Their Baby Miracle
Their Baby Miracle
Lilian Darcy
SURPRISE PACKAGE!When Lucas Halliday saw Reba Grant for the first time in months, he was in for a shock: Reba was pregnant–with his baby–and she'd just gone into labor!Reba couldn't believe it–this baby was coming way too early. And Lucas was hardly supposed to be her birthing partner. For she'd thought–and feared?–that she'd seen the last of the billionaire businessman, despite all that had happened between them. Now, with their tiny daughter fighting for survival, Reba was surprised to realize Lucas was a loving, devoted father. And that gave her hope–that maybe Lucas had potential as a husband, too….
He’d already asked the nurse a hundred questions.
He hadn’t sat down.
He’d asked if there were information booklets he could read, Internet sites he could look up, doctors he could talk to—as if their baby’s health and survival depended on him knowing everything there was to know about state-of-the-art preemie treatment, the way his business success depended on him knowing everything about a particular company or market.
It grated on Reba’s red raw nerves, and she wanted to yell at Lucas, “How is this going to help? Is this what our daughter really needs from you?”
But nobody yelled at the NICU, and she wouldn’t yell at the father of her baby, who was here, when she hadn’t had a clue, eight hours ago, just how much she would need him.
And just how close to him she would feel.
Dear Reader,
Get ready to counter the unpredictable weather outside with a lot of reading inside. And at Silhouette Special Edition we’re happy to start you off with Prescription: Love by Pamela Toth, the next in our MONTANA MAVERICKS: GOLD RUSH GROOMS continuity. When a visiting medical resident—a gorgeous California girl—winds up assigned to Thunder Canyon General Hospital, she thinks of it as a temporary detour—until she meets the town’s most eligible doctor! He soon has her thinking about settling down—permanently….
Crystal Green’s A Tycoon in Texas, the next in THE FORTUNES OF TEXAS: REUNION continuity, features a workaholic businesswoman whose concentration is suddenly shaken by her devastatingly handsome new boss. Reader favorite Marie Ferrarella begins a new miniseries, THE CAMEO—about a necklace with special romantic powers—with Because a Husband Is Forever, in which a talk show hostess is coerced into taking on a bodyguard. Only, she had no idea he’d take his job title literally! In Their Baby Miracle by Lilian Darcy, a couple who’d called it quits months ago is brought back together by the premature birth of their child. Patricia Kay’s You’ve Got Game, next in her miniseries THE HATHAWAYS OF MORGAN CREEK, gives us a couple who are constantly at each other’s throats in real life—but their online relationship is another story altogether. And in Picking Up the Pieces by Barbara Gale, a world-famous journalist and a former top model risk scandal by following their hearts instead of their heads….
Enjoy them all, and please come back next month for six sensational romances, all from Silhouette Special Edition!
All the best,
Gail Chasan
Senior Editor
Their Baby Miracle
Lilian Darcy
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
LILIAN DARCY
has written over fifty books for Silhouette Romance, Special Edition and Harlequin Medical Romance (Prescription Romance). Her first book for Silhouette appeared on the Waldenbooks Series Romance Bestsellers list, and she’s hoping readers go on responding strongly to her work. Happily married with four active children and a very patient cat, she enjoys keeping busy and could probably fill several more lifetimes with the things she likes to do—including cooking, gardening, quilting, drawing and traveling. She currently lives in Australia but travels to the United States as often as possible to visit family. Lilian loves to hear from readers. You can write to her at P.O. Box 381, Hackensack NJ 07602 or e-mail her at lildarcy@austarmetro.com.au.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter One
M arch in Biggins, Wyoming was cold.
Lucas could feel the threat of snow hanging in the air as he climbed out of the top-of-the-range SUV his father had bought late last year for tooling around the Halliday Corporation’s newest ranch. Across the street, the Longhorn Steakhouse beckoned warm and bright, and he ignored his uncharacteristic hesitation about going in.
Reba Grant would probably be there, working the big grill in the kitchen, behind the swing doors. He’d come here in the hope of seeing her—needing to see her, somehow—but that didn’t mean he looked forward to it. He knew it was likely to be a prickly and emotional meeting, uncomfortable for both of them.
Pushing open the door, he was greeted by warm air that smelled of good food and fresh coffee, and by Friday night crowds that might camouflage his arrival for a little longer, if he wanted more time. A red-haired waitress showed him to a small table in the corner. She moved with harried efficiency, snapping a menu in front of him, and asking if he wanted something to drink.
“Just water, thanks.”
“Coming right up.”
Her smile was short and small and landed somewhere over his left shoulder because she’d already turned away, which was just the way Reba had smiled at him the last time they’d met face to face, just before Christmas. They’d only had a short conversation, and it had felt awkward. He’d sensed her hostility. About a week after that, he’d seen her here in town and he was ninety-five percent sure that she’d seen him, too, but she’d quickly crossed the street and disappeared into the hardware store and they hadn’t talked.
No, he didn’t want more time.
They needed to talk tonight.
Having spent most of the past two and a half months at his home base in New York working fifteen-hour days on Halliday corporate business, Lucas had been slow to reach this decision, but he was right on top of it now.
They definitely needed to talk.
Reba had no right to feel hostile, but apparently she did, and that could surely only mean one thing. She had no idea how much Lucas had shared her own grief for what they’d lost in November.
He needed to tell her about his grief, here on her own territory, and they both needed to achieve some kind of closure and a way to handle the casual dealings they might occasionally need to have with each other in the future, now that he planned to spend more time at Seven Mile Ranch.
Hang on, casual dealings?
He questioned this word choice as soon as it flipped into his mind.
There had never been anything casual about Reba Grant, and it wasn’t a word people often applied to Lucas himself, either. There certainly hadn’t been anything casual about the way they’d first connected six months ago, back in September. Just because neither of them had wanted or envisaged—or had had the courage and imagination to consider, was that it?—a future to their immediate attraction, that didn’t mean it had been casual.
He looked at the waitress again, at her full tables and her waiting clientele. She had a strong, compact build, must only be in her late twenties—around Reba’s age—and seemed to have no trouble handling the workload. Just before the smile, she had thrown him a curious glance that suggested she knew exactly who he was, but still she would probably be a while getting back to him, the Halliday name notwithstanding.
If Reba was working tonight, she would be run off her feet, too. Maybe he should wait before seeking her out, but he didn’t want to. He’d only flown in from New York this afternoon, and he wanted to get this issue tabled and dealt with as soon as possible.
He mentally decided on his order and watched the waitress disappear through the swing door to the kitchen, taking another table’s empty plates. With one elbow, she held it open for a second waitress, heading in the opposite direction. He glimpsed the choreographed chaos centered around the grill and the fryer, and yes, there was Reba’s back view. He recognized it easily—the odd combination of grace and toughness in the way she held herself, the glossy mass of her dark hair.
Remembered desire flooded him like a tide.
Remembered fulfilment, too.
He knew how wildly that body moved in ecstasy. He remembered the creamy color and silky texture of her skin beneath her clothes, as if he’d seen and touched her yesterday. He knew the way her hair smelled, so simple and fragrant and good, and the throaty sound of her laugh.
Yes, that was definitely Reba.
Then, as the door swung closed again, she half-turned in order to reach for something, and for a moment he almost thought…
No.
Impossible.
But he kept watching the door, and he stood up at his table, to get a better view.
The door opened again within seconds, and this time what he saw left him in no doubt.
Reba was pregnant.
Still.
When he’d believed until this moment that she’d lost their baby in a miscarriage during her first trimester late last year.
“Somebody wants to talk to you,” Reba heard, but hardly took in which of the waitresses was speaking—definitely not Carla—because the woman had already disappeared again, carrying a pile of plates.
She looked up from the grill, and Lucas Halliday stood there, turned to stone just as she’d known he would, the moment they encountered each other again. He had the same instant, powerful effect on her senses that she remembered with an intensity that was almost like pain, and deep down this didn’t surprise her, either.
He looked every bit as angry as she’d expected, too, although she would challenge his right to feel that way, with all the energy she could muster.
“This isn’t a good time, Lucas,” she said, steady-voiced.
“From your perspective, maybe. From mine, it’s a very good time.” He shot a cold glance down at her bulging stomach. “You have a hell of a lot of explaining to do, Reba, overdue since we saw each other before Christmas, and I don’t see why I should wait any longer.”
“We’re run off our feet.” Her body had been telling her so for an hour or more. Her stomach ached below the hard, rounded jut of her growing pregnancy. It was a dull sort of ache that tightened around her like an uncomfortable belt then eased, which meant that she forgot about it as she worked, then remembered it when it came again.
“Take a break, Reba.” Her best friend Carla suddenly appeared, and touched her arm with a concerned gesture. She must already have seen that Lucas was here and she’d been hovering, waiting to step in when Reba needed her.
The two of them had known each other since school. Carla worked here as a waitress, and she had two children, one of them still a baby. Had she felt this same nagging ache at this point during her pregnancies? Both times, she’d worked until just a couple of weeks before the babies were due, but she’d never mentioned any problems or pains.
“I’m not scheduled for a break,” Reba answered her friend.
Carla took no notice. “You need to talk to him,” she said in a low voice. “Might as well make it now. The guy looks as if he can’t decide whether to faint or punch a wall.”
“Carla…”
Lucas was still standing there, stony and angry and shocked, ready to erupt as soon as he could get her alone.
“Twice you’ve thought it was over between the two of you, right?” Carla muttered. “Once in September, by mutual agreement, then again when you miscarried the twin in November. You have a history with him, Reba.”
“And a future, too.” Reba closed her eyes. Some kind of future, good or bad. He was the father of this baby, and it was already clear to her that he wasn’t going to let the issue go. “Okay, Carla, I know.”
“Gordie not in tonight, Reba?” The steakhouse’s newest waitress slipped by and threw the cheerful, familiar question at her, apparently oblivious to a tension in the air that had nothing to do with Gordie McConnell. Reba’s long relationship with Gordie had been over for more than eight months, although Gordie and half of Biggins didn’t seem to have gotten this straight in their heads, yet.
Reba gritted her teeth. “Haven’t seen him, Dee,” she answered.
Carla hissed in her ear, “Go. Now. Manager’s office. Your place, even. Talk to Lucas. Before Gordie does show up and make this even harder.” She stole the metal steak flipper out of Reba’s hand and pushed her toward the swing door. “Someone else can cover for you.”
“I have a table in the corner,” Lucas offered, his voice cold and his body wound tight.
“No. I’m not talking about this here, in front of half of Biggins,” Reba answered him. “We’ll go into the manager’s office, like Carla suggested.” She began to move in that direction at once, and he followed her, practically breathing down her neck.
“I’m glad you appreciate that we have some talking to do,” he said.
“It would be a little pointless to deny it, at this stage.”
“But you were planning to, if I hadn’t shown up.”
“No, I guess I knew you’d have to find out eventually. I was hoping it wouldn’t be until after the baby was born. And I should make it clear to you, Lucas, I don’t consider that you’re involved.”
“How in hell can I not be involved? Is this why you were so cool before Christmas? You were afraid I’d guess?”
“No. I didn’t know, then. I was angry, and I had good reason to be.”
But he’d focused on her first words, not her claim about anger. “You didn’t know? That doesn’t make sense.”
“It will in a minute.” She opened the manager’s office.
“Good, because I’m keen to hear,” he drawled, his voice as hard as whetstone. He entered the cramped office behind her and shut the door with a snap. The noise level from the restaurant fell away. “What I’m seeing is impossible. So start from the beginning. Tell me how in hell you staged that scene at the restaurant in Cheyenne, and at the hospital. Never mind my untrained eye, how did you convince a doctor that you’d lost the baby?”
She shook her head. “I can’t believe you think I’d do that.”
“I wouldn’t, without the evidence. But I tend to trust facts, not feelings.”
“I never staged anything, Lucas.” She turned to face him, feeling that strange and almost painful belt-tightening feeling again, around her stomach and across her back. As usual, it soon faded. Her desire for a comfortable chair and a pillow to support her lower spine remained, destined to stay unfulfilled.
With its littered desk and single chair, the office was way too cluttered for this confrontation, but she was glad she’d chosen privacy over space, all the same. Lucas Halliday still looked too good, in her eyes, still filled her with all the wildly contrasting feelings he’d generated in her almost six months ago, and again in November. Anger and resentment, unwilling interest in just what made him tick, steaming attraction, dawning respect.
“And that’s not the beginning, anyhow, and you know it,” she finished.
“So start with your definition of the beginning,” he said. “That first afternoon in the cabin? The night we tried to say goodbye at the door of my motel room? The day you came to see me out at the ranch in November?”
“None of those times.”
“No, I guess not. I guess it goes farther back, doesn’t it?”
Their eyes locked together. His looked dark and clouded with multiple layers of memory, and she knew he would have to define “the beginning” the same way as she did—the day, last September, when they’d first met…
Chapter Two
L ucas Halliday had no problem with buying a ranch for his father. He’d already bought four of them, over the past two years. All four had proved good investments, with his own regular visits to oversee things, and with the right people in place to run them.
This new purchase, however, was different. Dad’s latest wife—the third since his long-ago divorce from Lucas’s mother—had developed a very pretty fantasy about buying a real cattle ranch to use as a fourth home. Fifth, if you counted the yacht.
Raine wanted watercolor mountain views, a Vogue Living log cabin, movie soundtrack mooing steers—odorless, naturally—and a Fountain of Youth fishing stream. Dad was happy to go along with all of that, as long as the ranch paid its own way, just like the others did.
Lucas had been tasked with locating this impossible combination. He’d narrowed the search to southern Wyoming, because of its relative proximity to Colorado ski resorts and the airline hub city of Denver, and eliminated two properties, sight unseen. If he couldn’t give Dad and Raine a good report on Seven Mile he planned to tell them they could continue the quest on their own. He preferred cool-headed corporate takeovers to fantasy fulfilment for spoiled stepmothers, any day.
Having told the realtor that he would need three days to look over the place properly, he intended to be out of Wyoming and on a plane back to New York within half a day if Seven Mile fell short of Broadbent’s glowing description.
He got into Denver on a late flight, rented a car, drove north through Fort Collins to Laramie to get a better impression of the region, then southwest to Biggins. By the time he’d checked into the town’s best motel and eaten a late and surprisingly good meal in the quietest corner of the Longhorn Steakhouse, he was pretty convinced he’d be heading out of here tomorrow.
Biggins had no clothing boutiques, and no craft galleries or antique stores. There were just three motels, two options for dining and a single beauty salon. Raine expected big city amenities at a stone’s throw from rural beauty, but she wasn’t going to get that here.
Jim Broadbent knocked on Lucas’s motel room door at eight-thirty the next morning, and they drove out to Seven Mile together. It was a pretty drive. The Medicine Bow Range dreamed in the distance. Rolling grasslands filled the foreground. The September grass was colored in the morning light like yellow chalk and fresh honey and clear-varnished pine floors.
