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And what was keeping him anyhow? He lived on the next place over, and he’d had plenty of time to saddle up a horse or whatever.
After pushing up her mental sleeves in preparation to do battle, Ria drew a deep breath and tried once more to scare the creature away, this time raising her voice to a near shout. “Shoo!”
Again, nothing happened, except that the floor of the ancient porch seemed to ripple slightly under her feet as Bessie heaved her gritty brown bulk against the corner of the house.
As if in answer to her exasperated wonderment of moments before, headlights swung in at the top of Ria’s long dirt driveway, and she heard wheels bumping over hard, rocky ruts as a large vehicle barreled toward the house.
Mercifully distracted, Bessie stopped the awful bawling and the assault on the cottage, and Ria put her fingers to both temples and gave a sigh of angry relief as the tension-tight muscles between her shoulder blades relaxed slightly.
As the rig drew nearer, she could make out the outlines of the trailer being hauled behind it.
Bessie’s calf, invisible before, trotted out of the darkness and stood still in the cone-shaped gleam of the truck’s headlights. The animal didn’t seem frightened, as a deer or other wild creature would have been; instead, the calf remained where it was, giving a single, low grunt. A moment later, Bessie ambled over to stand beside her baby boy.
Ria was astounded by this behavior, and annoyed, too. She’d been sure both animals would charge her if she dared step off the porch, but now they were acting like well-trained pets.
Were they tame? Hard to believe, after the way they’d carried on like banshees with bellyaches, trampling her flower beds, trying to knock down her house.
As casually as if the incident were no big deal, though admittedly an inconvenience on his part, Landry opened the truck door, activating the interior lights and thus becoming deliciously visible. He raised one hand to Ria in a desultory wave, got out of the vehicle and started toward the back of the trailer. He whistled once, low and through his teeth, and, miraculously, both buffalo obeyed the summons as readily as a pair of faithful farm dogs.
Despite her earlier intention to avoid direct contact with her neighbor at all costs, Ria didn’t disappear into the house, shut the door and wait for Landry to retrieve his stray critters and leave, as she probably should have. Instead, she remained where she was, stubborn and indignant and, though this was completely unlike her, spoiling for a fight.
She listened through the thrumming of her blood in her ears as Landry opened the rear door of the trailer, soon heard the metallic rasp of a ramp being lowered, the steely, resounding thump as one end struck the ground.
Landry muttered some gruff command, and hooves clattered like thunder as two beasts the size of mastodons clattered up the ramp and into the trailer, which seemed too flimsy to contain them.
An instant later, the ramp clanked back into place, and then the doors were closed with a bang and bolted shut.
Go inside, Ria told herself. Let Landry Sutton take his stupid bison and get out of here.
It was prudent advice, since no good could come of a confrontation, but Ria still couldn’t bring herself to back down. Anyway, it was too late to pretend she wasn’t at home, as she’d planned to do, since Landry had obviously seen her.
Finally, the rancher rounded the truck and trailer, idly dusting his hands together as he moved, probably congratulating himself on a job well done. With just the wimpy porch bulb and the truck’s headlights to see by, Ria couldn’t make out his expression, but she didn’t need to, because she caught the brief flash of his grin.
Cocky bastard.
“It took you long enough to get here,” she blurted, folding her arms tightly across her chest, as if she were cold. She had a legitimate gripe, and she was still furious, but she regretted giving voice to the complaint, because instead of getting back into his truck, turning it around and heading out of there, he approached her.
His walk was slow and easy, loose-hipped and damnably sexy.
He came to a stop at the base of the porch steps, features awash in the light from the bulb beside the front door, and his grin was affable, generously tolerant and amused.
“If they did any damage,” he said mildly, “just send me a bill.”
No remorse at all. He thought the incident was funny.
People like Landry—rich people—always seemed to think money was the solution to every problem. Ria’s belly twisted.
She glared at Sutton—they were almost at eye level, since he was standing on the ground and she on the porch—and held her folded arms even more tightly against her chest. “Maybe you’ve heard the old saying?” she bit out. “‘Good fences make for good neighbors’?”
