Wind River Wrangler

by Lindsay McKenna

  Now, it was different. Shiloh was different. Damn, the woman was under his skin, worse than an itch that couldn’t be scratched. Laughing to himself as he slowly rose to his full height, hammer gun dangling in his gloved hand, Roan knew the shoe was now on the other foot. Instead of walking away from the woman, he was walking toward Shiloh. And he didn’t want to walk away from her. How the hell had THAT happened? When? Roan prided himself on knowing himself pretty well. He was a hard-core realist. Not a romantic. Not an idealist. In his line of work, pragmatism helped him survive.

  He picked up the sound of a truck coming his way. Lifting his chin, he looked toward Pine Hills. There was a dirt and gravel road between the hills and he saw one of the white ranch trucks appear. Who? Walking along the southern part of the porch that still needed the railing built, Roan placed the hammer gun on the deck and dropped his sweat-darkened leather gloves next to it. Taking off his black baseball cap, he ran his fingers through his damp hair and settled the cap back on his head, his focus on the truck coming his way.

  Maud? Sometimes, especially on a Sunday afternoon, she’d be out and about in her truck, checking the massive ranch. The weekly tourist families left at ten A.M. And the rest of the day was spent getting ready for another six families to come in for a week beginning at four P.M. the same day. She always stole time about now to drive around the ranch, checking on the fencing, the pastures, and the animals. It was just part of being a rancher.

  Roan held on to his surprise when he saw it wasn’t Maud, but Shiloh. As she parked in front of the garage, he stood at the stairs of the porch, hands resting on his narrow hips. His eyes slitted as he watched Shiloh open the door. His body automatically tightened. She’d arranged her hair into a topknot that seemed to be coming undone. Her tank top was a pale green, lovingly outlining her upper body and he wanted to curve his hands around her torso, move them upward to feel the firmness of her breasts, feel them tighten. The Levi’s she wore were loose but still hinted strongly of her long legs. Unhappy with himself, Roan took the steps down to the sidewalk to meet her.

  “This is a surprise,” he told her.

  Shiloh turned, smiling, holding out a plastic box in his direction. “I felt bad knowing you were out here all alone, without any help putting up that railing. I just made us dessert for tonight and thought you might like a warm piece of apple pie right now for lunch.”

  His hand met hers. Roan savored the brief contact as he took the plastic box, a huge slice of pie enclosed in it. “You didn’t have to do this,” he murmured, affected by her thoughtfulness. Her topknot was sliding off to one side, giving her a girlish look, tendrils soft around her temples and flushed cheeks.

  Shiloh laughed and shut the door, walking with him up the steps to the cabin porch. “Sure I did. You left me pancake batter this morning in the fridge. Remember?”

  He couldn’t tear his gaze from her radiant green eyes. Shiloh looked so happy. Happy to see him? Roan didn’t know and he gave her a sour smile. “What? You’re the kind of woman who, if I leave pancake batter for her, will make me a real, honest-to-God apple pie?” he teased. Roan sat down on the top stair of the porch. There was plenty of room for two people to sit there and not be crowded up against each other. He hoped Shiloh would sit with him. She did.

  Pushing tendrils of runaway hair away from her cheek as she sat down, her back against the railing, Shiloh said, “I am. That was so sweet of you, Roan. Thank you. I mean, how many men would think of that? You deserved something for your kindness.”

  The breeze was playful and as Roan opened the container, the wafting scent of cinnamon and nutmeg filled his nostrils. “I knew you liked pancakes” was all he said, digging into the warm pie with a plastic fork that she provided for him. Hell, she’d be surprised if she’d known he’d slowed at her door at five thirty this morning, wanting so badly to push the door open and go in and find her in bed. Wake her up with a kiss. Watch her melt into his arms as she’d melted into him yesterday . . . Tucking all those torrid thoughts away, he focused on the delicious, warm apple pie. It dissolved in his mouth.

  “Good?” Shiloh asked, tucking her legs against her body, arms wrapped around them.

  “Better than good,” he mumbled, sliding her a glance. Shiloh looked like she was part of this cabin. Part of Wyoming. As if she’d always lived here. Her hair was tangled, eyes warm with happiness. Most of all, her mouth was gently curved upward and it sent an ache directly to his lower body. She was relaxed. “Looks like you’ve been working,” he observed, pointing the fork toward her knees, which had some dust on them.

  Laughing, she said, “I guess I should have changed before I came out here. I woke up at nine and ate a ton of pancakes and it was my turn to clean the house this week, so I did it. I wanted to do something to thank you for your thoughtfulness and we didn’t have any dessert planned for tonight.” Shrugging, Shiloh said, “I made an apple pie. I went over to Maud’s home and she had some cellar apples from last year left over and she gave me a bunch so I could make it for us.”

  “Nice of Maud to do that,” Roan agreed. He was starving. And it didn’t take him long to finish off the thick slice of warm pie. Getting up, he took the plastic box to his pickup and pulled out a sack that contained his lunch he’d made this morning. Walking back, he sat down and opened it up. “Have you eaten yet?”

  “No,” Shiloh responded, and then she rolled her eyes. “I was on a mission to get the house clean and that pie baked in time for your lunch.”

  Roan had three turkey sandwiches in his bag. He pulled one out, handing it to her. “Eat this.”

  Man of few words. Shiloh grinned and took it. “Thanks.” She looked up, appreciating the east side of the porch now sporting the new railing. “Looks great, Roan. Did you have any trouble with it this morning?”

