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His head had ticked in the direction of her gesture, as if it distracted him. He clamped his lips tight and looked back up at her face. “I’ve been up most of the night with my horses.” His voice was tired, unemotional. “That rock crusher down there sent my broodmares crawling up the stable walls yesterday. Kept ’em skittish all night. Another day of this and I might lose a couple of my winter foals. If I do, I am holding you legally responsible.”
She’d listened to him on the phone often enough. His voice was always low, controlled like this. But in person, it carried a resonance that rolled from deep in his chest. She hadn’t felt that during their terse phone conversations. And underneath it all, she clearly sensed his rising ire.
She let one eyebrow arch high enough that it cleared the frame of her sunglasses. “I doubt you can do tha—” Unfortunately, the crusher drowned out her last word, underscoring the man’s argument.
I don’t, he mouthed as he made an emphatic jab at his chest.
“How can you—” Cassie shouted as the crusher took another vibrating bite out of the hill—boom, boom, ka-boom! Unfortunately, the noise halted before she finished on a high note “—possibly hold me responsible?” The men up on the roof turned their heads toward her shouting. More quietly she continued, “I am in no way liable for what happens to your horses.”
“You don’t have to make all that noise. You could have that rock chipped out by hand.”
Was this man insane? She yanked off her sunglasses so she could give him the benefit of her most incredulous stare.
“Mr. Coffey—” now it was she who kept her voice lethally low “—removing a ledge of imbedded red rock that size with little pickaxes—” she pinched a thumb and finger together in front of his face “—would take weeks, perhaps months, and we’ve got to have those lots cleared soon so we can pour concrete before the first fall freeze. If the noise disturbs you, I suggest you move your horses to a quieter location.”
She started to turn away, but he stepped around her, jerking off his sunglasses and matching her flabbergasted expression with an incredulous one of his own.
“Move twenty-two mares? Do you have any idea what that would cost? And where would I take them? Texas? That noise ricochets over the whole of the Flats. You can hear it all the way to the river! Cottonwood Ranch was down there a long time before you started building these fancy houses. You can just shut down those machines until after my mares foal—”
“Absolutely not. Do you know what that machinery cost? I can only rent it for a limited time, and while I’m paying for it, I’m using it every minute of the day.” Cassie had not reached her level of success by wasting money.
He planted his fists at his belt. They were into it now. “Not where there’s a noise ordinance.”
“For your information—” The accursed booming started up again, seeming to support Jake Coffey’s grievances all the more, and Cassie hated the fact that she had to raise her voice again. “I have obtained a noise variance.”
“Well, there you have it—” Coffey said sarcastically.
When she cupped a hand to her ear, he leaned closer, bringing the aroma of horses, smoky wood and fine leather forward with him. He smirked while keeping that maddening voice level.
“I reckon when my horses read that variance, they’ll calm right down.”
Cassie felt her blood pressure spike. Nothing irked her more than being mocked by a man. The Scottish temper that she had inherited from Boss McClean boiled right to the surface. “They can eat the variance, for all I care.” She narrowed her eyes as she stared into his infuriatingly calm ones. “Those crushers stay.”
Heads jerked around on the roof above.
She clamped her lips and gritted her teeth, hating herself for flaring up in the same way her father always had.
Jake Coffey’s color heightened and the line of his mouth tightened, but his voice remained calm, in spite of the deafening noise booming from the base of the ridge. “I thought maybe I could come up here and deal with you, man to ma—neighbor to neighbor. But I can see plain dealings won’t work with you. Never mind, then. I’ll be back with the sheriff in one hour.” He turned toward his truck.
She slapped the gloves against her thigh, wishing she could whack his hat off with them.
“The sheriff can keep me off your road, but that is all!” she shouted, even though, now, the crushers were silent. “And that’ll end soon enough when we put a stop to your blamed injunction. By the way, I’ve added the crushers to the countersuit I’m bringing to court—” her voice went spiraling up to a shriek “—and the dynamite!”
Coffey froze with his hand on the door of his pickup. His head swiveled toward her. For the first time he shouted back at her. “Dynamite?”
“My attorney’s faxing your attorney a letter right now.” Cassie waltzed toward him. “We’re going to get this damn road business squared away, once and for all, and we may as well settle up on the noise deal, too, because it looks like some blasting’s gonna be called for.” She tended to fall into her father’s tough speech patterns when she felt threatened. Normally, Cassie tried never to think about Boss McClean during the course of her workday. But this morning she’d thought of him twice already. Not a good sign.
