was alone in this world.
Dallas stepped to the edge of the boulder, lifted her arms above her head and touched her fingers together like a steeple. With one strong vault, she arced into the air and cut the water with her hands with only the smallest of splashes. She knew this lake—had spent hundreds of hours in her youth swimming in this lake. This lake was her swimming pool; the banks of this lake were her playroom. At Lightning Rock, she was more at home than any other place on earth. She hadn’t known how attached she was to the place—she hadn’t realized how hard it was going to be to say goodbye to this beautiful slice of paradise—until she had begun to clear out her father’s belongings. How many times a day had she stopped herself from tearing up? Countless.
Dallas touched a rock lodged at the bottom of the lake before she somersaulted forward to push herself up to the surface with her feet. She broke through the surface of the water just in time to hear Nick’s warning.
“Incoming!”
Dallas was treading her legs so she could wipe the water off her face and out of her eyes. She opened her eyes just in time to see Nick performing a cannonball off the boulder. Nick landed a short distance away from her with a giant splash. Some of the water displaced by his cannonball hit her in the face. She sputtered a little bit, spitting out lake water and wiping the water out of her eyes for a second time.
“What score would you give me?” Nick asked after he swam over to her.
The man’s arm strokes had been clean, strong and confident. She had spent so much of her time around rodeo men who had a propensity for stretching the truth a bit, she had half doubted Nick’s claim to be captain of his high school swim team. But not anymore.
The cool, fresh water made her feel renewed. She smiled with a laugh and held up two fingers playfully. “I had a better cannonball when I was nine.”
“Oh, yeah?” Nick asked, treading water beside her. “You think you can do better? Show me.”
The competitive spirit in her made her swim to the edge of the lake and back to the boulder to at least match, if not surpass, Nick’s “city boy” cannonball. Without paying attention to the time, the two of them tried to one-up each other in the cannonball arena. They should have been heading back to the homestead and tackling the trailer, but instead, they frolicked together in the lake as if they had nothing better to do and all the time in the world. The early afternoon slipped away from them, and it wasn’t until Nick called a tie that Dallas decided to let the competition end. She shared her bar of soap and shampoo with Nick, and they both left the lake a heck of a lot cleaner than they had gone in.
Together, they sat on the boulder to dry off in the sun. Sitting next to Nick, at one of her favorite spots in the world, felt as natural as being on the back of a horse. It didn’t—couldn’t—escape her notice that Nick had been making it easy for her to let down her guard. He liked her, she could see that in his eyes when he looked at her—she could hear it in his voice when he spoke to her—but he’d always been respectful. He’d always been kind. She couldn’t remember the last time she felt so close to a man. Was she falling for Nick Brand? Her feelings were so mixed-up lately, she couldn’t be sure. But, the nervous excitement she felt in her stomach whenever he stared into her eyes made her think that she might be falling for the Chicago lawyer. Hard.
“My sinuses are clear, that’s for darn sure.” Nick pinched his nose with his fingers and shook his head a bit.
Dallas had grabbed her towel and had spread it out so they could both sit down without burning their butts and the backs of their legs.
“Mmm, I feel so good right now.” Dallas tilted her head back to let the sun shine down on her face. “There’s nothin’ I like better than spending an afternoon swimming in Sweet William. This takes me back. It really does. Way back.”
“Sweet William? That’s the name of this lake?”
“Not the official name.” Dallas kept her eyes closed. “But it’s what me and Pop call it.”
She opened her eyes and pointed to the flowers growing wild along the bank of the lake. “See all those flowers? Those are Sweet Williams. They love to drink up the sun and bloom in the summer. I love me some good ol’ American wildflowers, don’t you?”
* * *
An American wildflower. That’s what Dallas was. Much like the wildflowers she loved so well, Nick had finally found a way to think about the cowgirl in a way that made sense to his brain. She was just as pretty and wild and hearty as those Sweet Williams growing on the side of a secret lake in Montana.
Sitting next to Dallas on that boulder, so close that he could smell the sweet scent of the soap on her browned skin, he couldn’t think of a time in his life when he wanted to touch a woman as badly as he wanted to touch her. He wanted to kiss away the little droplets of water on her neck and her shoulders. He wanted to slip her modest bathing suit straps off her shoulders, just enough to kiss the water from between her modest breasts.
The cowgirl had been difficult to read, but the giant “hands off” sign she wore like a badge of honor was easy enough to decipher. If he tried to kiss her, which had been a thought in his head for a couple of days, she would freeze him out. They were friendly acquaintances now; if he made any sort of move that she interpreted as sexual, he’d lose that precious ground and then some.
Why did he care so much about preserving his budding friendship and trust building with Dallas? He wasn’t entirely sure. Yes, he was attracted to her. But he didn’t have any illusion of starting a lasting relationship with a wild-child barrel racer. His life plan and hers were at serious odds. He had tried to imagine Dallas in Chicago and had failed. So it had to be the challenge that Dallas offered to his ego. He hadn’t always been the best-looking guy in the room, or the tallest, but he was decent looking, had blue eyes that women often gushed about, and he always had access to money and lots of it. Rejection wasn’t something he’d had to deal with too often in his life. With Dallas, it seemed like a 100 percent certainty.
* * *
“I’d like to make a quick run back to the ranch for supplies. I didn’t realize how bare our cupboards are,” Dallas said as she came out of her horse trailer dressing room wearing a clean, ribbed tank top and pair of faded blue jeans. Her hair was still damp and blowing in curly wisps around her face.
His uncle Hank and aunt Barb had let Dallas “shop” at Bent Tree every week to stock up on supplies so they didn’t have to make the trip to town. Would the supplies have flown so freely if he was the only one camped out at Lightning Rock? No. He was certain of that. His uncle had refused to talk to him about the sale of Lightning Rock; his uncle had refused to discuss easement rights that would allow the new owner to travel across Bent Tree land to reach Lightning Rock. So far, he’d been happy to avoid that “come to Jesus” moment he needed to have with his uncle. There was still so much cleanup left to do. But he couldn’t let his uncle put this off indefinitely. Uncle Hank, who was known in his community as being levelheaded and fair, lost all of that levelheadedness and reason when the topic of rightful ownership of Lightning Rock came up.
“You comin’ or stayin’?” Dallas put her cowgirl hat on, which signaled to him that she was officially ready to go.
Normally, he would steer clear of the farmhouse in order to avoid any possible confrontation with his uncle. Today, now halfway through the cleanup efforts, Nick realized that time for avoidance was running out.
“I’ll come with you.”
If Dallas was surprised by his choice, she didn’t show it on her face. She was a woman who kept her cards held tightly to her chest. Dallas had to know that she was smack-dab in the middle of a family feud, yet she never asked him one probing question. She kept herself focused on tying up the loose ends of her father’s life and let him handle his own family business.
Dallas climbed behind the wheel of her early-model Bronco and cranked the engine. Nick had been subjected to the cowgirl’s driving enough to grab the handle above the window and hold on tight. She preferred to be the one