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Valerie Beaufort was leading her gelding inside. He’d been right about the fragility, he thought, automatically assessing her figure, revealed clearly by the narrow-legged jeans and cotton shirt she was wearing. She was too thin for his taste. Small breasts and hips narrow as a child’s. She had pushed her hat back, revealing hair the color of leaves turning in the fall. No wonder she had a temper, he thought.
It took a second or two for his brain to register the other, although it should have been obvious from the first. Her stride was uneven. Noticeably so. An unexpected frisson of emotion uncoiled in the pit of Grey’s stomach. And he wasn’t even sure what it was he was feeling.
Head down, eyes on the ground, she hadn’t noticed him watching her as she limped across the barn, the big horse docilely following. Despite the feeling that this made him some kind of voyeur, Grey couldn’t seem to look away, and whatever he had felt in his gut when he’d noticed the limp stirred again.
She had been too damned prickly for him to be feeling sorry for her, he decided. But maybe this was why she was so standoffish, he thought, remembering that determined lift of her chin when she warned him she had a gun. Maybe it was this, instead of all that money, like he’d been thinking.
Just at that moment she glanced up, her gaze meeting his. Her eyes widened, and he was embarrassed to have been caught staring. He didn’t allow his eyes to fall, however. He had a pretty good idea of how she’d interpret it if he looked away now.
Her lips tightened before she opened them to ask, “Did you need something else, Mr. Sellers?”
“No, ma’am.”
Neither of them moved. Behind her, the gelding made some movement, but she ignored him. Her brown eyes, seeming too big for the small, oval face, held on Grey’s challengingly.
“You can use any bed in the bunkhouse,” she said finally. “Dinner’s at nine. Later than you’re used to, maybe, but I don’t like eating while the sun’s up.”
“Are you inviting me to dinner, Ms. Beaufort?”
“Hospitality forbids that I let a guest go hungry, Mr. Sellers, even an uninvited one. Don’t read anything else into the invitation, however. I figure having you come up to the house is easier than carrying a tray out there,” she said, gesturing with her chin toward the bunkhouse behind him.
“Yes, ma’am,” Grey said.
He realized that watching her limp across the barn had destroyed whatever perverse pleasure he had taken in baiting her. To do that now would make him feel petty, like taking cheap shots at someone who was not quite capable of defending herself.
Of course, she hadn’t seemed to have a problem dealing with his sarcasm, so he knew that was all in his head—and he knew why. He didn’t much like that reason being there, and he knew damn well she wouldn’t. He suspected she wasn’t the kind who would welcome pity, however dressed up it was and masquerading as something else.
“I don’t want you to get the idea that it’s an invitation to anything else, Mr. Sellers,” she said, bringing his attention back with an unpleasant jolt. “I don’t want to be your friend. I don’t want any closer acquaintance with you. I didn’t want to be your host, not even for one night, but it seems that choice has been taken out of my hands. So…Dinner. That’s all.”
“Grey,” he suggested. “I don’t get called Mr. Sellers often enough to feel real comfortable answering to it.”
He smiled at her, the nice, safe, polite one he pulled out for little old ladies and loan officers and cops who were holding ticket books. Not the smart-assed one he’d been carefully pretending to hide while he sparred verbally with an attractive woman from across a porch railing.
Her lips tightened. “Nine o’clock, Mr. Sellers. No need to dress up.” She turned her back and began to unsaddle the horse.
From the quickness of her movements there was no doubt she knew exactly what she was doing, and that she had been doing it on a regular basis for a long time. Despite his previous acknowledgment that this was one proud, prickly woman, Grey set down the bag he was holding and walked into the barn. It was already dusk, the light from the dying sun fading quickly.
He was surprised at how much darker the barn’s interior was than it had been outside. And surprised at how familiar were the smells. How evocative. He took a deep breath, inhaling a combined fragrance of hay, horse manure and oiled leather. Scents that would always mean home to him.
He walked toward the horse and his rider, watching as her small hands worked efficiently. As soon as she had loosened all the straps, Grey stepped forward, moving in front of her without warning. He lifted the saddle off and set it atop the rail of the nearest stall.
When he turned around, Valerie Beaufort’s eyes were on his face. There was a bloom of heat in her cheeks, and her lips were set so tight they were nothing but a white line.
“Don’t you ever do anything like that again,” she ordered.
The madder she got, the quieter her voice. He had noticed that on the porch. Which must mean she was furious right now.
“I don’t know what kind of men you’re used to being around, Ms. Beaufort, but I was raised to be a gentleman. I would have done the same for any lady.”
“You’re a lying son of a bitch,” she said. “You figured you’d just help the poor little cripple out, whether she needed it or not. Maybe get on my good side by showing what a gentleman you are. Or maybe you just wanted to feel better about yourself by doing your good deed for the day. I don’t really give a damn why you did that, but if ever I want your help, I’ll ask for it. If I don’t ask, Mr. Sellers, then you leave me the hell alone.”
