Barbara Dunlop - In Bed With The Wrangler

She pushed the wheeled chair aside and moved to go around him. “I think I’d better leave.”

She’d have to call her parents to rescue her, head back to Chicago with her tail between her legs, maybe even reconsider her relationship with Hargrove, since, as the three of them so often told her, she was naive in the ways of the real world.

At least with Hargrove, she knew where she stood.

“Why?” Royce asked, putting a hand on her arm to stop her.

She glanced at his hand, and he immediately let go.

“There’s obviously been a misunderstanding.” She’d hang out in the upstairs bedroom until a car could come for her. Then she’d head back to the airport, home to her parents’ mansion and back to her real life.

This had been a crazy idea from beginning to end.

“Clearly,” said Royce, his jaw tight.

She moved toward the door.

Royce’s voice followed her. “Running back to Mommy and Daddy?”

Her spine straightened. “None of your business.”

“What’s changed?” he challenged.

She reached for the doorknob.

“What’s changed, Amber?” he repeated.

She paused. Then she turned to confront him. No point in beating around the bush. “I thought I was a houseguest. You thought I was a call girl.”

A grin quirked one corner of his mouth, and her anger flared anew.

“Are you always this melodramatic?” he asked.

“Shut up.”

He shook his head and took a couple of steps toward her. “I meant what’s changed on your home front?”

“Nothing,” she admitted, except it had occurred to her that her parents might be right. She had been protected from the real world for most of her life. Maybe she wasn’t in a position to judge human nature. They’d always insisted Hargrove was the perfect man for her, and they could very well be right.

“So, why go back?” Royce pressed.

“Where else would I go?” She could sneak off to some other part of the country, but her father would track her down as soon as she accessed her bank account. Besides, the longer she stayed away, the more awkward the reunion.

Royce took another step forward. “You don’t have to leave.”

She scoffed out a dry laugh.

“I never thought you were a call girl.”

“You thought I was a barroom pickup.”

“True enough,” he agreed. “But only because it’s happened so many times before.”

“You’re bragging?”

“Just stating the facts.”

She scoffed at his colossal ego.

“You’re welcome to stay as a houseguest.” He sounded sincere.

“Are you kidding?” She couldn’t imagine anything more uncomfortable. He’d been planning to sleep with her. And for a few seconds there, well, sleeping with Royce hadn’t seemed like such a bad idea. And he must have known it. She was sure he’d known it.

Their gazes held.

“I can control myself if you can,” he told her.

“There’s nothing for me to control,” she insisted.

He let her lie slide. “Good. Then it’s settled.”

“Nothing is-”

He nodded toward the desk. “You organize my office and pay my bills, and I’ll keep my hands to myself.” He paused. “Unless, of course, you change your mind about my hands.”

“I’m not going to-”

He held up a hand to silence her. “Let’s not make any promises we’re going to regret.”

She let her glare do the talking, but a little voice inside her acknowledged he was right. She didn’t plan to change her mind. But for a few minutes there, it had been easy enough to imagine his hands all over her body.

Royce felt the burn in his shoulder muscles as he hefted another stack of two-by-fours from the flatbed to a waiting pickup truck. The two ranch hands assigned to the task had greeted him with obvious curiosity when he joined the work crew. Hauling lumber in the dark, with the smell of rain in the air, was hardly a choice assignment.

But Royce needed to work the frustration out of his system somehow. How had he so completely misjudged Amber’s signals? He could have sworn she was as into him as he was her.

He slid the heavy stack across the dropped tailgate and shifted it to the front of the box, admitting that he’d deluded himself the past few months in the hotel fitness rooms. High-tech exercise equipment was no match for the sweat of real work.

“Something wrong?” came Stephanie’s voice as she appeared beside him in the pool of the yard light. She tugged a pair of leather work gloves from the back pocket of her jeans. “You looked ticked off.”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Royce denied, turning on the dirt track to retrace his steps to the flatbed, passing the two hands who were on the opposite cycle. “Where’d you come from?”

Stephanie slipped her hands into the gloves, lifting two boards to Royce’s five, balancing them on her right shoulder. “I drove down to join you for dinner. I wanted to see how Amber was doing.”

“She’s fine.

“She inside?”

He shrugged. “I assume so.”

“You have a fight?”

