into consideration the number of times he’d mumbled the word damn under his breath.
Sighing deeply, she decided to brave the icy waters and said, “Surely there’s something we can do.”
He speared her with a look that could probably freeze boiling water and his mouth was set in a grim line. However, to her his lips still looked as delectable as a slice of key lime pie. “You heard what he said, Alyssa. We can try to appeal, but if we’re not successful we will still have to do the thirty days, which will only delay things,” he said.
Do the thirty days. He’d made it sound like a jail sentence. And since he would have to share the same roof with her, she wasn’t sure she particularly liked his attitude. She didn’t like what Hightower had said any more than he did, but there was no reason to get rude about it.
“Look,” she said. “I don’t like this any more than you do, but if we can’t change things then we need to do what Toner is requiring and—”
“The hell I will,” he said almost in a growl when he looked back at her. He had pulled into the parking lot of a restaurant and had brought his truck to a stop. “I have more to do with my time for the next thirty days than entertain you.”
She immediately saw red. “Entertain me? From saying that, I guess you’re assuming if we do decide to live together for the next thirty days it will be here at your place.”
He shrugged as if to ease the tension in his shoulders and said, “Of course.”
She frowned. He sounded so sure and confident. She would take joy in bursting his bubble. “Wrong. I have no intention of staying here in Austin with you.”
His eyes narrowed into slits as he continued to glare at her. “And just where do you assume you’ll stay?”
She glared back. “It’s not where I’ll stay but where you’ll stay. I’m returning to Waco and if you want to fulfill the terms of Toner’s decree you will, too.”
If she thought he was mad before then it was quite obvious he was madder now. “Look, lady. I have a ranch to run and I won’t be doing it from Waco.”
“You’re not the only one who owns a business, Clint. I’m not going to drop everything that’s going on in my life just to come out here to live with you.”
“And neither will I drop everything I’ve got going on here to move to Waco, even temporarily. That’s as stupid as stupid can get.”
She had to agree with him there, but still that didn’t solve their problem. According to Hightower, they needed to live under the same roof for thirty days, which meant that one of them had to compromise. But she didn’t feel it should be her and evidently he didn’t think it should be him, either. “Okay, you don’t want to move to Waco and I don’t want to move here, so what do you suggest we do to get that annulment?” she asked him.
He pulled his key out of the truck’s ignition and said, “I don’t know, but what I do know is that I think better on a full stomach.” He opened the door to get out. “Right now I suggest that we get something to eat.”
* * *
By the time the waitress had taken their order, Clint was convinced that somebody up there didn’t like him. If they did, they would not have dumped Alyssa Barkley in his lap. The woman was too much of a tempting package and someone he didn’t have time to deal with. The thought of her living under his roof, or for that matter, him living under hers, was too much too imagine. But he had been a Ranger long enough to know just how tangled red tape could get. Someone had screwed up. Otherwise they wouldn’t still be married—at least on paper. As she’d told Hightower, the marriage hadn’t even been consummated. It had been an assignment, nothing more.
“You’re a triplet, right?”
He glanced at her over the rim of his glass. “Yes. How do you know that?”
She shrugged. “It was common knowledge among the Rangers. I met your brother, Cole, once. He was nice. I also heard you have a sister.”
“I do,” he said, thinking about Casey, who had gotten married a few months ago. “If you go by order of birth, then I’m the oldest, then Cole and last Casey.”
“Is Cole still a Texas Ranger?”
He figured she must feel a little more relaxed to be asking so many questions. “Yes, he is.”
He didn’t know her well enough to reveal that Cole’s days with the Rangers were numbered. Like him, Cole planned to go out on early retirement; however, Cole hadn’t decided what he’d do after leaving the force. Clint wasn’t even sure if Cole planned to stay in Texas. His brother might take a notion to move to Montana like Casey had done to be near their father. The father the three of them thought was dead until a few years ago.
He took a sip of his coffee. In a way he knew what Alyssa was doing. She was trying to get his mind off the gigantic problem that was looming over their heads. But the bottom line was that they needed to talk about it and make some decisions. “Okay, Alyssa, getting back to our dilemma. What about you? Do you have any suggestions?”
She took a sip of her coffee and smiled before saying, “I guess I could go back to Waco and you remain here and forget we ever found out we were married and leave things as they are. As I said earlier, marriage isn’t in my future anytime soon. What about yours?”
“Not in mine, either, but still, having a wife isn’t something I can forget about,” he said. Several things could happen later to make him remember he was a married man.
For example, what would happen if she decided, as his wife, that she was entitled to half of everything he owned? His partnership with his cousin and brother-in-law was going extremely well. Not saying that she would, but he couldn’t take any chances. He had bought out Casey’s and Cole’s shares of the ranch and now it was totally his. The last thing he would tolerate was a “wife” staking a claim on anything that had his name on it.
And then there was the other reason he wouldn’t be able to forget he had a wife. She was too damn pretty. Her features were too striking and her body was too well-stacked. Even now sitting across from her at the table he could feel his temperature rise. Since he figured she hadn’t gotten that way overnight, he wondered how he had missed noticing how good she looked five years ago. The only excuse he could come up with was that at the time he’d been too heavily involved with Chantelle and only had eyes for one woman. Too bad Chantelle hadn’t had eyes for just one man.
“There has to be a way out of this,” she said, interrupting his thoughts with a disgusted look on her face. Disgusted or otherwise, her frustration didn’t downplay how full and firm her lips were, or how her eyes were so dark they reminded him of a raven’s wing. He wondered if her copper-brown hair was her natural color and he felt a tug in his gut when he thought of the one way he could easily find out. He shifted in his seat. His jeans suddenly felt a little too tight, especially in the area of his zipper.
Evidently she was waiting for him to respond, because her dark eyes were staring at him. He leaned back in his chair. “There is a way. We just have to think of it.”
* * *
Alyssa could feel Clint checking her out the same way she was checking him out, which only solidified her belief that living under the same roof with him wouldn’t work. There