Jim kept his conversation down to an intermittent trickle of facts about cattle breeds, growing seasons and water rights. An experienced realtor in his early fifties, the man gave the impression that he wouldn’t find this ranch too tough to sell, even in the unlikely event that Halliday Continental Holdings didn’t want it. He probably conveyed this same impression with every property he handled, and Lucas ignored it completely.
The mountains got closer. They passed the entrance to another property, and he had time to glimpse the name McConnell on the gate. Jim crossed a wide, shallow stream where the water ran silver over the rocks. Lucas knew that whatever attributes and advantages the Seven Mile Ranch might or might not have, it was going to be beautiful.
They turned onto a dirt road, and rumbled across several cattle guards. Ahead he saw a cluster of corrals and farm buildings, neat and modest and well-maintained. From this angle, they were almost lost beneath the enormous, soaring sky and looming mountain range.
“Who’s giving me the tour?” he asked Jim, as they approached the long, low ranch house, painted a faded barn red. “You?”
“I’m going to leave you with Joe Grant. Or his daughter.” Broadbent swung around and parked in the front yard at a crooked angle, then added, “Looks like it’s the daughter. Rebecca. Reba, everyone calls her.”
Rebecca Grant must have been sitting on the porch steps, waiting for their arrival. When Lucas caught sight of her emerging from the morning shadow cast by the house, she was still slapping her hands back and forth across the butt of her jeans to get rid of the dust.
She hadn’t dressed to impress, he noted, as her body hit the sun. Old Wranglers, scuffed boots, plaid flannel shirt. A swathe of dark hair hung around her face and partway down her back, glossy and healthy and natural.
As Lucas watched, she dragged a red circle of elastic from her pocket and pulled the mass of hair into a high ponytail at the back. The movement lifted her breasts inside the rumpled shirt and showed a glimpse of shadow on soft skin. She’d just completed the final twist of the elastic when she reached them.
“Hi,” she said. A wide smile jerked tight on her face and faded too soon. Mistrustful, ocean-toned eyes glinted like water.
“Reba,” answered Jim. “Beautiful morning.”
The realtor made introductions, and Reba chopped a hand in Lucas’s direction for him to shake. He complied, and felt the startling contrast of long, fine-boned feminine fingers and palms callused like cardboard.
“Is your Dad around?” Jim asked.
“He’s taken Mom into Cheyenne.”
“Doctor?”
She nodded, but didn’t say anything further on the subject.
“So you have a program mapped out for Mr. Halliday?”
“I thought we’d focus on the business side of the ranch today. The infrastructure. We’ll look at the recreational amenities tomorrow, Mr. Halliday, if you’re still interested in the place. We can take a drive down to Steamboat Springs, tour the far boundaries of the property. There’s a little cabin higher up, and you can get an idea of the fishing and gaming possibilities. If you’re still here after all that, we’ll take a closer look at the cattle.”
“Sounds good.”
“For now, we’ll start with the house,” she said, “since Mom’s not here to get disturbed by us coming through. Then the corrals, machinery sheds.”
“Forget about the house,” Lucas said, thinking aloud—insofar as he was thinking at all. Raine would be unimpressed with the ranch’s primary residence. She’d want it bulldozed to make way for something much grander. “It’ll have to come down, anyhow.”
Rebecca flinched and pressed her lips together, making her chin jut, and he realized that his statement had been cruel. She’d probably called this place home her whole life.
He couldn’t imagine what that would be like. Since his parents’ divorce when he was three, his mother had lived in four different homes, and his serially divorced and remarried father in…he’d lost count. At least seven. Lucas himself had shuttled back and forth between most of these so-called homes until going away to college at eighteen, but he’d never put down roots in any of them.
At one level, it had been fun, and yet… A faintly remembered sense of bewilderment and loss blew over his spirit, and for a few moments he almost envied Rebecca Grant.
Neck and jaw muscles tight with regret, he considered an apology, but that would only make his mistake worse. He wasn’t used to this kind of situation. His purchases and his takeovers didn’t usually have the power to hurt someone like this, on a personal, individual level.
The meaning of her jerky smile, mistrustful eyes and abrupt handshake became clear to him.
She didn’t want to sell.
“Would you like to stop in for coffee before we start, Jim?” Reba asked the realtor, but he shook his head. He was anxious to get out from under the awkward weight of atmosphere, probably.
“You’ll drop Mr. Halliday back to town when he’s ready, Reba?”
“Or Dad will.” Her voice was a little husky, and deeper than Lucas would have expected. It seemed to curl around him like a ribbon of scented smoke, drawing him in.
I should have driven the rental, he decided. Instead he’d listened to Jim’s warnings about dirt roads and confusing directions. Now he was beholden to prickly, intriguing Reba Grant in a way he didn’t like.
“Lucas, you’re going to be real impressed with this place.”
Jim offered the comment as he climbed into his vehicle. He roared out of the yard and back along the dirt track to the main road while Lucas was still, uncharacteristically, searching for the right reply. He really had no desire to hurt this woman, after the unthinking body blow he’d already delivered.
“Well, I’d like coffee,” she said, on a slow, stubborn drawl.
She turned on her heel and stalked toward the house, like a bad-tempered horse. Compared with the women he was used to, she didn’t walk with grace. Her movements were too angular, and too purposeful—blunt body language, surprisingly expressive.
Attractive, even.
Behind her, Lucas kept watching, for longer than he should.
“Sounds good,” he told her.
“So you’ll have to waste time on the house, after all,” she said sarcastically, over her shoulder.
“Listen, Ms. Grant—”
“You probably have no idea how it feels to care about a place like this, right?”
“No, you’re right, I don’t,” he answered, his voice clipped and tight.
“You probably think it’s only possible to care about a home with sixteen rooms and fifteen foot ceilings and priceless artwork on the walls.”
“Actually there’s no home I care about in that way.”
She stopped, turned fully, and stared at him for a moment. He stared back with narrowed eyes, masking the unexpected vulnerability he felt.
“Oh, well.” She sounded less defiant now, and her eyes had softened a little, although the words themselves were still an attack. “Maybe over your coffee you can work out the best angle for the wrecking ball, or something.”
He didn’t trouble to tell her that using a wrecking ball on this place would be like using a stonemason’s hammer on a thumb tack. In fact, they needn’t ’doze it at all. They could haul it to some less desirable position and use it as a bunkhouse for ranch hands or for the house staff Dad and Raine would require when they were in residence.
Yep, definitely. Ideal. Practical. Inexpensive—it would come right off its footings, and onto a truck. There was no basement.
Would moving it instead of wrecking it come as good news to Reba, after his initial blunt announcement? Lucas didn’t think so, somehow. This house looked as if it had grown in this spot, like lichen on a rock. She wouldn’t want it moved.
Ahead of him, she reached the screen door. It opened into a screened-in porch that ran across the house’s narrow front and around to the side. Her backside rocked as she pushed on the door and stepped inside, and he had to pull his gaze away.
There was something about her. You couldn’t call her pretty. And “beautiful” was such a loaded word. All the women he knew were beautiful. It didn’t fit her, either. But she definitely had something. A current of energy running in her veins, a kind of magnetism, and undeniable strength. Whatever report he gave his father about this place in the end, he knew he wasn’t going to be bored here today.
Rebecca led him into a big farm kitchen and he saw furniture comfortably worn from use, and huge windows showcasing views of the mountains. On the bench top, a coffeemaker sent out the aroma of ground beans steeped in boiling water. She slung the dark liquid into two mugs like a waitress. She didn’t ask him if he wanted cream or sugar, just raised the waxed carton, the china bowl and her eyebrows.
He shook his head. “Black, thanks.”
Was it his imagination, or did she add generous quantities of both cream and sugar to her own mug with a big dollop of attitude at the same time?
“There you go,” Reba said, as she slid the steaming beverage in Lucas Halliday’s direction.
She was glad Mom and Dad weren’t here. She squeezed another token smile onto her face, then let it drop as soon as it had fulfilled its contractual obligations. She didn’t want to sell this place.
If it wasn’t for her mother’s health, and the much easier life Mom would have down in Florida where her sister lived, it wouldn’t be happening. And if Reba hadn’t broken off her long-standing engagement to her ranching neighbor Gordie McConnell two months ago, it wouldn’t be happening, either. She and Gordie could have run the two ranches together, leaving Mom and Dad free to make their move, but she didn’t have the right skills to do it on her own.
She had known that showing potential buyers around her home would be hard, and she’d dreaded it, but the reality was even harder.
The reality was Lucas Halliday, corporate wheeler-dealer, heir to the family empire, dressed down in elastic-sided boots, jeans just old enough to fit right and a thin cotton sweater with a designer label subtly emblazoned on the left breast pocket.
He unsettled her. The way he moved, like a man accustomed to his road through life paying out as smooth as ribbon in front of him. The way he looked.
He wasn’t conventionally handsome. His top lip was fuller than the lower one, and his prominent cheekbones were slightly uneven. His nose had a bend in it, just below the bridge. His skin was a little rough, as if he’d had trouble with it in his teens. But he had amber brown eyes, a strong chin, hair the color of maple syrup with a handful of Atlantic sand tossed in and a body that could have sold gym equipment to any man in America.
Let him buy the ranch, if he wanted it. She hoped he would make the decision quickly, and get out of her life, out of her space.
He seemed to fill it too forcefully.
After taking a gulp of her coffee, she went through to the cramped room beyond the kitchen that Dad used as an office. She grabbed the pile of papers he had prepared. There were surveyors’ maps of the property, marked with various details, sheets of figures on fodder yields and winter feed requirements and the inventory of farm machinery included in the sale.
Piling all of it in front of Lucas at the kitchen table where he sat, she said, “Here. Maybe you’d like to take a look at some of this while you drink your coffee. So we don’t waste time.”
She stressed the word “we” just a little. She could have been out with the hands today, refencing the stackyards or putting out salt. Instead, she had to spend her time with a man who planned to bulldoze her home and didn’t mind telling her so.
Except that when she’d tried to attack back, she almost thought she’d seen a spark of something softer in him. Understanding. Or even a wistful kind of envy. It sparked an unwilling curiosity inside her, which smoldered slowly, the way a carelessly thrown cigarette butt smoldered in dry summer heat before setting a whole forest on fire.
He took a mouthful of coffee, which left a film of the thin black liquid glistening on his lower lip. Then he sat back in his chair and twisted a little, to take in the view. He hadn’t looked at the papers she’d given him.
“This is great,” he said. His big shoulder pushed to within a few inches of her hip. From this angle she could see the way his dark lashes silhouetted against his cheeks.
“I hope you mean the coffee.” She took a step back, out of his space.
“Actually I meant the whole—” He stopped.
She glared at him, silently daring him to mention bulldozers again.
You want to praise the vista from the windows of a house you’re planning to tear down, Mr. Halliday? I don’t think so!
“Yes, I mean the coffee,” he agreed. “Great coffee.”
His mouth closed firmly over the last word.
No smile.
He lifted his mug toward his lips, met her spark spitting eyes with his, and if there was any kind of apology there, any kind of understanding, or the vulnerability she thought she’d seen before, he didn’t let it show. His gaze held hers, narrow-eyed and thoughtful. Arm and mug froze midair.
She felt herself getting hot.
Aware.
She hadn’t ever responded physically to a man this fast, and didn’t know why it was happening. She’d met impressive looking men before. Was it the adrenaline of wanting to fight this one, over the ranch?
Gee, that made sense—to link attraction and fight.
“Look,” he said, “I know you probably would have preferred for Jim to give me this tour.”
“Might have helped.” She folded her arms across her chest and hunched her shoulders, resisting the pull she didn’t want. “I’ve lived here my whole life. I’m not looking forward to this.”
“It’s the selling and leaving, surely, not the thought of the changes a buyer will make.” His eyes were steady and clear. “Any buyer is going to make changes.”
“I’d prefer not to hear about them, if I don’t have to.”
“You’re going to stay in the area, right?”
“I plan to, yes, at this stage.” In fact, she still felt very uncertain about what she wanted from her future. She loved it here so much.
He shrugged, as if nothing more needed saying.
Okay, so he had a point. Burying her head in the sand would be impractical and impossible, if she stayed in Biggins. A buyer could make worse changes than bulldozing a very ordinary home that just happened to have been hers for twenty-six years, and her family’s for a lot longer.
She set her mouth tight, detesting Lucas Halliday for being right, for being up front about it like this, for making her nerve endings sing without even knowing it and for apparently understanding that bluntness was just a little easier on her spirit than empathy would have been.
“I’m sorry this task is falling to you,” he said. Each word came out measured and matter-of-fact. “But my father will expect the kind of detail I can only get from someone who really knows the place. If it’s any consolation, he’s not going to haggle over the price if I tell him this is the ranch he wants, and he’s keen to push the purchase through quickly.”
He spread his hands in a gesture that almost looked like an apology. “Raine, my stepmother, wants a white Christmas in a log cabin this year.”
“We can do the log cabin,” she answered, just as matter-of-fact. “No guarantees on the snow. There, you’ll have to negotiate with a higher power. Got any favors you can call in?”
He laughed. It should have eased the atmosphere, but it didn’t. Drinking her coffee in clumsy gulps, Reba watched him page through the documents and papers she’d laid out. He drank absently, giving the impression that he hardly tasted the strong brew, and he thudded the mug down on the table top between mouthfuls.
He took out a pocket calculator and keyed in several sets of figures, absorbed in his assessment. Was he checking Dad’s math? He scribbled some lines in a pocket-size notebook.
Uncomfortable about watching him, Reba retreated behind the breakfast bar. She wiped down the stove top, cleaned the crumb tray beneath the toaster and watered the row of African violets on the windowsill above the sink.
She almost watered Lucas Halliday himself, while she was at it. He’d come to the sink to return his mug. She’d been filling the little tin watering can again and hadn’t heard him, his movements masked by the sound of water drumming on metal. When she turned with the filled can, intending to water the flowering cyclamens in her parents’ room, as well, they came face to face and can to chest.
“Whoa!” He grabbed the pouring end of the can and a spray of drops darkened across the arm of his sweater.
“Oops.”
“No problem.”
He still had the mug. She snatched it from him too abruptly, turned and put it and the watering can on the draining board.
She could feel him still standing right behind her, feel him through to her bones, to the roots of her hair and to the walls of her lungs, which suddenly refused to draw breath. The strength of his pull on her body shocked her, and she heard his next words with a rush of relief.
“Ready to head outside?”
Reba kept both of them busy the whole morning. She did the job delegated to her by Jim Broadbent and her father, and she did it well, Lucas considered. It was painfully apparent how much she cared about this place, although she struggled hard not to show it. Again, with a hot pool of envy low in his gut, he wondered how that would feel.
Not useful, in a situation like this, when the family had to sell.
He should be grateful he’d never have the same problem.
They looked over almost every piece of infrastructure and equipment included in the sale. Calving barn, corrals, machinery sheds, scale room, tack room and bunkhouse. Pickups, stock trailers, haying equipment, round baler, swather and bale feed. A semi-Kenworth tractor, a tractor with loader…The list went on and on, and didn’t deviate from the list both Reba and Jim Broadbent had already given him.
