by Cindy Dees
Down, boy. He needed to sleep off the stress of cutting himself badly and being rescued by Jessica.
He crawled into bed, his alarm set for six o’clock and the morning feeding. It was weird knowing Jessica was in the house, and that, for once, he wasn’t alone. It was...nice. And that was his last thought before he crashed.
* * *
When Wes woke up, the sun was streaming in his window at far too high an angle. The sun shouldn’t even be up yet! He looked at his alarm clock, saw it was pushing ten o’clock and bolted out of bed, swearing and leaping into clothes. He hated being late for the morning feeding. The cows got restless, and with so many of them close to calving, he didn’t want to stress them out.
He charged into the living room and pulled up short. Jessica was sitting at the kitchen table drinking a cup of coffee. And, more to the point, she was wearing a pair of his jeans, which hung baggily on her slender frame, and one of his flannel shirts, which was covered in bits of hay.
“What have you done?” he blurted.
“I turned off your alarm clock so you could get some rest, and I fed the cows this morning. You probably ought to go out and check that I gave them enough hay. I was getting pretty tired by the end, and I may not have thrown down enough for them.”
“You fed the cows?” he repeated blankly. Jessica Blankenship, jet-setter, trust fund baby and city girl extraordinaire, had fed his cows? Had he woken up in an alternate universe or something?
“I saw you do it before, and it’s not exactly rocket science to put corn and hay into a feeder.” She added, “There’s a pot of coffee made, and I’ll fry you up some eggs if you’d like.”
Yup. Definitely an alternate universe.
“How’s your finger feeling this morning?”
“It hurts a little. Nothing much.”
“Since you can’t work around the ranch today, I’d like to go over my thoughts about your house with you. Maybe take you on a shopping trip.”
He groaned. “If you take me to a craft store, I may have to kill myself.”
“The alternative is to trust me and let me make all the decisions for your renovation.”
“Renovation?” he echoed in alarm. “I thought we were talking about a little facelift. A rug here and there. Maybe some new paint.”
“Wesley Morgan. If you ever paint those glorious ceiling beams and wood-planked walls, I will personally have to hurt you!”
His eyebrows lifted. “No paint. Got it.”
“So what’s it going to be? Shopping hell or do you trust me?”
He lifted his gaze to hers across the table. “I guess I trust you.”
She stared back, her sky blue eyes wide and beautiful and surprised. “Well, okay then,” she breathed. She shook herself out of her apparent shock. “I’ve got some phone calls to make.”
“I’m going to go check on the cows while you do your designer thing,” he announced. “And then I’m going to do some work in the woodshed—and no, I won’t try to carve anything one-handed. I’ve got some sanding and staining to do.”
“No heavy lifting or hard work for you!” she called after him.
“Yes, ma’am!” he called back over his shoulder, feeling more cheerful than he had in a very long time.
Chapter 11
Jessica made calls to the contractors she’d been using on the Runaway Ranch cabin and lined up a whole list of people to come in and start work. Since she couldn’t safely leave Outlaw Ranch to go shopping by herself, she resorted to the internet, which wasn’t her favorite way to work since colors couldn’t be relied upon to be accurate from pictures. But she did her best.
She placed a large order for furniture and guessed at the colors. If they were awful, she could always have Charlotte Adams re-cover the upholstered pieces. In the meantime, she needed to start clearing the space. She chose the guest bedroom, which was sparsely furnished with only a single bed and a chest of drawers, as her base of operations. She emptied drawers and cabinets in the kitchen into plastic bins she found stacked in the mudroom.
And then she moved on to Wes’s bedroom, stacking his clothing, which was as neatly folded as she would have expected of a career Marine, in the drawers in the guest room. It was strangely intimate handling his personal possessions. The scent of his aftershave rose faintly from the folded shirts, and she resisted an urge to bury her nose in them. After all, it wasn’t like she was in love with the guy—
The thought stopped her cold. How did she feel about him, anyway? Goodness knows, she was attracted to him. And fascinated by him. She hadn’t been able to get him out of her mind ever since she’d briefly dated him. And when she’d been in fear for her life, her thoughts had turned to him first. That had to say something about how she felt, didn’t it?
If he had stayed in the military, she would have known what to expect of a long-term relationship with him. But this life of his in Montana, on a ranch no less, was completely foreign to her. Would she go stir-crazy in a place like this? Or would the lure of making a life with a man like Wes be enough to make her want to settle down and put down roots?
Her father’s career had moved the two of them to a brand-new place every few years. If Wes had stayed in the Corps, his career would have been the same way. She’d never even considered the notion of staying in one place for long before. But then, she’d never considered the notion of having an actual family, either. Had Wes becoming a rancher changed the equation?
She finished putting all the things she planned to keep through the renovation in the guest bedroom just in time for the first workers who arrived. She wasted no time putting them to work demolishing the kitchen, bathrooms and ripping out fixtures. The more stuff that could be gone before Wes returned to the house, the less he could complain about her plans for renovating his home.
