Love Grows Wild Read Online Winter Renshaw

Categories Genre: Alpha Male, Contemporary, Suspense Tags Authors: Winter Renshaw Advertisement

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I’ve negotiated dozens of deals over the years, and I’m used to playing the long game, except we’re going on eight years of this now and it’s getting ridiculous.

I’m a patient man, but lately mine’s running paper thin.

I want that land.

I have to have it.

I scratch at my temple as she fusses with the rusty orange cattle gate at the end of the dirt driveway that leads to Rich’s farmhouse. It takes her a second or two, but she finally figures out the latch, swings the gate wide, and returns to her Audi.

I bet she’s a real estate agent.

But that doesn’t make sense. Rich said he’d sell to me, that we’d do a private party deal. I even promised to give him 10 percent above market value in an attempt to eliminate any competition.

In twenty years, I’ve amassed nearly ten thousand acres of farm ground. My personal home rests on a secluded piece of four hundred of those acres, my house sitting at the top of the hill overlooking it all. It’s a million-dollar view—best one in the county. Trees. River. Rolling hills. Stars for days on a clear night. Privacy on top of privacy. The ultimate luxury. No neighbors for a solid five miles in any direction. The freedom to let people into—or keep them out of—your world is priceless. It’s a piece of ground that’s mine and mine alone, space to think and breathe and be alone and unbothered with my thoughts at the end of a long day.

It’s my fortress of solitude—minus having Rich as a neighbor.

But more than that, I’ve got personal ties to that property, to that house and those grounds and that section of river. I made a promise to someone a lifetime ago, someone near and dear to me, and I’ll be damned if I break it.

Blondie disappears down Rich’s driveway.

I don’t usually make a habit of being nosy—in this town you don’t have to because everyone talks to everyone and things always trickle down eventually. But that woman’s definitely not from around here, and she’s sniffing around my land.

Pulling out onto the road, I take a right and head to Rich’s.

Only, the second I do, Truitt sends me a panicked text asking if I’m on my way yet.

I am.

Just not in the direction I should be headed.

2

Wren

The key turns with a satisfying click.

For a second, I stand frozen—my hand on the doorknob, my son bouncing at my side, and the weight of everything that brought us here pressing down on my shoulders. But beneath that weight, there’s something else too.

The faintest flicker of hope.

The buzzing undercurrent of excitement.

The thrill of the unknown.

“Can I go in first?” Atticus asks, practically vibrating. He’s been patient for the entire drive, even when my phone’s GPS lost signal halfway down a gravel road and I had to wing it like some pioneer mom in a black Audi.

“Go for it.” I hold the door open wide.

He darts inside, his thick, sandy hair bouncing as his sneakers thud against the old wood floors. The place smells like cedar and dust, warmth and love, and a lifetime of other people’s memories. Yet at the same time, it smells like home.

I follow him in, eyes sweeping the open space—the whitewashed walls, the exposed white oak beams, the warm glow of late morning light filtering through sheer linen curtains.

It’s smaller than our downtown loft but cozier, grounded in something real. It has depth and charm and character. If these walls could talk, I imagine they’d have stories for days.

I’m feeling inspired already.

There’s a spark in my chest, a nudge, a niggle in the center of my stomach that gives me reassurance that this was the right move.

“Mom, we have a real fireplace!” Atticus shouts from what I assume is the living room. “And the floor creaks when I jump! Listen! Can you hear it?”

“Just try not to fall through it,” I call, smiling despite myself. I leave the key on the entryway table, where someone left a little ceramic dish shaped like a horseshoe. A welcome gift or a forgotten knickknack—either way, I’m claiming it. Besides, horseshoes are supposed to symbolize luck, and lately I’ve been running low on that.

Atticus barrels back into the foyer a minute later, already winded. “Can I go outside now?”

“There’s five acres of backyard and no one to yell at you for running too fast. Go wild,” I say, waving him off. Thirty-five acres of this forty-acre purchase consisted of rentable farm ground—which I’m told will bring in about fourteen thousand dollars a year in income, among other tax benefits I had no idea existed. Not only did I find a property that belongs on a movie set, I’m being paid to own it too.

Mom always told me sometimes things fall apart just so they can fall back together when the time is right. She’s never wrong about these things. She was right about my ex-fiancé too. Her first impression of Nick was that he seemed “fickle.” I told her he was probably just nervous, but deep down, I wondered the same about him. He was notoriously indecisive about everything, from the color of his button-down shirt for work each morning to the drink he was going to order at a restaurant we’d been to a hundred times before. I used to tease him about it, never thinking he’d one day be indecisive about me. I suppose sometimes it’s easier to see what we want to see, to believe what we so badly want to believe.


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