Landry sobered a little, but a glint of mischief lingered in his eyes. “Do they?” he countered, charitably amenable.
Condescending SOB. He was nettling her on purpose and, worse, he was enjoying it.
Ria glowered back at him. She was a sensible person, so what was stopping her from just turning around, without another word, and marching straight into her house and slamming the door in his handsome face for good measure?
No answer came to her.
Landry sighed heavily, as though sorely put-upon, his broad shoulders rising and falling slightly as he inhaled and then thrust out a breath. “Look,” he said, sounding resigned now. “I’m sorry about what happened, but all I can do is apologize and make restitution—”
“You could also build better fences,” Ria suggested tersely. Who was this snippy woman inhabiting her body? Her normal self was pleasant and friendly, at least most of the time, but there were things about Landry Sutton—some of them impossible to put into words—that just plain got on her last nerve and stayed there.
Now he folded his arms. Was he doing that rapport thing, reflecting her stance? Trying to win her over with body language?
Fat chance.
“My fences,” he replied tautly, “are just fine. Most likely, somebody left a gate open somewhere, that’s all.”
“That’s all?” Ria sputtered, still wondering why she was prolonging this conversation when all she wanted was to go back inside, take a hot bath, read for an hour and then fall into the warm oblivion of a good night’s sleep. Once she drifted off, she wouldn’t have to think about her too-sexy neighbor, her demanding half sister, Meredith, or the fact that she’d bought a flower farm in the heart of Podunk County, Montana, and was barely making a go of the enterprise, even without the perils of free-range buffalo. “These flowers aren’t just for decorating my yard, Mr. Sutton,” she added primly. “I earn a good part of my living selling them. I won’t know for certain until morning, when I can see clearly enough to assess the damage, but there’s a reasonable chance that some or all of my crop has been wiped out.” She sucked in a breath, huffed it out. “Surely, you can see why I’d be concerned?”
Her tone implied that he couldn’t, being oblivious and all.
At this, Landry looked both exasperated and apologetic. He sighed again, shoved a hand through his hair. “Yes,” he answered, in a measured tone. “If I didn’t say it before, I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t,” Ria said briskly. She hadn’t intended to say what came out of her mouth next; it just happened, and she didn’t have the luxury of unsaying the words. “Why can’t you raise cattle or chickens or hogs or sheep, like everyone else around here? Why does it have to be buffalo?”
A muscle tightened in Landry’s fine jaw, relaxed again, as if by force of will. “Well, for one thing, I’m not like ‘everyone else around here,’” he retorted. Then he narrowed his eyes, studied her for a long, scrumptiously uncomfortable moment and added, “And unless I miss my guess, Ms. Manning, you’re not, either.”
Heat suffused Ria’s entire body, and a rush of—well, something—quivered in her belly and hardened her nipples and set her heart to pounding. All her life, she’d wanted to fit in, to belong, though something inside her always rebelled, in the end, causing her to go her own way instead of following the herd.
She’d thought, until this night, until this instant, that no one else knew her secret, that she was different. Even her late husband, Frank, had never seen through the act, as intimate as they’d been, and now here was Landry Sutton, of all people, calling her out, subtly questioning the facade she’d worked so hard to maintain.
Damn him.
“Since this conversation is getting us nowhere,” she said, quietly reasonable, “it would probably be best if we said good-night.”
The evening, balmy before, had grown chilly, and goose bumps rippled across Ria’s flesh. Conversely, her insides felt molten, like lava about to blow out the side of an otherwise tranquil mountainside.
Landry chuckled, but it was a rueful sound, a little raw, a little broken. He looked away, looked back, and, inside the trailer, Bessie and her huge “calf” fidgeted impatiently, and it seemed possible, at least to Ria, that they might actually turn the whole thing over, right there in her driveway.
“You’re probably right,” he conceded, without a trace of generosity. “But I’ll be back tomorrow. We can look the—crops—over together, and come to some kind of agreement.” A brief pause. “Not that I can really picture you agreeing with me about much of anything.”
By then, Ria was fresh out of bluster and ready comebacks—civil ones anyhow.