The construction crew was efficient and had mostly gutted the kitchen before Wes stopped in the doorway, staring around in shock. “Jessica!” he shouted over the din.
She poked her head out of his bedroom where she was directing the removal of the ceiling. “Oh, hey,” she replied casually.
“What in the hell are you doing?” he demanded.
“You said I could redo you house. I’m redoing it.”
“I thought you were going to redecorate it, not destroy it!”
“I’m not destroying it. I’m restoring it. That’s different.” She smiled winningly at him, but he didn’t seem to be buying it if that scowl thundering on his brow was any indication.
“I can’t afford all of this—” he started.
She cut him off breezily. “I’m extremely good at my job. I won’t cost you any more than you can afford. Trust me.”
His gaze narrowed into a full-on glare at that. “We need to talk about this—”
“Later. I need to keep an eye on the crew and make sure they do exactly what I want. Otherwise, you may end up having to pay for replacing more than you need to.” It was a lie because she planned to foot the whole bill for this project, but she really didn’t want to have an all-out fight with him in front of the crew she’d hired.
He whirled and retreated from the combat zone that the house had become, which was just as well. She really did have a lot to do today.
By midafternoon, demolition was mostly done, and the crew had transferred most of the debris to a dumpster that had been delivered.
She rode over to the cabin at Runaway Ranch with the construction crew’s foreman to check on the latest work there and was delighted to see that the floor was installed, the new kitchen cabinets hung and the light fixtures in place. The rough-honed granite counters needed to be installed, a little touch-up painting finished and the furniture delivered, and the cabin would be done.
The foreman dropped her off back at Wes’s house in the late afternoon, and she called a thank-you to him and headed for Wes’s front door. The por
ch floor had been stripped away, with only a three-foot-wide walkway of wood planks left intact. She picked her way carefully to the front door.
She looked up and realized Wes was looming in the doorway. And he looked furious. She stepped inside as the last workmen packed up for the day and left, promising to be back first thing in the morning.
The door closed and silence fell in the gutted house.
“Just out of curiosity,” Wes asked with ominous calm, “how long is this renovation going to take?”
She shrugged. “Four to six weeks if we don’t hit any snags and the wiring and plumbing turn out to be sound.”
“How am I supposed to live in the middle of this? Do I even have a working toilet?”
“I left a toilet and sink in your bathroom, and the shower in the guest bath still works.”
“How am I supposed to eat?” he asked.
She shrugged. “We can eat out.”
“You do realize it’s a solid half-hour drive to Sunny Creek, right? Each way.”
“The microwave oven is in the guest bedroom, and I’ll get us a hot plate.” She added cheerfully, “Oh, and the coffeepot still works. It’ll be fun. Like camping.”
The look on his face announced that he saw no possibility of camping in his own house to be fun.
She rolled her eyes. “If you’re not up for an adventure, you can always go stay in the hunting cabin at your parents’ place. The furniture’s being delivered there tomorrow and it will be finished.”
“What part of ‘I don’t want anything to do with my parents’ don’t you get?”
“You called your dad when you needed help with Number 19 and Daisy.”
“That’s different. An animal was suffering and needed help.”
“No, it isn’t different,” she disagreed. “You need help and your parents have the means to offer it to you. Why won’t you let them assist you in any way?”
“Because I want to do this on my own.”
“Then quit whining about not having a kitchen and help me with the renovation instead of fighting me on it.”
“I never wanted all of this.”
Oh, now he chose to complain? He gave her permission to do the job and then, when the reality of it was staring him in the face, he wanted to back out? Wow. That was a whole lot like their entire relationship, now that she stopped to think of it. She, for one, was sick of his whole on-again off-again games.
She wagged an accusing finger at him. “You know what, Wes? You’re a hypocrite. You climb up on your high horse when it’s convenient for you, but heaven forbid that you should take a little help from your parents or admit that you have feelings for me when it’s not to your advantage to do so.”
“What does my having feelings for you have to do with my not being able to stay in my own home because you’ve wrecked it?”
She ignored his attempt to turn the topic and warmed to her own point. “You’re all happy to sleep with me when you feel like doing it, but then you push me away when I’m interested in being with you. You want me to admit I have feelings for you, but I don’t see you admitting that you have feelings for me, even though we both know you do.”
“I...what?” He sounded blank, as if he didn’t know what she was talking about.
Men. They were all a bunch of unconscious, un-self-aware jerks at times. Wes was acting just like her father. She rolled her eyes.
“Oh, puh-lease, Wes. Nobody has the kind of chemistry in bed that we do without real feelings for each other being involved.”
“That’s not true—” he started.
She cut him off, well and truly irritated now. “You know what? You seriously need to get over yourself. You’re so busy hanging on to your grudge against me that you can’t see how you really feel about me, even though it’s staring you straight in the face.”
