Million-Dollar Maverick by Christine Rimmer

Author:Christine Rimmer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2014-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

Collin Traub had thick black hair and eyes to match. Growing up, there wasn’t a dare he wouldn’t take. He rode the rodeo, broke a lot of hearts and never went to college. Everyone said he would come to no good.

He’d fooled them all. Collin was a talented saddle maker by trade and, as it turned out, a politician by avocation. He’d married Willa Christensen a year ago. They were happy together, Collin and Willa. Everyone remarked on it, even Nate’s mother, who’d never in her life until then had a kind thing to say about Collin Traub.

Nate dreaded the meeting with Collin. It was tough enough to try and make amends to Sutter, who had never called him dirty names or punched him in the face hard enough to black both his eyes.

Making amends to Collin Traub? Uh-uh. Never in his life had he planned to do any such thing.

For the rest of the afternoon, Nate considered ways he might back out of apologizing to his lifelong nemesis. But every time he just about convinced himself there was no way he was meeting Collin at the Ace in the Hole, he would think of Callie. He would see her shining eyes looking up at him, see the faith she’d put in him, the trust she had in his supposed deep-down goodness.

And he would know that he had to do it. He had to be...better than he’d ever thought he was capable of being.

He walked into the Ace at six-thirty, figuring he’d do well to get there first, to try and take a little control of a situation in which he found himself at a total disadvantage. He knew of a certain booth in back, in the corner, where he and the Traub brothers could take care of business without the whole town watching.

Unfortunately, the Traub brothers were way ahead of him.

Sutter and Collin were already there, sitting at the bar with Dallas and one of their other brothers, Braden. Collin spotted Nate instantly in the mirror on the back wall.

Their eyes met and locked.

And Nate felt dread and something like fury, all in a lead-weighted ball in the pit of his stomach. He thought of all the names Collin had called him when they were growing up: “Goody-boy” and “Mama’s little sweetheart,” “butt-wipe” and “Little College Man,” among so many others too down and dirty to ever repeat.

And then there were the fights they’d had, the way they’d go at each other, no holds barred, punching and kicking, each of them determined to finish the other off for good every time.

Never in a hundred million years had he imagined he would come to this moment: to be standing in the Ace, staring eye to eye in the mirror with Collin Traub, planning to humble himself, to tell his enemy that he had gone too far and wanted to apologize.

Collin turned around and faced him. “Nate.”

Nate gave him a nod. “Collin.”

“You’re early,” the other man said mildly.

Nate took off his hat.

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