So she let the gibe pass, nodded stiffly and, at last, went back inside the cottage. Once over the threshold, she shut the door hard behind her and turned the dead bolt with a reverberating click.
Through the door, she heard Landry Sutton laugh.
* * *
“THAT IS ONE hardheaded woman,” Landry remarked aloud as, back behind the wheel of his truck, he negotiated a wide U-turn and drove slowly back up Ria Manning’s driveway to the county road beyond.
Minutes later, at his own place, he backed the trailer he’d borrowed from Zane up to a corral gate, got out of the truck and proceeded to release Bessie and her calf into the pasture at Hangman’s Bend.
That done, he parked the truck, still hitched to the trailer, alongside the house.
Thanks to Highbridge, light glowed in the kitchen windows, and Landry felt a shade less lonely—and less bleak—because, for the next little while anyway, he wouldn’t be alone.
“Alone,” of course, was a relative term.
He tended to a few chores in the barn, checking on the horses, making sure there was hay in every feeder and no debris in the waterers in the stalls and finally headed for his half-finished house.
He’d borrowed the stock trailer from Walker Parrish, but there was no need to return it tonight. Anyhow, his muscles were starting to ache again, from the bronc ride that morning, and his pride wasn’t in great shape, either. Bad enough that he’d been thrown three times in front of half of Parable County; the confrontation with Ria Manning had left him feeling scraped raw on the inside.
Okay, yeah, the lady had a right to be pissed off about the damage Bessie and her strapping calf might or might not have done to her property, but, hell, he’d offered to make good for that, hadn’t he? What else could he do, at this point?
Damned if he had a single clue.
One thing was abundantly clear, though—nothing he said or did was going to please Ria. She just flat-out didn’t like him, buffalo-on-the-loose notwithstanding, and while Landry didn’t usually give a rat’s ass about other people’s opinions, this was different. This time, with this particular woman, he cared.
And that might have been the most troublesome part of all.
Reaching the house, Landry crossed the flagstone patio and stepped into the kitchen, which was spacious and ultramodern, with travertine tiles on the floors, gleaming granite on the counters and the latest in top-of-the-line appliances. He nodded a greeting to his butler, Highbridge, before heading for one of several steel sinks to wash up a little.
Highbridge, tall, skinny as a zipper turned sideways and exuding English dignity from every pore, stood with his hands clasped behind his back and his spine straight. For him, this was relaxed.
“I trust the most recent—buffalo incident—is behind us?” he murmured, obviously stifling a smile.
Landry dried his hands. “For the time being,” he conceded, a mite on the grumpy side now.
Highbridge consulted his heirloom pocket watch, drawn from a special pocket in his long-tailed butler’s coat. Cleared his throat. “Will there be anything else, sir?” he asked.
Landry moved to the oven—make that ovens—where his dinner awaited, carefully covered in foil and still warm. “No,” he responded tersely. “You can change out of that monkey suit and do whatever it is you do, once the workday’s over.”
Using a potholder, he removed the plate from the oven, lifted a corner of the foil and peered beneath it. Cornish game hen, roasted to crispy perfection, wild rice, exquisitely seasoned, and green beans cooked up just the way Landry liked them best—boiled, with bacon and chopped onion.
His mood might have been on the sour side, but his stomach rumbled with involuntary anticipation.
Highbridge, usually anxious to vanish into his well-appointed quarters to watch some reality show on TV or, conversely, read from one of his vast collection of multivolume tomes, like Churchill’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, lingered. Cleared his throat again, a clear indication that there was more he wanted to say.
With a silent curse, Landry carried his plate to the trestle table in the center of the vast room, where cutlery, a starched linen napkin and a glass of red wine awaited him, and sat down.
“What?” he nearly barked.
“Ms. Manning,” Highbridge began carefully. He faltered and made another attempt, but that failed, too, and he just stood there, hands still clasped behind his rigid back, looking reluctant and stubborn, both at once.
“What about her?” Landry demanded, plunging a fork into the succulent game hen on his plate.
“Well,” Highbridge ventured, “she did have something of a scare this evening, you must admit.” Even you. “Is she all right?”
