Can't Hurry Love Read Online Free PDF

silver eyebrow. “You can have this.” She pushed the bowl across the desk.
    “You’re eating it.” Victoria stared at the scrambled eggs with bacon and cheese. Little green flecks of chive sat on the mountain of sour cream on top. She couldn’t even imagine Celeste eating something like that.
    “Ruby made it; I couldn’t say no.”
    Couldn’t say no? Celeste?
    “Go ahead,” Celeste urged.
    There was a voice in her head telling her to reject the offer. To pretend that she wasn’t hungry. To pretend that she was fine despite the fact that her stomach was a speaking bear. That was the old Victoria.
    “Thanks,” she said and grabbed the bowl, scooping up the dollop of sour cream sprinkled with cheese. It melted in her mouth, salty and tangy, and she nearly groaned.
    It tasted like colors, like explosions of yellow and orange and creamy white.
    When had she stopped tasting things?
    Celeste smiled, and Victoria didn’t even care that the Queen was laughing at her.
    “So? How is the ranching business going?”
    Again, the lie surfaced on her lips. Fine. Just fine. Everything is great .
    But it wasn’t.
    She stood on the edge of another failure, and pride hadn’t ever helped her. Ever.
    “Eli sold the entire Angus herd yesterday,” she said. “I told him I wanted to learn how to ranch, how to do this … well, and he made me muck out the stalls.”
    “Muck—”
    “Shovel shit.” The words felt good in her mouth, round and then sharp at the end. She should do more swearing.
    Celeste’s lips pursed slightly and Victoria mined through the eggs for a big chunk of bacon and then groaned at the taste. Salty and meaty, with a hint of smoke. Pink, it tasted pink, tinged with black. So good. Food was so good sometimes. She’d forgotten.
    “He hates me.” She was talking with her mouth full, and even that felt good. “And I don’t blame him, but this land is mine now and I don’t know what to do with it.”
    “Well, it seems to me Eli might not be the best person to talk to.”
    “He’s run this ranch for years, his father before him, and his father before that.” She shoveled more eggs, finding chunks of tomato like buried treasure.
    “Yes. I know.” Celeste crossed her legs and ran a hand over her perfectly behaved silver hair, from crown to nape. “And I suppose if you want to learn how to be a cowboy, or … I don’t know … shovel shit, he’d be a wonderful person to talk to.”
    Victoria choked on her eggs in her delight in Celeste’s cattiness. If there was anything Celeste was good at it was being a snob, and as a recovering snob herself, Victoria relished a little backslide into bitchery.
    “But I can guarantee you that Lyle didn’t ask Eli how to run his business.”
    Victoria sat up straighter, catching on to Celeste’s way of thinking. Being the recipient of Celeste’s smile was like getting blessed by the pope—Victoria felt suffused with purpose.
    She took another bite of breakfast and started opening drawers to the big desk, stopping when she found an old-fashioned Rolodex. Rifling through the cards, the white paper worn and frayed under her fingers, shepulled out the ones that might be helpful to a woman in her position—bank managers, accountants, lawyers.
    “I need to talk to the accountant. Arrange a meeting with Randy Jenkins. There’s probably someone at the bank who—”
    The soft click of the door closing behind Celeste as she left the den sounded like a door slamming.
    Victoria stared at the shut door.
    Once upon a time she would have thought that she’d done something wrong. That Celeste was mad at her. And she would have gone out of her way to figure out what the problem was and then try to fix it.
    She’d stopped humming early on in her marriage because Joel had found it disruptive.
    Victoria took another bite of eggs and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
    Feeling gloriously unmannered, she went back to her Rolodex and the task of becoming a