made in a loose-leaf notebook. When the last item was checked off, Lightning Creek would once again be a bona fide working ranch. Her working ranch...well, hers and her sister’s, but she’d be the one living there, managing it once Dani got married next summer.
“I’ll give you that,” Dani agreed as she returned to the kitchen while Jolie hung her damp coat on a hook near the front door. “But my arena should have been up by now and it’s ticking me off. And it’s not doing your practice schedule any good.”
Jolie’s barrel racing season started in a matter of weeks at the Glennan Memorial Day Rodeo and she and her mare still had some serious work to do to get up to speed. Unfortunately, the soggy conditions made practicing in the outdoor arena impossible, which in turn made it difficult to reestablish herself as a barrel racing contender—which she needed to do if she hoped to eventually establish a business.
She’d moved back to Lightning Creek Ranch with the idea of conducting barrel racing clinics while her sister continued to develop her successful horse training business. Between the two of them, they’d figured they could keep the ranch afloat and make enough to live comfortably—as long as one of them, aka Jolie, worked a steady job to help pay the land taxes and other incidental expenses.
But once she’d moved home, Jolie had found that she hated seeing the ranch lie fallow. All five cows had been bred the previous spring and all had successfully calved. But the fields were a wreck, the buildings needed re-roofing and the irrigation system needed revamping.
The ranch was in even worse shape than it had been during her teen years when it had slowly been slipping away from them as hay and cattle prices tanked. They’d hung on until the prices rebounded, but only by cutting back to bare bones while their mother worked at a full-time job.
So one late night, over a bottle of wine—or had it been two?—Jolie and Dani had come to an agreement. They would put the Lightning Creek right again. It wouldn’t be a big operation, but they would increase the herd, lease out the fields, mow and bale the meadow hay instead of letting it go to waste. With careful management, they should be able to glean enough profit for Jolie to quit her job in a couple of years and until then they’d build the training business.
That had been the plan, anyway. Then Dani had become engaged to Gabe Matthews, the landscape architect who lived in the mansion next door. Even though Dani still used the ranch as her base of operations, revitalizing the Lightning Creek had become more Jolie’s project.
Jolie had no problem with that. Finally she could put a bit of her animal science degree to work in a meaningful way instead of preg-checking cattle on a mega ranch. She also didn’t mind being the decision-maker. As the youngest of four, she’d been bossed around more than the average kid, and enough was enough.
And speaking of being bossed around...
“Guess who my new supervisor is?” Jolie said, following her sister into the kitchen. At the stove, she sipped a little sauce off a teaspoon and reached for the salt.
“Mike?”
“Still laid up from his hip surgery. No. It’s Dylan.”
Dani turned back from where she was taking plates out of the cupboard. “Dylan?” Her mouth twitched.
“It’s not funny, Dan.”
“Is he as hot as ever?”
“I never found him hot.”
“Liar.”
“I could appreciate his attractiveness but it’s difficult to classify someone who is ordering you around and generally pissing you off as hot.”
Dani shrugged. “Hot is hot.”
Jolie rolled her eyes and went for the wineglasses. Pasta cried out for wine. So did her rather trying day.
Dani waited until they were seated with the bowl of pasta between them before she said, “I assume you’ll be able to work together?”
“I have little choice. I like my job and once Finn gets back it’ll be back to normal. All I have to do is hang on until then.”
“You’ll play nice with Dylan?”
Jolie smiled with mock sweetness. “Of course, Dani. He’s my employer.”
DYLAN CLOSED HIS laptop and pushed it aside. Finn wasn’t answering his emails. It was probable that he wasn’t available to answer, given his circumstances, or he might not be opening the mail from his cousin, knowing full well that said cousin had a few choice things to say about the help Finn had hired.
Dylan reached for the bottle on the sideboard next to Mike’s kitchen table—his makeshift desk—and poured a shot of bourbon. The deed was done and now he had to live with it.
He lifted his glass in a salute to his absent cousin. “Up yours, Finn.”
He sipped and leaned back in his chair. Hell, this might all be for the best. Having Jolie around could distract him from the other issues in his life. The box of lingerie had definitely distracted him. Steamy images of Jolie in a garter belt didn’t mesh well with him trying to keep her on task in the store.
Was she still as easily sidetracked as she’d been a decade ago? Did she still head off on those wild tangents when she was supposed to be focused on the matter at hand? Her flippant attitude indicated a possible yes to those questions.
All he needed was to have to do two jobs instead of one. But again, maybe being that busy would keep him from fixating on getting the doctor’s release he needed to go back on patrol and stop riding the desk. Law enforcement might not have been the career he and his father had plotted for him, but he loved it.
He didn’t know if he could handle a desk job for the rest of his career—not unless he was wearing a detective’s badge while doing so. He was scheduled to sit for the exam in a matter of weeks, but it was a crap shoot. He knew better guys than him that had failed it the first go, so he needed a contingency plan to ensure he didn’t end up in Logistics until he did pass the exam. And that plan involved getting a doctor’s release and going out on patrol.
“Hey, Dylan?” His grandfather’s gravelly voice came from the back bedroom where he was sorting through belongings in preparation for his move to a smaller, more manageable house on the edge of town, closer to the store.
“Yeah?” Dylan pushed his chair back and got to his feet, putting the bottle on the sideboard before heading down the hall.
Mike was standing between two cardboard boxes with neatly folded tops. “Can you haul these out to the living room so I have room to maneuver?”
“You bet.” Dylan knew it killed Mike to have to ask for help, but at least he was asking. His recovery from the hip replacement had taken longer than expected because he’d tried to do too much too soon. Apparently he’d learned a lesson.
“Marjorie can’t take the goats.”
Dylan stopped in the doorway. “That’s too bad.”
“Yeah.” Mike shook his head. “I don’t want Maisy and Daisy to become cabrito