Everything seemed well-maintained, and when it wasn’t, Reba said so. “This flatbed needs new tires,” and “One of the four-wheelers isn’t running right.”
Lucas lost count of how many times he saw her denim-clad hip hike up at an angle, and her neatly rounded backside slide across the torn seat of the battered ranch pickup as she climbed in to the driver’s seat. He got to know the sound of the gears and the clutch, like a strand of familiar music, and the smell of dust and grass and engine oil like a neighbor’s brand of tobacco.
He’d never realized you could drive a pickup with such a high caloric expenditure. Reba didn’t raise her voice and she never swore, but she wrenched the wheel around, lunged at the gearstick and floored accelerator and brake pedal as if driving was a form of hand-to-hand combat.
Every time they stopped, she slapped her pretty, callused hands on her thighs, yanked on the hand brake, looked at him with her big, bluey-greeny-grayish eyes—incredible eyes, because, seriously, what color could you possibly call them?—and announced, without smiling, “Scale shed,” or “Lower Creek Field,” as if they’d just navigated the Amazon River, and she navigated it every day.
“Is this pickup on my vehicle list?” he finally asked.
She drove it the same way she walked—not gracefully, but with a way of moving that kept grabbing his gaze and that, for some unknown reason, he liked. He’d handled a lot of vehicles in his time, but he wasn’t sure that he’d be able to handle this one. Not without practice, anyhow.
The woman who sat beside him would take practice to handle, also. He found himself imagining a little too clearly what the rewards might be.
“You wouldn’t want this one,” she told him. “It’s on its third time round the mileage clock, and it’s got more temperament than a jumpy horse. Second gear pops out with no warning. It stalls under a thousand revs, and it drinks oil like I drink coffee. Can’t get through the day without a big top-up, first thing every morning.”
At the hay stacking yard in the Lower Creek Field, a couple of the hands were fixing fence, with a herd of mama cows looking on.
“They’re bred,” she told him. “They’ll start calving in mid-March.”
She introduced him to the ranch hands, Pete and Lon. The four of them ate a lunch of sandwiches, cookies and more coffee, standing up. The sun shone out of the pristine blue. Lucas’s back felt hot, and his eyes tired from squinting.
He looked at one of the hands. Lon, he was pretty sure, but he might have gotten them mixed up. The man was standing bare-chested with his T-shirt tucked into the back of his jeans like a cleaning rag, and Lucas wished he could peel off his sweater. Inappropriate for the potential buyer of a high-priced ranch to be seen shirtless, unfortunately.
Reba looked hot, too.
When she thought no one was watching, she rolled her sleeves as far as her smooth, soft biceps, and unfastened another button at the front of her shirt. She rewound the red elastic around her ponytail, pulling it higher so that the thick, glossy hair swung free of her sweat-misted neck.
She had sunglasses on, but she mostly kept them pushed up on her head, as if she could see the detail of her beloved ranch more clearly without them. Lucas would have liked to borrow them, and wished he’d worn some of his own, to shield his city eyes against the bright light.
After they left Pete and Lon, she showed him the Upper Creek Field and they walked two hundred yards or more, along the bank of the fishing stream, with Lucas dropping behind her, letting her lead the way.
I’m not doing this so I can watch her walk, am I? he thought, a little disturbed at the idea when he realized he was. That purposeful, rolling stride, that tight, shapely denim butt.
Too distracting.
Too enticing.
Not on the agenda.
He kicked along faster and caught up to her in four strides, in time to hear her telling him, “A little farther on, we’ll be able to glimpse the gaming cabin.”
Then she spotted an untidy shape in the grass and they both realized it was a cow, long dead, that had somehow escaped the vigilance of the ranch hands. She frowned at the sight, gave a hiss of breath and narrowed her incredible eyes, with their dark fringed lashes.
Lucas reached out and touched her shoulder, expecting that she’d turn into his arms for a moment’s support, wanting her to do it. He felt soft flannel over warm bone, and let his hand slide down to her bare arm, which was even warmer and softer.
A rush of intense desire powered through his body and snatched the air from his lungs. He could have sworn she felt it, too. He heard the awareness as a new rhythm in her breathing, and felt the midday heat of their bodies mingle.
After just a moment, however, she flicked off the contact like a horse flicking a fly, then hugged her arms around herself and pivoted away. “Too late to do anything about it, now.”
“I’m afraid so,” he answered.
“I’ll tell Lon about it when we get back.” She let a beat of silence hang in the air, then said, “Look, can you see the movement in the stream?”
Lucas knew something about trout, Reba soon realized, so she didn’t need to point out which were browns or cutthroats or rainbows. The plentiful fish gleamed beneath the water like painted foil. The current braided transparent patterns on the streambed and babbled nonsense songs in the clear air.
The walk took twenty minutes, because they did it slowly. Neither of them talked very much at all. The sun shone. The wind riffled the trees. Reba liked the silence, and she liked that Lucas Halliday knew how to be silent. Some people didn’t.
“Here’s the place where we can see the cabin,” she told him, stopping beside a still, shaded pool.
She’d been aiming for this spot. From here, they should turn back.
“Yeah? Can you show me?”
He seemed interested, but she still didn’t know what he was thinking, or what mental notes he’d made for the report he’d present to his father. No point in wondering about it, she told herself again. His intention would become apparent with time.
“Well,” she said, “there’s a ridge line coming down to the water about two hundred yards upstream, can you see it?”
Standing beside her, only a little behind, Lucas followed the arrow of Reba’s arm. “With a seam of rock showing below the trees?”
“That’s it,” she said. “Follow it up. There’s a downed tree, a ponderosa pine, making a kind of notch about two thirds of the way to the top.”
“This time, I’m not seeing it.” He leaned closer, cursing hours of computer screens two feet from his face, trying to use her arm like a rifle sight.
He caught the waft of her scent and it hit him like heat haze rising from a tarred road. Sunscreen predominated, with afternotes of hot, clean hair and sun-dried cotton. Why should things like that smell so good? He was more accustomed to designer perfume, but his body told him that this was better.
Way better.
“Look for a slash of paler color. A lightning bolt opened up the trunk like matchwood this summer.”
“Okay, got it,” he answered. His shoulder brushed against her back, and he felt a flicker of movement from her. Vibration, rather than movement. She didn’t ease away, and her voice rose in pitch, dropped in volume and filled with breath.
No doubt. She felt it, too.
“Directly behind it, you can see the roof of the cabin, in the fold of the next slope,” she said.
“Yes. Dark shingles, and the line of a window frame?” He could feel the swell and fall of her breathing, and he could still smell her hot, cottony, beachy fragrance.
“That’s it,” she told him. “It’s beautiful up there, but we hardly use the place anymore. My grandfather used to bring hunting parties up there all the time.”
“Show me tomorrow?”
“Do you ride?”
“Some. When I can.”
“Then we’ll ride up. After the trip to Steamboat Springs in the morning.”
“Sounds great.” He turned his face ninety degrees in her direction and grinned at her.
He was just inches away from her, now, and was sorely tempted to move even closer, to see what she’d do, to test this powerful pull. Her eyes were like mist over ocean, or rain on a summer pond. His shoulder slid across her spine with slow, deliberate pressure, and he stepped back, before she could fight him.
No, before she could lean into him. Yes, that’s what she would have done, he realized. She would have leaned against him. She knew it, and though a part of her wasn’t happy about that, the rest of her didn’t care.
He didn’t push the moment, or push her reaction. He didn’t particularly want to get slapped in the face right now, and a slap in the face was a definite possibility. Nor did he want to add any more of an emotional element to a potential business transaction that had already become too personal for his taste.
He wasn’t used to this.
“I think I’ve seen enough for today,” he told her, and he meant Reba herself as much as he meant her ranch.
Chapter Three
“T ell me what you regret about last November,” Lucas said to Reba. “What should I have done differently? What would you have done differently? Tell me what you resent in how I handled everything from the very beginning, September included.”
His eyes flicked to Reba’s pregnant stomach and he frowned. They hadn’t gotten to the nitty gritty, yet. They were both still caught up in memories about their first meeting that were still achingly vivid, even after almost six months.
Reba searched for the right answer to his question, while the nagging, belt-tightening ache in her back and stomach notched a little higher on the pain scale, slower to let go, this time. She didn’t like it. It made her uneasy. She reached for the inadequate chair at the manager’s desk and eased herself into it, making it squeak, just as the door opened, hard on the sound of a token knock.
“Gordie’s here, looking for you,” one of the waitresses said.
Churned up and uneasy, she couldn’t school the impatience out of her voice. “Oh, now?”
“What shall I tell him?”
“Tell him I’m— Tell him—”
“Tell him to wake up to the fact that he’s not wanted, and hasn’t been for eight months or more,” Lucas answered for her, then revised at once, “No, just tell him she’s not here. Let him work out the rest for himself.” The waitress nodded, the door closed, and he added to Reba, “McConnell’s still around. Is he back in the picture, then?”
“No, he’s not.”
Reba felt quite positive on this subject.
Gordie himself vacillated like waterweed in a river current, however. His attitude back in September had pushed her right into Lucas’s arms, she sometimes felt. He’d hung around the steakhouse, the way he still hung around. He’d given with one hand and taken away with the other, and he was still doing it.
After showing Lucas around the ranch that first day, she’d worked a shift at the steakhouse the same night, venting her complicated feelings about the sale and the man by throwing her steaks roughly around the grill. It hadn’t helped. She was still feeling tense and angry and confused when Gordie had sloped into the kitchen to hang out with her, and maybe that was the real point where it had all started with Lucas…
“Hi, Reb.” Gordie had dragged a stool in from the bar and positioned himself on it in front of the big freezer. He already had a light beer in his hand.
“Hi, yourself,” Reba had answered. Her smile was an effort. “No food in your fridge, tonight?”
She tried to make it into a tease, but found it irritating that he still came in here like this, so often. And she was tired, after too much tension with Lucas Halliday today, while she’d showed him over the ranch, so she had to fight to hide the irritation.
She and Gordie had broken up two months ago, for heaven’s sake! Maybe she should be pleased that they could still be friends, as far as he was concerned. True, she did feel a certain degree of relief. She wouldn’t want to think that she’d hurt him so badly he couldn’t stand her company. In a small ranching town like Biggins, when she cooked four shifts a week at the only decent restaurant, that would be awkward for a whole lot of people.
But it made her uncomfortable that his routine had been so little changed by her calling off their engagement. He should have started serial dating around three counties, or something. He should have brought strange blondes in here to dangle in front of her, every week. He should at least have had his hair cut different, and bought a couple of new shirts.
Like I’ve done any of that? she scolded herself, as she watched him take a gulp of his beer.
“I’ve been thinking, Reb,” he said, ruffling his choppy dark hair at the back with his spare hand. It stuck up after he’d finished with it, definitely getting too long.
He was the only person who called her Reb. She didn’t mind it from him. She didn’t challenge the statement that he’d been thinking, either. He had a good brain, especially for figures. She didn’t possess one herself. He had statistics on his computer, relating to the McConnell ranch, that even her father wouldn’t have thought to tabulate. He spent a lot of time on the Internet, which apparently made money for him, she wasn’t even sure how. And he could ride as if his thighs were part of the horse.
“Yeah?” she answered, slinging three steaks on the grill.
“You’ve got a buyer sniffing around, right?”
“He seems interested. But he’s a businessman. Pretty hardheaded.” Enough to bulldoze my family home. “He’s not going to make a spur-of-the-moment decision. He wants to see more tomorrow, so I’m taking him down to Steamboat, and up to the cabin.”
“Because I’ve been thinking.”
“You said that.” She smiled, to soften the statement, and wished once again that he wasn’t here. Or that he was somehow different. Tougher? With more emotional perception in his heart?
“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.”
Lucas let Reba go ahead of him, watching the tight way she held her body, the tight way she walked. He wanted to tell her it was okay, he wasn’t going to get put off a major purchase because of one outdated hunting shack.
And even if he did decide against the place, on his father’s behalf, Jim Broadbent was right. A buyer would show up soon. She could relax. Meanwhile, whatever happened with the sale, he had no intention of riding rough-shod over her feelings.
He almost reached out to her with the same touch of support and understanding that she’d rejected yesterday when they’d spotted the dead beast, but she was too far in front, and the chance was lost.
For the moment.
But after the way she’d flirted with him in the car, his whole body was primed by the physical stretch of the recent ride and ached for its next opportunity.
The cabin wasn’t locked, of course. The porch floorboards resonated beneath her feet, and by the time he’d stepped onto it behind her, she’d rattled the old door handle and swung the door open. He’d expected a dusty, musty interior, with dirt-misted window panes, uneven floors and shabby furnishings, but it wasn’t like that at all.
“I came up here two days ago, cleaned it and aired it out,” she explained. She’d even put fresh flowers in a couple of vases. There was the smell of lavender in the air. The furniture was old, true, but of good quality, and there were new throw pillows and slipcovers on the couch and two armchairs. The kitchen, also, must have been modernized only about ten years ago.
The old fireplace had been replaced with a modern, glass-fronted wood-burning stove. It was fan-forced, and would give out fantastic heat. You could slide the Persian-style rug closer, arrange the throw pillows in a heap on top, and sit here in front of it.
Toasting marshmallows.
Baking potatoes wrapped in foil.
Making love.
Hard to imagine, on an eighty-five-degree day, that such heat could be needed, but Lucas knew that temperatures could drop to thirty below, up here. Raine’s white Christmas was a pretty safe bet.
The rooms were way too cramped for Raine’s taste, though. He and Reba stood within touching distance because they had little choice. The windows were too small and the ceilings were too low. His stepmother would claim claustrophobia and boredom within a day.
Bulldoze the log cabin, too?
Absolutely not! Raine could build a new one, open plan, with twenty-foot ceilings, acres of glass and satellite TV, in some ostentatious location. Lucas would lay claim to this place for himself—his cut of the purchase, his finder’s fee. It was an irrational, emotional impulse, and he wasn’t sure why he felt it so strongly. He knew it didn’t make sense. He knew it wasn’t even his decision to make.
What was happening, here?
Too much.
More than flirtation.
Already, he understood more than he wanted to about why Reba’s roots ran so deep into this soil.
“Do you want to see upstairs?” she asked him.
“Please.” Sounded as if he were begging, and maybe he was.
She went ahead, denim rear end rocking as usual, and he followed closely, unable to tear himself free of her aura, so that when she suddenly turned and spoke, he was right behind. “I should have showed you the—”
The point she broke off was the point where his hand landed on her hip. Her body softened in an instant, and swayed toward him. Her eyes widened and went dark. Since he was one step below, her mouth was level with his, and only an inch away. He could feel her breath cooling his lip. She didn’t attempt to increase the distance.
Good.
They’d gotten to this, at last.
He hadn’t been sure that they would, and her huge eyes told him it might already be more than she’d expected.
