Courted by the Texas Millionaire by Crystal Green

Author:Crystal Green
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2012-09-08T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

After Davis and Violet let go of each other’s hands, they said their goodbyes for the day, then he watched her walk through the aisle of tents.

Friends.

It was probably a good thing, because it meant they wouldn’t be enemies. It was probably the most he should ask from her, too.

But it’d been such a long time since Violet had been the closest he’d ever had to a female friend that he wasn’t sure he knew how to be that way again. He certainly hadn’t been true “friends” with any other female afterward.

He headed down the street, through the growing crowd of homegrown attendees and the tourists. People stopped him to say what a great weekend this was shaping up to be, and it made Davis think of how Violet had wanted him to pay attention to what he’d done for the town, to feel some pride in it.

Amazingly, he did, maybe for the first time ever.

He passed the buildings decorated with bunting and the artisan tents on his way to the town square, where a banjo trio was plucking away at their instruments and drawing a crowd. Davis circled to the back of the performance tent, finding Jennifer Neeson and Lianna Hurst arguing about logistics for the apple pie bake-off, and he took a detour.

Over a week ago, before Violet came, he would’ve gone right over to them to flirt. But now?

It didn’t seem that alluring. Violet made other women seem out of the question, even if she was off limits.

Friends, he reminded himself, as a weight sank within him.

Under the nearby gazebo, a group of older men—ex-miners—were seated in a circle, and Davis left Jennifer and Lianna behind to check in with the guys. He came around the back of the structure as they were talking and using their knives to whittle blocks of wood. A few handmade signs announced that they were selling their work, which perched on the gazebo railing—everything from little horses to woodland creatures and totems.

These men weren’t exactly big fans of Davis’s since they’d been forced into an early retirement due to the mine shutting down, but that never stopped Davis from being affable.

Their voices rose even above the banjos. “Have you seen him with that Osborne girl?”

They must’ve spied Davis roaming the square but didn’t know he’d come around to their area. He almost spoke up before they could say something they might regret, but he was too late.

“Well,” said another ex-miner, “her daddy turned his back on us. Why wouldn’t she do it, too, by hanging around another man who screwed us out of a job?”

They were talking about how Violet’s father had blown the whistle on the kaolin mine’s safety conditions. What burned Davis even more was that they were insinuating that Violet had inherited the title of “betrayer”—that she was a turncoat because she was friends with Davis, who’d attracted the Mine Safety and Health Administration’s attention with his newspaper stories.

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