Melody felt as though her stomach was tied in knots as Cisco turned the truck off the main road onto a bumpy gravel driveway. Or was it a driveway? She didn’t know anything about this stuff. What if it was actually another road and they had an additional hour in the truck?

Would that actually be so bad? Melody couldn’t be sure. She was enjoying the time spent in the truck. They were chatting, and even though the topics were not all comfortable or maybe even her business, they were still talking and it was still—well, it was fun.

“I’m sorry about what I said,” Melody told him suddenly. She didn’t know why she felt compelled to say this. “For what I said about your date. You know?”

“It’s all right.” He glanced over, and the corners of his mouth turned up in a smile.

She could smell him. It was so strange. Usually after working in the coffee shop the only thing she could smell was herself because she reeked of coffee.  It was such a pervasive smell that nothing else could overpower it. Until Cisco, apparently. The spicy scent of his sandalwood cologne lingered just beneath everything else in that truck.

He looked good. Really good. She had never seen him in casual clothing. He always wore slacks and dress shirts with loafers. Of course, she absolutely liked the sight of him in that clothing. He looked hot. But right now, he was sporting a pair of soft blue jeans, some very worn boots, and a white T-shirt. He looked like—actually, he looked like a cowboy.

“I appreciate you being nice about my comments,” Melody told him slowly. Ugh! Why was she harping on this topic anyway? “I just wanted to make sure that you realize I’m not judging you for your choice in women.”

“That isn’t what I thought.” He sounded tight somehow. “The woman—her name is Vittoria—she’s actually a coworker. It’s just hard to decide what’s safe about dating or going out with a coworker. You know?”

“I never go out with coworkers,” she said flatly. “It never works out well.”

“I never even asked,” he said suddenly. He was looking over at her every other second as though he were really interested in what he was about to say. “But are you dating someone. I don’t want to make trouble for you.”

“I’m not. Dating someone, that is. And if I were dating someone, then he should know better than to think I would cheat or be disloyal even if I’m spending time with someone else who happens to be male.”

“Right.” He smirked. “If that were me—hypothetically of course—then there is no way I would let another guy within ten feet of you. I wouldn’t take the chance.”

“What if that guy was helping me with my inheritance like you are?” She wondered what his deal was. Was he just super possessive? Would that even matter to her?

“I cannot imagine a scenario where I would leave you to figure anything out on your own. Not like this. Nothing this big. If there’s some guy out there who would date you and then, just say, oh, you’re having problems with some lawyer screwing you over? Too bad. It’s your problem.” Cisco’s look of dark disapproval somehow gave her comfort. He was a gentleman, not an ass. “Then he deserves to be whipped.”

“And you’re going to do it in your snazzy cowboy boots?” she teased.

He glanced down and looked strangely self-conscious. “I haven’t worn these in years, but I wasn’t sure what we were walking into out here, and they seemed a logical choice. They’re pretty scuffed up.”

“You used to ride?” The idea of riding a horse was so foreign to Melody that she could not even imagine what it would be like. “That’s pretty cool.”

“I grew up on a ranch,” he said drily. “I rode, I roped, I used to brand cattle every spring. It was pretty much do the ranch chores with my brothers or die.”

“Wow.”

Suddenly, she looked up and realized that they were driving toward something. There was a rambling two-story house coming up fast. It looked like something out of a movie. The first thing you noticed was the big A-frame roofline and then the deep front porch. There was even a swing to the left of the front door. The big front pillars were half natural stone, and the steps looked warped or something. It was very odd looking.

There was a big window on the second story under the A-frame and then several more windows on the first floor. Two chimneys flanked both sides of the house, and Melody could not help but imagine what it would be like to curl up in that house in front of a roaring fire while it snowed outside.

Behind the main house were a barn and some corrals. In fact, the closer they drove to the property itself, the more fencing she saw. It looked like you could actually put a whole herd of cows in that enclosure. How many ever there were in a whole herd of cows these days. It wasn’t like Melody knew anything about ranching anyway.

“Is this my grandparents’ place?” She looked at Cisco because she needed confirmation. “It looks amazing!”

Cisco made a noise she could not interpret and then pulled his truck up in front of the house. “It needs a serious coat of paint and a new roof,” he commented slowly. “Let’s get out and see what we’re dealing with here.”

Melody nearly fell out of the truck in her eagerness to be out and looking at her property. She’d never owned anything before. Nothing at all. Just her car and that barely counted. This was unbelievable.

She pounded her way up the front steps. They weren’t even wood! They were stone. The paint on the porch floor was peeling, and the wood looked warped, but she didn’t care. It actually looked sturdier than the apartment building where her little one-room apartment was located.

“I wonder how many bathrooms there are?” she whispered.

Cisco shook his head and followed her up the steps. “You said you didn’t have a key, right?”

Melody felt her excitement fade fast. “No. Watson didn’t give me any, and I didn’t even think to ask.”

“We’ll fix that tomorrow,” Cisco murmured. “For now?”

He was poking around the front door. Next he moved to the pillars at the front of the porch. Melody watched him with no small amount of fascination. She could not imagine what he was doing or why. Did he think there was some kind of secret entrance like an old haunted house with a hidden room or something?

“There we go!” Cisco exclaimed suddenly.

Melody realized that he had removed what appeared to be a loose rock from one of the posts. He was now holding a key in his hand. Had the thing actually been stashed in the post? Why?

“Hide a key,” Cisco said by way of explanation. “It’s a pretty common practice when you lock the door of a place that probably didn’t get locked very often.”

