he entered and waited until his eyes adjusted to the dimness. The stalls, he noted, were empty. Whatever animals were housed here, he reasoned, were probably out in the field, feeding.
But where was she?
A loud curse, turning the air blue, answered his silent question. It came from behind the barn.
Rounding the building, he found June sitting on the ground, nursing her thumb, which she’d popped into her mouth. A myriad of tools were haphazardly spread out around her. It looked as if a hardware store had exploded. A tractor that had known better times was behind her.
He crouched down beside her, ready to examine the injury. “Are you all right?”
Self-conscious, she drew her hand out of reach. “I will be when I get the use of my thumb back.” Rising to her feet, she examined the mashed digit, then raised her eyes to his face. “Come for an encore?”
Amusement played on her lips. For her part, she’d decided to view what had happened last night lightly. Because to do anything else was far too scary for her to contemplate.
“Come to apologize, actually.”
“Why?” She looked at him more closely. Had he come by to say that he was sorry he had kissed her? The thought stung and she had no idea why. June turned away from him and pretended to focus her attention back to the errant tractor. She purposely kept her voice nonchalant. “I thought it was rather nice, as far as kisses went.”
“It was. Very nice.” No, nice wasn’t a word he would have used here. It was far too bland to describe what he’d felt. “Better than nice—”
June looked at him. “Then why are you apologizing?”
“Because you’re you and I’m me.”
If there was something that made less sense, she wasn’t aware of it. She cocked her head, as if trying to delve into his head. “Did those X-ray machines at the airports do something to your brain? That didn’t make any sense.”
He supposed she was right. He wasn’t even sure what he was really doing here. “I’m not making too much sense this morning.” When she looked at him quizzically, he gave her the first excuse he could think of. “I didn’t sleep a lot last night.”
She picked up a torque wrench and turned back to the tractor again. “Most tourists have trouble adjusting to the fact that the sun sets about ten and rises about three in August.”
“That wasn’t the problem.” He stood looking over her shoulder, trying not to notice how slender it was. “I’ve never had any trouble sleeping before.”
Annoyed with the machine she was trying to resurrect, she looked at him over her shoulder. “So what’s giving you trouble now?”
He decided to be candid, and honest. “My conscience.”
Her smile was wry. “Should have left that at the airport, too.”
“June, I—”
She stopped what she figured was another apology in its tracks. Why did men always think they were the ones who made things happen, who took the initiative?
June swung around, her hands on her hips, the torque wrench dangling from her fingertips. “Nothing happens to me that I don’t want to happen. Let’s just leave it at that, okay? Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got a tractor to bring back from the dead.”
He gravitated to the neutral terrain. “What’s wrong with it?”
“I just told you, it’s dead.” She waved the wrench at it. “No matter what I do to it, the engine just won’t turn over.”
Though he’d kept a regular mechanic at the cab company, he was a fair mechanic on his own. “Mind if I take a look at it?”
Her temper, she found, was rather short today. “It doesn’t need to be looked at, it needs to be fixed.”
“Can’t do that if I don’t look at it first.”
“I’ve looked at it. I’ve been looking at it for the last day and a half.” In disgust, she threw down the torque wrench and stepped away, knowing that if she kept at it any longer in her present state of mind, she might just use the wrench to take apart the rest of it and chuck it all. “Be my guest.”
“Thanks, don’t mind if I do.” Kevin rolled up his sleeves.
For the first time since he’d arrived in Hades, he felt useful. And at home.
“Try it.”
Just coming out of the house with a glass of iced coffee for Kevin—all that she could manage to scrounge up on short notice in the way of a sociable beverage—June stopped dead in her tracks.
Not because of his short instruction, given as he waved at the tractor, but because in the time that it had taken her to go inside and try to locate something other than the two bottles of beer in her refrigerator to offer him, Kevin had finally surrendered to the heat and stripped off his damp shirt.
She’d already noticed, albeit somewhat unwillingly, how the material had clung to his body. But the difference between her speculation and reality was the difference between a Monet and a six-year-old’s crayon rendition of a lake. The man’s torso looked as if Michelangelo had studied it before creating his statue of David.
Kevin’s chest was sculpted, tanned and gleaming. She pressed her lips together to make sure her mouth wasn’t hanging open.
How did a man who, until very recently, ran a cab company and spent most of his time in enclosures of one sort or another come off looking like a model in search of a product to push? In Kevin’s present state, he could have sold argyle socks to Australian Aborigine tribesmen in the wild.
Kevin looked in her direction, a quizzical expression on his face and she realized that she’d all but solidified in place. Allowing the sizzling effect of his appearance to penetrate further, she thawed out immediately.
Clearing her throat as she rejoined the animated world, June looked at the tractor skeptically, trying very hard to focus her thoughts on the piece of machinery and not the man holding the wrench.
It wasn’t easy.
Tractor, think tractor. She stared at the antiquated machine that had been housed in the barn for the better part of a decade and a half. Overhauling it, she’d gotten it to work several times, but never for long and on this last effort, it had completely given up the ghost no matter what she tried.
June chewed on her lower lip. He’d been working on the tractor for the better part of three hours. Granted, he seemed to have gotten all the pieces back to where they belonged or, at least, off the ground, but that was no proof that he’d done any better a job than she had in all of her previous recent attempts to get the engine to run again.
She took a few steps forward. “What did you do?” she wanted to know.
Since
