silently thanked his mother for her interfering ways as his eyes slid lower and took in more of the amazing view, noting how her jeans hugged her hips and the tied button-down shirt that accentuated her slim waist, giving just a peek of midriff. The top was unbuttoned low enough to give more than a suggestion of the breasts beneath.
Everything about her set him on fire. She was rather petite but didn’t seem frail in the slightest despite her stature. She gave off an air of feistiness. Brock liked feisty.
Brock realized that he’d stood there without speaking for far too long, and brought his eyes back to hers. He suddenly felt a bit like an awkward teenager, not a grown man of nearly thirty. It took all his effort to arrange his face into a cool, confident smile. “Hello, ma’am,” he said, putting on a slightly thicker drawl than usual. Ladies liked the Southern drawl. “I’m Brock McNeal. My folks live just over the way. They said Mrs. Stanford was in need of some help fixin’ up this place, and I thought it best to come introduce myself.”
A plan was already formulating in Brock’s mind. Make nice to the old lady, get in good with the beautiful mystery woman, then ask her for a date. Easy enough. His only problem was that two weeks in town suddenly didn’t seem near enough time if he could spend it enjoying her company.
The woman standing before him smiled. “Nice to meet you. Call me Cassie. Your mother was so sweet to offer your help. I really don’t know how I would manage all of the work by myself.”
Brock’s mind shifted gears quickly. The widow wasn’t some old woman at all. Which meant that Cassie was here all on her own. But was she mourning a recently lost husband? She didn’t seem to be. Would it be wrong to ask her out?
Before he could come to a conclusion, there were noises behind her and two young boys shot into the doorway behind Cassie, their identical faces peering at him from behind Cassie’s legs.
“Zach, Carter, say hello to Mr. McNeal. He’ll be helping us fix up the place a bit,” Cassie said.
Brock tried his hardest to keep the disappointment off his face, but he wasn’t sure he succeeded.
Of course she had kids. There had to be something or his ma would’ve just come out and told him about her sneaky little plan. She knew well enough by now he didn’t plan on having any children, and that meant no dating women with kids, either.
When the boys chirruped quiet hellos, he gave them a little wave before turning his attention back to their too-beautiful mother. “It was nice to meet you, but I better get back for dinner,” he said.
Cassie seemed to sense his suddenly urgent need to leave; she nodded and said, “But I’ll see you tomorrow and we can discuss the repairs?”
The almost desperate look in her eyes was too much. “Sure thing,” he responded before turning away from the door, cursing his own bad luck.
Why did she have to be a mom?
Cassie closed the door, trying not to show just how shaky she was feeling. She took in a large gulp of air, as if she hadn’t breathed properly since first opening the door.
She put her hand to her chest, trying to calm the beating heart beneath. As soon as she did it, she realized her fingers were only touching bare skin and she groaned. She’d been unpacking boxes in the warm living room and had answered the door without realizing she was wearing a shirt that showed far more skin than she would have otherwise.
What must he have thought, to see her standing in the doorway showing off her stomach and chest like that?
Her mind went from zero to naughty in an instant, and it took all her effort to bring it back to being appropriately embarrassed.
“He’s got big arms,” Carter commented, oblivious to his mother’s mental gymnastics.
Oh, she had noticed his arms. She had noticed every single inch of him, from the shaggy sun-kissed brown hair under a battered cowboy hat all the way to his scuffed boots. Her eyes had eaten him up like so much candy the moment she had seen him standing on her porch. But she wasn’t planning on telling her four-year-old son that. “Hopefully he’ll be strong enough to do things I can’t do all on my own to get this ranch working,” she said, trying to maintain her concentration on the tasks at hand.
“We’ll help, too,” Zach responded, a look of such sincerity on his young face that her heart—and eyes—welled up at the sight.
“I know you will,” she answered, ruffling the boy’s dark curls, trying to keep the worry out of her voice.
It had seemed like a great idea only a couple of months ago. Purchase a ranch, get out of the city and live the life she’d always wanted. It seemed so simple. But she hadn’t expected everything to cost quite so much, and now here she was with a broken-down ranch that needed to make money, somehow, and she didn’t have the faintest clue how to go about it.
She knew that once she got her small doctor’s office going in the front room of the ranch house, she would be able to make ends meet, but finances would likely be tight for a while, and a running, profitable ranch would help give her a cushion. Instead, she was going to need to pour money into this place before she could hope to get much out of it.
Finding this ranch for sale when she so desperately wanted to leave Minneapolis had seemed like fate, and she’d jumped at the chance. Now, it seemed more like a crazy whim she’d acted on without thinking it through.
Mrs. McNeal’s offer of a helpful son had been a gift from heaven, and she knew she could never turn down the assistance, even if the man on the doorstep made her think nothing but the most sinful of thoughts.
Cassie pictured the way he had been standing there looking her over, and she felt short of breath again. She had tried to behave as professionally as she could, despite the inclination to kiss this complete stranger. She was no longer a whimsical young woman who could give in to an impulse of that sort, no matter how strong.
It was more difficult than she’d like to admit, though. She did not look forward to seeing the man again, and she needed to keep her distance when those urges pushed her to do some very inappropriate things. If she had any choice, she would tell the neighbors she didn’t require any help, after all. But she did, so there was nothing for it.
Cassie turned her thoughts back to her two sons, who were playing amid the boxes piled around the living room. “Time for bed,” she told them, and they hopped up, racing for the bathroom.
Zach won, shutting the door in Carter’s face. While he waited his turn, he went over to his mother and pulled on her arm. “Can you tell us the story about the time Dad saved the baby birds?” he asked, looking up to her with his large green eyes.
Cassie’s heart squeezed tight. The boys idolized their father and always wanted to hear stories about him. He had only been gone for six months, and she couldn’t face tarnishing their perfect image of him, so she had kept telling them the good stories over and over, keeping the not-so-good ones to herself. To them, he was a kind-hearted police officer who had died in an unfortunate car crash. She wanted it to stay that way.
Zach and Carter were by far the biggest reason why she couldn’t bring a man into her life. They weren’t ready. Especially not for someone like this Mr. McNeal, who
