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“If we got married after all, your Dad might decide not to sell,” he said. “I’d be willing.”
At this, she had to fight to stop her jaw dropping open. “We broke it off, Gordie,” she reminded him, then added more bluntly, “I broke it off.”
“Yeah, I know, but nothing much has changed since then, has it? For either of us? Except that your Dad is selling the ranch.”
“There’s that, yes,” she answered heavily.
“So I wondered… I kind of was relieved when you broke it off, but now I’m thinking we were both too hasty. We had a good thing going, and I should have talked you out of it, instead of feeling—”
“Gordon McConnell…!”
“Not to insult you, or anything.”
“Because you were kind of relieved?” She plated two ribeyes, and threw a glance over the grill to see if anything else needed flipping.
“I just— You make me nervous, Reb.”
“What do you mean by that?” Her anger rose inside her.
“You scare me. The way you’re so— But that’s okay. If you could just—”
“Let’s get this straight, here! Are you asking me to change, so that you could stand to marry me, so that we could keep Seven Mile in the family?”
He blinked his light blue eyes. “Just tone down a bit. Don’t feel stuff so much. Don’t get so emotional and passionate about everything. Is all. Makes me nervous. See, you’re doing it now!”
Damn right she was!
Damn right she was emotional!
And apparently it showed. The clenched teeth and the half growl, half shriek that escaped from between the clenched teeth gave a clue.
“I don’t think we should get married, Gordie,” she said. With difficulty, she kept the lid on the passion that he regretfully, tactfully, didn’t want as part of the Rebecca Grant package.
He flinched a little, then argued, “But you want to keep the ranch.”
He’d always been persistent.
“No, I don’t,” she yelled, over the hiss of cooking steak. “I spent all day today, showing that buyer over the place, and he’s ideal. Rich. Smart. Experienced.”
Interesting. Complex. Hot.
“If he’s serious, I couldn’t be happier,” she went on. “Mom and Dad deserve to have the best lifestyle they can, down in Florida. I’m glad I scare you, Gordie, because you’re beginning to scare me!”
“So now you know how it feels. Just tone down. I care about you. You know that. We’re good together.”
They were terrible together!
They’d been terrible together for more years than she cared to count, and they’d always had more habit than passion in the mix. She hadn’t questioned this because he rode so well and he ranched so well. He had the organizational skills, number skills and money skills that she lacked. On paper, he was perfect for her, and his ranch was right across the fence.
And she’d been holding her breath about Mom’s health for so long, she hadn’t wanted to rock any boats. Wanting to stay safe, she’d hidden her head in the sand, but safety had proved an illusion.
She couldn’t even remember the immediate trigger that had prompted her to tell him it was over. Thinking back, she decided there wasn’t one.
They hadn’t had a fight. She hadn’t met someone else. She’d just reached some invisible line in the sand and cracked.
Exploded.
And the fallout and shrapnel was still in the air. She’d realized that this wasn’t her life. Watching Gordie Mc-Connell sit on a bar stool drinking beer while she cooked, telling her to “tone down” just wasn’t her life.
He’d said the toning down thing to her before, she remembered, but she’d never understood what he meant, never paid it the right attention. And it might be someone else’s life, but it wasn’t hers.
So what’s mine?
She didn’t know.
Meanwhile, Gordie hung out in the kitchen for another half hour, while in her mind Reba watched the pieces of her exploded self still hanging in the air. She had no idea where they would eventually fall, and she didn’t trust this odd new intuition that Lucas Halliday could somehow help her find out.
She felt a sudden need to explore the intuition, all the same.
As arranged, Lucas arrived at Seven Mile early the next morning in his rental car.
Reba had told him she’d show him the shortcut from the ranch down to Steamboat Springs. On the way back, they would make a couple of detours. He wanted to look at trout streams and hunt down the elusive herd of wild horses that roamed the Medicine Bow Range. The round trip would probably take a good six hours, apparently, plus a stop for lunch, so she’d suggested they start at seven.
She seemed different, this morning, he thought.
The same electric current ran through her veins that he’d seen in her all of yesterday, but today it was… Bolder? More open? Less angry, but even more determined. She was proving something to somebody, with those sparking eyes and that jutting jaw. Lucas didn’t know what it was, or who she was proving it to, and maybe she didn’t, either, but it was a pretty impressive sight.
Today, he drove while she navigated. He thought they might clash over the new roles, but they didn’t. She told him where to turn in plenty of time, which let him relax and focus on the drive.
And on her.
The Indian summer temperature was forecast to flare even higher today. She wore shorts in anticipation, although at this hour a dawn chill still lay on the land. The honey-beige of the shorts matched the tan on her legs and drew his attention to how long and smooth they were, stretching down to a newer, shinier version of yesterday’s boots.