He anchored her other hip in place, to keep the rest of her where she was, and watched her lips press together, then part again. She had another, more determined and even more doomed attempt at saying what she’d wanted to say before. “While we were downstairs, I should have showed you the—” Then she stopped again.
“Just show me the bedroom.” His voice rasped, and the last word lost itself on her mouth.
Her lips were as warm and sweet as ripe fruit. They responded just the way he’d known they would. He closed his eyes. He didn’t want to look, he only wanted to taste and feel. She stayed in place, thighs pressed to his groin, which meant she had to know just what her body had already done to him.
Oh, yes, she knew! She was overwhelmed by it, but she knew.
Did she know that she’d begun to shimmy against him, too? Her hips slid and rocked, slid and rocked. The movement went just an inch or two either way, and was oh-so-slow, but it made him throb and want to lunge. Her breasts, in their thin covering of lace and stretch cotton, jutted softly against his chest and he imagined her nipples, pebbled as hard as he was, from the slow friction between them.
How would they look, her nipples? Puckered with need? Definitely! Big and dark, or dainty and pink? He didn’t care either way, he just wanted to know, see, touch and kiss.
“Show me the bed,” he said.
Without waiting for her answer, he deepened the kiss, tangling his tongue in her mouth. He tasted the fresh, sweet apple she’d withheld from the horses several minutes ago. He abandoned her hips and slid his hands higher, trailed his fingertips across her breasts and thought, “Yes! I knew it. Like cherry stones.”
She sank back with her spine arched. Suddenly she was seated on the wooden tread of the stairs, reaching up for him, eyes half-closed and hair threatening to tumble from its high knot. He went after her, chasing the taste of her mouth, chasing her body heat. He ended up bracing his fingers on the stair edge, his weight looming over her.
She pulled him lower. His face fell between her breasts and she gasped and threw her head to one side. He felt the heat-perfumed mass of her hair drift onto his hand. The soft mounds of her breasts against his cheeks and nose and lips felt like warm satin.
Her thighs parted and squeezed his ribs, half supporting him while he rolled a little. He slid her top up, clumsy with desire. Cupping her with one hand, he thumbed her hardened nipple, then replaced his thumb with his mouth, through a lace and net bra.
She dragged herself back, higher up the stairs, and held his face between her hands. Her eyes were still enormous, filled with a wild light and a soft flame of doubt. Throbbing, damming himself back, he realized she was still debating this. He pressed his lips together, struggling with a code of honor that said it had to be her own decision, made freely.
“Okay, I’ll show you the bed,” she said at last, on another gasp of air.
Her fingers feathered up his neck and into his hair and she stretched to kiss him, her mouth hungry and full of promise. Lucas discovered he was shaking, and that he hadn’t breathed for the entire time she’d studied his face.
They scrambled the rest of the way up the stairs, breathless. There were just two bedrooms built into the roof line, both of them small, and he had to duck his head through the low doorway of the slightly larger one. Beside a double bed covered in fresh white sheets and a faded patchwork quilt, Reba crossed her arms, pulled her tank top over her head and unsnapped her bra.
Both garments fell to the floor in a pale heap and she turned to face him, straight-backed, arms at her sides, giving him the sight of her bare breasts and peaked nipples like a gift. Her eyes were huge and her breath came in shallow pants.
And he knew so totally that she just—didn’t—do—this, she just didn’t bring men to this cabin to make love, on a regular basis, or ever. Letting her make the decision on her own wasn’t enough.
Not with a woman like Reba.
He knew what he wanted. Even if the corporation didn’t buy the ranch, he wanted a piece of it to take away with him. He wanted a piece of Reba Grant, her passion and her intensity, to take away with him in the form of his memory of how she’d feel in his arms, writhing beneath his touch.
But knowing what he wanted wasn’t good enough.
Instead of wrapping himself around her as he wanted to, instead of lifting her against him and pulling at her jeans, he allowed himself just one soft brush of his knuckles across those jutting gifts. They were fuller and rounder than he’d expected them to be, with the crests even bigger and darker than his imagination had painted them.
Then he placed his hands on the knobs of her shoulders, looked into her eyes and said, “Wait.”
She seemed to understand exactly why he’d stopped. Instead of taking it as a way out, however, or even giving herself any further pause for thought, she lifted her chin, looked at him with narrowed, glittering eyes and said, “No.”
“Why, Reba?”
“Because I want this. And so do you. Don’t ask questions. Do me the courtesy of believing I know what I want.”
“I’m not offering anything beyond—”
“I’m not asking for anything beyond. This is now. That’s all. It’s more than I—way more than I expected, even an hour ago, but—” she made her hand into a fist over her stomach “—it feels right, here. It feels necessary.”
For another moment Lucas hesitated, and Reba felt the possibility of rejection slam into her.
Could he?
He couldn’t!
He wanted this every bit as much as she did. She knew that. He hadn’t denied it. The only way he’d reject her would be if some decent, chivalrous, protective instinct overcame him, and he decided that his making love to her right now was a favor she’d be better off without.
Despite the depth she’d glimpsed in him yesterday, Reba wasn’t convinced that a corporate prince like Lucas Halliday possessed any such chivalrous instincts. She certainly didn’t want him to possess them, right now. Gordie McConnell had them, and she was sick of them! Lucas was accurate in what he suspected about her narrow previous experience, and she didn’t want that to get in the way.
Yes, Lucas, you’re right, I’ve never done anything like this before.
Anything like this.
She and Gordie had made love, yes, but Gordie would never have done so in the middle of a working day, with no advance planning, in a location not previously designated as appropriate. And that burned her. So much about her life, and the crossroads she’d reached in it, burned her right now.
Dear Lord, she was nearly twenty-seven years old, she was about to have her home pulled out from under her like an old blanket off a horse’s back. She was going to make love to Lucas now—a rough analysis of her mental calendar told her it should be safe—and she’d think about the ramifications later. She was going to do this before something in her soul atrophied into dry wood and she lost the ability to even imagine a different life for herself, let alone go out and find it!
“There’s no doubt you know what you want.” Lucas’s voice caught on several of his words, and she felt his gaze on her peaked nipples like a caress. “Don’t you care what I want?”
“If you don’t want this…me…my body, then there’s been something very wrong with your signals, since yesterday.” She drew in a deep breath, felt her breasts lift, saw his tongue lap against his lower lip. His jeans strained at the front. He stepped closer to her, but not close enough.
“I’m talking about the ranch,” he said.
“You think this is about—” Anger tightened her scalp. She dragged in a shaky breath and tried again. “You think I’m trying to sell you the ranch, right now, with this? That’s— That’s—”
“No! Hell, no, Reba!” Another step, urgent, that brought him toe to toe against her. He slid his hands up to her elbows. “I just wanted you to consider whether doing this—making love—” the word melted on his tongue like syrup “—would feel different if you knew my decision on the purchase.”
Again, she didn’t hesitate. “If you’ve made a decision, I don’t want to know. Because it wouldn’t make a difference. Okay?”
He nodded, touched her hair, her neck, let his hand trail lower, and bent his head to her mouth. “Yeah, you’re right, I guess,” he said, on a soft growl. “Wouldn’t make a difference to me, either.”
For the first time, she held him. She ran her palms up his strong back, and learned the pattern of his muscles, on either side of his spine. She helped him wrench the unwanted T-shirt up and over his head, put her tongue to her fingertip then, looking down, touched the moisture to his nipples. They hardened into little beads as it evaporated, and she felt a coil of pleasure and satisfaction deep inside.
She could do this to a man. She could do this to Lucas Halliday. And she wanted to do a whole lot more.
“Tell me what you like,” she said, branding him with kisses between every phrase. “Show me. Touch me in all the places you want. With your hands. With your mouth. Teach me, Lucas.”
“Hell, haven’t you ever—?”
“Yes. Yes, I have. But not like this. Nothing like this.” She reached for the front of his pants, fumbling a little as she snapped them open. She began to ease the zipper down, and he took a hissing breath. “Did I catch you?” she asked.
“No. Keep going. Yes, like that.”
She did, even more slowly, feeling the straining ridge of cloth and man pushing at her hand. When he was free, she slid trousers and underwear down in one movement. She dropped low in front of him and let her mouth explore the texture of his thigh on the way. She knew exactly where he wanted to be touched, but kept that pleasure from him, stringing it out.
He couldn’t stand it, pulled her back up and hauled her toward him so that they were pressed together from her breasts to her knees. His thigh eased between her legs, and she knew how hot she must feel to him, how full and ready.
“Take off your boots and your jeans,” he said. “Let me look at you.”
The old bed creaked as he sat and levered his own boots off. He kicked them beneath the bed, beyond the hem of the quilt, and she did the same. Then he watched while she shimmied her jeans down her hips, and she could tell he liked everything he saw.
“I didn’t…uh…come equipped for this,” he said, reaching for her. “If we need to set limits, can we set them now?”
“It’s okay. The timing is— No limits.” She brushed his mouth with hers, lifted his hands and brought them to her breasts.
“None?”
“Anything that feels good. Anything that’s a part of this.”
“Touching you, Reba, that’s everything.”
They kissed until her bones softened to liquid, and she no longer knew where her body ended and his began. His mouth was everywhere. She gripped him the way she’d have gripped a bolting horse, only who was bolting, who was out of control? Him, or her?
She leaned back on her hands and he knelt in front of her, on the braided woollen rug, trailing his lips down her jaw, her neck, to her breasts and beyond, to her sweet core. She bucked and twisted and sank into the bed, clenched her fists against the flood that swept her away, then felt him slide higher and seek entry. She was so swollen and ready that he slipped into her in a single movement, and a sound wrenched out of him, making his body vibrate against her chest.
“Reba, you’re so beautiful, so strong. The way you moved just now…”
He thrust and she rocked, clinging to him, digging her fingers into the muscles of his back. She loved his weight on top of her and the almond smell of his hair in every breath she took.
Their climax came freely, and ebbed in a series of aftershocks that jerked both their bodies like whips. Reba didn’t know what to say, whether to say anything at all, so she kissed him again, touching her mouth to his softly, as if each kiss was a word of tenderness or thanks.
“Hey…” he finally whispered.
“Hey,” she answered back.
Chapter Four
“Y ou okay?” Lucas asked. He was watching the way Reba winced and shifted in the unforgiving, creaky office chair, his eyes bright with perception, as usual—perception and suspicion.
And, yes, okay, she didn’t feel very comfortable right now. Who could, with this tightness coming and going? The pregnancy book she’d bought talked about false contractions—irregular, tight rather than painful, normal and nothing to worry about. This was apparently them, and normal or not, she didn’t like them.
There wasn’t a lot of tenderness in Lucas’s question, she noted. The hard, calculating shell of a successful business man appeared to be back in place, making Reba question the other qualities she had thought she’d discovered in him last September, as well as the heat and exhilaration and happiness she would have sworn they’d both felt, the first time they’d made love.
“My back’s a little sore, that’s all,” she answered him, playing it down. “I’ve been on my feet a bit too long tonight.”
As soon as she’d waded through this confrontation with Lucas, she would ask Carla about the way her body felt and the way it should feel. She would consult the doctor, give in her notice to the steakhouse management tomorrow, spend the next three months flat out in bed, if she had to.
“You’re looking after yourself, I hope,” Lucas said. “You’re getting the proper prenatal care?” Again, it sounded like an accusation, rather than a sign of his concern. Where was the man who’d lain in bed with her, so hungry and so tender?
Reba lifted her chin. “The doctor thinks I’m doing great, especially considering the one I lost.”
“Is that what happened? Is that possible?”
“Yes!” Her scalp prickled with anger, and acid rushed up into her throat. She carried a child fathered by a stranger, it seemed. “I lost this baby’s twin, although I didn’t realize I was still pregnant for another month and a half. Good grief, Lucas, you couldn’t possibly believe I staged it, could you? Staged any of it? How could I?”
He shook his head and closed his eyes, as if totally at a loss, and images of last year flashed through their minds, once again. September and November, Indian summer and winter’s first chill. They’d known too many different emotions together, in too short a time…
Reba sat in the Indian summer shade on the bank of the creek and watched Lucas casting his line for trout. He stood in the water in thigh-high wading boots borrowed from her father, with his legs braced wide against the current. The muscles in his back rippled and tightened as he whipped his body back then forward to make the cast.
For half a second, the nylon filament caught the sun and made a scribble of light against a background of cool green shade, then the delicate fly silently hit the water and the line disappeared. Lucas’s whole focus arrowed to the task of working the rod and the line.
Reba’s breath caught and tightened in her chest as she watched him. It was like vertigo, and she was frightened of it—not sorry that he would be leaving tomorrow morning. She would need some space by then, and some time to think without the storm of sensual distraction that built inside her whenever she was with him.
This relationship wasn’t meant to last.
They both knew that.
It’s a turning point, that’s all, she thought. A window thrown open in my mind.
Lucas had already caught three good-size fish, enough to cook and eat outdoors for lunch, over an open fire. In the expectation that he would fish as well as he seemed to do everything else, Reba had packed the pickup truck with the appropriate accompaniments, and soon they would drive the mountain track up to the cabin, where her grandfather had once made the ring of stones that the Grant family had been using as a picnic hearth on summer days for nearly fifty years.
And she had no doubt as to what she and Lucas would do up there after the meal was over.
For the last time?
They ate the fresh fish with bread and butter and salt and lemon, washed down with ice-cold mouthfuls of light beer, and then they didn’t have to say a word, they just doused the fire, opened the door of the cabin and went upstairs.
In the small, tidy bedroom, Reba wondered if she’d ever be able to come to this place again without thinking of Lucas. Their awareness of each other, and their impatience, seemed to crowd the air and make it sing.
She knew she’d remember it every time she saw the dappled light dancing through the windows as a breeze moved the tree branches, every time she smelled the scent of lavender, because of the flowers she’d put here and the homemade sachets that scented the cotton sheets.
Pulling her top over her head, she felt Lucas’s touch sear across her body. His hands curved around her ribs, brushed across her breasts, made her neck tingle. They tried to help each other undress, but just ended up laughing and kissing, fighting their uncooperative clothing.
“Are we in a hurry, here, or something?” he whispered.
“So slow down.”
“Can’t.”
“Neither can I.”
They only managed to do that when they got to the really important part—the part where they couldn’t talk anymore, because their breathing was coming too fast and every sense was too overwhelmed. Then he held her and slid into her with a teasing control that had her pulling at him, crying out for more, until they both exploded, with pulses of light behind her closed lids like fireworks, or stars.
That night, she drove into Biggins, parked her pickup quietly in the far corner of the steakhouse parking lot and slipped across Main Street to Lucas’s motel. He took her into Cheyenne for a long, slow meal and then brought her back again.
“I’ll need to head out of here pretty early tomorrow to make my flight to New York,” he told her, at the door of his room.