A matching anger grew as she spit words at him. Maybe it was the nagging headache he’d fought all day. The need for a drink that he hated like hell to admit. Or maybe it was pure guilt because she had come too close to the truth. Whatever the reason, his own rage suddenly boiled up past his normally well-developed self-control.
He grabbed her upper arms, locking his fingers around them hard enough to make her flinch. Her pupils dilated in shock. Ms. Rich-bitch Beaufort had probably never had a man touch her, he thought, in anger or any other way. With this kind of attitude, who the hell would want to? Despite the fact that his brain was already telling him he had made a huge mistake, he shook her. Not hard, just a single, sharp movement.
The bones of her upper arms were thin under his hands. As childlike as the rest of her appeared to be. Vulnerable. And realizing that should have destroyed his anger. It should have made him ashamed of the fact that he was manhandling someone so much smaller than he was.
Someone who was also…crippled. It was the word she had used. He didn’t like having it in his head. The fact that it was there, just as she had accused, seemed to fuel his anger.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with you, lady,” he said, his voice low and deliberately menacing, his hands still gripping her arms. “I came out here because I was hired to do a job. And because I need the money. Believe me, I don’t want to be your friend, either. And if you think offering to feed me gives you the right to be rude, you need to rethink your policy on hospitality. I would have taken that saddle off for any woman. That’s how I was raised. You can be damn sure, however, that being nice to you is a mistake I won’t make again.”
He released her so abruptly she staggered. He fought the urge to grab her elbow and steady her until she regained her balance. Instead, he pushed between her and the flank of the roan and strode angrily across the barn and then outside to where he’d left his bag. He scooped it up without looking back and walked into the bunkhouse, slamming the door closed behind him.
The noise didn’t help his headache appreciably. Neither did the blood that was pounding through his temples. It had been a long time since he had really lost his temper. A long time since anyone or anything had driven him out of the fog of apathy that had surrounded him since he’d quit the External Security Team. He couldn’t even begin to explain why he had lost it now.
But it made him ashamed. And exposed. As if he had opened himself up and revealed to this woman that all the gears and cogs that were supposed to be turning smoothly inside his head had gotten a little out of whack. Or maybe, considering what he’d just done, a lot out of whack.
He threw the bag on top of the bunk nearest the door and watched the dust lift in a small cloud around it. She’d probably file a complaint. He hoped it was with Beneficial Life rather than with Joe Wallace. After all, he could con Wallace with some tale about why this hadn’t worked out.
And he’d have to pay back the money somehow. He didn’t have a clue how he was going to manage that. He sat down on the edge of another bunk and put his aching head into his hands.
Way to go, hotshot, he thought, everything he had said to her running through his head. The way to win friends and influence people.
I don’t want to be your friend, Valerie Beaufort had said. He sure as hell couldn’t blame her for that.
Chapter Two
Valerie stuck her fork into the pork chop on her plate, making another neat row of holes. When Grey Sellers hadn’t shown up for dinner, she had sat down at the table a few minutes after nine, feeling righteous. And indignant. And then nauseated.
I rode too far in the afternoon heat, she told herself.
You acted like a jackass, her conscience jeered, because a man had the nerve to take the saddle off a horse for you.
Which he did for all the wrong reasons.
Feminist bull. Since when is it a crime for a man to help a woman?
When he does it for the wrong reasons.
You’re a mind reader? You know for sure why he was moved to do that terrible thing to you?
Tired of the internal conflict and especially of trying to answer that last question, Val pushed back her chair, picked up her plate and carried it over to the garbage can. She opened the can with the foot pedal and dumped the battle-scarred pork chop, the roll and green beans in. Then she set her plate in the sink and turned to look at the serving bowls on the kitchen table. It’s a shame to waste all that food, she thought.
Especially when there’s a hungry man out in the bunkhouse who would probably be more than willing to take care of it for you. A man you invited to dinner under the guise of hospitality and then attacked because he reciprocated with what was possibly nothing more than an act of kindness of his own.
Some act of kindness. He grabbed my shoulders hard enough to bruise, she reminded herself, determined to hold on to her anger because she hadn’t found a way to let go of it without admitting she’d been partially at fault in the situation.
She advanced on the table and began to pick up dishes and carry them over to the counter. She didn’t open the garbage can again until she had everything transferred, but even then she couldn’t bring herself to throw the food away.
Instead, she took another plate out of the cabinet, almost slamming it down on the counter, and piled two pork chops, three rolls and the rest of the green beans onto it. She set the plate on a tray, along with the bowl of fruit salad and a fork, a spoon and a knife. Then she took a clean napkin out of the drawer and spread it over the top.