A baggy, dark navy sweatshirt hid the rest of her. Its round neckline half covered a thin gold chain she hadn’t been wearing yesterday, and showed the occasional glimpse of something white—a tank-top shoulder strap, or possibly her bra.
She had her hair looped and knotted at the back, with some sexy little tendrils already escaping. She even wore makeup. It made her eyes more startling than ever in their unusual color. Her lips were darker and redder, and he noticed them every time she spoke, every time he dared take his eyes from the road to look sideways.
Yesterday, she’d dressed down for him. Today, she’d apparently dressed up, in her own way, for wild horses and Steamboat Springs.
Heck, how long was it since he’d met a woman who considered polished riding boots a big step up on the fashion ladder?
For most of the drive, he forgot to think about what Dad or Raine would want if they were here. Raine hated hair-raising roads with no guardrails and steep drops. She hated getting dust on the car. Actually the car rental company might not be too thrilled about that, either.
Hair-raising roads with no guard rails and steep drops didn’t seem to trouble Reba Grant. The temperature climbed and she took off her sweatshirt. Yes, the white fabric did belong to a tank-top—a little stretchy cotton thing with a triangular panel of lace in front. It fit snugly over her curves and her ribs, and he could faintly see the pretty shape of a white bra beneath it.
Using the discarded sweatshirt for a pillow behind her head, she slid her seat back and stretched her long legs out in front. She pointed out wildlife and vistas and potholes in the road with a combination of familiarity and fresh interest that sparked his own curiosity.
“You sat up like a startled cat just now, but you must have seen elk around here before.”
“Sometimes you forget to look, when you’ve seen something before. You take it for granted. I told myself I wasn’t going to do that today.”
“Because you’re selling? Because you won’t be here any more? I thought you were staying in Biggins.”
“I want to. Wanted to,” Reba corrected herself.
Yesterday, she would have resented Lucas probing her on personal issues like this. Today, she wanted to talk, and still had last night’s odd sense that he could be the right person to listen.
Something about his eyes.
The perception.
The blunt honesty.
He’d talked about bulldozing her home. Bluntness could be refreshing, sometimes. It could be necessary. Even if she got angry with him, anger could give clarity, the way it had last night, with Gordie. She couldn’t simply wait for the explosion in her life to settle. She had to go out and look for the pieces.
“I didn’t really consider the alternatives,” she went on. “I don’t want to move to Florida. I’m not sure what there would be for me there. I love this country.” She took a breath of the mint-clean morning air flooding through the half-open window. “But I don’t want to end up twenty years from now, still a short-order cook at the same restaurant, with corns on my feet and dreams that faded before I even knew I had them—”
“Can’t picture you like that, for sure.”
“—because I never had the courage or took the time to really think about the future. This is a—a huge turning point. I don’t want to just let it happen to me.”
His glance arrowed across in her direction. As usual he seemed to take her whole soul in at a glance. And her whole body. “You don’t want your father to sell the ranch. That’s clear. Jim Broadbent said your mother’s health made the decision. She has lupus, right?”
“Systemic Lupus Erythematosis, yes.”
She hated the disease, hated its long, unpronounceable name. Some people called it SLE, which was snappy, at least. It had variable, wandering symptoms that were unique to each person. It had unpredictable phases of exacerbation and remission, and it could kill Mom eventually, if her kidneys failed or the disease reached other vital organs. Those worst case scenarios might not occur for years, or ever, but she’d never be cured.
“And your dad wouldn’t consider leaving the place for you to run?”
“No, they need the money. But I couldn’t run it. My brain’s not built that way.”
“You seem pretty bright to me, and totally at home around the ranch.”
“It’s not just about doing the right chores at the right time. It’s a business. You’d know that. I don’t have a business brain. I’d have to get a really competent manager, which would eat up too much cash flow, on top of the wages for the hands and everything else.”
“It could still be a profitable enterprise.”
“All my parents’ assets are tied up in Seven Mile Creek, and if they don’t sell, they’ll have to rent in Florida, and watch their pennies. Mom’s medical bills are getting higher every year. No, the ranch has to be sold.”
“But you’d prefer a local buyer, not me,” Lucas said, pushing Reba a little. He wanted all of this clear, and out in the open. He wanted to understand the sources of this woman’s anger, her unhappiness, and her fight.
Her voice dropped and slowed and took on a throaty quality he knew she couldn’t control, and maybe didn’t even hear. She ran her palm down her bare thigh and he heard the light friction of her work-roughened skin. Palms like cardboard, legs like silk, inner thighs like whipped cream melting over apple—
Hell, he had to stop thinking about her this way…didn’t he?
