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She didn’t.
Instead, she shook her head and said, “No, I don’t think so.”
Finn regarded her thoughtfully. “In my experience, a person’s either lost or they’re not. There is no gray area.”
The woman smiled at him. “Didn’t think I’d find a philosopher all the way out here.”
“It’s not philosophy, it’s just plain common sense,” Finn told her.
To him, so-called philosophers referred to the gaggle of retired old men who got together every morning and sat on the sun-bleached bench in front of the general store, watching the rest of the town go through its paces and commenting on life when the spirit moved them. He was far too busy to indulge in that sort of thing.
“Well, if you don’t need directions, then I’ll get back to my work,” he told her. The woman was clearly out of her element, but if she didn’t want to talk about what she was doing out here, he wasn’t about to prod her. Lost or not, it was strictly her business.
“I don’t need directions, but I do have a question.” She raised her voice as if to get his attention before he began hammering again.
Finn turned back to face her. She looked rather fair. He could see a sunburn in her near future if she didn’t at least put the top up on her car. Skin that fair was ripe for burning.
“Which is?” he asked casually.
“Did you build this yourself?” The woman got out of her car and crossed to the freshly rebuilt front steps of the house.
Thanks to Brett, honesty had always been at the core of his behavior. His older brother expected and accepted nothing less than that. Anyone can lie, Brett maintained, but it took a real man to tell the truth each and every time, even when it wasn’t easy.
“No,” Finn replied. “The ranch house was already here. I just changed things around a little, replaced what needed replacing, added a little here, a little there—that kind of thing,” he told her simply.
He made it sound as if he’d hammered down a few loose boards, but one look at the exterior told her that the man with the impossibly appealing physique had done a great deal more than just that. The structure looked brand-new. She knew for a fact that this part of the state was hard on its buildings and its terrain. Summers could be brutal, and they left their mark on practically everything, especially structures. The ranch house she was looking at had been resurfaced, replaced and renovated—and recently.
Connie couldn’t help wondering if that craftsmanship extended to the inside of the building, as well.
There was only one way to find out.
“Could you take me on a tour of the inside of the house?” she asked brightly.
“I could,” the cowboy answered but made no effort to follow through on her request.
“But?” she asked.
She made him think of a stick of dynamite about to go off. He was about ten inches taller than she was, but a stick of dynamite didn’t have to be very big to make a sizable impression.
Just who was this woman, and what was she doing here? “But I don’t even know who you are.”
“I’m not dangerous, if that’s what you’re thinking,” she told him.
Like he believed that.
Finn’s mouth curved ever so slightly, the left side more than the right. He wondered just how many men this woman had brought to their knees with that killer smile of hers.
“There’s dangerous, and then there’s dangerous,” he replied, his eyes never leaving hers.
She raised her chin just a little, doing her best to generate an air of innocence as she assured him, “I’m neither.”
The cowboy continued looking at her. The image of a human lie detector flashed through her mind for an instant. She discovered that breathing took a bit of concentration on her part.
“I don’t know about that,” he said. But the next moment, he seemed to shrug away his assessment of her and said, “Okay, why not? Don’t lean against anything,” he warned before going up the porch steps. “The paint’s still fresh in places.”
She had no intentions of taking away any part of this house on her person. “I’ll keep that in mind,” she told him.
Connie waited for her tour guide to open the front door. If the inside looked nearly as good as the outside, she was ready to be blown away.
“After you,” the cowboy told her once he’d opened the front door.
Connie crossed the threshold, taking it all in at once.
She hadn’t missed her guess. The inside of the house was simplistic and all the more captivating for that. It was a house that emphasized all things Western, with just the right touch of modern thrown in to keep the decor from being completely entrenched in the past.
There were only a few pieces of furniture. For the most part, the house was empty, but then, she hadn’t asked to come in just to see the furniture. She was looking to take stock of the workmanship firsthand.
She hadn’t been wrong.
This cowboy did have a gift for bringing things together—and apparently, a knack for knowing just when to back off.
“How long have you been working on this?” she asked, wanting as much input from the man and about the man as she could get.