Landry reached for the saltshaker and proceeded to oversalt his food, mainly because he knew the act would bug his butler, who made every effort to serve healthy meals. Right or wrong, Landry felt like bugging somebody.
“She’s as prickly as a porcupine with PMS,” Landry answered flatly. “I don’t know if she’s ‘all right,’ but she’s definitely her usual ornery self.”
A corner of Highbridge’s normally unexpressive mouth quivered just slightly, though whether this indicated annoyance or amusement was anybody’s guess.
Taking his etiquette cues from Henry VIII, Landry ripped off a drumstick and raised it to his mouth, bit into it, chewed and swallowed with lengthy deliberation, hoping Highbridge would take the hint and retire for the evening.
Landry had, after all, used up his quota of words for the day, and felt no inclination to chat—especially if the subject of the exchange was Ria Manning.
Yet again, Highbridge cleared his throat. “I see,” he said.
Landry might have rolled his eyes, if he hadn’t been so busy chowing down on all that good food. After the day he’d put in, he was ravenous. “And?” he prompted pointedly. “Obviously, you have more to say. Spill it, okay?”
Highbridge arched both bushy white eyebrows and stood his ground. “‘Spill it’?” he echoed, letting it be known that he considered the freewheeling use of slang one of America’s many lesser charms.
“Explain,” Landry explained, and none too politely.
“It’s just that Ms. Manning is a very nice, hardworking person,” Highbridge supplied.
“Hardworking,” Landry conceded, somewhat testily now, “yes. ‘Nice’? I don’t think so.”
“She has very good manners,” Highbridge insisted, sounding miffed.
Landry paused in the act of devouring his supper and studied the butler solemnly. Highbridge, a man with a mysterious past, had been working for him since before he’d married Susan—a lifetime ago. “Really?” he replied. “I hadn’t noticed.”
To Highbridge, hard work and good manners were everything. Reasons enough, as far as he was concerned, to overlook proclivities ranging from littering to international terrorism.
“You do understand that Ms. Manning is a widow?” Highbridge went on.
“Yes,” Landry admitted, thinking of the wide gold wedding band on Ria’s left-hand ring finger. If she was wearing it after all this time, it followed that she was still hung up on her dead husband. An oddly discouraging insight. And where was this conversation headed, exactly? He had no idea. “So I’ve been told,” he finished.
Highbridge sighed, as though balancing the unwieldy weight of the world on his narrow shoulders. “If there’s nothing else—”
Landry leveled a look at his only full-time employee, a look that said Highbridge should have gone off duty hours ago.
Some of Zane’s ranch hands moonlighted for Landry now and then, and a cleaning lady came in three times a week, but other than that, Highbridge was the whole staff. When a picture of the butler dressed to ride the range popped into Landry’s mind, complete with a Stetson, a sun squint and woolly chaps, he had to smile.
“Have a good night,” he said.
Highbridge nodded, with his usual formality, and left the kitchen.
Once he was gone, a rush of fresh loneliness passed through Landry, which was crazy, because Highbridge wasn’t the type to shoot the breeze, whatever the time of day, but there it was.
He finished his dinner, imagining how things were on his brother’s half of the ranch, over beyond the creek. By now, Cleo would have come back from town and made supper, and after the meal, Brylee would have chased the housekeeper off, good-naturedly, of course, so she and Zane could clear the table and load the dishwasher. They’d talk about their day—Zane, no doubt, would offer a comical account of Landry’s bronc-riding episode, and Brylee would elbow him and tell him to be nice, and then she’d blush as they both remembered summer-afternoon lovemaking.
Whoa, Landry thought, derailing his previous train of thought by shoving his chair back from the table and getting to his feet. He carried the remains of his supper—gourmet fare by anybody’s standards, so he had no business complaining on that score—over to the sink. There, he tossed the bones in the trash bin and scraped and then rinsed his plate and stowed it in the machine, along with his utensils and the wineglass.
Maddie Rose Sutton had raised her boys to clean up after themselves, swearing she wasn’t about to unleash a couple of slobs on a world full of women who had enough to do as it was, without kid-gloving some man. By now, it was a habit.