She stood looking down at the covered food for a few seconds before she reached across the sink and turned on the lights out in the yard. She picked up the tray before she could change her mind and carried it through the door, pushing the screen open with her hip.
When she rounded the corner of the barn, she could see a dim light coming from the bunkhouse. The patch of ground where she was standing was still in darkness, however, out of range of the lights from either building. Safe, she thought, grateful for the concealing shadows. Safe from what? the voice of her own logic, which she was beginning to despise, taunted.
Still reluctant to face the man she had yelled at this afternoon, she had to make herself walk over to the door and knock, balancing the tray on her hip. There was no sound from inside the bunkhouse, and no answer to her rather tentative tap. After a couple of minutes she knocked again, more forcefully this time, and then she turned the knob, pushing the door inward.
“Mr. Sellers?” she called.
There was still no response, so she pushed the door wider and stepped inside. The bunkhouse appeared to be empty. Maybe he was out doing another security check, she mocked mentally. She had been aware that he was making a check of all the windows and doors while she had been cooking dinner. She had already locked them as soon as she had come inside, of course, so he hadn’t had any reason to complain about her security measures.
She set the tray down on the table in front of the potbellied stove and turned to leave. For a moment her eyes surveyed the building her father had built. Pretty primitive by any standard. There were six bunks, three on each side; the table she had put the tray on and its four chairs; the stove; and bookshelves that held a variety of puzzles, games and books.
All of it was covered by a fine layer of silt that the desert wind had brought in. She hadn’t cleaned out here in a long time because no one had lived in the bunkhouse in years, which was exactly the way she wanted it.
Her father had accused her of being a recluse. Maybe she was. But the confrontation with Grey Sellers this afternoon made her know she didn’t regret the life she had chosen. She didn’t need that kind of upheaval again, especially not now.
That kind of upheaval. She repeated the phrase, wondering why she had used it in relation to Sellers. There was nothing in this situation that was anything like the other.
Her eyes rose, sheer instinct maybe, and found him watching her from the doorway that led to the bunkhouse’s communal bathroom. His black hair was wet, glistening with blue highlights under the glare of the bare, swaying electric bulb. Obviously he had just gotten out of the shower, which was why he hadn’t answered her knock or her call.
He was wearing the same jeans he’d worn this afternoon, but he was barefoot. And he was in the process of rebuttoning the chamois-colored shirt. As he did, those gray eyes, which had taken her breath this afternoon, rested inquiringly on her face.
His long fingers continued to work the buttons through their holes, one after the other, not seeming to hurry over the task. The open edges of the shirt revealed a flat brown stomach, centered by an arrow of dark hair. Her eyes had time to trace down it, all the way to where it disappeared into the waistline of his low-riding jeans, before he got to that last button, pulling the shirt together and destroying her view.
“I brought your dinner,” she said, forcing her gaze back up.
For some reason, her mouth had gone dry, so that the words were hard to articulate. She hoped he wasn’t aware of the effect that glimpse of his body had on her normally guarded emotions.
He glanced at the tray of food she had set down on the table, and then back at her. “Thank you, ma’am,” he said.
“And I wanted to apologize for…flying off the handle at you this afternoon,” she said, forcing the words out and hearing their clipped coldness.
It was a grudging apology at best, but her people skills were rusty. And this man seemed to have the ability to throw her off balance, just by looking at her. Just by that subtle movement at the corner of his mouth, which was happening again.
As if he knew something amusing, but didn’t intend to share. As if he were laughing inside. Laughing at her? she wondered. Paranoia, she chided, pulling her eyes away from his lips.
“I don’t like people assuming I can’t do whatever I set out to do,” she continued doggedly, determined to get this out of the way, to offer some explanation as to why she had reacted as she had this afternoon, without getting too close to the painful truth that she hated being treated as if she were handicapped.
“I didn’t assume anything about what you can or can’t do, Ms. Beaufort,” he said, his voice without inflection. “I told you. I was raised to be a gentleman. Old-fashioned, I guess. At least nowadays. But since you were obviously offended, I apologize. For…everything,” he finished softly. “I assure you, nothing like that will ever happen again.”
His eyes held on her face, saying more than his words. Those were probably meant to make up for the fact that he had put his hands on her. Except he hadn’t even mentioned that. There had been no apology for manhandling her.
Of course, she acknowledged, he wasn’t the only one who was not explaining everything. Usually she just ignored people who made a point of noticing her disability. With him, she had made a big deal of it. And if she were honest, she would have to admit that she knew why.
This was the first man she had been attracted to in years—more years than she wanted to remember. The first one to affect her with this subtle sexual tension since she had broken her engagement to Barton Carruthers.
Nothing like that will ever happen again, he had promised. The “that” carefully unqualified or defined. And she was equally unwilling to pursue a discussion of that physical contact. Grey Sellers would be gone in the morning. She would see to that, even if she had to drive him into town herself and then send someone out here to tow his truck off her property.
