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