cram stuff on the shelves so you’ll have to waste time locating ingredients. Happy now, Mr. Ryder?”
“No,” he mumbled, shooting her a disgruntled glance.
Admirably she shrugged off his hostility and resumed the task of arranging items that began with N. Silence reigned for several moments while she progressed through O and P and skipped over Q to place a box of rice on the shelf.
“Where’re you from, Seymour? You don’t speak Oklahoman.”
“Colorado.” She plunked down the spaghetti sauce next to the rice.
“What happened? Did the school administration fire you and you had to leave the state to outrun your reputation?”
Laura gnashed her teeth as she swiveled around to meet Wade’s insolent smirk. The man didn’t know how close he’d come to having a jar of spaghetti sauce smack him right between his moss-green eyes. “No, as a matter of fact I come highly recommended by my principal.”
She had no idea why she was defending herself to him. She certainly didn’t owe him an explanation and he didn’t deserve one. She’d never had acceptance issues with her associates, either. Most people gravitated toward her friendly, nonconfrontational nature. All except His Grouchiness. He seemed to derive wicked pleasure from provoking her.
“No doubt, you came with all sorts of recommendations,” he said in a tone that implied scandalous activities. “Did the principal’s wife resent the competition? Did you move on before she stamped a scarlet letter on your forehead?”
Laura quivered with outrage. The horrible man had the audacity to stand there, assassinating her character, judging her by his lowlife standards and condemning her in one felled swoop. “I was not having an affair with my principal,” she defended hotly. “For your information my principal was a she!”
“Gad, that’s even worse,” he said distastefully.
The man was insufferable! “I came here to be on my own and work in the same school system with my college roommate, not that it’s any of your business,” she all but shouted.
Wade shook his tousled raven head. “I’ve got a news flash for you, Seymour, the PTA isn’t going to approve of striking up your old affair with your college roommate, either.”
Laura didn’t know what possessed her to react so violently to his goading. Her ability to apply restraint and self-control, after years of dealing with challenging students, failed her completely. Before she realized what she’d done, the container of salt that she had clenched in her fist was sailing across the room and smacked Wade squarely in the chest. With a horrified gasp, she watched him stare at the container that plopped on the tiled floor. He turned his death-ray glare on her and Laura’s face flushed with mortification. Damn it, she’d let him get to her.
With extreme effort, Wade doubled over to retrieve the salt container then tossed it back to her. “I guess you don’t think I’m injured in enough places already, huh?”
Regretful and embarrassed, Laura emitted an inarticulate sound and refused to meet his mocking gaze.
He smiled wickedly, then added, “I’ll bet your résumé failed to mention that you’re prone to violence when provoked. How many students have you clobbered when they’ve managed to tick you off, Seymour?”
Laura was so frustrated and angry that she was shaking. Her heart jackhammered in her chest, spurred by an overdose of adrenaline. She wanted to grab this infuriating rascal by the throat and strangle him for making her lose her temper. She almost never lost her temper. But Wade Ryder, the devil incarnate, had witnessed her complete loss of control.
“You aren’t going to let loose with the waterworks, too, are you?” he taunted. “If you’re going to cloud up and rain every day, I’ll make sure I have flood insurance.”
“I wouldn’t give you the satisfaction of seeing me cry,” she snapped at him. “Just go away.”
“Nope, this is my house and my kitchen.”
“Fine then, I qu—” Laura shut her mouth so fast she nearly cropped off the tip of her tongue. No matter what the man said to her, no matter how often he goaded and insulted her, she wasn’t going to quit. She wanted this job. She needed this job for a dozen good reasons.
He arched a dark, challenging brow, daring her to complete that sentence. “Yes, Seymour? You were saying?”
Laura might not have been the modern-day version of Einstein, but she was smart enough to deduce that A: Wade Ryder didn’t like her. And B: He didn’t want her crowding his private space. And C: He was trying to provoke her into quitting her new job before she had twenty-four hours under her belt. She didn’t understand why he wanted her gone because she didn’t know him well enough to determine what made him tick. But, for pure contrariness alone, she wasn’t giving this cantankerous rancher the satisfaction of hearing her say she quit. She wasn’t a quitter and she’d dealt with troublesome students during her four years of teaching at the elite private school in Colorado—a job her brothers had pulled a few strings to secure for her….
The thought served to bolster her firm resolve. She was going to tough it out on her own, no matter how snide and sarcastic Wade Ryder proved to be. She wasn’t a wuss, even though most of her former students weren’t in the juvenile delinquent category of kids who tested her temper and challenged her authority on a daily basis—not like Mr. I’m-Gonna-Give-You-Hell-Just-To-See-If-You-Can-Take-It Ryder. No matter how mad he made her—and he’d made her plenty mad already—she wouldn’t quit. She’d stay, if only to aggravate him.
“I’m not quitting,” she told him as she squared her shoulders and tilted her chin to a determined angle. The fact that she was trembling with frustration probably detracted from her defiant stance, but she’d get better at dealing with this rascal. Now that she knew he was deliberately trying to get rid of her, she’d refuse to take him seriously, wouldn’t allow him to annoy her. In fact, she could be as disagreeable as he was if she really tried.
“If you aren’t quitting then you better toughen up,” he goaded her. “I have no intention of letting up on you.”
“Why? Because it goes against your sour, surly nature to be nice to people?” she flung back.
Wade didn’t so much as flinch when she flashed him a smirk. With jerky, agitated motions, she resumed stocking the kitchen cabinets in alphabetical order. He felt like a first-class ass for provoking Laura. His conscience—which he was trying to ignore—was screaming some pretty raunchy curses at him for behaving so badly.
Silently he marveled at her organizational abilities that the White House would envy. Hell, the woman could probably run a small country all by herself and still take a couple of days’ vacation each week. But if he was to succeed in his campaign to rout Ms. Temptation from his house then he couldn’t pay her compliments or cut her any slack.
An apology flocked to his tongue, but he refused to voice it because being nice to her would defeat his purpose. And damn it, he was uncomfortably aware of Laura Seymour in her trim-fitting, perfectly creased jeans and her pink knit blouse that displayed the full rounded swells of her breasts. Her perfume kept trying to lure him across the kitchen to get a stronger whiff and his good hand itched—and so did the injured one—to map the alluring contours of her goddesslike body.
Sheesh! Of all the women in all the
