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Okay, so he had a point. Burying her head in the sand would be impractical and impossible, if she stayed in Biggins. A buyer could make worse changes than bulldozing a very ordinary home that just happened to have been hers for twenty-six years, and her family’s for a lot longer.
She set her mouth tight, detesting Lucas Halliday for being right, for being up front about it like this, for making her nerve endings sing without even knowing it and for apparently understanding that bluntness was just a little easier on her spirit than empathy would have been.
“I’m sorry this task is falling to you,” he said. Each word came out measured and matter-of-fact. “But my father will expect the kind of detail I can only get from someone who really knows the place. If it’s any consolation, he’s not going to haggle over the price if I tell him this is the ranch he wants, and he’s keen to push the purchase through quickly.”
He spread his hands in a gesture that almost looked like an apology. “Raine, my stepmother, wants a white Christmas in a log cabin this year.”
“We can do the log cabin,” she answered, just as matter-of-fact. “No guarantees on the snow. There, you’ll have to negotiate with a higher power. Got any favors you can call in?”
He laughed. It should have eased the atmosphere, but it didn’t. Drinking her coffee in clumsy gulps, Reba watched him page through the documents and papers she’d laid out. He drank absently, giving the impression that he hardly tasted the strong brew, and he thudded the mug down on the table top between mouthfuls.
He took out a pocket calculator and keyed in several sets of figures, absorbed in his assessment. Was he checking Dad’s math? He scribbled some lines in a pocket-size notebook.
Uncomfortable about watching him, Reba retreated behind the breakfast bar. She wiped down the stove top, cleaned the crumb tray beneath the toaster and watered the row of African violets on the windowsill above the sink.
She almost watered Lucas Halliday himself, while she was at it. He’d come to the sink to return his mug. She’d been filling the little tin watering can again and hadn’t heard him, his movements masked by the sound of water drumming on metal. When she turned with the filled can, intending to water the flowering cyclamens in her parents’ room, as well, they came face to face and can to chest.
“Whoa!” He grabbed the pouring end of the can and a spray of drops darkened across the arm of his sweater.
“Oops.”
“No problem.”
He still had the mug. She snatched it from him too abruptly, turned and put it and the watering can on the draining board.
She could feel him still standing right behind her, feel him through to her bones, to the roots of her hair and to the walls of her lungs, which suddenly refused to draw breath. The strength of his pull on her body shocked her, and she heard his next words with a rush of relief.
“Ready to head outside?”
Reba kept both of them busy the whole morning. She did the job delegated to her by Jim Broadbent and her father, and she did it well, Lucas considered. It was painfully apparent how much she cared about this place, although she struggled hard not to show it. Again, with a hot pool of envy low in his gut, he wondered how that would feel.
Not useful, in a situation like this, when the family had to sell.
He should be grateful he’d never have the same problem.
They looked over almost every piece of infrastructure and equipment included in the sale. Calving barn, corrals, machinery sheds, scale room, tack room and bunkhouse. Pickups, stock trailers, haying equipment, round baler, swather and bale feed. A semi-Kenworth tractor, a tractor with loader…The list went on and on, and didn’t deviate from the list both Reba and Jim Broadbent had already given him.
Everything seemed well-maintained, and when it wasn’t, Reba said so. “This flatbed needs new tires,” and “One of the four-wheelers isn’t running right.”
Lucas lost count of how many times he saw her denim-clad hip hike up at an angle, and her neatly rounded backside slide across the torn seat of the battered ranch pickup as she climbed in to the driver’s seat. He got to know the sound of the gears and the clutch, like a strand of familiar music, and the smell of dust and grass and engine oil like a neighbor’s brand of tobacco.
He’d never realized you could drive a pickup with such a high caloric expenditure. Reba didn’t raise her voice and she never swore, but she wrenched the wheel around, lunged at the gearstick and floored accelerator and brake pedal as if driving was a form of hand-to-hand combat.
Every time they stopped, she slapped her pretty, callused hands on her thighs, yanked on the hand brake, looked at him with her big, bluey-greeny-grayish eyes—incredible eyes, because, seriously, what color could you possibly call them?—and announced, without smiling, “Scale shed,” or “Lower Creek Field,” as if they’d just navigated the Amazon River, and she navigated it every day.
“Is this pickup on my vehicle list?” he finally asked.
She drove it the same way she walked—not gracefully, but with a way of moving that kept grabbing his gaze and that, for some unknown reason, he liked. He’d handled a lot of vehicles in his time, but he wasn’t sure that he’d be able to handle this one. Not without practice, anyhow.
The woman who sat beside him would take practice to handle, also. He found himself imagining a little too clearly what the rewards might be.
“You wouldn’t want this one,” she told him. “It’s on its third time round the mileage clock, and it’s got more temperament than a jumpy horse. Second gear pops out with no warning. It stalls under a thousand revs, and it drinks oil like I drink coffee. Can’t get through the day without a big top-up, first thing every morning.”
At the hay stacking yard in the Lower Creek Field, a couple of the hands were fixing fence, with a herd of mama cows looking on.
