her if you haven’t got her number.” Chuckling, she turned away to retrieve Christie Eagle’s chart.
The small fifty-year-old wood-frame house was showing serious signs of age. Even in the dark shadows of the night, Luke could see the peeling paint, the slightly uneven steps of the porch, the shutters that probably hadn’t hung straight in decades. Surprised, he braked to a stop at the curb and grabbed the wrinkled scrap of paper he’d tossed on the dash when he left the clinic a few minutes earlier. A quick glance at the address Rocky had scrawled there four hours earlier assured him he’d made no mistake. This was it—the place where Kate Fortune’s granddaughter was living.
It made no sense, he told himself as he approached the front steps. He didn’t know anything about the details of the old lady’s will, apart from what Rocky had told him, but it was a given that she wasn’t strapped for funds. She could, no doubt, afford the best that Clear Springs had to offer. So what was she doing living here?
Bothered more than he should have been by the question, he knocked briskly on the door, determined not to get caught up in the intriguing diversity that was Rocky Fortune. The lady had her quirks and the money to indulge them. He didn’t care what she did as long as she agreed to pay him a decent lease on the airfield.
Knocking again, he frowned when there was no answer. Someone was obviously home—he could see the lights through the covered windows, and the walls were practically vibrating from the country-and-western song being belted out on a radio inside. “What the hell?” he muttered, and tried the knob. It opened without a sound. Surprised, he scowled. Crazy girl, didn’t she know better than to leave her door unlocked at night? Clear Springs might not be much of a metropolis, but just like anywhere else, it had its fair share of crime.
Giving the door a slight nudge, he stepped cautiously inside and found himself in a small entrance hall. On the radio, a whiskey-voiced man was singing about a honky-tonk woman, but Luke hardly noticed. Through the arched doors that led to the living room he caught sight of Rocky, and he could do nothing but stare. This was, he knew, the same woman who’d come sashaying into his clinic earlier that afternoon, dressed to kill and flashing her money around. The expensive business suit, however, had been traded for paint-spattered jeans and a ragtag cotton shirt, her high heels for a pair of tennis shoes that looked as if they’d been through a war. Standing with her back to him, her wild red hair covered with a blue bandanna, she was painting the living room and singing her heart out, while her slim hips kept heart-stopping time to the beat of the music. Feeling like he’d been struck by lightning on a clear day, Luke stood as if turned to stone, while deep inside a hot pulse kept time with every sway of her hips.
Belting out the current number one country hit, Rocky turned to add paint to her dry roller pan—and nearly dropped it, stunned when she saw Luke Greywolf standing in the doorway. She should have laughed—she was a mess, with white paint in her hair and on her clothes and even under her fingernails, and her singing had often been compared to a cat’s screeching. But there was something in his eyes that wasn’t the least bit funny, and suddenly her chest seemed tight and breathing wasn’t nearly as easy as it had been before she spied him in the doorway.
Flustered, she hit the power switch to the radio. “Well, this is a surprise,” she said, too loudly, shattering the sudden silence. “I wasn’t expecting to see you this evening.”
“I knocked,” he said stiffly. “But the radio—”
“Was blaring,” she finished for him, grinning. “I have to crank it up to max when I sing, or I’d have every dog in the neighborhood howling at the moon.”
For a moment, she thought she saw a smile start to curl up the corners of his mouth, and she found herself waiting expectantly, her gaze fastened on his lips. But then his eyes fell to the roller and pan at her feet, the paint on her arms and clothes, and a confused anger hardened his face. Scowling at her, he growled, “Tell me something, lady. Just what the hell kind of game are you playing, anyway?”
Taken aback by the unexpected attack, Rocky blinked. “Game? What are you talking about?”
“This handyman routine,” he retorted, waving at the drop sheets and painting paraphernalia that littered the living room. “I didn’t think you people cut up your own meat, let alone knew how to yield a paintbrush.”
Outraged, Rocky gasped, her brown eyes narrowing dangerously. “Cut up our own meat?”
It was the wrong thing to say. Luke knew it the second the words left his mouth, and he wanted to kick himself. What was it about this woman that knocked him off kilter so easily? He’d never had a problem communicating with women before—he liked them, dammit! But there was something about Rocky Fortune that just seemed to rub him the wrong way.
Heat climbing up his throat, he quickly back-pedaled. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. It’s just that your family is rolling in dough, and you’re probably not used to doing things for yourself—”
“Like tying my own shoelaces?”
Luke winced at the sweetly purred gibe. “You’re not going to make this easy for me, are you?”
“Not on your life,” she retorted, beginning to enjoy herself. “So what can I do for you, Doc? You didn’t show up here just to insult me.”
She knew, dammit, why he was there—he could see the anticipation dancing in her eyes. And she was going to make him squirm. Amused in spite of himself, he swallowed his pride and admitted, “I’ve given it some thought and realized I may have rejected your offer to lease the airstrip too quickly. I thought maybe we could discuss terms.”
“Terms, huh?” she echoed, grinning. “I think I can manage that.” Whisking off the sheets covering the furniture, she motioned to him to take a seat in an overstuffed chair, then settled opposite him on a faded brocade coach. “Okay, Doc, the ball’s in your court. It’s your serve. Give it your best shot.”
He named a sum that he thought was more than fair, only to have her gasp as if he’d just insulted her. “You’ve got to be kidding! That’s highway robbery. Have you looked at the runway recently? And the hangar?”
She threw out a figure that was half the one he’d named, he countered, and the game began. With a skill Luke couldn’t help but admire, she held her ground and bartered like a horse trader, making no attempt to hide the fact that she was in her element. Later, it would bother him that he’d enjoyed himself so much, but when he rose to leave nearly an hour after he arrived, they had a deal.
Confident that he’d gotten the best of her, he solemnly shook hands with her, then couldn’t resist gigging her as she walked him to the door. “You drive a hard bargain, lady. But I would have taken less, you know.”
Unperturbed, she only grinned. “Really? That’s good to know, Doc. Because I would have paid more.” Her brown eyes sparkling, she laughed and shut the door in his face.
Two
The snow that had been falling all day had finally stopped, but the night was dark as pitch and cold as the devil. Flipping off the clinic lights, Lucas stepped outside and locked the front door, swearing under his breath as the wind seemed to cut right through his clothes. With a sharp jerk, he tugged the zipper of his down jacket as high as it would go, but it didn’t help. Nothing did when the temperature was dropping like a rock toward zero and a twenty-mile-an-hour wind was blowing fit to kill. Leaning into the gale, his shoulders hunched against the cold that snaked down the back of his neck, he hurried toward his Bronco at the far end of the clinic’s
