laughed as he shook his head. “More like my father and my siblings,” he clarified.
“Siblings,” Val echoed, nodding her head. The sinking feeling disappeared as if it hadn’t been there to begin with. She could feel her mouth curving. “Siblings are good,” she pronounced.
“They seem to think so,” Rafe told her. “And that goes for my father, too,” he added.
Val nodded. She’d heard him specify his father the first time. It looked like she was about to present her case before a committee. Nothing she hadn’t done before. She’d been with Sinclair Productions for a few years now and during that time, she’d encountered a whole range of home owners from a single, hermit-like owner to a holding company she had to spend days tracking down. She’d pleaded her boss’s case before all of them.
“I’d like to meet these siblings and your dad so I could talk to them and see if there’s anything I can do or say to convince them to give their permission to use this ranch as a backdrop of the film we’re making. No sense in my sending on these photos to the director if it’s just to tease him and raise his hopes, only to find out that your siblings and dad won’t let us film here.”
The way she phrased it, he got the feeling that she had just arbitrarily had him throwing in his lot with her. Although he now saw no harm in it, he didn’t want her just taking it for granted, either. He wanted to hear the woman’s pitch first—just in case there was something she hadn’t mentioned or that he was overlooking.
“I didn’t say I’d be all right with it,” he reminded her.
He didn’t have to. She could feel the way he was leaning. But, for the sake of his pride, she played along.
The woman named Val turned her face up to his and it occurred to Rafe that he had never looked into such a soulful pair of eyes before.
“And there’s nothing I can say to get you to throw your lot in with us? We pay well. I’ve looked at a great many different places and this is the first one that struck me as being perfect. It’s so unspoiled and pristine—”
He could all but channel what his father and siblings would say. Money had never been their prime motivation and even less now, since they were no longer strapped.
“And we’d like to keep it that way,” he told her. That was what was important, keeping the land productive and beautiful.
“I completely understand and we can write that into the contract. That if we don’t leave this place exactly as pristine as we found it, then the fees for using it while filming our movie will be doubled.” Val detected some resistance in his face. “I might be able to get my boss to triple it.”
Given what she was saying, Rafe could only come to one conclusion. “Then he will leave it in bad shape.”
“No,” she said firmly, “he’ll be triply inspired to make sure no one leaves behind so much as a candy wrapper tumbling about in the wind.”
She moved just a shade closer to him. “What do you say?”
If ever someone had deserved to hear the word yes—
Rafe’s eyes widened as the thought suddenly froze in his mind.
Observing him, for a second, Val was certain that she had him. But then he grabbed her by the shoulders, pushing her to move ahead of him. “I say, run!”
Chapter Two
Stunned, Val held her ground. His response made no sense to her. What did it have to do with what she’d just asked him?
“What?” she demanded.
“Run!” Rafe repeated, this time shouting the word at her.
Was this some sort of a joke? Val stared at the cowboy in confusion. She still didn’t understand why he’d say something like that.
“Run?” Val echoed incredulously. “Why would you tell me to...?”
This was no time for a debate. Instead of biting off a few choice words of explanation, Rafe grabbed her hand. Rather than pushing her ahead of him, he went the other route. He pulled her in his wake.
Hard.
And then she finally heard it. She heard the cause for his alarm. The sound of something pounding on the ground felt as if it reverberated right through her, like an earthquake in the distance.
The “earthquake” felt like it was coming closer by the moment.
Val turned her head in the direction the sound was coming from.
That was when she saw it.
A bull.
A huge, black bull was charging directly at them.
At her.
Val needed no further incentive to take flight. A veteran of several marathons—every one of them undertaken for some sort of a good cause—she immediately upped her game. With her pouring it on, Rafe no longer had to pull her in his wake. Despite the situation, a hint of admiration at her speed filled him when he realized that she was now keeping up with him and that at any moment she was going to pull ahead of him.
“He’s gaining on us!” Val cried, beginning to realize that just maybe this competition between the charging bull and them might not end well after all.
Less than a minute later, Val saw that they were not just running from something, they were running toward something. Directly up ahead was a long stretch of wire fencing.
“Will that keep him from trampling us?” she managed to ask as she continued running alongside of Rafe for all she was worth.
“It damn well better,” was all he allowed himself to say.
There was no point in telling her that he had a plan B. That if worse had come to worst and Valentine had frozen with fear, he’d been prepared to divert the beast, to get the bull’s attention so that it would run after him rather than attack the woman who had turned up on his property unannounced like this. Rafe hadn’t been raised to subscribe to the “every man for himself” school of thought. His father would have never allowed it.
But luckily, the woman with the improbable first name was not only sexy as hell, she was fit, which in this case meant that she was capable of keeping up with him and—for now—keeping ahead of Jasper, the whimsical name that Alma had awarded the bull that they had bought a year ago to breed with some of their cattle.
Reaching the fence less than a minute ahead of the charging bull, Rafe quickly pushed his uninvited guest up and over the fence. The next second, he dove over it himself. Rafe managed to clear it—all except for his left boot, the tip of which got caught on the very edge of the fence.
What began as a clean execution became less so as he found himself falling short of his intended mark.
Rather than hitting the grass, Rafe landed on top of Val, who was just in the process of turning around. Instead of gaining her feet, she gained added weight. Enough weight to push the air right out of her.
A
