Cheyenne rode through the gate, waited while Jesse shut it again.
“I don’t see any barbwire,” she said.
“You won’t,” Jesse answered, adjusting his hat so the brim came down low over his eyes. “There isn’t any. Horses manage to tear themselves up enough as it is, without rusty spikes ripping into their hide.”
In spite of all he was putting her through, before he’d even agree to look at the blueprints for Nigel’s development, Jesse rose a little in Cheyenne’s estimation. Spurs were cruel, and so was barbed wire. He clearly disapproved of both, and Cheyenne had to give him points for compassion.
Jesse had never been mean, she reminded herself. He’d been wild, though. Even in high school, he’d been a seasoned poker player—she’d seen him in illicit games with her dad and some of the other old-timers long before he was of age.
“Is this what you do all day?” she asked, as they rode through high, fragrant grass toward a distant ridge. White clouds scalloped the horizon like foam on an ocean tide, and the sky was the same shade of blue as Jesse’s eyes.
One side of his mouth cocked up in a grin, and he adjusted his hat again. “Is what what I do all day? Ride the range with good-looking women, you mean?”
Cheyenne was foolishly pleased by the compliment, however indirect, though the practical part of her said she was being played and she’d better beware. She’d dated, when she had the time, and even had had one or two fairly serious relationships, but Jesse McKettrick was way out of her league. Forgetting that could only get her into trouble.
She smiled, held both reins in one hand so she could wipe a damp palm dry on the leg of Jesse’s mother’s jeans, and then repeated the process with the other. “You must herd cattle and things like that,” she said, as if he needed prompting.
“Rance would like to run a few hundred head of beef,” Jesse answered, picking up the pace just a little, so both horses accelerated into a fast walk. “The Triple M isn’t really in the cattle business anymore. It’s more like what the easterners call hobby farming. I train the occasional horse, ride in a rodeo once in a while, and play a hell of a lot of poker. What about you, Cheyenne? What do you do all day?”
“I work,” she said, and then realized she’d sounded like a self-righteous prig, and immediately wished she wasn’t too damn proud to backpedal.
He pretended to pull an arrow, or maybe a poisoned spear, out of his chest, but his grin was as saucy as ever. Nothing she could say was going to get under that thick McKettrick hide.
Not that she really wanted to. Much.
“How far are we going to ride?” she asked, closing the figurative barn door after the horse was long gone.
“Just onto that ridge up there,” Jesse answered, pointing. His horse was trotting now, and Cheyenne’s kept pace. “You can see clear across to the county road from just outside the Triple M fence line. It’ll take your breath away.”
Cheyenne swallowed, bouncing so hard in the saddle that she had to be careful not to bite her tongue. Her Native American grandmother, a proud member of the Apache tribe, would die of shame to see the way Cheyenne rode—if she hadn’t already been dead.
Don’t let me love that land too much, she prayed.
Jesse slowed his horse with no discernible pull on the reins. Reached over to take hold of Pardner’s bridle strap with one hand and bring him back to a sedate walk. “Do you ever wish you could do anything else?” he asked.
The question confused Cheyenne at first because she was concentrating on two things: not falling off the horse, and not throwing away everything she’d worked for because she liked the scenery. Then she realized Jesse was asking whether or not she liked her job.
“It’s a challenge,” she allowed carefully. “Very rewarding at times, and very frustrating at others. Our last development was geared to the mid-income crowd, and it was nice to know younger families would be moving in, raising kids there.”
Nigel had lost his shirt on that development, but Jesse didn’t need to know that. Naturally, the investors hadn’t been pleased, which was why Cheyenne’s boss was so desperate to secure the prime acres she was about to see in person for the first time.
She’d offered to buy one of the condos in the batch Nigel had privately called El Fiasco, for Ayanna and Mitch to live in. The price had been right—next to nothing, since they’d practically been giving the places away by the time the project had limped to a halt. Ayanna had toured the demo condo, thanked Cheyenne for the thought, and had graciously refused, saying she’d rather live in a tepee.
The refusal still stung. This from a woman who subsists in public housing, she thought. A place where the Dumpsters overflow and the outside walls are covered with graffiti.
“Where was this development?” Jesse asked.
“Outside of Phoenix,” Cheyenne answered. They were riding up a steep incline now. Then, before he could ask, she added, “You wouldn’t have heard of it.”
“What was it called?”
She wet her lips and avoided his eyes. There was another gate up ahead, and beyond it, trees. Magnificent pines, their tips fiercely green against the soft sky. “Casa de Meerland,” she said.
“Catchy name,” Jesse said dryly. “I read about that in the Republic.”
Great, Cheyenne thought. He knew about the delays, the lawsuits, the unsold units, the angry investors. “As I told you last night,” she said, carefully cheerful, “we’re prepared to pay cash. You needn’t worry about the company’s reputation—we’re rock solid.”
“Your company’s reputation is just about the last thing I’d ever worry about,” Jesse said. “Mowing down old-growth timber and covering the meadows with concrete—now, that’s another matter.”
Cheyenne tensed. She knew her smile looked as fixed as it felt, hanging there on her face like an old window shutter clinging to a casing by one rusted hinge. “We have a deal,” she said. “I’ll look at the land, and you’ll give the blueprints a chance. I sincerely hope you’re not about to renege on your end of it.”
“I never go back on my word,” Jesse told her.
Cheyenne held her tongue. If he never went back on his word, it was probably only because he so rarely gave it in the first place.
“What do you do when you’re not pillaging the environment?” he asked. They were approaching a second gate, held shut by another loop of wire.
She glared at him.
He laughed.
“I don’t have time for hobbies,” she said. Wearing Jesse’s mother’s jeans and boots reminded her of the woman she’d seen only from a distance, around Indian Rock, always dressed in custom-made suits or slacks and a blazer. Evidently, there was another, earthier side to Callie McKettrick.
“I could give you riding lessons.”
“Thanks, but no thanks,” she answered, a little too quickly and a little too tightly.
“Suppose I completely lost my head and agreed to sell you this land. Would you be in town for a while afterward?”
The question shook Cheyenne, though she thought she did a pretty good job of hiding her reaction. Was there a glimmer of hope that he’d agree to the deal? And what did he want her to say? That she’d be gone before the ink was dry on the contract, or that she’d stay on indefinitely?
In the end, it didn’t matter what he wanted. The truth was the truth, and while Cheyenne liked to dole it out in measured doses, she was a lousy liar. “I’d be here for six months to a year, overseeing the construction end and setting up a sales office.”
They’d