“No. We didn’t have a fight.” An argument, maybe. In fact, it was more of a misunderstanding. And it was none of his sister’s damn business.

“Something wrong with Bar-”

“No!” Royce practically shouted. Wait a minute. His sister might have changed topics. He forced himself to calm down. “What?”

“With Barry Brewster,” she enunciated. “Our VP of finance? I talked to him earlier, and he sounded weird.”

Royce slid his load into the pickup then lifted the boards from Stephanie’s shoulder and placed them in the box. “Weird how?”

It was Stephanie’s turn to shrug. “He yelled at me.”

Royce’s brow went up. “He what?”

They stepped out of the way of the two hands each carrying a load of lumber.

Stephanie lowered her voice. “With Jared gone. Well, Blanchard’s Sun, an offspring of Blanchard’s Run, took silver at Dannyville Downs, and-”

“S-o-n son?” Royce asked.

“S-u-n. It’s a mare.”

“You don’t think that will get confusing?”

Stephanie frowned at him. “I didn’t name her.”

“Still-”

“Try to stay on topic.”

“Right.”

The temperature dropped a few degrees. The wind picked up, and ozone snapped in the air. Royce went back to work, knowing the rain wasn’t far off.

Stephanie followed. “Blanchard’s Run is proving to be an incredible sire. With every week that passes, his price will go up. So I called Barry to talk about moving some funds to the stable account.”

“Did you really expect him to hand over a million?”

“Sure.” She paused, sucking in a breath as she hefted some more lumber. “Maybe. Okay, it was a long shot. But that’s not my point.”

“What is your point?”

The first, fat raindrops clanked on the truck’s roof, and one of the hands retrieved an orange tarp from the shed. Royce increased his pace to settle the last of the lumber on the pickup, then accepted the large square of plastic.

“You two get the flatbed,” he instructed, motioning for Stephanie to move to the other side of the pickup box.

“My point,” Stephanie called over the clatter from the tarp under the increasing rain, “is Barry’s reaction. He went off on me about cash flow and interest rates.”

“Over a million dollars?” Royce threaded a nylon rope through the corner grommet of the tarp and looped it around the tie-down on the running board. It was a lot to pay for a horse, sure. But there weren’t enough zeros in the equation to raise Barry’s blood pressure.

“I felt like a ten-year-old asking for her allowance.”

“That’s because you behave like a ten-year-old.” Royce tossed the rope over the load to his sister.

“It’s a great deal,” she insisted as lightning cracked the sky above them. “If we don’t move now, it’ll be gone forever.”

“Isn’t that what you said about Nare-Do-Elle?”

“That was three years ago.”

“He cost us a bundle.”

“This is a completely different circumstance. I’m right this time.” She tossed the rope back. “You don’t think I’ve learned anything in three years?”

Royce cinched down the tarp. He wasn’t touching that question with a ten-foot cattle prod. “What exactly do you want me to do?” he asked instead.

“Talk to Barry.”

“And say what?”

“Tell him to give me the money.”

Royce grinned.

“I’m serious.” The rain had soaked into her curly auburn hair, dampening her cheeks, streaking down her freckled nose.

“You’re always serious. You always need money. And half the time you’re wrong.”

She waggled her leather gloved finger at him. “And half the time I’m right.”

“So I’ll get you half a million.”

“And you’ll lose out on generations of champion jumpers.”

Royce walked the rope around the back of the pickup, tying it off on the fourth corner. “Sorry, Steph.”

Her hands went to her hips. “I own a third of this company.”

“And I have Jared’s power of attorney.”

“You two have always ganged up on me.”

“Now you’re sounding like a child.”

“I’m-”

“I’m not giving a million dollars to a child.”

Her chin tipped up. “You weren’t giving it to me anyway.”

“True,” Royce admitted. He couldn’t resist chucking her under that defiant chin. “You’ve got a perfectly adequate operating budget. Live within your means.”

“This is an extraordinary opportunity. I can’t begin to tell you-”

“There’ll be another one tomorrow. Or next week. Or next month.” He’d known his sister far too long to fall for her impassioned plea.

“That’s not fair.”

“Life never is.”

Thunder clapped above them, and the heavens opened up, the deluge soaking everything in sight. The ranch hands ran for the cook shed, and Royce grabbed Stephanie’s hand, tugging her over the muddy ground toward the lights of the house.