“Awhile,” Finn replied vaguely, as if wondering just what her end game was.
* * *
WHILE THIS WOMAN had apparently been taking stock of the house as he went about showing her around the two floors, Finn did the same with her. So far, he hadn’t come to any useful conclusion. She hadn’t really volunteered anything except a few flattering comments about his work. He still had no idea what had brought her to Forever, or even if she meant to come to Forever, or was just passing by on her way to somewhere else.
“Awhile,” the woman repeated, going back to what he’d said about his timetable. “Does that mean six months or six years or what?”
“Awhile means awhile,” he replied in a calm voice, then added, “I’m not exactly keeping a diary on this.”
“Then you’re just doing this for fun?”
“Not exactly.” Because he could see that she intended to stand there, waiting, until he gave her some sort of a more satisfying answer, he told her. He saw no reason not to. “It’s a wedding present.”
“For your bride?” she guessed.
Finn nearly choked. He didn’t intend to get married for a very long time. Possibly never.
“No,” he denied with feeling. “For my brother. It’s his wedding.”
“And this is his house?” she asked, turning slowly around, this time taking in a three-hundred-sixty-degree view. No doubt about it, she thought. The work done on the ranch house was magnificent.
“He says it belongs to all three of us, but Earl Robertson’s will left it to him.” And as far as he and Liam were concerned, this was Brett’s house.
“Honor among brothers. That’s refreshing.”
He thought that was an odd way to phrase it. “Don’t know one way or the other about refreshing. Do know what’s right, though, and this house is right for Brett and Lady Doc.”
“Lady Doc?” she repeated, slightly confused.
“That was the nickname my brother gave Alisha when she first came to Forever. Alisha’s a doctor,” he told her by way of a footnote. “Look, lady, I’d love to stand around and talk some more—it’s not every day that we see a new face around here—but I really do have to get back to work.”
The woman raised her hands in mock surrender, showing the cowboy that she was backing off and giving him back his space. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to take you away from your work.”
Having said that, she turned on her heel and headed back to her vehicle.
As he watched her walk away, Finn found himself captivated by the way the woman’s hips swayed with every step she took. It also occurred to him at the same time that he didn’t even know her name.
“Hey,” he called out.
Ordinarily, that was not a term Connie would answer to. But this one time, she made an exception. People acted differently out here. So rather than get into her car, Connie turned around and looked at him, waiting for the cowboy to say something further.
Raising his voice, Finn remained where he was. “You got a name?” he asked.
“Yes, I do,” Connie replied.
With that she slid in behind the steering wheel of her car, shut her door and started up her engine.
Always leave them wanting more was an old adage she had picked up along the way, thanks to her grandfather. Her grandfather had taught her a great many things. He had told her, just before he passed away, that he had great faith in her. The only thing her father had ever conveyed to her was that she was a huge and ongoing source of disappointment to him.
Her grandfather, she knew, would have walked away from her father a long time ago. At the very least, he would have given up trying to please her father, given up trying to get him to take some sort of positive notice of her.
But she was too stubborn to give up.
Knocked down a number of times for one reason or another, she still got up, still dusted herself off and was still damn determined to someday make her father actually pay her a compliment—or die trying to get it out of him.
* * *
CONNIE SPENT THE rest of the afternoon driving around, getting marginally acquainted with the lay of the surrounding land. She took in the reservation, as well—if driving around its perimeter could be considered taking it in. She never got out of her vehicle, never drove through the actual terrain because even circumnavigating it managed to create an almost overwhelming sadness within her.
Her father had been right about one thing. She was a child of affluence. The sight of poverty always upset her. But rather than fleeing and putting it out of her mind, what she had seen seemed to seep into her very soul. She could not imagine how people managed to go on day after day in such oppressive surroundings.
It also made her wonder why the reservation residents didn’t just band together, tear some of the worst buildings down and start fresh, putting up something new in their place.
Not your problem, Con. Your father issued you a challenge. One he seemed pretty confident would make you fall flat on your face. It’s up to you to show him once and for all that he’s wrong about you. That he’s underestimated you all along.