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Lilian Darcy
SURPRISE PACKAGE!When Lucas Halliday saw Reba Grant for the first time in months, he was in for a shock: Reba was pregnant–with his baby–and she'd just gone into labor!Reba couldn't believe it–this baby was coming way too early. And Lucas was hardly supposed to be her birthing partner. For she'd thought–and feared?–that she'd seen the last of the billionaire businessman, despite all that had happened between them. Now, with their tiny daughter fighting for survival, Reba was surprised to realize Lucas was a loving, devoted father. And that gave her hope–that maybe Lucas had potential as a husband, too….
He’d already asked the nurse a hundred questions.
He hadn’t sat down.
He’d asked if there were information booklets he could read, Internet sites he could look up, doctors he could talk to—as if their baby’s health and survival depended on him knowing everything there was to know about state-of-the-art preemie treatment, the way his business success depended on him knowing everything about a particular company or market.
It grated on Reba’s red raw nerves, and she wanted to yell at Lucas, “How is this going to help? Is this what our daughter really needs from you?”
But nobody yelled at the NICU, and she wouldn’t yell at the father of her baby, who was here, when she hadn’t had a clue, eight hours ago, just how much she would need him.
And just how close to him she would feel.
Dear Reader,
Get ready to counter the unpredictable weather outside with a lot of reading inside. And at Silhouette Special Edition we’re happy to start you off with Prescription: Love by Pamela Toth, the next in our MONTANA MAVERICKS: GOLD RUSH GROOMS continuity. When a visiting medical resident—a gorgeous California girl—winds up assigned to Thunder Canyon General Hospital, she thinks of it as a temporary detour—until she meets the town’s most eligible doctor! He soon has her thinking about settling down—permanently….
Crystal Green’s A Tycoon in Texas, the next in THE FORTUNES OF TEXAS: REUNION continuity, features a workaholic businesswoman whose concentration is suddenly shaken by her devastatingly handsome new boss. Reader favorite Marie Ferrarella begins a new miniseries, THE CAMEO—about a necklace with special romantic powers—with Because a Husband Is Forever, in which a talk show hostess is coerced into taking on a bodyguard. Only, she had no idea he’d take his job title literally! In Their Baby Miracle by Lilian Darcy, a couple who’d called it quits months ago is brought back together by the premature birth of their child. Patricia Kay’s You’ve Got Game, next in her miniseries THE HATHAWAYS OF MORGAN CREEK, gives us a couple who are constantly at each other’s throats in real life—but their online relationship is another story altogether. And in Picking Up the Pieces by Barbara Gale, a world-famous journalist and a former top model risk scandal by following their hearts instead of their heads….
Enjoy them all, and please come back next month for six sensational romances, all from Silhouette Special Edition!
All the best,
Gail Chasan
Senior Editor
Their Baby Miracle
Lilian Darcy
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
LILIAN DARCY
has written over fifty books for Silhouette Romance, Special Edition and Harlequin Medical Romance (Prescription Romance). Her first book for Silhouette appeared on the Waldenbooks Series Romance Bestsellers list, and she’s hoping readers go on responding strongly to her work. Happily married with four active children and a very patient cat, she enjoys keeping busy and could probably fill several more lifetimes with the things she likes to do—including cooking, gardening, quilting, drawing and traveling. She currently lives in Australia but travels to the United States as often as possible to visit family. Lilian loves to hear from readers. You can write to her at P.O. Box 381, Hackensack NJ 07602 or e-mail her at lildarcy@austarmetro.com.au.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter One
M arch in Biggins, Wyoming was cold.
Lucas could feel the threat of snow hanging in the air as he climbed out of the top-of-the-range SUV his father had bought late last year for tooling around the Halliday Corporation’s newest ranch. Across the street, the Longhorn Steakhouse beckoned warm and bright, and he ignored his uncharacteristic hesitation about going in.
Reba Grant would probably be there, working the big grill in the kitchen, behind the swing doors. He’d come here in the hope of seeing her—needing to see her, somehow—but that didn’t mean he looked forward to it. He knew it was likely to be a prickly and emotional meeting, uncomfortable for both of them.
Pushing open the door, he was greeted by warm air that smelled of good food and fresh coffee, and by Friday night crowds that might camouflage his arrival for a little longer, if he wanted more time. A red-haired waitress showed him to a small table in the corner. She moved with harried efficiency, snapping a menu in front of him, and asking if he wanted something to drink.
“Just water, thanks.”
“Coming right up.”
Her smile was short and small and landed somewhere over his left shoulder because she’d already turned away, which was just the way Reba had smiled at him the last time they’d met face to face, just before Christmas. They’d only had a short conversation, and it had felt awkward. He’d sensed her hostility. About a week after that, he’d seen her here in town and he was ninety-five percent sure that she’d seen him, too, but she’d quickly crossed the street and disappeared into the hardware store and they hadn’t talked.
No, he didn’t want more time.
They needed to talk tonight.
Having spent most of the past two and a half months at his home base in New York working fifteen-hour days on Halliday corporate business, Lucas had been slow to reach this decision, but he was right on top of it now.
They definitely needed to talk.
Reba had no right to feel hostile, but apparently she did, and that could surely only mean one thing. She had no idea how much Lucas had shared her own grief for what they’d lost in November.
He needed to tell her about his grief, here on her own territory, and they both needed to achieve some kind of closure and a way to handle the casual dealings they might occasionally need to have with each other in the future, now that he planned to spend more time at Seven Mile Ranch.
Hang on, casual dealings?
He questioned this word choice as soon as it flipped into his mind.
There had never been anything casual about Reba Grant, and it wasn’t a word people often applied to Lucas himself, either. There certainly hadn’t been anything casual about the way they’d first connected six months ago, back in September. Just because neither of them had wanted or envisaged—or had had the courage and imagination to consider, was that it?—a future to their immediate attraction, that didn’t mean it had been casual.
He looked at the waitress again, at her full tables and her waiting clientele. She had a strong, compact build, must only be in her late twenties—around Reba’s age—and seemed to have no trouble handling the workload. Just before the smile, she had thrown him a curious glance that suggested she knew exactly who he was, but still she would probably be a while getting back to him, the Halliday name notwithstanding.
If Reba was working tonight, she would be run off her feet, too. Maybe he should wait before seeking her out, but he didn’t want to. He’d only flown in from New York this afternoon, and he wanted to get this issue tabled and dealt with as soon as possible.
He mentally decided on his order and watched the waitress disappear through the swing door to the kitchen, taking another table’s empty plates. With one elbow, she held it open for a second waitress, heading in the opposite direction. He glimpsed the choreographed chaos centered around the grill and the fryer, and yes, there was Reba’s back view. He recognized it easily—the odd combination of grace and toughness in the way she held herself, the glossy mass of her dark hair.
Remembered desire flooded him like a tide.
Remembered fulfilment, too.
He knew how wildly that body moved in ecstasy. He remembered the creamy color and silky texture of her skin beneath her clothes, as if he’d seen and touched her yesterday. He knew the way her hair smelled, so simple and fragrant and good, and the throaty sound of her laugh.
Yes, that was definitely Reba.
Then, as the door swung closed again, she half-turned in order to reach for something, and for a moment he almost thought…
No.
Impossible.
But he kept watching the door, and he stood up at his table, to get a better view.
The door opened again within seconds, and this time what he saw left him in no doubt.
Reba was pregnant.
Still.
When he’d believed until this moment that she’d lost their baby in a miscarriage during her first trimester late last year.
“Somebody wants to talk to you,” Reba heard, but hardly took in which of the waitresses was speaking—definitely not Carla—because the woman had already disappeared again, carrying a pile of plates.
She looked up from the grill, and Lucas Halliday stood there, turned to stone just as she’d known he would, the moment they encountered each other again. He had the same instant, powerful effect on her senses that she remembered with an intensity that was almost like pain, and deep down this didn’t surprise her, either.
He looked every bit as angry as she’d expected, too, although she would challenge his right to feel that way, with all the energy she could muster.
“This isn’t a good time, Lucas,” she said, steady-voiced.
“From your perspective, maybe. From mine, it’s a very good time.” He shot a cold glance down at her bulging stomach. “You have a hell of a lot of explaining to do, Reba, overdue since we saw each other before Christmas, and I don’t see why I should wait any longer.”
“We’re run off our feet.” Her body had been telling her so for an hour or more. Her stomach ached below the hard, rounded jut of her growing pregnancy. It was a dull sort of ache that tightened around her like an uncomfortable belt then eased, which meant that she forgot about it as she worked, then remembered it when it came again.
“Take a break, Reba.” Her best friend Carla suddenly appeared, and touched her arm with a concerned gesture. She must already have seen that Lucas was here and she’d been hovering, waiting to step in when Reba needed her.
The two of them had known each other since school. Carla worked here as a waitress, and she had two children, one of them still a baby. Had she felt this same nagging ache at this point during her pregnancies? Both times, she’d worked until just a couple of weeks before the babies were due, but she’d never mentioned any problems or pains.
“I’m not scheduled for a break,” Reba answered her friend.
Carla took no notice. “You need to talk to him,” she said in a low voice. “Might as well make it now. The guy looks as if he can’t decide whether to faint or punch a wall.”
“Carla…”
Lucas was still standing there, stony and angry and shocked, ready to erupt as soon as he could get her alone.
“Twice you’ve thought it was over between the two of you, right?” Carla muttered. “Once in September, by mutual agreement, then again when you miscarried the twin in November. You have a history with him, Reba.”
“And a future, too.” Reba closed her eyes. Some kind of future, good or bad. He was the father of this baby, and it was already clear to her that he wasn’t going to let the issue go. “Okay, Carla, I know.”
“Gordie not in tonight, Reba?” The steakhouse’s newest waitress slipped by and threw the cheerful, familiar question at her, apparently oblivious to a tension in the air that had nothing to do with Gordie McConnell. Reba’s long relationship with Gordie had been over for more than eight months, although Gordie and half of Biggins didn’t seem to have gotten this straight in their heads, yet.
Reba gritted her teeth. “Haven’t seen him, Dee,” she answered.
Carla hissed in her ear, “Go. Now. Manager’s office. Your place, even. Talk to Lucas. Before Gordie does show up and make this even harder.” She stole the metal steak flipper out of Reba’s hand and pushed her toward the swing door. “Someone else can cover for you.”
“I have a table in the corner,” Lucas offered, his voice cold and his body wound tight.
“No. I’m not talking about this here, in front of half of Biggins,” Reba answered him. “We’ll go into the manager’s office, like Carla suggested.” She began to move in that direction at once, and he followed her, practically breathing down her neck.
“I’m glad you appreciate that we have some talking to do,” he said.
“It would be a little pointless to deny it, at this stage.”
“But you were planning to, if I hadn’t shown up.”
“No, I guess I knew you’d have to find out eventually. I was hoping it wouldn’t be until after the baby was born. And I should make it clear to you, Lucas, I don’t consider that you’re involved.”
“How in hell can I not be involved? Is this why you were so cool before Christmas? You were afraid I’d guess?”
“No. I didn’t know, then. I was angry, and I had good reason to be.”
But he’d focused on her first words, not her claim about anger. “You didn’t know? That doesn’t make sense.”
“It will in a minute.” She opened the manager’s office.
“Good, because I’m keen to hear,” he drawled, his voice as hard as whetstone. He entered the cramped office behind her and shut the door with a snap. The noise level from the restaurant fell away. “What I’m seeing is impossible. So start from the beginning. Tell me how in hell you staged that scene at the restaurant in Cheyenne, and at the hospital. Never mind my untrained eye, how did you convince a doctor that you’d lost the baby?”
She shook her head. “I can’t believe you think I’d do that.”
“I wouldn’t, without the evidence. But I tend to trust facts, not feelings.”
“I never staged anything, Lucas.” She turned to face him, feeling that strange and almost painful belt-tightening feeling again, around her stomach and across her back. As usual, it soon faded. Her desire for a comfortable chair and a pillow to support her lower spine remained, destined to stay unfulfilled.
With its littered desk and single chair, the office was way too cluttered for this confrontation, but she was glad she’d chosen privacy over space, all the same. Lucas Halliday still looked too good, in her eyes, still filled her with all the wildly contrasting feelings he’d generated in her almost six months ago, and again in November. Anger and resentment, unwilling interest in just what made him tick, steaming attraction, dawning respect.
“And that’s not the beginning, anyhow, and you know it,” she finished.
“So start with your definition of the beginning,” he said. “That first afternoon in the cabin? The night we tried to say goodbye at the door of my motel room? The day you came to see me out at the ranch in November?”
“None of those times.”
“No, I guess not. I guess it goes farther back, doesn’t it?”
Their eyes locked together. His looked dark and clouded with multiple layers of memory, and she knew he would have to define “the beginning” the same way as she did—the day, last September, when they’d first met…
Chapter Two
L ucas Halliday had no problem with buying a ranch for his father. He’d already bought four of them, over the past two years. All four had proved good investments, with his own regular visits to oversee things, and with the right people in place to run them.
This new purchase, however, was different. Dad’s latest wife—the third since his long-ago divorce from Lucas’s mother—had developed a very pretty fantasy about buying a real cattle ranch to use as a fourth home. Fifth, if you counted the yacht.
Raine wanted watercolor mountain views, a Vogue Living log cabin, movie soundtrack mooing steers—odorless, naturally—and a Fountain of Youth fishing stream. Dad was happy to go along with all of that, as long as the ranch paid its own way, just like the others did.
Lucas had been tasked with locating this impossible combination. He’d narrowed the search to southern Wyoming, because of its relative proximity to Colorado ski resorts and the airline hub city of Denver, and eliminated two properties, sight unseen. If he couldn’t give Dad and Raine a good report on Seven Mile he planned to tell them they could continue the quest on their own. He preferred cool-headed corporate takeovers to fantasy fulfilment for spoiled stepmothers, any day.
Having told the realtor that he would need three days to look over the place properly, he intended to be out of Wyoming and on a plane back to New York within half a day if Seven Mile fell short of Broadbent’s glowing description.
He got into Denver on a late flight, rented a car, drove north through Fort Collins to Laramie to get a better impression of the region, then southwest to Biggins. By the time he’d checked into the town’s best motel and eaten a late and surprisingly good meal in the quietest corner of the Longhorn Steakhouse, he was pretty convinced he’d be heading out of here tomorrow.
Biggins had no clothing boutiques, and no craft galleries or antique stores. There were just three motels, two options for dining and a single beauty salon. Raine expected big city amenities at a stone’s throw from rural beauty, but she wasn’t going to get that here.
Jim Broadbent knocked on Lucas’s motel room door at eight-thirty the next morning, and they drove out to Seven Mile together. It was a pretty drive. The Medicine Bow Range dreamed in the distance. Rolling grasslands filled the foreground. The September grass was colored in the morning light like yellow chalk and fresh honey and clear-varnished pine floors.
Jim kept his conversation down to an intermittent trickle of facts about cattle breeds, growing seasons and water rights. An experienced realtor in his early fifties, the man gave the impression that he wouldn’t find this ranch too tough to sell, even in the unlikely event that Halliday Continental Holdings didn’t want it. He probably conveyed this same impression with every property he handled, and Lucas ignored it completely.