Her aunt Rosemarie always said that Cassie’s father was not a bad man. Only weak. And Cassie had to admit, his legacy to her, good and bad, had certainly amounted to a lot more than blunt language and hot temper. From him, and from her grandfather, she had learned the nuts and bolts of the building business, had absorbed it into her very cells. But her grandfather had shown her the rewards for doing things right, while her father had shown her the penalty for doing things wrong.
“Dynamite?” Jake Coffey repeated, and his dry lips looked paler.
But the haughty answer Cassie might have tossed back died in her throat, because even as the booming vibrated through the woods again, they both heard a horrified scream above it, followed by frantic shouting from the men up on the roof.
Cassie whirled to see Tom Harris, the youngest of the stonemasons, skidding down a valley of the roof like a puppet whose strings had snapped. The young man’s face looked shocked, disoriented, as he tumbled sideways with such force that he knocked toe boards loose on his way down. The other men scrambled along the shingles grabbing for him, but he slipped from their hands and went flying over the edge, hitting a high scaffolding before bouncing down thirty feet onto a jagged pile of limestone below.
Cassie emitted a choked cry, then raced to the fallen man. She threw herself to her knees on the mound of rocks, tossed aside her sunglasses and shouted, “Tom! Tom!”
The young man, an apprentice barely out of his teens, lay perfectly still, white-faced, with eyes closed. But he was still breathing. Blood pooled onto the limestone from the back of his head. Cassie jerked off her flannel shirt and pressed it against the gash.
“He grabbed ahold of a live wire up there!” Darrell Brown shouted as he crabbed his way down the scaffolding toward the ladder braced against it. Other men were crawling down behind him like ants off a mound.
From inside the structure, the banging of hammers, the whining of saws and the loud rumbling of a rock radio station all ceased. The framing carpenters rushed out and gathered around with the stonemasons.
High up on the house, a new man—a loner named Whitlow—stood and pointed with a long piece of board at a thick white wire. Up there, Cassie knew, the dangling wire was the power to the decorative lighting that would eventually illuminate the massive chimney.
“That one shouldn’t be hot!” she argued senselessly.
“This thing’s hot, all right,” the carpenter called back. He casually flipped it with the stick, and sparks flew.
The man’s fearlessness with the arching wire snapped a red flag in Cassie’s mind, but she was too distracted by Tom’s condition to puzzle its meaning.
Why the hell was that wire hot? It wasn’t like her electrician to make a mistake and switch the temporary with the main power.
“Somebody go kill that damn power,” she ordered.
A gangly young man hollered, “Yes, ma’am!” and sprinted away.
“Somebody go down to the site trailer and get the big first-aid kit.”
Again Cassie’s order was obeyed with a “Yes, ma’am!”
Jake Coffey had dropped to one knee on the other side of Tom and was pressing two fingers against the victim’s neck. “His pulse is okay,” he said quietly.
Cassie fumbled around in the bib of her overalls, pulled out her cell phone and punched 9-1-1. Electric shock was a worry, but she was more concerned about the effects of the fall. She told the dispatcher the problem quickly, while Darrell scurried over the stones toward them.
“No,” Cassie shouted into the phone. “There’s a shortcut, a private gravel road—” she looked pointedly at Jake Coffey “—through Cottonwood Ranch.” Jake nodded. His dark brown eyes were alert, concerned. His mouth looked grim.
“How far is the turnoff from Highway 86?” She searched Jake’s face imploringly while the dispatcher held.
“Let me.” He took the cell phone from her. “It’s two-tenths of a mile. Hard to see. I’ll phone someone at the ranch and tell them to park one of our red trucks out there and flag the paramedics.”
He handed Cassie the phone. “They want us to stay on the line.”
She nodded, pressed the phone to her ear and looked down at Tom.
“Think he broke his neck?” she heard Darrell calling to Jake Coffey, who was sprinting toward his pickup.
“We’d better not move him, just in case,” Jake called back. Cassie looked up and saw him pull out his cell phone. She turned her full attention back to Tom.
The men stood in a circle of stunned silence, watching as Jake, Darrell and Cassie covered Tom with emergency blankets, then padded the man’s limbs against the sharp rocks as best as they could. They bandaged his burned hand, and then there was nothing to do but wait on the ambulance.
In the distance the rock crushers resumed their methodical work, the operators oblivious of the tragedy up on the hill. The sound filled Cassie with a mixture of guilt and nausea. She wanted the noise—that aggressive sound of progress—to stop. She knew there was no rational reason for work all over the development to halt. Still, her ambitious concerns of only moments ago seemed utterly callow now.
Please let him be okay, she prayed as she studied Tom’s unconscious face. “Hold on,” she told him gently. “Help is on the way.”