“I know how I feel about you. I—”
She cut him off again, finishing his sentence for him. “You hate me. Despise me. You’ll never forgive me,” she snapped. “But you’re all kinds of willing to jump in the sack with me. How do you reconcile that with your big words about not being able to stand the sight of me, Mr. Mega-Morals?”
It was probably a low blow to attack his morals, but it was high time someone hit him over the head with a big, fat dose of reality.
Yes, he’d been wronged. But she wasn’t entirely at fault in being drugged, either. A tiny bit of wrong had been done to her, too. She hadn’t asked to be threatened and blackmailed nor to be put in the impossible situation of trying to protect a man she cared about deeply by having to hurt him. And she surely didn’t deserve his hate for choosing to save his life.
She glared at him, hoping that at least a tiny bit of what she was thinking showed in her eyes. He deserved a swift kick in the shins, and she was apparently the person the universe had chosen to deliver it.
Lord knew, those bullets flying at her on an isolated mountain road—when she’d thought she was safe—had been a kick in the shins to her.
Wes interrupted her internal rant, which she privately thought was a pretty good one as rants went. “Look, Jessica. I get that you’re enjoying playing house with me. But we both know this won’t last for you. You’ll get bored and restless, and then your wild streak will rear its ugly head and you’ll do something unpredictable.”
Her wild streak was ugly? “Gee, I thought you rather liked my wild streak,” she retorted. “Particularly in bed. I dare you to tell me you don’t.”
He opened his mouth. Closed it again.
Uh-huh. That was what she thought. She pressed her point, continuing, “Without my wild streak, you’d be just another boring stick-in-the-mud. I keep you stirred up. Feeling alive. Admit it.”
“Being around you is...interesting. I’ll grant you that.”
Ha. Just interesting? She was a three-ring circus of fun! And he loved it, whether he admitted it or not.
“You disappoint me, Wes. I thought you were more honest than this. But now I see you’re lying to yourself in addition to lying to me.”
She scored a hit with that salvo. He whirled away from her and stomped across the bare living room to stare out the big windows at the back of the room, opening onto a magnificent Rocky Mountain tableau.
He looked as solid and immovable as the mountains beyond him. And, face it, his strength was one of the reasons she loved him a little. She never had been the kind of person to hold a grudge. And as she stared at his broad shoulders, narrow waist and long legs, her irritation at him waned, replaced by aching longing.
She said more reasonably to his back, “I don’t have to stay here. I’ll be perfectly safe at Runaway, and if I’m there, you and I won’t have to keep tearing each other apart.”
She still had little more than the clothes on her back by way of possessions, and it was an easy matter to fetch the keys for her repaired car and her purse from the guest room and head for the front door.
Wes moved fast, meeting her at the door, his big hand closing around hers as she gripped the door latch. “Stay,” he said roughly.
She looked up at him candidly. “I’m sorry. You can’t have it both ways, Wes. You can’t hate me and want me with you.”
His frown deepened even more. She felt a frisson of sympathy for him, but this wasn’t her problem. He had to work it out for himself.
She continued gently, “I know how I feel. But until you figure out how you feel, I can’t be with you. I’ll see the renovation through, of course. And then I’ll honor your wishes and leave for good.”
* * *
Wes stared at the closed front door that Jessica had just left through. A combination of high indignation and impotent fury tore through him. His head might acknowledge the validity of her arguments, but his heart howled in frustration that she’d walked away from him and left him here, alone. Again.
Wha
t was up with that? He shouldn’t care if she left. Hell, he should be relieved that she was gone. He’d survived a near miss with getting tangled up in her insane life once more. He’d barely escaped the last time; no way would he have made it clear of her twice. The odds just didn’t stack up that way.
He turned and stared at the war zone she’d made of his house. Somehow, it was an apt analogy for what she did to his head and heart.
Gah! He stomped out to the calving barn and was relieved to see the signs that another cow would give birth tonight. Something, anything, to keep his mind off the most exasperating female he’d ever had the misfortune of knowing.
When he finally made his way back to the house in the wee hours of the morning as mama and new calf, a nice-looking bull, rested comfortably, he prayed that Jessica had at least left him a bed to sleep in. He was startled to realize she’d torn the entire ceiling out of his bedroom. The wood beams that held up the roof were visible now, and the space felt huge and cavernous. Wow. What a change. The last thing he wanted to do was acknowledge that she was good at her job, but she really was a talented designer.
And there was no place in his life for her.
* * *
Jessica felt bad shacking up with Wes’s parents again, but it wasn’t like she had anyplace else to go. Miranda had thrown her an understanding look that communicated her sympathy at loving a Morgan man, and then insisted she stay in the newly renovated cabin. Sure, she could return to the B and B in Sunny Creek, but after having been shot at she would hate to draw trouble to Annabelle Cooper’s doorstep, and the B and B wasn’t exactly an armed fortress.
As it was, she couldn’t avoid going into Sunny Creek and doing a little shopping for herself soon. She needed more clothes and toiletries and an actual computer. If she was going to do design work, she couldn’t keep doing it on her phone.