The mountains got closer. They passed the entrance to another property, and he had time to glimpse the name McConnell on the gate. Jim crossed a wide, shallow stream where the water ran silver over the rocks. Lucas knew that whatever attributes and advantages the Seven Mile Ranch might or might not have, it was going to be beautiful.
They turned onto a dirt road, and rumbled across several cattle guards. Ahead he saw a cluster of corrals and farm buildings, neat and modest and well-maintained. From this angle, they were almost lost beneath the enormous, soaring sky and looming mountain range.
“Who’s giving me the tour?” he asked Jim, as they approached the long, low ranch house, painted a faded barn red. “You?”
“I’m going to leave you with Joe Grant. Or his daughter.” Broadbent swung around and parked in the front yard at a crooked angle, then added, “Looks like it’s the daughter. Rebecca. Reba, everyone calls her.”
Rebecca Grant must have been sitting on the porch steps, waiting for their arrival. When Lucas caught sight of her emerging from the morning shadow cast by the house, she was still slapping her hands back and forth across the butt of her jeans to get rid of the dust.
She hadn’t dressed to impress, he noted, as her body hit the sun. Old Wranglers, scuffed boots, plaid flannel shirt. A swathe of dark hair hung around her face and partway down her back, glossy and healthy and natural.
As Lucas watched, she dragged a red circle of elastic from her pocket and pulled the mass of hair into a high ponytail at the back. The movement lifted her breasts inside the rumpled shirt and showed a glimpse of shadow on soft skin. She’d just completed the final twist of the elastic when she reached them.
“Hi,” she said. A wide smile jerked tight on her face and faded too soon. Mistrustful, ocean-toned eyes glinted like water.
“Reba,” answered Jim. “Beautiful morning.”
The realtor made introductions, and Reba chopped a hand in Lucas’s direction for him to shake. He complied, and felt the startling contrast of long, fine-boned feminine fingers and palms callused like cardboard.
“Is your Dad around?” Jim asked.
“He’s taken Mom into Cheyenne.”
“Doctor?”
She nodded, but didn’t say anything further on the subject.
“So you have a program mapped out for Mr. Halliday?”
“I thought we’d focus on the business side of the ranch today. The infrastructure. We’ll look at the recreational amenities tomorrow, Mr. Halliday, if you’re still interested in the place. We can take a drive down to Steamboat Springs, tour the far boundaries of the property. There’s a little cabin higher up, and you can get an idea of the fishing and gaming possibilities. If you’re still here after all that, we’ll take a closer look at the cattle.”
“Sounds good.”
“For now, we’ll start with the house,” she said, “since Mom’s not here to get disturbed by us coming through. Then the corrals, machinery sheds.”
“Forget about the house,” Lucas said, thinking aloud—insofar as he was thinking at all. Raine would be unimpressed with the ranch’s primary residence. She’d want it bulldozed to make way for something much grander. “It’ll have to come down, anyhow.”
Rebecca flinched and pressed her lips together, making her chin jut, and he realized that his statement had been cruel. She’d probably called this place home her whole life.
He couldn’t imagine what that would be like. Since his parents’ divorce when he was three, his mother had lived in four different homes, and his serially divorced and remarried father in…he’d lost count. At least seven. Lucas himself had shuttled back and forth between most of these so-called homes until going away to college at eighteen, but he’d never put down roots in any of them.
At one level, it had been fun, and yet… A faintly remembered sense of bewilderment and loss blew over his spirit, and for a few moments he almost envied Rebecca Grant.
Neck and jaw muscles tight with regret, he considered an apology, but that would only make his mistake worse. He wasn’t used to this kind of situation. His purchases and his takeovers didn’t usually have the power to hurt someone like this, on a personal, individual level.
The meaning of her jerky smile, mistrustful eyes and abrupt handshake became clear to him.
She didn’t want to sell.
“Would you like to stop in for coffee before we start, Jim?” Reba asked the realtor, but he shook his head. He was anxious to get out from under the awkward weight of atmosphere, probably.
“You’ll drop Mr. Halliday back to town when he’s ready, Reba?”
“Or Dad will.” Her voice was a little husky, and deeper than Lucas would have expected. It seemed to curl around him like a ribbon of scented smoke, drawing him in.
I should have driven the rental, he decided. Instead he’d listened to Jim’s warnings about dirt roads and confusing directions. Now he was beholden to prickly, intriguing Reba Grant in a way he didn’t like.
“Lucas, you’re going to be real impressed with this place.”
Jim offered the comment as he climbed into his vehicle. He roared out of the yard and back along the dirt track to the main road while Lucas was still, uncharacteristically, searching for the right reply. He really had no desire to hurt this woman, after the unthinking body blow he’d already delivered.
“Well, I’d like coffee,” she said, on a slow, stubborn drawl.
She turned on her heel and stalked toward the house, like a bad-tempered horse. Compared with the women he was used to, she didn’t walk with grace. Her movements were too angular, and too purposeful—blunt body language, surprisingly expressive.
Attractive, even.
Behind her, Lucas kept watching, for longer than he should.
“Sounds good,” he told her.
“So you’ll have to waste time on the house, after all,” she said sarcastically, over her shoulder.
“Listen, Ms. Grant—”
“You probably have no idea how it feels to care about a place like this, right?”
“No, you’re right, I don’t,” he answered, his voice clipped and tight.
“You probably think it’s only possible to care about a home with sixteen rooms and fifteen foot ceilings and priceless artwork on the walls.”
“Actually there’s no home I care about in that way.”
She stopped, turned fully, and stared at him for a moment. He stared back with narrowed eyes, masking the unexpected vulnerability he felt.
“Oh, well.” She sounded less defiant now, and her eyes had softened a little, although the words themselves were still an attack. “Maybe over your coffee you can work out the best angle for the wrecking ball, or something.”
He didn’t trouble to tell her that using a wrecking ball on this place would be like using a stonemason’s hammer on a thumb tack. In fact, they needn’t ’doze it at all. They could haul it to some less desirable position and use it as a bunkhouse for ranch hands or for the house staff Dad and Raine would require when they were in residence.
Yep, definitely. Ideal. Practical. Inexpensive—it would come right off its footings, and onto a truck. There was no basement.
Would moving it instead of wrecking it come as good news to Reba, after his initial blunt announcement? Lucas didn’t think so, somehow. This house looked as if it had grown in this spot, like lichen on a rock. She wouldn’t want it moved.
Ahead of him, she reached the screen door. It opened into a screened-in porch that ran across the house’s narrow front and around to the side. Her backside rocked as she pushed on the door and stepped inside, and he had to pull his gaze away.
There was something about her. You couldn’t call her pretty. And “beautiful” was such a loaded word. All the women he knew were beautiful. It didn’t fit her, either. But she definitely had something. A current of energy running in her veins, a kind of magnetism, and undeniable strength. Whatever report he gave his father about this place in the end, he knew he wasn’t going to be bored here today.
Rebecca led him into a big farm kitchen and he saw furniture comfortably worn from use, and huge windows showcasing views of the mountains. On the bench top, a coffeemaker sent out the aroma of ground beans steeped in boiling water. She slung the dark liquid into two mugs like a waitress. She didn’t ask him if he wanted cream or sugar, just raised the waxed carton, the china bowl and her eyebrows.
He shook his head. “Black, thanks.”
Was it his imagination, or did she add generous quantities of both cream and sugar to her own mug with a big dollop of attitude at the same time?
“There you go,” Reba said, as she slid the steaming beverage in Lucas Halliday’s direction.
She was glad Mom and Dad weren’t here. She squeezed another token smile onto her face, then let it drop as soon as it had fulfilled its contractual obligations. She didn’t want to sell this place.
If it wasn’t for her mother’s health, and the much easier life Mom would have down in Florida where her sister lived, it wouldn’t be happening. And if Reba hadn’t broken off her long-standing engagement to her ranching neighbor Gordie McConnell two months ago, it wouldn’t be happening, either. She and Gordie could have run the two ranches together, leaving Mom and Dad free to make their move, but she didn’t have the right skills to do it on her own.
She had known that showing potential buyers around her home would be hard, and she’d dreaded it, but the reality was even harder.
The reality was Lucas Halliday, corporate wheeler-dealer, heir to the family empire, dressed down in elastic-sided boots, jeans just old enough to fit right and a thin cotton sweater with a designer label subtly emblazoned on the left breast pocket.
He unsettled her. The way he moved, like a man accustomed to his road through life paying out as smooth as ribbon in front of him. The way he looked.
He wasn’t conventionally handsome. His top lip was fuller than the lower one, and his prominent cheekbones were slightly uneven. His nose had a bend in it, just below the bridge. His skin was a little rough, as if he’d had trouble with it in his teens. But he had amber brown eyes, a strong chin, hair the color of maple syrup with a handful of Atlantic sand tossed in and a body that could have sold gym equipment to any man in America.
Let him buy the ranch, if he wanted it. She hoped he would make the decision quickly, and get out of her life, out of her space.
He seemed to fill it too forcefully.
After taking a gulp of her coffee, she went through to the cramped room beyond the kitchen that Dad used as an office. She grabbed the pile of papers he had prepared. There were surveyors’ maps of the property, marked with various details, sheets of figures on fodder yields and winter feed requirements and the inventory of farm machinery included in the sale.
Piling all of it in front of Lucas at the kitchen table where he sat, she said, “Here. Maybe you’d like to take a look at some of this while you drink your coffee. So we don’t waste time.”
She stressed the word “we” just a little. She could have been out with the hands today, refencing the stackyards or putting out salt. Instead, she had to spend her time with a man who planned to bulldoze her home and didn’t mind telling her so.
Except that when she’d tried to attack back, she almost thought she’d seen a spark of something softer in him. Understanding. Or even a wistful kind of envy. It sparked an unwilling curiosity inside her, which smoldered slowly, the way a carelessly thrown cigarette butt smoldered in dry summer heat before setting a whole forest on fire.
He took a mouthful of coffee, which left a film of the thin black liquid glistening on his lower lip. Then he sat back in his chair and twisted a little, to take in the view. He hadn’t looked at the papers she’d given him.
“This is great,” he said. His big shoulder pushed to within a few inches of her hip. From this angle she could see the way his dark lashes silhouetted against his cheeks.
“I hope you mean the coffee.” She took a step back, out of his space.
“Actually I meant the whole—” He stopped.
She glared at him, silently daring him to mention bulldozers again.
You want to praise the vista from the windows of a house you’re planning to tear down, Mr. Halliday? I don’t think so!
“Yes, I mean the coffee,” he agreed. “Great coffee.”
His mouth closed firmly over the last word.
No smile.
He lifted his mug toward his lips, met her spark spitting eyes with his, and if there was any kind of apology there, any kind of understanding, or the vulnerability she thought she’d seen before, he didn’t let it show. His gaze held hers, narrow-eyed and thoughtful. Arm and mug froze midair.
She felt herself getting hot.
Aware.
She hadn’t ever responded physically to a man this fast, and didn’t know why it was happening. She’d met impressive looking men before. Was it the adrenaline of wanting to fight this one, over the ranch?
Gee, that made sense—to link attraction and fight.
“Look,” he said, “I know you probably would have preferred for Jim to give me this tour.”
“Might have helped.” She folded her arms across her chest and hunched her shoulders, resisting the pull she didn’t want. “I’ve lived here my whole life. I’m not looking forward to this.”
“It’s the selling and leaving, surely, not the thought of the changes a buyer will make.” His eyes were steady and clear. “Any buyer is going to make changes.”
“I’d prefer not to hear about them, if I don’t have to.”
“You’re going to stay in the area, right?”
“I plan to, yes, at this stage.” In fact, she still felt very uncertain about what she wanted from her future. She loved it here so much.
He shrugged, as if nothing more needed saying.
Okay, so he had a point. Burying her head in the sand would be impractical and impossible, if she stayed in Biggins. A buyer could make worse changes than bulldozing a very ordinary home that just happened to have been hers for twenty-six years, and her family’s for a lot longer.
She set her mouth tight, detesting Lucas Halliday for being right, for being up front about it like this, for making her nerve endings sing without even knowing it and for apparently understanding that bluntness was just a little easier on her spirit than empathy would have been.
“I’m sorry this task is falling to you,” he said. Each word came out measured and matter-of-fact. “But my father will expect the kind of detail I can only get from someone who really knows the place. If it’s any consolation, he’s not going to haggle over the price if I tell him this is the ranch he wants, and he’s keen to push the purchase through quickly.”
He spread his hands in a gesture that almost looked like an apology. “Raine, my stepmother, wants a white Christmas in a log cabin this year.”
“We can do the log cabin,” she answered, just as matter-of-fact. “No guarantees on the snow. There, you’ll have to negotiate with a higher power. Got any favors you can call in?”
He laughed. It should have eased the atmosphere, but it didn’t. Drinking her coffee in clumsy gulps, Reba watched him page through the documents and papers she’d laid out. He drank absently, giving the impression that he hardly tasted the strong brew, and he thudded the mug down on the table top between mouthfuls.
He took out a pocket calculator and keyed in several sets of figures, absorbed in his assessment. Was he checking Dad’s math? He scribbled some lines in a pocket-size notebook.
Uncomfortable about watching him, Reba retreated behind the breakfast bar. She wiped down the stove top, cleaned the crumb tray beneath the toaster and watered the row of African violets on the windowsill above the sink.
She almost watered Lucas Halliday himself, while she was at it. He’d come to the sink to return his mug. She’d been filling the little tin watering can again and hadn’t heard him, his movements masked by the sound of water drumming on metal. When she turned with the filled can, intending to water the flowering cyclamens in her parents’ room, as well, they came face to face and can to chest.
“Whoa!” He grabbed the pouring end of the can and a spray of drops darkened across the arm of his sweater.
“Oops.”
“No problem.”
He still had the mug. She snatched it from him too abruptly, turned and put it and the watering can on the draining board.
She could feel him still standing right behind her, feel him through to her bones, to the roots of her hair and to the walls of her lungs, which suddenly refused to draw breath. The strength of his pull on her body shocked her, and she heard his next words with a rush of relief.
“Ready to head outside?”
Reba kept both of them busy the whole morning. She did the job delegated to her by Jim Broadbent and her father, and she did it well, Lucas considered. It was painfully apparent how much she cared about this place, although she struggled hard not to show it. Again, with a hot pool of envy low in his gut, he wondered how that would feel.
Not useful, in a situation like this, when the family had to sell.
He should be grateful he’d never have the same problem.
They looked over almost every piece of infrastructure and equipment included in the sale. Calving barn, corrals, machinery sheds, scale room, tack room and bunkhouse. Pickups, stock trailers, haying equipment, round baler, swather and bale feed. A semi-Kenworth tractor, a tractor with loader…The list went on and on, and didn’t deviate from the list both Reba and Jim Broadbent had already given him.
Everything seemed well-maintained, and when it wasn’t, Reba said so. “This flatbed needs new tires,” and “One of the four-wheelers isn’t running right.”