* * *
THAT THOUGHT WAS still replaying itself in her head when she finally drove back into Forever late that afternoon. She was hungry, and the idea of dinner—even one prepared at what she viewed to be a greasy-spoon establishment—was beginning to tempt her.
But as much as she wanted to eat, she wanted to finish up her homework even more.
In this case, her homework entailed checking out the local—and lone—bar to see the kind of people who hung out there. She wanted to meet them, mingle with them and get to know them, at least in some cursory fashion. She was going to need bodies if she hoped to get her project underway, and Murphy’s was where she hoped to find at least some of them.
Right now all she knew was that her father had purchased a tract of land within Forever at a bargain price because no one else was interested in doing anything with it. A little research on her part had shown that the town was deficient in several key departments, not the least of which was that it had nowhere to put up the occasional out-of-town visitor—which she just assumed Forever had to have at least once in a while. That particular discovery was confirmed when she went to book a hotel room and found that the nearest hotel was some fifty miles away from the center of Forever.
The hick town, her father had informed her through Emerson, his right-hand man, needed to have a hotel built in its midst. Giving her the assignment, her father washed his hands of it, leaving all the details up to her.
And just like that, it became her responsibility to get the hotel built for what, on paper, amounted to a song.
Her father had hinted that if she could bring the project in on time and on budget—or better yet, under budget, he might just take her potential within the company more seriously.
But she needed to prove herself worthy of his regard, of his trust. And until that actually happened, he had no real use for her. He made no effort to hide the fact that he was on the verge of telling her that he no longer needed her services.
Connie had every intention of showing her father just what a vital asset she could be to his construction conglomerate. She also promised herself that she was going to make him eat his words; it was just a matter of time.
Stopping her vehicle behind Murphy’s, Connie parked the car as close to the building as she could. The gleaming white sports car wasn’t a rental she was driving, it was her own car. She wasn’t superstitious by nature, but every good thing that had ever happened to her had happened when she was somewhere within the vicinity of the white sports car. It was, in effect, her good-luck talisman. And, as the embodiment of her good fortune, she wanted to keep it within her line of vision, ensuring that nothing could happen to it.
She intended on keeping an eye on it from inside the bar.
However, Connie quickly discovered that was an impossibility. For one thing, the bar’s windows didn’t face the rear lot.
Uneasy, she thought about reparking her car or coming back to Murphy’s later, after dinner.
But then she reminded herself that her car had a tracking chip embedded within the steering wheel. If her car was stolen, the police could easily lay hands on it within the hour.
Provided they knew about tracking chips and how to use them, she qualified silently. She took measure of the occupants within the bar as she walked in. The first thought that crossed her mind was that the people around her could never be mistaken for the participants in a think tank.
Still looking around, she made her way to the bar, intending on ordering a single-malt beer.
A deep male voice asked her, “What’ll it be?” when she reached the bar and slid onto a stool.
The voice sounded vaguely familiar, but she shrugged the thought away. She didn’t know anyone here. “What kind of beer do you have on tap?” she asked, continuing to take inventory of the room.
“Good beer.”
The answer had her looking at the bartender instead of the bar’s patrons. When she did, her mouth dropped open.
“You,” she said in stunned surprise.
“You,” Finn echoed, careful to hide his initial surprise at seeing her.
Unlike the woman seated at that bar, he’d had a couple of minutes to work through his surprise. It had spiked when he first saw her walk across the threshold. Disbelief had turned into mild surprise as he watched her make her way across the floor, weaving in and out between his regular patrons.
When she’d left the ranch this morning, he’d had a vague premonition that he would be seeing her again—but he hadn’t thought that it would be this soon. He should have known better. The woman had asked too many questions for someone who was just passing through on her way to somewhere else.
“So what are you?” The woman posed the question to him. “A rancher or a bartender?”
“Both,” he said without the slightest bit of hesitation. Around here, a man had to wear a lot of hats if he planned on surviving. “At least, that’s what my brother says.”
“The one who’s getting married,” she recalled.
So, she had been listening. That made her a rare woman, Finn concluded. The women in his sphere of acquaintance talked, but rarely listened. “That’s the one.”
“You have any more brothers?”
