mental notes he’d made for the report he’d present to his father. No point in wondering about it, she told herself again. His intention would become apparent with time.
“Well,” she said, “there’s a ridge line coming down to the water about two hundred yards upstream, can you see it?”
Standing beside her, only a little behind, Lucas followed the arrow of Reba’s arm. “With a seam of rock showing below the trees?”
“That’s it,” she said. “Follow it up. There’s a downed tree, a ponderosa pine, making a kind of notch about two thirds of the way to the top.”
“This time, I’m not seeing it.” He leaned closer, cursing hours of computer screens two feet from his face, trying to use her arm like a rifle sight.
He caught the waft of her scent and it hit him like heat haze rising from a tarred road. Sunscreen predominated, with afternotes of hot, clean hair and sun-dried cotton. Why should things like that smell so good? He was more accustomed to designer perfume, but his body told him that this was better.
Way better.
“Look for a slash of paler color. A lightning bolt opened up the trunk like matchwood this summer.”
“Okay, got it,” he answered. His shoulder brushed against her back, and he felt a flicker of movement from her. Vibration, rather than movement. She didn’t ease away, and her voice rose in pitch, dropped in volume and filled with breath.
No doubt. She felt it, too.
“Directly behind it, you can see the roof of the cabin, in the fold of the next slope,” she said.
“Yes. Dark shingles, and the line of a window frame?” He could feel the swell and fall of her breathing, and he could still smell her hot, cottony, beachy fragrance.
“That’s it,” she told him. “It’s beautiful up there, but we hardly use the place anymore. My grandfather used to bring hunting parties up there all the time.”
“Show me tomorrow?”
“Do you ride?”
“Some. When I can.”
“Then we’ll ride up. After the trip to Steamboat Springs in the morning.”
“Sounds great.” He turned his face ninety degrees in her direction and grinned at her.
He was just inches away from her, now, and was sorely tempted to move even closer, to see what she’d do, to test this powerful pull. Her eyes were like mist over ocean, or rain on a summer pond. His shoulder slid across her spine with slow, deliberate pressure, and he stepped back, before she could fight him.
No, before she could lean into him. Yes, that’s what she would have done, he realized. She would have leaned against him. She knew it, and though a part of her wasn’t happy about that, the rest of her didn’t care.
He didn’t push the moment, or push her reaction. He didn’t particularly want to get slapped in the face right now, and a slap in the face was a definite possibility. Nor did he want to add any more of an emotional element to a potential business transaction that had already become too personal for his taste.
He wasn’t used to this.
“I think I’ve seen enough for today,” he told her, and he meant Reba herself as much as he meant her ranch.
Chapter Three
“T ell me what you regret about last November,” Lucas said to Reba. “What should I have done differently? What would you have done differently? Tell me what you resent in how I handled everything from the very beginning, September included.”
His eyes flicked to Reba’s pregnant stomach and he frowned. They hadn’t gotten to the nitty gritty, yet. They were both still caught up in memories about their first meeting that were still achingly vivid, even after almost six months.
Reba searched for the right answer to his question, while the nagging, belt-tightening ache in her back and stomach notched a little higher on the pain scale, slower to let go, this time. She didn’t like it. It made her uneasy. She reached for the inadequate chair at the manager’s desk and eased herself into it, making it squeak, just as the door opened, hard on the sound of a token knock.
“Gordie’s here, looking for you,” one of the waitresses said.
Churned up and uneasy, she couldn’t school the impatience out of her voice. “Oh, now?”
“What shall I tell him?”
“Tell him I’m— Tell him—”
“Tell him to wake up to the fact that he’s not wanted, and hasn’t been for eight months or more,” Lucas answered for her, then revised at once, “No, just tell him she’s not here. Let him work out the rest for himself.” The waitress nodded, the door closed, and he added to Reba, “McConnell’s still around. Is he back in the picture, then?”
“No, he’s not.”
Reba felt quite positive on this subject.
Gordie himself vacillated like waterweed in a river current, however. His attitude back in September had pushed her right into Lucas’s arms, she sometimes felt. He’d hung around the steakhouse, the way he still hung around. He’d given with one hand and taken away with the other, and he was still doing it.
After showing Lucas around the ranch that first day, she’d worked a shift at the steakhouse the same night, venting her complicated feelings about the sale and the man by throwing her steaks roughly around the grill. It hadn’t helped. She was still feeling tense and angry and confused when Gordie had sloped into the kitchen to hang out with her, and maybe that was the real point where it had all started with Lucas…
“Hi, Reb.” Gordie had dragged a stool in from the bar and positioned himself on it in front of the big freezer. He already had a light beer in his hand.
“Hi, yourself,” Reba had answered. Her smile was an effort. “No food in your fridge, tonight?”
She tried to make it into a tease, but found it irritating that he still came in here like this, so often. And she was tired, after too much tension with Lucas Halliday today, while she’d showed him over the ranch, so she had to fight to hide the irritation.
She and Gordie had broken up two months ago, for heaven’s sake! Maybe she should be pleased that they could still be friends, as far as he was concerned. True, she did feel a certain degree of relief. She wouldn’t want to think that she’d hurt him so badly he couldn’t stand her company. In a small ranching town like Biggins, when she cooked four shifts a week at the only decent restaurant, that would be awkward for a whole lot of people.
But it made her uncomfortable that his routine had been so little changed by her calling off their engagement. He should have started serial dating around three counties, or something. He should have brought strange blondes in here to dangle in front of her, every week. He should at least have had his hair cut different, and bought a couple of new shirts.
Like I’ve done any of that? she scolded herself, as she watched him take a gulp of his beer.