“Didn’t get locked?” The idea was an absolute anathema to Melody. “Why would you not lock your doors while you aren’t home?”

Cisco gestured to the very empty, very quiet front yard. “Do you see any reason to lock a door?”

There was nothing but the wind passing by out front. It was so quiet that it seemed almost unreal. Melody saw no other cars. There were no other houses visible in the distance. The only thing she thought she might be able to see was a plume of dust several miles away, potentially from some other vehicle leaving the highway.

“Okay, I think I might see your point,” Melody allowed. “I’ve never been anywhere that there weren’t a thousand people within earshot.”

“Welcome to the country,” Cisco murmured as he worked the key into the lock on the front door.

The creaky old thing had cloudy glass set into the top half of it. There was a squeaky screen door, and the peeling green paint on the door matched the green that the house had been once upon a time. Melody could not possibly imagine what it would be like to live someplace like this. But for whatever reason, she was in love with the idea of this place.

“It’s amazing,” she whispered as the door finally opened and they peeked inside.

Cisco grunted as they entered a sort of foyer. The place was packed with furniture, books, knickknacks, and a musty smell that came from disuse. There was a fine coating of dust on everything.

“Oh my gosh!” Melody laughed out loud. “Look at this television set! I’ve never seen anything this old! It’s a whole cabinet and not just a TV.”

Cisco poked his head into the living room from what she imagined to be the kitchen. “Yeah, my parents had a set like that when I was a kid. I think it belonged to my grandparents.”

“Crazy.”

She ran her fingers through the dust on the television cabinet. Then she moved to an ancient buffet. There were photographs. She picked them up and looked carefully at each one. It was inconceivable to think that she was somehow related to the people in the pictures. She recognized her mother in more than a few. The times Melody had visited her grandparents in the nursing home, they had showed her a few photographs they had left of her mother.

Melody picked up an ancient brass frame. The black-and-white picture had been taken in front of this house. It was shocking to realize that this house had been in her family for multiple generations. That was obvious from the clothing in the photos. This house had been the center of it all.

Turning a slow circle, Melody tried to imagine little children running through this space. It was cluttered right now in the way that houses belonging to older people usually are. She headed back through the foyer to the hallway leading straight away from the front door. There were two bedrooms on the main floor and a bathroom between them.

She touched the iron bedstead in the back bedroom. The antique bedframe matched the ancient wood furniture. It was all dry and dusty and in dire need of some oil, but the drawers opened and closed just fine. It was good furniture. It was useable. It was—it was ready for another generation of Farrells.

“Hey there, you okay?”

Melody turned to see Cisco leaning through the doorway. She smiled at him. At the moment, she didn’t have any words. She didn’t know what to say to express this strange sensation she had inside. The world suddenly felt huge and foreign. She felt so very alone. And yet she wasn’t. Not right now. For the first time in her life, she had someone who was at least willing to listen and to help her without asking for anything in return.

“This was my mother’s room, I bet,” Melody whispered. Then she turned to look at Cisco. “Do you think my mother would have slept here?”

He didn’t laugh at her. He did not judge or say she was being stupid or anything of the sort. Instead, he walked to the window and fingered the lacy curtains. “I think you might be right. My mom put lacy curtains in my sister’s bedroom. And the view here is really great. You can see the barn and the mountains from here. Your mom would have had a view of her horse in the mornings.” There was a smile on Cisco’s face that Melody had never seen before. “And let me tell you, when it came to Pixie, my sister wanted to see just about everything the mare was doing at all times.”

“What was it like for your sister?” Melody murmured thoughtfully. “Growing up on a ranch, I mean.”

Cisco shrugged. “It’s complicated. Jesse isn’t actually our sister. She was a neighbor kid. Her dad was my dad’s best friend. She’s a year younger than me, the same age as my youngest brother. When her folks were killed in some kind of accident, she came to live with us.” He gave a low snort and pointed to the lacy curtains. “Hence the curtains, right? My mom wanted a girl so bad after having five boys that she treated Jesse like a freaking doll!”

Melody had this mental image of a little cowgirl who was running away to ride her horse while wearing a lacy pink dress. “I think I would have been like that. I think my mother would have been too.”

“Family is tough to handle no matter what.” Cisco turned toward her. His handsome face was set in serious lines, but there was such kindness in his blue eyes that she could not even imagine how one man could be so wonderful and caring. “I can’t even begin to understand what it would be like to not know your family or to have absolutely no honest connection to them beyond this house full of stuff that other people would consider junk.”

“I want this place,” Melody told him suddenly. “I’ve never owned property. And I don’t know anything about this place or what it takes to keep up a house. I just know that I want this place. I want to be part of this family. I want my history, and for all I know, it’s stuffed into these walls with the rest of the junk in this place.”

To Cisco’s credit, he did not laugh at her. He didn’t tell her that she was crazy. He did not say anything negative at all. He only nodded. That was when she realized that he hadn’t put any hair product in his hair this morning. She had wondered what it would look like if he didn’t try to smash it down and glue it there. The answer was that it looked amazing.

Unable to resist, Melody reached up and ran her fingers through the soft strands of his black hair. The fact that it was curly only added to the attraction. He was such a handsome man. She wanted to touch more. She wanted to let her fingers move from his hair to his jaw. There was a dusting of whiskers on his chin that fascinated her. But for now, the hair was enough. She sifted her fingers through it and could not help but pretend that she had a real right to do so.

Not that such a thing would ever happen. Not in this lifetime. Cisco Hernandez was so far out of her league that they were barely the same species of human being. And that was just how it was.