“They’re bred,” she told him. “They’ll start calving in mid-March.”
She introduced him to the ranch hands, Pete and Lon. The four of them ate a lunch of sandwiches, cookies and more coffee, standing up. The sun shone out of the pristine blue. Lucas’s back felt hot, and his eyes tired from squinting.
He looked at one of the hands. Lon, he was pretty sure, but he might have gotten them mixed up. The man was standing bare-chested with his T-shirt tucked into the back of his jeans like a cleaning rag, and Lucas wished he could peel off his sweater. Inappropriate for the potential buyer of a high-priced ranch to be seen shirtless, unfortunately.
Reba looked hot, too.
When she thought no one was watching, she rolled her sleeves as far as her smooth, soft biceps, and unfastened another button at the front of her shirt. She rewound the red elastic around her ponytail, pulling it higher so that the thick, glossy hair swung free of her sweat-misted neck.
She had sunglasses on, but she mostly kept them pushed up on her head, as if she could see the detail of her beloved ranch more clearly without them. Lucas would have liked to borrow them, and wished he’d worn some of his own, to shield his city eyes against the bright light.
After they left Pete and Lon, she showed him the Upper Creek Field and they walked two hundred yards or more, along the bank of the fishing stream, with Lucas dropping behind her, letting her lead the way.
I’m not doing this so I can watch her walk, am I? he thought, a little disturbed at the idea when he realized he was. That purposeful, rolling stride, that tight, shapely denim butt.
Too distracting.
Too enticing.
Not on the agenda.
He kicked along faster and caught up to her in four strides, in time to hear her telling him, “A little farther on, we’ll be able to glimpse the gaming cabin.”
Then she spotted an untidy shape in the grass and they both realized it was a cow, long dead, that had somehow escaped the vigilance of the ranch hands. She frowned at the sight, gave a hiss of breath and narrowed her incredible eyes, with their dark fringed lashes.
Lucas reached out and touched her shoulder, expecting that she’d turn into his arms for a moment’s support, wanting her to do it. He felt soft flannel over warm bone, and let his hand slide down to her bare arm, which was even warmer and softer.
A rush of intense desire powered through his body and snatched the air from his lungs. He could have sworn she felt it, too. He heard the awareness as a new rhythm in her breathing, and felt the midday heat of their bodies mingle.
After just a moment, however, she flicked off the contact like a horse flicking a fly, then hugged her arms around herself and pivoted away. “Too late to do anything about it, now.”
“I’m afraid so,” he answered.
“I’ll tell Lon about it when we get back.” She let a beat of silence hang in the air, then said, “Look, can you see the movement in the stream?”
Lucas knew something about trout, Reba soon realized, so she didn’t need to point out which were browns or cutthroats or rainbows. The plentiful fish gleamed beneath the water like painted foil. The current braided transparent patterns on the streambed and babbled nonsense songs in the clear air.
The walk took twenty minutes, because they did it slowly. Neither of them talked very much at all. The sun shone. The wind riffled the trees. Reba liked the silence, and she liked that Lucas Halliday knew how to be silent. Some people didn’t.
“Here’s the place where we can see the cabin,” she told him, stopping beside a still, shaded pool.
She’d been aiming for this spot. From here, they should turn back.
“Yeah? Can you show me?”
He seemed interested, but she still didn’t know what he was thinking, or what mental notes he’d made for the report he’d present to his father. No point in wondering about it, she told herself again. His intention would become apparent with time.
“Well,” she said, “there’s a ridge line coming down to the water about two hundred yards upstream, can you see it?”
Standing beside her, only a little behind, Lucas followed the arrow of Reba’s arm. “With a seam of rock showing below the trees?”
“That’s it,” she said. “Follow it up. There’s a downed tree, a ponderosa pine, making a kind of notch about two thirds of the way to the top.”
“This time, I’m not seeing it.” He leaned closer, cursing hours of computer screens two feet from his face, trying to use her arm like a rifle sight.
He caught the waft of her scent and it hit him like heat haze rising from a tarred road. Sunscreen predominated, with afternotes of hot, clean hair and sun-dried cotton. Why should things like that smell so good? He was more accustomed to designer perfume, but his body told him that this was better.
Way better.
“Look for a slash of paler color. A lightning bolt opened up the trunk like matchwood this summer.”
“Okay, got it,” he answered. His shoulder brushed against her back, and he felt a flicker of movement from her. Vibration, rather than movement. She didn’t ease away, and her voice rose in pitch, dropped in volume and filled with breath.
No doubt. She felt it, too.
“Directly behind it, you can see the roof of the cabin, in the fold of the next slope,” she said.
“Yes. Dark shingles, and the line of a window frame?” He could feel the swell and fall of her breathing, and he could still smell her hot, cottony, beachy fragrance.
“That’s it,” she told him. “It’s beautiful up there, but we hardly use the place anymore. My grandfather used to bring hunting parties up there all the time.”
“Show me tomorrow?”
“Do you ride?”
“Some. When I can.”