Lucas lost count of how many times he saw her denim-clad hip hike up at an angle, and her neatly rounded backside slide across the torn seat of the battered ranch pickup as she climbed in to the driver’s seat. He got to know the sound of the gears and the clutch, like a strand of familiar music, and the smell of dust and grass and engine oil like a neighbor’s brand of tobacco.
He’d never realized you could drive a pickup with such a high caloric expenditure. Reba didn’t raise her voice and she never swore, but she wrenched the wheel around, lunged at the gearstick and floored accelerator and brake pedal as if driving was a form of hand-to-hand combat.
Every time they stopped, she slapped her pretty, callused hands on her thighs, yanked on the hand brake, looked at him with her big, bluey-greeny-grayish eyes—incredible eyes, because, seriously, what color could you possibly call them?—and announced, without smiling, “Scale shed,” or “Lower Creek Field,” as if they’d just navigated the Amazon River, and she navigated it every day.
“Is this pickup on my vehicle list?” he finally asked.
She drove it the same way she walked—not gracefully, but with a way of moving that kept grabbing his gaze and that, for some unknown reason, he liked. He’d handled a lot of vehicles in his time, but he wasn’t sure that he’d be able to handle this one. Not without practice, anyhow.
The woman who sat beside him would take practice to handle, also. He found himself imagining a little too clearly what the rewards might be.
“You wouldn’t want this one,” she told him. “It’s on its third time round the mileage clock, and it’s got more temperament than a jumpy horse. Second gear pops out with no warning. It stalls under a thousand revs, and it drinks oil like I drink coffee. Can’t get through the day without a big top-up, first thing every morning.”
At the hay stacking yard in the Lower Creek Field, a couple of the hands were fixing fence, with a herd of mama cows looking on.
“They’re bred,” she told him. “They’ll start calving in mid-March.”
She introduced him to the ranch hands, Pete and Lon. The four of them ate a lunch of sandwiches, cookies and more coffee, standing up. The sun shone out of the pristine blue. Lucas’s back felt hot, and his eyes tired from squinting.
He looked at one of the hands. Lon, he was pretty sure, but he might have gotten them mixed up. The man was standing bare-chested with his T-shirt tucked into the back of his jeans like a cleaning rag, and Lucas wished he could peel off his sweater. Inappropriate for the potential buyer of a high-priced ranch to be seen shirtless, unfortunately.
Reba looked hot, too.
When she thought no one was watching, she rolled her sleeves as far as her smooth, soft biceps, and unfastened another button at the front of her shirt. She rewound the red elastic around her ponytail, pulling it higher so that the thick, glossy hair swung free of her sweat-misted neck.
She had sunglasses on, but she mostly kept them pushed up on her head, as if she could see the detail of her beloved ranch more clearly without them. Lucas would have liked to borrow them, and wished he’d worn some of his own, to shield his city eyes against the bright light.
After they left Pete and Lon, she showed him the Upper Creek Field and they walked two hundred yards or more, along the bank of the fishing stream, with Lucas dropping behind her, letting her lead the way.
I’m not doing this so I can watch her walk, am I? he thought, a little disturbed at the idea when he realized he was. That purposeful, rolling stride, that tight, shapely denim butt.
Too distracting.
Too enticing.
Not on the agenda.
He kicked along faster and caught up to her in four strides, in time to hear her telling him, “A little farther on, we’ll be able to glimpse the gaming cabin.”
Then she spotted an untidy shape in the grass and they both realized it was a cow, long dead, that had somehow escaped the vigilance of the ranch hands. She frowned at the sight, gave a hiss of breath and narrowed her incredible eyes, with their dark fringed lashes.
Lucas reached out and touched her shoulder, expecting that she’d turn into his arms for a moment’s support, wanting her to do it. He felt soft flannel over warm bone, and let his hand slide down to her bare arm, which was even warmer and softer.
A rush of intense desire powered through his body and snatched the air from his lungs. He could have sworn she felt it, too. He heard the awareness as a new rhythm in her breathing, and felt the midday heat of their bodies mingle.
After just a moment, however, she flicked off the contact like a horse flicking a fly, then hugged her arms around herself and pivoted away. “Too late to do anything about it, now.”
“I’m afraid so,” he answered.
“I’ll tell Lon about it when we get back.” She let a beat of silence hang in the air, then said, “Look, can you see the movement in the stream?”
Lucas knew something about trout, Reba soon realized, so she didn’t need to point out which were browns or cutthroats or rainbows. The plentiful fish gleamed beneath the water like painted foil. The current braided transparent patterns on the streambed and babbled nonsense songs in the clear air.
The walk took twenty minutes, because they did it slowly. Neither of them talked very much at all. The sun shone. The wind riffled the trees. Reba liked the silence, and she liked that Lucas Halliday knew how to be silent. Some people didn’t.
“Here’s the place where we can see the cabin,” she told him, stopping beside a still, shaded pool.
She’d been aiming for this spot. From here, they should turn back.
“Yeah? Can you show me?”
He seemed interested, but she still didn’t know what he was thinking, or what mental notes he’d made for the report he’d present to his father. No point in wondering about it, she told herself again. His intention would become apparent with time.
“Well,” she said, “there’s a ridge line coming down to the water about two hundred yards upstream, can you see it?”
Standing beside her, only a little behind, Lucas followed the arrow of Reba’s arm. “With a seam of rock showing below the trees?”
“That’s it,” she said. “Follow it up. There’s a downed tree, a ponderosa pine, making a kind of notch about two thirds of the way to the top.”
“This time, I’m not seeing it.” He leaned closer, cursing hours of computer screens two feet from his face, trying to use her arm like a rifle sight.
He caught the waft of her scent and it hit him like heat haze rising from a tarred road. Sunscreen predominated, with afternotes of hot, clean hair and sun-dried cotton. Why should things like that smell so good? He was more accustomed to designer perfume, but his body told him that this was better.
Way better.
“Look for a slash of paler color. A lightning bolt opened up the trunk like matchwood this summer.”
“Okay, got it,” he answered. His shoulder brushed against her back, and he felt a flicker of movement from her. Vibration, rather than movement. She didn’t ease away, and her voice rose in pitch, dropped in volume and filled with breath.
No doubt. She felt it, too.
“Directly behind it, you can see the roof of the cabin, in the fold of the next slope,” she said.
“Yes. Dark shingles, and the line of a window frame?” He could feel the swell and fall of her breathing, and he could still smell her hot, cottony, beachy fragrance.
“That’s it,” she told him. “It’s beautiful up there, but we hardly use the place anymore. My grandfather used to bring hunting parties up there all the time.”
“Show me tomorrow?”
“Do you ride?”
“Some. When I can.”
“Then we’ll ride up. After the trip to Steamboat Springs in the morning.”
“Sounds great.” He turned his face ninety degrees in her direction and grinned at her.
He was just inches away from her, now, and was sorely tempted to move even closer, to see what she’d do, to test this powerful pull. Her eyes were like mist over ocean, or rain on a summer pond. His shoulder slid across her spine with slow, deliberate pressure, and he stepped back, before she could fight him.
No, before she could lean into him. Yes, that’s what she would have done, he realized. She would have leaned against him. She knew it, and though a part of her wasn’t happy about that, the rest of her didn’t care.
He didn’t push the moment, or push her reaction. He didn’t particularly want to get slapped in the face right now, and a slap in the face was a definite possibility. Nor did he want to add any more of an emotional element to a potential business transaction that had already become too personal for his taste.
He wasn’t used to this.
“I think I’ve seen enough for today,” he told her, and he meant Reba herself as much as he meant her ranch.
Chapter Three
“T ell me what you regret about last November,” Lucas said to Reba. “What should I have done differently? What would you have done differently? Tell me what you resent in how I handled everything from the very beginning, September included.”
His eyes flicked to Reba’s pregnant stomach and he frowned. They hadn’t gotten to the nitty gritty, yet. They were both still caught up in memories about their first meeting that were still achingly vivid, even after almost six months.
Reba searched for the right answer to his question, while the nagging, belt-tightening ache in her back and stomach notched a little higher on the pain scale, slower to let go, this time. She didn’t like it. It made her uneasy. She reached for the inadequate chair at the manager’s desk and eased herself into it, making it squeak, just as the door opened, hard on the sound of a token knock.
“Gordie’s here, looking for you,” one of the waitresses said.
Churned up and uneasy, she couldn’t school the impatience out of her voice. “Oh, now?”
“What shall I tell him?”
“Tell him I’m— Tell him—”
“Tell him to wake up to the fact that he’s not wanted, and hasn’t been for eight months or more,” Lucas answered for her, then revised at once, “No, just tell him she’s not here. Let him work out the rest for himself.” The waitress nodded, the door closed, and he added to Reba, “McConnell’s still around. Is he back in the picture, then?”
“No, he’s not.”
Reba felt quite positive on this subject.
Gordie himself vacillated like waterweed in a river current, however. His attitude back in September had pushed her right into Lucas’s arms, she sometimes felt. He’d hung around the steakhouse, the way he still hung around. He’d given with one hand and taken away with the other, and he was still doing it.
After showing Lucas around the ranch that first day, she’d worked a shift at the steakhouse the same night, venting her complicated feelings about the sale and the man by throwing her steaks roughly around the grill. It hadn’t helped. She was still feeling tense and angry and confused when Gordie had sloped into the kitchen to hang out with her, and maybe that was the real point where it had all started with Lucas…
“Hi, Reb.” Gordie had dragged a stool in from the bar and positioned himself on it in front of the big freezer. He already had a light beer in his hand.
“Hi, yourself,” Reba had answered. Her smile was an effort. “No food in your fridge, tonight?”
She tried to make it into a tease, but found it irritating that he still came in here like this, so often. And she was tired, after too much tension with Lucas Halliday today, while she’d showed him over the ranch, so she had to fight to hide the irritation.
She and Gordie had broken up two months ago, for heaven’s sake! Maybe she should be pleased that they could still be friends, as far as he was concerned. True, she did feel a certain degree of relief. She wouldn’t want to think that she’d hurt him so badly he couldn’t stand her company. In a small ranching town like Biggins, when she cooked four shifts a week at the only decent restaurant, that would be awkward for a whole lot of people.
But it made her uncomfortable that his routine had been so little changed by her calling off their engagement. He should have started serial dating around three counties, or something. He should have brought strange blondes in here to dangle in front of her, every week. He should at least have had his hair cut different, and bought a couple of new shirts.
Like I’ve done any of that? she scolded herself, as she watched him take a gulp of his beer.
“I’ve been thinking, Reb,” he said, ruffling his choppy dark hair at the back with his spare hand. It stuck up after he’d finished with it, definitely getting too long.
He was the only person who called her Reb. She didn’t mind it from him. She didn’t challenge the statement that he’d been thinking, either. He had a good brain, especially for figures. She didn’t possess one herself. He had statistics on his computer, relating to the McConnell ranch, that even her father wouldn’t have thought to tabulate. He spent a lot of time on the Internet, which apparently made money for him, she wasn’t even sure how. And he could ride as if his thighs were part of the horse.
“Yeah?” she answered, slinging three steaks on the grill.
“You’ve got a buyer sniffing around, right?”
“He seems interested. But he’s a businessman. Pretty hardheaded.” Enough to bulldoze my family home. “He’s not going to make a spur-of-the-moment decision. He wants to see more tomorrow, so I’m taking him down to Steamboat, and up to the cabin.”
“Because I’ve been thinking.”
“You said that.” She smiled, to soften the statement, and wished once again that he wasn’t here. Or that he was somehow different. Tougher? With more emotional perception in his heart?
“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.”
Lucas let Reba go ahead of him, watching the tight way she held her body, the tight way she walked. He wanted to tell her it was okay, he wasn’t going to get put off a major purchase because of one outdated hunting shack.
And even if he did decide against the place, on his father’s behalf, Jim Broadbent was right. A buyer would show up soon. She could relax. Meanwhile, whatever happened with the sale, he had no intention of riding rough-shod over her feelings.
He almost reached out to her with the same touch of support and understanding that she’d rejected yesterday when they’d spotted the dead beast, but she was too far in front, and the chance was lost.
For the moment.
But after the way she’d flirted with him in the car, his whole body was primed by the physical stretch of the recent ride and ached for its next opportunity.
The cabin wasn’t locked, of course. The porch floorboards resonated beneath her feet, and by the time he’d stepped onto it behind her, she’d rattled the old door handle and swung the door open. He’d expected a dusty, musty interior, with dirt-misted window panes, uneven floors and shabby furnishings, but it wasn’t like that at all.
“I came up here two days ago, cleaned it and aired it out,” she explained. She’d even put fresh flowers in a couple of vases. There was the smell of lavender in the air. The furniture was old, true, but of good quality, and there were new throw pillows and slipcovers on the couch and two armchairs. The kitchen, also, must have been modernized only about ten years ago.
The old fireplace had been replaced with a modern, glass-fronted wood-burning stove. It was fan-forced, and would give out fantastic heat. You could slide the Persian-style rug closer, arrange the throw pillows in a heap on top, and sit here in front of it.
Toasting marshmallows.
Baking potatoes wrapped in foil.
Making love.
Hard to imagine, on an eighty-five-degree day, that such heat could be needed, but Lucas knew that temperatures could drop to thirty below, up here. Raine’s white Christmas was a pretty safe bet.
The rooms were way too cramped for Raine’s taste, though. He and Reba stood within touching distance because they had little choice. The windows were too small and the ceilings were too low. His stepmother would claim claustrophobia and boredom within a day.
Bulldoze the log cabin, too?
Absolutely not! Raine could build a new one, open plan, with twenty-foot ceilings, acres of glass and satellite TV, in some ostentatious location. Lucas would lay claim to this place for himself—his cut of the purchase, his finder’s fee. It was an irrational, emotional impulse, and he wasn’t sure why he felt it so strongly. He knew it didn’t make sense. He knew it wasn’t even his decision to make.
What was happening, here?
Too much.
More than flirtation.
Already, he understood more than he wanted to about why Reba’s roots ran so deep into this soil.
“Do you want to see upstairs?” she asked him.
“Please.” Sounded as if he were begging, and maybe he was.
She went ahead, denim rear end rocking as usual, and he followed closely, unable to tear himself free of her aura, so that when she suddenly turned and spoke, he was right behind. “I should have showed you the—”
The point she broke off was the point where his hand landed on her hip. Her body softened in an instant, and swayed toward him. Her eyes widened and went dark. Since he was one step below, her mouth was level with his, and only an inch away. He could feel her breath cooling his lip. She didn’t attempt to increase the distance.
Good.
They’d gotten to this, at last.
He hadn’t been sure that they would, and her huge eyes told him it might already be more than she’d expected.
He anchored her other hip in place, to keep the rest of her where she was, and watched her lips press together, then part again. She had another, more determined and even more doomed attempt at saying what she’d wanted to say before. “While we were downstairs, I should have showed you the—” Then she stopped again.
“Just show me the bedroom.” His voice rasped, and the last word lost itself on her mouth.
