Danger, Sweetheart by MaryJanice Davidson

a decade old so he could look out the window while laughing his ass off just slew her. She couldn’t help it, she tried to help it, but she laughed, too. The mingled noise was … how’d he put it? Wonderful.
    Oh, hell. I am not finding Vegas Douche charming. That shit ain’t happening. Not. Happening.
    Right?
    Right.

 
    Twelve
    Natalie Lane was a would-be murderess, a fiend so vile she had the potential to give Elizabeth Báthory competition. She was clearly trying to kill him, and had an excellent chance of succeeding, but he had yet to fathom her motive. Inherent sociopathy, he assumed, was not a motive, or at least not enough of one.
    Oh God, she’s so beautiful and her hands are so small and I want to hold them, I want to hold them all the time—
    He shook off the sentiment. He would die on this farm. This horrible, hateful, brutal fucking farm. Heartbreak Farm, ha! It ought to be renamed Myocardial Infarction Farm.
    Oh my gaaaawd! Rake laughed in his head. Drama queen is not a good look for you, big brother; it’s worse than that time I dyed your hair orange in your sleep. Sure, everybody called you Mario Batali all summer, but you had some dignity, man.
    He had suspected nothing that first day. In fact, he had taken quite a liking to Heartbreak at first look, not least because Natalie Lane, of all people, worked there! And appeared to love it and everything about it: the work, the animals, the buildings, the house, the best ways to torture Blake … it filled the already lovely woman with zeal that left her dazzling.
    Zeal that left her … my God, man. Get ahold of yourself.
    Good advice. He tried.
    Natalie had given him a tour of the house, the barn (called Main One for a reason she would not explain), the other outbuildings. She had introduced him to several sullen men and women, and if glances could decimate he would have been murdered half a dozen times before lunch. Also, lunch was not at lunchtime. He had missed lunchtime. By thirty-eight minutes.
    â€œBreakfast at five, lunch at nine thirty, supper at four.”
    â€œWhat about second breakfast?”
    Yes! A small smile. “God, I love Billy Boyd.” He found that puzzling but didn’t comment. (Hours later, as his griping stomach kept him awake, he Googled and saw that was the name of the actor who played Peregrin Took in a series of movies that were somewhat popular. And thank goodness. He’d been afraid she had referenced a boyfriend, and then been annoyed he’d been afraid.) “Almost as much as Peter Dinklage,” she’d finished (it was fine; Google had explained Mr. Dinklage was another actor and thus their relationship was platonic at most).
    Along the way he was educated on the difference between a ranch and a farm. “Heartbreak Ranch? Really? Have we somehow ended up in a nineteenth-century Western?”
    â€œNot a ranch. It’s a farm.”
    â€œDifference, please?”
    â€œA farm raises mostly crops. A ranch raises mostly cattle. A farm can have loads of cows and still be a farm. A dairy farm that grows no crops is still a farm. All ranches are farms, but not all farms are ranches.”
    â€œThat makes no logical sense,” he protested, annoyed, as he often was, by imprecise explanations. “Is there a cutoff point? If you have so many acres for farming, and so many cows for milking and what have you, where are you on the spectrum that the addition of one more cow makes a farm of a ranch?”
    She had stared at him and that was the first time he felt close to death by foreman beatdown. Then had bypassed the definitions and added, “And I can’t imagine you care, but it’s called Heartbreak Farm because in the early nineteen hundreds a townie from Sweetheart proposed to a farmer’s daughter.”
    â€œA story,” he said, leaning against his Supertruck. (After she had given him a tour of the house they had returned to the