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?