Her lips were as warm and sweet as ripe fruit. They responded just the way he’d known they would. He closed his eyes. He didn’t want to look, he only wanted to taste and feel. She stayed in place, thighs pressed to his groin, which meant she had to know just what her body had already done to him.
Oh, yes, she knew! She was overwhelmed by it, but she knew.
Did she know that she’d begun to shimmy against him, too? Her hips slid and rocked, slid and rocked. The movement went just an inch or two either way, and was oh-so-slow, but it made him throb and want to lunge. Her breasts, in their thin covering of lace and stretch cotton, jutted softly against his chest and he imagined her nipples, pebbled as hard as he was, from the slow friction between them.
How would they look, her nipples? Puckered with need? Definitely! Big and dark, or dainty and pink? He didn’t care either way, he just wanted to know, see, touch and kiss.
“Show me the bed,” he said.
Without waiting for her answer, he deepened the kiss, tangling his tongue in her mouth. He tasted the fresh, sweet apple she’d withheld from the horses several minutes ago. He abandoned her hips and slid his hands higher, trailed his fingertips across her breasts and thought, “Yes! I knew it. Like cherry stones.”
She sank back with her spine arched. Suddenly she was seated on the wooden tread of the stairs, reaching up for him, eyes half-closed and hair threatening to tumble from its high knot. He went after her, chasing the taste of her mouth, chasing her body heat. He ended up bracing his fingers on the stair edge, his weight looming over her.
She pulled him lower. His face fell between her breasts and she gasped and threw her head to one side. He felt the heat-perfumed mass of her hair drift onto his hand. The soft mounds of her breasts against his cheeks and nose and lips felt like warm satin.
Her thighs parted and squeezed his ribs, half supporting him while he rolled a little. He slid her top up, clumsy with desire. Cupping her with one hand, he thumbed her hardened nipple, then replaced his thumb with his mouth, through a lace and net bra.
She dragged herself back, higher up the stairs, and held his face between her hands. Her eyes were still enormous, filled with a wild light and a soft flame of doubt. Throbbing, damming himself back, he realized she was still debating this. He pressed his lips together, struggling with a code of honor that said it had to be her own decision, made freely.
“Okay, I’ll show you the bed,” she said at last, on another gasp of air.
Her fingers feathered up his neck and into his hair and she stretched to kiss him, her mouth hungry and full of promise. Lucas discovered he was shaking, and that he hadn’t breathed for the entire time she’d studied his face.
They scrambled the rest of the way up the stairs, breathless. There were just two bedrooms built into the roof line, both of them small, and he had to duck his head through the low doorway of the slightly larger one. Beside a double bed covered in fresh white sheets and a faded patchwork quilt, Reba crossed her arms, pulled her tank top over her head and unsnapped her bra.
Both garments fell to the floor in a pale heap and she turned to face him, straight-backed, arms at her sides, giving him the sight of her bare breasts and peaked nipples like a gift. Her eyes were huge and her breath came in shallow pants.
And he knew so totally that she just—didn’t—do—this, she just didn’t bring men to this cabin to make love, on a regular basis, or ever. Letting her make the decision on her own wasn’t enough.
Not with a woman like Reba.
He knew what he wanted. Even if the corporation didn’t buy the ranch, he wanted a piece of it to take away with him. He wanted a piece of Reba Grant, her passion and her intensity, to take away with him in the form of his memory of how she’d feel in his arms, writhing beneath his touch.
But knowing what he wanted wasn’t good enough.
Instead of wrapping himself around her as he wanted to, instead of lifting her against him and pulling at her jeans, he allowed himself just one soft brush of his knuckles across those jutting gifts. They were fuller and rounder than he’d expected them to be, with the crests even bigger and darker than his imagination had painted them.
Then he placed his hands on the knobs of her shoulders, looked into her eyes and said, “Wait.”
She seemed to understand exactly why he’d stopped. Instead of taking it as a way out, however, or even giving herself any further pause for thought, she lifted her chin, looked at him with narrowed, glittering eyes and said, “No.”
“Why, Reba?”
“Because I want this. And so do you. Don’t ask questions. Do me the courtesy of believing I know what I want.”
“I’m not offering anything beyond—”
“I’m not asking for anything beyond. This is now. That’s all. It’s more than I—way more than I expected, even an hour ago, but—” she made her hand into a fist over her stomach “—it feels right, here. It feels necessary.”
For another moment Lucas hesitated, and Reba felt the possibility of rejection slam into her.
Could he?
He couldn’t!
He wanted this every bit as much as she did. She knew that. He hadn’t denied it. The only way he’d reject her would be if some decent, chivalrous, protective instinct overcame him, and he decided that his making love to her right now was a favor she’d be better off without.
Despite the depth she’d glimpsed in him yesterday, Reba wasn’t convinced that a corporate prince like Lucas Halliday possessed any such chivalrous instincts. She certainly didn’t want him to possess them, right now. Gordie McConnell had them, and she was sick of them! Lucas was accurate in what he suspected about her narrow previous experience, and she didn’t want that to get in the way.
Yes, Lucas, you’re right, I’ve never done anything like this before.
Anything like this.
She and Gordie had made love, yes, but Gordie would never have done so in the middle of a working day, with no advance planning, in a location not previously designated as appropriate. And that burned her. So much about her life, and the crossroads she’d reached in it, burned her right now.
Dear Lord, she was nearly twenty-seven years old, she was about to have her home pulled out from under her like an old blanket off a horse’s back. She was going to make love to Lucas now—a rough analysis of her mental calendar told her it should be safe—and she’d think about the ramifications later. She was going to do this before something in her soul atrophied into dry wood and she lost the ability to even imagine a different life for herself, let alone go out and find it!
“There’s no doubt you know what you want.” Lucas’s voice caught on several of his words, and she felt his gaze on her peaked nipples like a caress. “Don’t you care what I want?”
“If you don’t want this…me…my body, then there’s been something very wrong with your signals, since yesterday.” She drew in a deep breath, felt her breasts lift, saw his tongue lap against his lower lip. His jeans strained at the front. He stepped closer to her, but not close enough.
“I’m talking about the ranch,” he said.
“You think this is about—” Anger tightened her scalp. She dragged in a shaky breath and tried again. “You think I’m trying to sell you the ranch, right now, with this? That’s— That’s—”
“No! Hell, no, Reba!” Another step, urgent, that brought him toe to toe against her. He slid his hands up to her elbows. “I just wanted you to consider whether doing this—making love—” the word melted on his tongue like syrup “—would feel different if you knew my decision on the purchase.”
Again, she didn’t hesitate. “If you’ve made a decision, I don’t want to know. Because it wouldn’t make a difference. Okay?”
He nodded, touched her hair, her neck, let his hand trail lower, and bent his head to her mouth. “Yeah, you’re right, I guess,” he said, on a soft growl. “Wouldn’t make a difference to me, either.”
For the first time, she held him. She ran her palms up his strong back, and learned the pattern of his muscles, on either side of his spine. She helped him wrench the unwanted T-shirt up and over his head, put her tongue to her fingertip then, looking down, touched the moisture to his nipples. They hardened into little beads as it evaporated, and she felt a coil of pleasure and satisfaction deep inside.
She could do this to a man. She could do this to Lucas Halliday. And she wanted to do a whole lot more.
“Tell me what you like,” she said, branding him with kisses between every phrase. “Show me. Touch me in all the places you want. With your hands. With your mouth. Teach me, Lucas.”
“Hell, haven’t you ever—?”
“Yes. Yes, I have. But not like this. Nothing like this.” She reached for the front of his pants, fumbling a little as she snapped them open. She began to ease the zipper down, and he took a hissing breath. “Did I catch you?” she asked.
“No. Keep going. Yes, like that.”
She did, even more slowly, feeling the straining ridge of cloth and man pushing at her hand. When he was free, she slid trousers and underwear down in one movement. She dropped low in front of him and let her mouth explore the texture of his thigh on the way. She knew exactly where he wanted to be touched, but kept that pleasure from him, stringing it out.
He couldn’t stand it, pulled her back up and hauled her toward him so that they were pressed together from her breasts to her knees. His thigh eased between her legs, and she knew how hot she must feel to him, how full and ready.
“Take off your boots and your jeans,” he said. “Let me look at you.”
The old bed creaked as he sat and levered his own boots off. He kicked them beneath the bed, beyond the hem of the quilt, and she did the same. Then he watched while she shimmied her jeans down her hips, and she could tell he liked everything he saw.
“I didn’t…uh…come equipped for this,” he said, reaching for her. “If we need to set limits, can we set them now?”
“It’s okay. The timing is— No limits.” She brushed his mouth with hers, lifted his hands and brought them to her breasts.
“None?”
“Anything that feels good. Anything that’s a part of this.”
“Touching you, Reba, that’s everything.”
They kissed until her bones softened to liquid, and she no longer knew where her body ended and his began. His mouth was everywhere. She gripped him the way she’d have gripped a bolting horse, only who was bolting, who was out of control? Him, or her?
She leaned back on her hands and he knelt in front of her, on the braided woollen rug, trailing his lips down her jaw, her neck, to her breasts and beyond, to her sweet core. She bucked and twisted and sank into the bed, clenched her fists against the flood that swept her away, then felt him slide higher and seek entry. She was so swollen and ready that he slipped into her in a single movement, and a sound wrenched out of him, making his body vibrate against her chest.
“Reba, you’re so beautiful, so strong. The way you moved just now…”
He thrust and she rocked, clinging to him, digging her fingers into the muscles of his back. She loved his weight on top of her and the almond smell of his hair in every breath she took.
Their climax came freely, and ebbed in a series of aftershocks that jerked both their bodies like whips. Reba didn’t know what to say, whether to say anything at all, so she kissed him again, touching her mouth to his softly, as if each kiss was a word of tenderness or thanks.
“Hey…” he finally whispered.
“Hey,” she answered back.
Chapter Four
“Y ou okay?” Lucas asked. He was watching the way Reba winced and shifted in the unforgiving, creaky office chair, his eyes bright with perception, as usual—perception and suspicion.
And, yes, okay, she didn’t feel very comfortable right now. Who could, with this tightness coming and going? The pregnancy book she’d bought talked about false contractions—irregular, tight rather than painful, normal and nothing to worry about. This was apparently them, and normal or not, she didn’t like them.
There wasn’t a lot of tenderness in Lucas’s question, she noted. The hard, calculating shell of a successful business man appeared to be back in place, making Reba question the other qualities she had thought she’d discovered in him last September, as well as the heat and exhilaration and happiness she would have sworn they’d both felt, the first time they’d made love.
“My back’s a little sore, that’s all,” she answered him, playing it down. “I’ve been on my feet a bit too long tonight.”
As soon as she’d waded through this confrontation with Lucas, she would ask Carla about the way her body felt and the way it should feel. She would consult the doctor, give in her notice to the steakhouse management tomorrow, spend the next three months flat out in bed, if she had to.
“You’re looking after yourself, I hope,” Lucas said. “You’re getting the proper prenatal care?” Again, it sounded like an accusation, rather than a sign of his concern. Where was the man who’d lain in bed with her, so hungry and so tender?
Reba lifted her chin. “The doctor thinks I’m doing great, especially considering the one I lost.”
“Is that what happened? Is that possible?”
“Yes!” Her scalp prickled with anger, and acid rushed up into her throat. She carried a child fathered by a stranger, it seemed. “I lost this baby’s twin, although I didn’t realize I was still pregnant for another month and a half. Good grief, Lucas, you couldn’t possibly believe I staged it, could you? Staged any of it? How could I?”
He shook his head and closed his eyes, as if totally at a loss, and images of last year flashed through their minds, once again. September and November, Indian summer and winter’s first chill. They’d known too many different emotions together, in too short a time…
Reba sat in the Indian summer shade on the bank of the creek and watched Lucas casting his line for trout. He stood in the water in thigh-high wading boots borrowed from her father, with his legs braced wide against the current. The muscles in his back rippled and tightened as he whipped his body back then forward to make the cast.
For half a second, the nylon filament caught the sun and made a scribble of light against a background of cool green shade, then the delicate fly silently hit the water and the line disappeared. Lucas’s whole focus arrowed to the task of working the rod and the line.
Reba’s breath caught and tightened in her chest as she watched him. It was like vertigo, and she was frightened of it—not sorry that he would be leaving tomorrow morning. She would need some space by then, and some time to think without the storm of sensual distraction that built inside her whenever she was with him.
This relationship wasn’t meant to last.
They both knew that.
It’s a turning point, that’s all, she thought. A window thrown open in my mind.
Lucas had already caught three good-size fish, enough to cook and eat outdoors for lunch, over an open fire. In the expectation that he would fish as well as he seemed to do everything else, Reba had packed the pickup truck with the appropriate accompaniments, and soon they would drive the mountain track up to the cabin, where her grandfather had once made the ring of stones that the Grant family had been using as a picnic hearth on summer days for nearly fifty years.
And she had no doubt as to what she and Lucas would do up there after the meal was over.
For the last time?
They ate the fresh fish with bread and butter and salt and lemon, washed down with ice-cold mouthfuls of light beer, and then they didn’t have to say a word, they just doused the fire, opened the door of the cabin and went upstairs.
In the small, tidy bedroom, Reba wondered if she’d ever be able to come to this place again without thinking of Lucas. Their awareness of each other, and their impatience, seemed to crowd the air and make it sing.
She knew she’d remember it every time she saw the dappled light dancing through the windows as a breeze moved the tree branches, every time she smelled the scent of lavender, because of the flowers she’d put here and the homemade sachets that scented the cotton sheets.
Pulling her top over her head, she felt Lucas’s touch sear across her body. His hands curved around her ribs, brushed across her breasts, made her neck tingle. They tried to help each other undress, but just ended up laughing and kissing, fighting their uncooperative clothing.
“Are we in a hurry, here, or something?” he whispered.
“So slow down.”
“Can’t.”
“Neither can I.”
They only managed to do that when they got to the really important part—the part where they couldn’t talk anymore, because their breathing was coming too fast and every sense was too overwhelmed. Then he held her and slid into her with a teasing control that had her pulling at him, crying out for more, until they both exploded, with pulses of light behind her closed lids like fireworks, or stars.
That night, she drove into Biggins, parked her pickup quietly in the far corner of the steakhouse parking lot and slipped across Main Street to Lucas’s motel. He took her into Cheyenne for a long, slow meal and then brought her back again.
“I’ll need to head out of here pretty early tomorrow to make my flight to New York,” he told her, at the door of his room.
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Lilian Darcy
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: SURPRISE PACKAGE!When Lucas Halliday saw Reba Grant for the first time in months, he was in for a shock: Reba was pregnant–with his baby–and she′d just gone into labor!Reba couldn′t believe it–this baby was coming way too early. And Lucas was hardly supposed to be her birthing partner. For she′d thought–and feared?–that she′d seen the last of the billionaire businessman, despite all that had happened between them. Now, with their tiny daughter fighting for survival, Reba was surprised to realize Lucas was a loving, devoted father. And that gave her hope–that maybe Lucas had potential as a husband, too….