When she had, she’d talk to Wallace or to the insurance company, and all of this nonsense would be over. Maybe she had overreacted this afternoon—she wouldn’t deny that—but there was no need to continue to do so. Grey Sellers had chosen to ignore the fact that he’d touched her, and she would, too.
“And thanks for bringing the tray out,” he said, his voice low. “I figured the invitation to dinner had been rescinded.”
Rescinded. As strange a choice of words for the man he seemed to be as untoward had been. But the soft sincerity in his voice made her conscious again that she didn’t feel threatened by him. She hadn’t, not even when he’d shaken her. His action had been only a reflex, a reaction to her anger and her accusation.
“Good night,” she said, deliberately breaking the connection that was growing between them. She didn’t want to know any more about Grey Sellers than she already did. She didn’t want to think about him any more than she already had.
She limped across the room, conscious that her footsteps echoed unevenly on the old boards. Conscious that his eyes were on her, even if she couldn’t see them. Let him watch. Let him get a good look, she thought, suddenly angry and unsure why.
After tomorrow, she told herself again, things would go back to normal. At least, as normal as they could be until she had gotten rid of the albatross that was Av-Tech.
And the sooner she did that, the better, she decided, shutting the door of the bunkhouse firmly behind her. All the way back into the house, however, it seemed she could feel the force of those silver eyes, still watching her.
“IT’S OKAY,” Valerie crooned to the stallion, keeping her voice low and soothing. “Easy now. Easy, boy. Everything’s okay now, you big old bad boy.”
This on top of everything else, she thought, feeling the tension, which she had spent most of the nearly sleepless night trying to destroy, seep back into her neck and shoulders.
Being tense wasn’t a real good thing, of course, when you were dealing with a spooked horse. And despite her continued attempts at reassurance, the black was still upset, head up and ears forward.
One reason she had chosen Kronus as her first stallion was because of his disposition. For a stud horse, he was remarkably well behaved. She had watched him work, and his previous owner had vouched for him. And since she had owned the stallion, he had never given her any cause to question that reputation.
Until today. As soon as she’d come out of the house this morning, shortly after dawn, she had heard him banging in his stall. He had even splintered one of the rails, which meant she didn’t want to leave him in the tiny holding pen until she could make repairs.
Probably better to put him into the corral, she had thought. The other horses were all in the pasture that surrounded the spring, so there would be nothing to bother him out there. Nothing beyond whatever it was that had made him so edgy already.
He’d be in a less confined space and less apt to do himself damage. She took her eyes off the black long enough to glance back into the stall she had just led him out of. It was inside the simple enclosure that she had built herself when she decided she needed to buy her own stud. Granted, the building was very small, but it had seemed plenty secure, and it was far enough from the barn that he didn’t cause problems with the other horses.
She could see nothing in the stall to provoke this kind of display. However, a lot of things could spook a horse, from an unexpected or unfamiliar noise to a piece of plastic blowing along the ground.
Maybe Kronus sensed there was a stranger on the property. As she led the jittery stallion by the bunkhouse, her eyes focused briefly on the door, still closed against the growing light. She realized that she had been aware of that door the whole time she’d been in the yard.
Anticipating when her uninvited guest might open it? she wondered, leading the stud toward the corral. If so, it was an anticipation she didn’t want to feel. Despite her resolve, however, she remembered the impact of Grey Sellers’ eyes. And that small tug of amusement at the corner of his mouth.
She had been momentarily distracted by that memory, but her attention was abruptly brought back to Kronus, where it should have been all along. He had been nervous throughout the short journey. Now he threw up his head, jerking against the lead, and jigging to the side.
She shortened the nylon rope by changing the position of her hand, intent on controlling his head. She was by his shoulder, right where she needed to be. Even so, she could sense the gathering of muscle in those powerful hindquarters, his front hooves even seeming to lift a fraction from the ground.
Val knew that he just wanted to be gone, just to get away from whatever was frightening him. That flight instinct was highly developed in horses, and that’s exactly what Kronus wanted to do. Just get the hell out of here.
Although she was talking to him the whole time, she could feel his tension building. And she still couldn’t understand why. There was nothing—
He jerked his head up, pulling strongly against the lead she held, the whites of his eyes showing. She stayed with him, fighting to keep control. They were so near the safety of the paddock. If she could just get him through that gate and inside.
She reached for the gate with her free hand, and Kronus crow hopped, trying to pull away. He dragged her a few inches away from the fence before she was able to get his head back down.
She could feel her bad knee beginning to tremble, however, as it always did under strain. She ignored it, gritting her teeth against the pain, and grimly hung on as he jumped to the side again.
It would be dangerous for the horse to let him get loose, as crazy as he was acting. Although her land was fenced around the perimeter, there were too many ways he could do damage to himself if he got away out there.
