it had ripped.
“I was so sure nobody would rent this place in this condition.”
She surprised him with a quiet laugh. “Amazing things happen.”
He looked at her again and felt himself smiling in response. “That they do.”
“Sorry I can’t offer you coffee or anything, but I just rented the place this morning and I haven’t been out to get supplies, or even any dishes or a coffeemaker. I figured I could do that tomorrow.”
“This morning? Just this morning?” That gave him pause. “You have a car, right?”
She shook her head.
“Well, hell,” he said. “That’s not gonna work. You can’t carry much on foot—the store’s on the other side of town. What do you need?”
She shrugged a shoulder. “That depends on how comfortable I want to be.”
“Short term, right?”
“Two months at most.”
He nodded. “Okay. I’ve got some stuff at my place you can use. Coffeemaker, pots and pans, some spare dishes and things. No reason you should buy that stuff for just a couple of months.”
Her mouth opened a little in surprise. “Are you sure you can spare it?”
“Hell, yeah. That house belonged to my parents. When I moved back here, I came with a lot of stuff from my place in Denver. I wanted my own things, and I just moved a lot of theirs to the side.” Feeling a little awkward, he admitted, “I just wasn’t ready to get rid of it, you know?”
She nodded. “But now? Are you comfortable with somebody else using it?”
“Sure. I’m not lending you the heirloom china, though.”
She laughed again, and this time it was an easier sound. That was good. If he was going to have to deal with a tenant as closely as he’d need to deal with this one, what with all the work this place needed quickly, it was far better to deal with one who wasn’t uptight about everything.
And the rest of it? Well that was just being neighborly.
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll get you some minimum stuff to get through the night, and we can discuss what else you need in the morning.”
“But,” she said, “Ben said you were out working at one of the ranches. You must be tired.”
“I am. But if I stop moving, I’ll freeze up. So let’s just get you a coffeepot, some dishes. Like I said, just enough for tonight. We can deal with anything else in the morning.”
Then he turned and limped his way to the front door, aware of her light step following him.
Kelly followed him, noticing the limp, but even more noticing his lean, rangy build, a build that, encased in jeans and a plaid Western shirt, suggested a lot of hard muscle beneath. His face had a chiseled appearance, a few lines that seemed awfully deep for a guy who didn’t look like he was much older than she was, and the sun had bronzed him. His hair was dark and a little wavy, and just a bit too long.
He was the kind of guy a lot of women in her previous life would have noticed, partly because he had a great build, but partly because he was so different from what they were accustomed to. A rednecked cowboy, evidently, and a far cry from the guys she had known who got their muscles in gyms and their tans on the beach or in salons.
She had to admit that she liked it. Life with her soon-to-be-ex husband had revolved around his practice and the hours he spent with a personal trainer. Not to mention the careful artifice of sun-streaked hair from a bottle.
Once that had seemed normal to her, but now she loathed the plasticity of it. Which was really kind of a funny thought, since Dean had been a plastic surgeon. She swallowed a giggle, surprised that she even wanted to laugh.
“So,” said Hank Jackson, the limping cowboy who had just barged into her life, “how the heck did you get curtains up so fast?”
“It was the first thing I did this morning,” she answered truthfully. “I walked into town and bought them. The rods were still good.”
“Yeah, I hadn’t pulled them down, either.” He paused at the steps to his porch and looked at her. “I’ve always heard that the first thing women do in a new place is put up curtains. Never believed it before.”
“Well, you can believe it now.” Nor did she have any intention of telling him why those curtains were so important to her.
“I guess not all stereotypes are stereotypes,” he remarked. He tugged a key out of his pocket and unlocked the front door.
The house smelled a tiny bit stale, having been closed up for a while, but it wasn’t a bad stale. Just faint hints that meals had been cooked here, that someone had lived here and been away.
It had a similar layout to her place, although it was a bit bigger. And the signs of a woman’s presence still dominated. She guessed that he hadn’t been able to part with a lot, including dotted Swiss curtains with ruffles, cheerful rag rugs and picture frames holding bunches of dried flowers.
He led her down the hallway, much longer than the tiny one in her place, to a large kitchen. Unlike hers, this one had been modernized with new cabinets, a dishwasher, a stainless-steel stove and a matching refrigerator.
“Let me get some boxes,” he said, and disappeared through a door.
She waited, looking around, and felt her throat tighten unwillingly. This place practically shouted “home,” unlike the mansion she’d left behind. Sometimes she wondered how she could have been so stupid and blind.
Hank returned a couple of minutes later with a box under each arm. “I think a lot of what you need is already here.”
He set them on the table and she moved closer to look as he opened them.
“Ah, I do have a memory,” he said wryly as he revealed a drip coffeemaker, some dishes and flatware.
“This is terribly kind of you,” she said honestly. “I’d have managed.”
“I’m sure you would have, but when you have a neighbor, it’s not always necessary. And if you’re only going to stay a few weeks, it just makes sense to lend you my extras.”
“Thank you.”
He smiled, an expression that lit up his face. “Let’s get this stuff over there, and come back for some more. You cook a lot?”
“Not really.” Not anymore. Life with Dean had meant dining out nearly every night, and when dining at home there’d been guests and a cook. Funny how that all looked to her in retrospect. But she didn’t want to think about that now.
It felt odd, after weeks on the run, to be trusting someone again, even if the trust only went as far as to let her new landlord lend her some things. Her nerve endings had been crawling for so long that she wasn’t sure they were capable of stopping.
But she was sure she had