She kept up this litany of silent prayer and verbal reassurance while they waited for the medics.
Time stretched taut, and she glanced up once to find Jake Coffey, wearing his sunglasses again, obviously studying her. When he caught her glance, he removed the shades, poked them into his breast pocket and squatted down on his haunches next to her.
As their eyes met in mutual concern, her fear mysteriously seemed to abate and a strange lightness overcame her.
“Is there anything else I can do?” Jake said quietly.
His face, the face she’d viewed as an angry opponent’s only moments before, was the face of a compassionate ally now. She looked away because she felt the sting of tears and she didn’t want to cry in front of the men…or in front of Jake Coffey. She shook her head and turned to stroke Tom’s unburned hand.
Jake stood up again. “Fellas.” He addressed the men gathered around. “We’d better move all these pickups out of the way.” The circle of Levi’s and boots disappeared from Cassie’s view, and then she heard engines roaring to life. She only glanced up from Tom’s face one other time, to see the vehicles pulling away from the cul-de-sac. At the same time, she caught sight of men jogging down the hill from the other building sites.
None of them could do anything to help Tom, she knew, but she felt a wave of gratitude for the caliber of the subcontractors and workmen she employed. These men were the finest of craftsmen, and they knew the meaning of teamwork and cooperation. They were always on schedule, always fair, always professional and honest, and not one of them would let a man lay fallen without rushing to his side.
She heard the sirens then. “Here comes help, Tom,” she reassured the young man and squeezed his hand.
ONCE TOM WAS STRAPPED into a neck brace and safely loaded into the ambulance, Cassie turned to find the men still grouped around the cul-de-sac. An air of helpless frustration was setting in.
“Let’s get back to work!” Darrell Brown bellowed at the assembly. He waved a beefy paw, and slowly, as if unfreezing from a carved tableau, the men responded.
“Ms. McClean, I’m so sorry this happened.” A deep voice spoke quietly from behind Cassie. She turned. She hadn’t noticed Jake Coffey still standing there.
She tilted her face up to him and tried to speak, but could only give her head a forlorn shake. He studied her, and his eyes were sad. They were also very kind, as if the earlier animosity between them had never existed.
He sighed. “What a terrible thing to happen.”
“I can’t believe it,” Cassie admitted, and looked away.
Their sudden bonding over the accident came as a surprise to Cassie. And those few seconds of eye contact also brought another completely unexpected sensation. A thrill of attraction pulsed through her middle as she realized again that Jake Coffey was undeniably good-looking.
Cassie, who spent her days solely in the company of men, was seldom genuinely attracted to one. She often wondered if living in the world of construction had left her abnormally inured to male magnetism. But her honesty—her most valued trait—prevented her from feigning attraction when there simply was none. Even so, she secretly worried about herself: at age twenty-seven, she remained stubbornly alone.
And yet, she enjoyed men—enjoyed their world, their ways. She just couldn’t seem to develop an intimate relationship with one. And ordinarily she wouldn’t even behave normally around a guy this attractive, but for some reason she wasn’t acting like an awkward schoolgirl now. She supposed she was too shocked to be anything but totally raw, totally natural.
This man standing beside her was certainly handsome. But there was something else about him. She glanced up again to find him still looking at her, with the tiniest frown line of compassion forming between his brows. She decided it was that protective, caring look that was definitely causing a physical stir deep inside of her. The realization gave her a spark of sheer wonder, of amazement. Of all things. She might actually have enjoyed discovering these new sensations if she weren’t so worried about Tom. She couldn’t let herself feel such things—she shouldn’t even acknowledge such things—at a time like this.
She looked away, toward the ambulance now winding its way down the hill. Darrell Brown punched numbers into his cell phone as he paced the ground where the ambulance had briefly stopped. Contacting Tom’s family, Cassie supposed.
She glanced up at Jake Coffey. “I’ve got to get to the hospital,” she mumbled. The hospital. Would Tom even make it that far? She had never seen a body look so limp. Imagining the possibilities, she started to tremble and clutched her arms at her waist. She felt like she was going to cry. “Excuse me,” she said as she moved around Jake Coffey.
He gave a hoarse whisper. “Of course.” And he stepped aside.
She glanced back and saw that he was still studying her with that look of concern. She stopped in her tracks and drew a great shuddering breath.
His lips opened and he hesitated, as if he wanted to say something important but wasn’t sure how. Then he simply said, “I hope the young man will be okay.”
“Me, too.” Cassie’s tears threatened to spill over and she covered her mouth with her hand.
Jake stepped forward and wrapped warm fingers above her elbow. “Are you okay?”