Did he?
Maybe she wanted him to.
Her eyes glared at him a lot, but the rest of her body said something different. Powerfully. His groin tightened and filled even more, and he stared ahead at the road, not daring to look sideways, in case he gave too much away. Or in case he caught fire.
She tilted her head, smiled a little, like a slow dawn breaking. “Actually, I’m getting used to you,” she said.
All the way through brunch at Steamboat, a look around the resort, and a failed attempt to find the wild horses, all through the winding drive back, Reba felt the exhilarating prick of danger in Lucas Halliday’s company.
Just yesterday, her emotional compass had been arrowed toward a hopeless need to protect the ranch, to protect the childhood she’d loved by staving off this big city buyer until a better one came along—a buyer like Gordie McConnell would have been, if he’d had the money, or the right claim on her heart.
She had wanted a buyer who would come into the steakhouse every night, regular as clockwork, tell her how the place was going and listen to everything she said about keeping it the same.
Today, everything was different.
Gordie was the only lover she’d ever had. He’d been in her life too long, and had stopped her from seeing her future clearly. That was her fault as much as his, and she had to do something about it. Lucas Halliday seemed like part of the answer. She knew he wouldn’t be looking for anything beyond a short-lived flirtation. Why not respond, just a little, just to see how it felt?
It needn’t go very far.
And yet if it did…
She’d never felt this way about a near-stranger before—this awareness that he wanted her and she wanted him, on a raw, physical level, immune to any other considerations. It made her dizzy, hungry, exultant, scared. The right kind of scared. Full of adrenaline and courage. She found that she liked it.
Back at the ranch after their long morning of touring in the car, he was ready to get on horseback right away, so she changed into jeans and her scuffed riding boots and took him out to the stable. She gave him her own mare, Ruby, while she took her father’s gelding, Moe. Lucas hadn’t big-noted his riding skills, but he found his way around the tack room without asking dumb questions, and mounted the sixteen-hand animal with ease. He’d be all right.
Reba loved this ride up to the cabin, and they couldn’t have picked a better day for it. The fields shimmered in the heat and the air was scratchy with dust. However, once the horses had splashed through a shallow section of the stream to reach the forested mountain slopes beyond, the shade beneath the ponderosas struck cool on her hot body.
Neither she nor Lucas spoke very much as they rode. Saddles creaked, insects buzzed, horse shoes clapped like scattered applause on earth and grass and rock. Knowing the route, Reba led the way. She only turned back once in a while, to warn Lucas about a tricky section or point out something of interest.
It must have been around three in the afternoon, or a little later, when they reached the cabin, but she hadn’t worn a watch, so she didn’t know for sure. Dismounting, she looped Moe’s reins around an old-fashioned hitching post, and Lucas did the same. She swung her day pack clear of her shoulders and brought out some carrots and apples as treats for the horses. They began to crunch on the offerings loudly.
Pretending to be absorbed in feeding them, and chewing on one of the two apples she’d saved, she watched Lucas covertly. He shaded his amber eyes with his hand and looked back the way they’d come. He had a folded crease in one leg of his bone-colored pants, after their ride, echoing the softer, darker crease he’d have in his skin, at just about the same point, where his thigh met his backside.
His back had to be hot under his black T-shirt, and he should be wearing a hat. The tan on that curve of neck would turn red, soon. Reba had sunblock in her day pack. She could offer him some. He would stretch his jaw and smooth the white liquid around that long, brown column, before handing the fragrant plastic bottle back to her. She could watch every movement.
She didn’t make the offer.
What had captured his interest, down below, anyhow? You couldn’t see the house or the outbuildings from here, but you could see the Bailey field and the Upper Creek field and a section of the road leading into Biggins. Felt as if they had to be a good two miles or more from the nearest human being.
Her heart shifted and sank. Maybe that was his exact thought. He’d probably consider it way too isolated, up here. His interest in the ranch, on his father’s behalf, would turn out to be a frivolous city slicker impulse, and wouldn’t survive this afternoon of reality.
“This place have electricity?” he asked, confirming her fear as he turned and came toward her again.
“Generator.”
“And tanked roof runoff for water.” He’d obviously seen the galvanized piping, and the tank that stood behind the cabin.
“It’s not meant for year-round living.” She heard defensiveness raising the pitch of her voice. “If you want your stepmother to have her white Christmas here, you’ll need to haul some firewood. See, here’s where the vehicle track comes out. We didn’t take that, because it’s longer, but you can get a pickup along it, or snowmobiles in winter. Easy.”
He only nodded, walked over and stood at the head of the track, looking down it as far as the first bend. Turning again, he said, “Shall we take a look inside?”
“Sure.”
