back seat so she could pull the jack out of the trunk, she was remembering the last time.
She and Mitch had been eighteen, right out of high school, and his truck—that old Dodge pickup Mitch kept running through some magical combination of used parts and duct tape—had gotten its third flat of the week.
All summer long, he had been threatening to make her change the next one.
This time, he made good on the threat.
“It’s your fault,” he claimed. “If not for you, I wouldn’t be driving all over these back roads.”
“My fault?” Clara had managed to sound outraged, even around her laughter. “I am not requiring you to find the best, most secret make-out spot in all of Palo Pinto County. That is your own personal, private quest.”
“Not private enough. We still haven’t found
private enough
.” Mitch cut his hazel eyes toward her. “Anyway, you’re the one who doesn’t want your uncle to catch us. It’s definitely your turn to change the tire.”
“If I refuse?” she’d asked, smiling despite herself.
“It’ll be really awful.” He heaved an exaggerated sigh. “We’ll sit here until dark. Past dark. Mr. Graves will get worried, and call out the cops, and the search dogs. When they find us, they’ll ask us what we’re doing out here. I won’t have any choice but to tell them.”
“Tell them what?” Clara could barely speak through her laughter.
With wide, rounded eyes, Mitch adopted a quasi-serious tone. “That you brought me out here for immoral purposes, and then held me captive.” He shrugged. “You’ll go to prison. It’ll totally ruin your life. I’ll be sad, but I will eventually move on.” His voice grew tearful, and he held his hand to his chest. “But I will always remember you fondly.”
“Fondly? Seriously?” Still laughing, Clara scooted across the bench seat away from him. “Fine. I’ll change the damn tire. But if I do, you’d better remember me more than just fondly.”
“If you change the tire, you won’t have to go to prison, so it won’t be an issue.” In the end, Mitch had gotten out of the truck and tried to take over, his wide grin showing off his perfectly white, straight teeth.
“Oh, no. Step off, cowboy. I got this,” she said, wagging her finger at him.
Even now, she smiled at the memory, despite everything that had come so soon afterwards.
“I got this,” she whispered as she placed the jack under the rental.
Fifteen minutes later, the car sported a ridiculously tiny spare donut tire, the full-size flat safely stowed in the trunk.
Clara’s hands were black. Without thinking, she wiped them down the front of her designer jeans, then grimaced at the marks.
Oh, well. She could always buy more.
The combination of dealing with the grease from the lug-nuts and crawling around on the ground to set the jack almost certainly meant that everything she was wearing was ruined, anyway.
Back in the driver’s seat, she flipped down the visor to check her appearance.
A black smudge ran across her forehead and up into her hair, probably where she had shoved the blonde curls out of the way. The curls themselves were in disarray, some of them flattened or missing altogether, others spiraling out into frizz.
Streaks where sweat had dripped down her face ran through her carefully applied makeup. Clara turned the vent so the air conditioner could blow directly on her.
Taken all together, she looked like a woman who had just changed a tire on the side of the road on a hot Texas day.
Not exactly the way she had envisioned returning to Necessity, Texas.
With any luck, she wouldn’t see anyone she knew.
Or more to the point, anyone who knew her.
* * *
“Hey, Mac, we got another problem out at the Rittman B.”
Mitchell MacAllan—“Mac” these days, at least to the men on his crews—squeezed the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger, warding off an impending headache. The late-afternoon sun shining in his eyes wasn’t helping.
He wouldn’t be home until after dinner for the fifth night in a row.
“You there, Mac?” Bobby’s voice echoed a little through the cell phone Mac still held to his ear.
He blew out a sharp breath. He might not know if any of them would still have a job tomorrow, but today, at least, he had work to tend to.
“Yeah. I’m still here. What’s up?”
“Looks like the pump is burned out again.” Bobby sounded almost as tired as Mac felt.
“Shit.” Mac drew out the vowel until it sounded like “she-it” and growled with frustration. “Duke been messing with the valves again?”
He could almost hear the shrug in the mechanic’s voice. “No way to tell for sure. Anyway, I didn’t want to touch it until I talked to you.”
There was no chance Bobby had gotten a cell signal on the ranch, either. Duke Rittman had refused to allow cell towers on any of the vast number of acres he owned, no matter how much the phone companies offered for the lease.
He had refused to allow drilling on his ranch, too, until he had discovered that he didn’t actually own the mineral rights to his land and the court had forced him to allow Aerio Oil and Gas onto the property to drill.
The site had been nothing but trouble ever since.
Mac couldn’t prove it, but he was certain that Duke took every possible chance to slow them down.
“How far out are you?” he asked Bobby.
“Had to come out almost to the interstate to call. I’m sending pictures now.”
One look at the images that came through moments later told Mac everything he needed to know. “That’s a two- or three-day job. Let’s hold off until after the meeting tomorrow.”
The pause at the other end of the line held all the anxiety Mac had been shoving down for the last three weeks, ever since he found out that Gavin Graves, the owner of Aerio, had died unexpectedly.
Bobby was anxious that he might not keep his job.
For Mac, the realization that Gavin’s niece Clara had inherited the company was far worse.
Clara Graves was his new boss.
And tomorrow, he was going to have to give her a report on the state of the company. He needed all the information he could gather. “Head on out to the next site, Bobby. Give me a call when you’re done. In fact, update me on all the sites you visit today.”
“You got it, Mac.”
He had poured his entire professional life into this company. With one wave of her hand—well, a stroke of a pen, anyway—she could take away everything he cared about.
Again.
He wasn’t going to let that happen. Not this time.
This time, he would convince her. He would find the right words, the right argument—a way to keep her from destroying everything he had built.
Mac squared his shoulders and resettled his straw cowboy hat on his head.
This time, everything would be different.