Cassie nodded, then shook her head as the tears came. She swiped at them and glanced up at the rooftop, where the wirey young carpenter who’d handled the hot wire was standing, braced at the edge, staring down at the two of them. She turned her face away from the house so the men couldn’t see, and Jake pulled her around in front of him, shielding her from view with his huge shoulders.
Cassie dropped her eyes, ashamed of her unprofessional behavior, but he said, “It’s okay to cry.”
She shook her head. “It’s just that so many things have been going wrong lately. One little thing after another. And now this.” She swiped at her eyes again.
To her astonishment, he produced a clean red bandana from his back pocket. “Here.”
She took it and swabbed her cheeks. “Thanks.” She handed it back.
He stuffed it back into his jeans. “Accidents happen, Ms. McClean, especially on construction sites.”
Cassie sniffed. “I know that. But ever since I started this development, it seems like it’s been one calamity after another. I admit I’m a bit of a perfectionist, and I’ve planned and saved and dreamed about this project for so long…but I’m beginning to think my dream is turning into a nightmare.”
“Look, I don’t want to add to your stress today,” he offered gently. “We can finish our business another time.”
“Okay,” Cassie said. But she was so upset that she couldn’t even recall what business, exactly, they had been discussing. Dynamite. Oh, damn. She had pitched that word out like a lit stick of the stuff. And she hadn’t remained civil like she’d planned, not at all. And now she’d started to shake and cry like a fool because one of her men got hurt. Jake Coffey had certainly seen her at her worst, and now, she’d have to face this man—this handsome, intimidating man—in civil court, the day after tomorrow.
Seeing him again felt like the last thing she needed. And yet, as she watched him walk away, it felt like the only thing she wanted.
CHAPTER TWO
JAKE COFFEY STEERED THROUGH THE LABYRINTH of streets in The Heights, fighting down a strange mixture of low arousal and high confusion. Since the day the sign went up announcing The Heights, he and architect and home builder C. J. McClean had been on a collision course. He’d spoken to her on the phone several times. But nothing in her smooth, confident, businesslike and occasionally caustic voice had indicated that Ms. McClean was so young…and so very beautiful.
What a face! Even without a speck of makeup, it was a face so fresh—so beguiling—that no healthy, normal man with two eyes in his head was likely to forget it.
Her eyes, he’d noticed the instant she removed the sunglasses, were deep set, blue as a cloudless Oklahoma sky, full of intelligence and fire. And when they’d filled with tears, he’d had to fight the urge to cradle her in his arms.
She sported the kind of thick, bushy blond ponytail that he was a sucker for—a wild, unselfconscious mane that broadcast vitality. That straight, little, barely freckled nose enhanced her look…and to top it all off, she had those full, ripe lips. She was his all-American type, all right. The kind of lively doll he’d tried to impress at high school football games and rodeo championships ever since he was a randy kid.
His type. Complete with that fit, curvy little body. Even those ridiculous overalls couldn’t disguise her curvy bust, especially after she’d stripped off that baggy shirt to help the injured man. With only a thermal undershirt hugging her torso, it was easy to see that Cassie McClean had the goods. What was a woman like that doing sashaying around among construction crews all day long? Breaking lots of hearts, he bet. He’d done enough checking to know she wasn’t married, but he wondered if she had a steady boyfriend.
What the heck was he doing, thinking about her in this vein? He didn’t know a thing about C. J. McClean, except that she had the kind of rare good looks he’d once been a complete sucker for. And behind that pretty face, she had a mean-as-a-junkyard-dog business style.
Cowboy, he reminded himself sternly, for the foreseeable future, you’ve taken yourself out of circulation.
He’d sworn off dating as long as he had Jayden and Dad and the horses to worry over. And besides, since his divorce, he’d discovered that it was damn crazy out there in singleland. Scary, in fact. Cute little numbers wrapped in spandex could turn into a sane man’s nightmare after only a couple of casual dates.
The last sweet young thing in his life had, in fact, ended up being a genuine stalker. Sitting outside the ranch gates in her darkened car. Calling late at night and scaring Jayden with her whispery questions: “Where’s your daddy tonight, honey?”
After he’d finally gotten rid of that weirdo, he decided he would live without women for a while. At least until Jayden’s life was more stable. Truth was, being single wasn’t an impossible lifestyle—if a man kept himself real, real busy.
Your life might not be fun— he recited his familiar self-lecture —but it’s sane. It’s healthy. It’s simple. Well, okay, maybe not simple. He gripped the steering wheel and gritted his teeth as he drove past the rock crushers. They banged so loudly they made his truck windows vibrate. It took enormous self-control not to flip the bird at the cussed things.
