manager’s office.
“Good, because I’m keen to hear,” he drawled, his voice as hard as whetstone. He entered the cramped office behind her and shut the door with a snap. The noise level from the restaurant fell away. “What I’m seeing is impossible. So start from the beginning. Tell me how in hell you staged that scene at the restaurant in Cheyenne, and at the hospital. Never mind my untrained eye, how did you convince a doctor that you’d lost the baby?”
She shook her head. “I can’t believe you think I’d do that.”
“I wouldn’t, without the evidence. But I tend to trust facts, not feelings.”
“I never staged anything, Lucas.” She turned to face him, feeling that strange and almost painful belt-tightening feeling again, around her stomach and across her back. As usual, it soon faded. Her desire for a comfortable chair and a pillow to support her lower spine remained, destined to stay unfulfilled.
With its littered desk and single chair, the office was way too cluttered for this confrontation, but she was glad she’d chosen privacy over space, all the same. Lucas Halliday still looked too good, in her eyes, still filled her with all the wildly contrasting feelings he’d generated in her almost six months ago, and again in November. Anger and resentment, unwilling interest in just what made him tick, steaming attraction, dawning respect.
“And that’s not the beginning, anyhow, and you know it,” she finished.
“So start with your definition of the beginning,” he said. “That first afternoon in the cabin? The night we tried to say goodbye at the door of my motel room? The day you came to see me out at the ranch in November?”
“None of those times.”
“No, I guess not. I guess it goes farther back, doesn’t it?”
Their eyes locked together. His looked dark and clouded with multiple layers of memory, and she knew he would have to define “the beginning” the same way as she did—the day, last September, when they’d first met…
Chapter Two
L ucas Halliday had no problem with buying a ranch for his father. He’d already bought four of them, over the past two years. All four had proved good investments, with his own regular visits to oversee things, and with the right people in place to run them.
This new purchase, however, was different. Dad’s latest wife—the third since his long-ago divorce from Lucas’s mother—had developed a very pretty fantasy about buying a real cattle ranch to use as a fourth home. Fifth, if you counted the yacht.
Raine wanted watercolor mountain views, a Vogue Living log cabin, movie soundtrack mooing steers—odorless, naturally—and a Fountain of Youth fishing stream. Dad was happy to go along with all of that, as long as the ranch paid its own way, just like the others did.
Lucas had been tasked with locating this impossible combination. He’d narrowed the search to southern Wyoming, because of its relative proximity to Colorado ski resorts and the airline hub city of Denver, and eliminated two properties, sight unseen. If he couldn’t give Dad and Raine a good report on Seven Mile he planned to tell them they could continue the quest on their own. He preferred cool-headed corporate takeovers to fantasy fulfilment for spoiled stepmothers, any day.
Having told the realtor that he would need three days to look over the place properly, he intended to be out of Wyoming and on a plane back to New York within half a day if Seven Mile fell short of Broadbent’s glowing description.
He got into Denver on a late flight, rented a car, drove north through Fort Collins to Laramie to get a better impression of the region, then southwest to Biggins. By the time he’d checked into the town’s best motel and eaten a late and surprisingly good meal in the quietest corner of the Longhorn Steakhouse, he was pretty convinced he’d be heading out of here tomorrow.
Biggins had no clothing boutiques, and no craft galleries or antique stores. There were just three motels, two options for dining and a single beauty salon. Raine expected big city amenities at a stone’s throw from rural beauty, but she wasn’t going to get that here.
Jim Broadbent knocked on Lucas’s motel room door at eight-thirty the next morning, and they drove out to Seven Mile together. It was a pretty drive. The Medicine Bow Range dreamed in the distance. Rolling grasslands filled the foreground. The September grass was colored in the morning light like yellow chalk and fresh honey and clear-varnished pine floors.
Jim kept his conversation down to an intermittent trickle of facts about cattle breeds, growing seasons and water rights. An experienced realtor in his early fifties, the man gave the impression that he wouldn’t find this ranch too tough to sell, even in the unlikely event that Halliday Continental Holdings didn’t want it. He probably conveyed this same impression with every property he handled, and Lucas ignored it completely.
The mountains got closer. They passed the entrance to another property, and he had time to glimpse the name McConnell on the gate. Jim crossed a wide, shallow stream where the water ran silver over the rocks. Lucas knew that whatever attributes and advantages the Seven Mile Ranch might or might not have, it was going to be beautiful.
They turned onto a dirt road, and rumbled across several cattle guards. Ahead he saw a cluster of corrals and farm buildings, neat and modest and well-maintained. From this angle, they were almost lost beneath the enormous, soaring sky and looming mountain range.
“Who’s giving me the tour?” he asked Jim, as they approached the long, low ranch house, painted a faded barn red. “You?”
“I’m going to leave you with Joe Grant. Or his daughter.” Broadbent swung around and parked in the front yard at a crooked angle, then added, “Looks like it’s the daughter. Rebecca. Reba, everyone calls her.”
Rebecca Grant must have been sitting on the porch steps, waiting for their arrival. When Lucas caught sight of her emerging from the morning shadow cast by the house, she was still slapping her hands back and forth across the butt of her jeans to get rid of the dust.
She hadn’t dressed to impress, he noted, as her body hit the sun. Old Wranglers, scuffed boots, plaid flannel shirt. A swathe of dark hair hung around her face and partway down her back, glossy and healthy and natural.
As Lucas watched, she dragged a red circle of elastic from her pocket and pulled the mass of hair into a high ponytail at the back. The movement lifted her breasts inside the rumpled shirt and showed a glimpse of shadow on soft skin. She’d just completed the final twist of the elastic when she reached them.
“Hi,” she said. A wide smile jerked tight on her face and faded too soon. Mistrustful, ocean-toned eyes glinted like water.
“Reba,” answered Jim. “Beautiful morning.”
The realtor made introductions, and Reba chopped a hand in Lucas’s direction for him to shake. He complied, and felt the startling contrast of long, fine-boned feminine fingers and palms callused like cardboard.
“Is your Dad around?” Jim asked.
“He’s taken Mom into Cheyenne.”
“Doctor?”
She nodded, but didn’t say anything further on the subject.
“So you have a program mapped