“Then we’ll ride up. After the trip to Steamboat Springs in the morning.”
“Sounds great.” He turned his face ninety degrees in her direction and grinned at her.
He was just inches away from her, now, and was sorely tempted to move even closer, to see what she’d do, to test this powerful pull. Her eyes were like mist over ocean, or rain on a summer pond. His shoulder slid across her spine with slow, deliberate pressure, and he stepped back, before she could fight him.
No, before she could lean into him. Yes, that’s what she would have done, he realized. She would have leaned against him. She knew it, and though a part of her wasn’t happy about that, the rest of her didn’t care.
He didn’t push the moment, or push her reaction. He didn’t particularly want to get slapped in the face right now, and a slap in the face was a definite possibility. Nor did he want to add any more of an emotional element to a potential business transaction that had already become too personal for his taste.
He wasn’t used to this.
“I think I’ve seen enough for today,” he told her, and he meant Reba herself as much as he meant her ranch.
Chapter Three
“T ell me what you regret about last November,” Lucas said to Reba. “What should I have done differently? What would you have done differently? Tell me what you resent in how I handled everything from the very beginning, September included.”
His eyes flicked to Reba’s pregnant stomach and he frowned. They hadn’t gotten to the nitty gritty, yet. They were both still caught up in memories about their first meeting that were still achingly vivid, even after almost six months.
Reba searched for the right answer to his question, while the nagging, belt-tightening ache in her back and stomach notched a little higher on the pain scale, slower to let go, this time. She didn’t like it. It made her uneasy. She reached for the inadequate chair at the manager’s desk and eased herself into it, making it squeak, just as the door opened, hard on the sound of a token knock.
“Gordie’s here, looking for you,” one of the waitresses said.
Churned up and uneasy, she couldn’t school the impatience out of her voice. “Oh, now?”
“What shall I tell him?”
“Tell him I’m— Tell him—”
“Tell him to wake up to the fact that he’s not wanted, and hasn’t been for eight months or more,” Lucas answered for her, then revised at once, “No, just tell him she’s not here. Let him work out the rest for himself.” The waitress nodded, the door closed, and he added to Reba, “McConnell’s still around. Is he back in the picture, then?”
“No, he’s not.”
Reba felt quite positive on this subject.
Gordie himself vacillated like waterweed in a river current, however. His attitude back in September had pushed her right into Lucas’s arms, she sometimes felt. He’d hung around the steakhouse, the way he still hung around. He’d given with one hand and taken away with the other, and he was still doing it.
After showing Lucas around the ranch that first day, she’d worked a shift at the steakhouse the same night, venting her complicated feelings about the sale and the man by throwing her steaks roughly around the grill. It hadn’t helped. She was still feeling tense and angry and confused when Gordie had sloped into the kitchen to hang out with her, and maybe that was the real point where it had all started with Lucas…
“Hi, Reb.” Gordie had dragged a stool in from the bar and positioned himself on it in front of the big freezer. He already had a light beer in his hand.
“Hi, yourself,” Reba had answered. Her smile was an effort. “No food in your fridge, tonight?”
She tried to make it into a tease, but found it irritating that he still came in here like this, so often. And she was tired, after too much tension with Lucas Halliday today, while she’d showed him over the ranch, so she had to fight to hide the irritation.
She and Gordie had broken up two months ago, for heaven’s sake! Maybe she should be pleased that they could still be friends, as far as he was concerned. True, she did feel a certain degree of relief. She wouldn’t want to think that she’d hurt him so badly he couldn’t stand her company. In a small ranching town like Biggins, when she cooked four shifts a week at the only decent restaurant, that would be awkward for a whole lot of people.
But it made her uncomfortable that his routine had been so little changed by her calling off their engagement. He should have started serial dating around three counties, or something. He should have brought strange blondes in here to dangle in front of her, every week. He should at least have had his hair cut different, and bought a couple of new shirts.
Like I’ve done any of that? she scolded herself, as she watched him take a gulp of his beer.
“I’ve been thinking, Reb,” he said, ruffling his choppy dark hair at the back with his spare hand. It stuck up after he’d finished with it, definitely getting too long.
He was the only person who called her Reb. She didn’t mind it from him. She didn’t challenge the statement that he’d been thinking, either. He had a good brain, especially for figures. She didn’t possess one herself. He had statistics on his computer, relating to the McConnell ranch, that even her father wouldn’t have thought to tabulate. He spent a lot of time on the Internet, which apparently made money for him, she wasn’t even sure how. And he could ride as if his thighs were part of the horse.
“Yeah?” she answered, slinging three steaks on the grill.
“You’ve got a buyer sniffing around, right?”
“He seems interested. But he’s a businessman. Pretty hardheaded.” Enough to bulldoze my family home. “He’s not going to make a spur-of-the-moment decision. He wants to see more tomorrow, so I’m taking him down to Steamboat, and up to the cabin.”
“Because I’ve been thinking.”
“You said that.” She smiled, to soften the statement, and wished once again that he wasn’t here. Or that he was somehow different. Tougher? With more emotional perception in his heart?