  “I missed you.” Roan scowled. And then he said more carefully, “I missed having a partner to help me lay that railing.” He’d seen the sudden surprise in Shiloh’s face over his first blurted admission. Scrambling, Roan didn’t want to put pressure on Shiloh and quickly adjusted his words. He DID miss her, dammit. Coming out to the cabin this morning in first light, it felt damned lonely without her.

  “I was torn,” Shiloh admitted, enjoying the sandwich because she was equally starved. “I thought about you out here by yourself and that you’d need a second pair of hands.”

  “I got it done,” he murmured, finishing off the first sandwich and reaching into the sack for the second one. “You need to give your palms a day off with those blisters on them. No sense in working today and then tearing them open. They’ll heal faster if the blisters don’t pop.”

  “Always a man of reality,” Shiloh teased, brushing her hands off on the sides of her jeans. “But I’m going to stay, Roan. I don’t want to hammer today, but I want to spend the rest of the day helping you to put up the rest of the railing.”

  Roan felt his heart lurch with sudden happiness. His mouth thinned as he regarded her. There was a stubborn look in Shiloh’s eyes, the way she set her mouth, as if preparing for an argument from him. A grin leaked out of one corner of his mouth. “I don’t suppose if I told you no, you’d listen to me?”

  “Got that right, cowboy.” She stood up, dusted off her britches, and said, “I brought my gloves and I got my hat. I’m ready to be a gofer today and help you where and when you need a second pair of hands.”

  Roan sized her up, appreciating every inch of her lean, graceful body. “I’ll bet you were a handful as a kid growing up.” He saw her lips turn into a winsome smile.

  “How did you guess?”

  Chapter Twelve

  Shiloh dawdled over her apple pie after dinner. At her elbow, Roan was making good progress in demolishing his portion. He’d dropped three huge scoops of vanilla ice cream onto it. She’d taken one scoop. Burning with curiosity, she asked, “Do you get home very often to visit your parents in Montana?”

  Roan could sense her feelers out and aimed in his direction. “A
bout once a year. I usually go up for the fall roundup, help my dad out with collecting about three thousand head of cattle that’s wandered around their fifty-thousand-acre ranch.”

  “Wow,” she murmured. “That sounds like a big ranch.”

  “It is.” He savored sharing his meals with Shiloh. Roan couldn’t imagine what life was like without her. She completed him in ways no woman ever had before. Just the way her brows moved around, he could see her mind flying along at Mach 3 with her hair on fire. What was she after? Roan could feel her stalking him. It wasn’t a bad thing, just kind of amusing to him. She was a writer. Curiosity was high in Shiloh’s world and he sensed she wanted to know a whole helluva lot more about him than she did presently. She pushed the melting ice cream around on her half-eaten pie, thinking.

  “Was your dad always a rancher? I thought he was in the Army at one time?”

  “He was in for thirty years before he retired, came home, and took over my grandparents’ ranch.”

  “Oh,” she murmured, tilting her head, studying him. “Then . . . you’re a military and ranching family?”

  Nodding, Roan picked up his mug of coffee and took a sip. “The Triangle Ranch has been in my family for over a hundred years.”

  “Wow,” Shiloh murmured. “That’s amazing!”

  He grinned. “Why is it amazing?” Roan couldn’t help but tweak her, see where her plotting and planning to get info out of him was going.

  “Well,” she said, pushing the pie away, “I’m just trying to construct a story about who you are.”

  “Ah, truth at last.”

  She blushed. “Oh, come on, Roan! I’ll have you know, you’re the most closemouthed man I’ve ever met. If you can get away with stringing only one or two words together to answer me, you do.”

  “I call that succinct communications,” he parried, his grin remaining. He saw her brows draw down into a scowl. Shiloh was a wordsmith and Roan knew she valued communication more that he did.

  “I call it stunted conversation at best.”

  He chuckled and spooned in a forkful of pie.

  “It’s not funny,” Shiloh grumped good-naturedly. “It’s tough to hold a meaningful conversation with you, Roan.”

  “Don’t I always give you answers when you ask?”

  “Well . . . yes, but they’re so short. There’s no details. Just ‘yes’ and ‘no.’”

  “I see.” He could feel her bridling over this idea of limited conversation with him. Looking for a way to get more than two or three words out of him. “I just gave you a long sentence about my family’s ranch, didn’t I?” he pointed out, enjoying teasing her far too much.

  “And I loved it. I want more long complex sentences like that, Roan.”

  He shook his head and gave her a rueful look. “I’ll bet when you were a little girl you just weaseled anything you wanted out of your mom and dad. Didn’t you?”

  She rolled her eyes. “There you go again, Roan. Changing the direction of the conversation. This isn’t about me. I want it to be about YOU.”

  “Yeah,” he murmured, finishing off the last of the pie, “I get it.”

  Shiloh sat back, pouting and staring at him. “Do you not want to talk with me? Is that it?”

  Roan held her unsure gaze. His heart contracted because he could see she was stymied and hurt by his gruff shortness. “No, I like talking with you, Shiloh.” A whole helluva lot more than he should. Roan saw some of her hurt go away, but the confusion remained in her gaze. “All my life, I’ve lived and worked around men. Not women. Men have a different language than women.”

  “Yes, it’s called short, terse sentences. The fewer words, the better,” she muttered unhappily, wrapping her arms around her chest. “And you’re laughing at me. I can see it in the way your mouth is set.”

  Roan reached out without thinking, brushing a tendril away from her cheek and gently easing it aside. “Let’s get one thing clear between us, Shiloh. I would never laugh at you. I might tease the dickens out of you, but I would never, ever make fun of you. That’s not who I am. I don’t believe in humiliating another person. It’s not in my DNA.”

  Her lips compressed and Shiloh weighed his gruff words. “I know I’m a woman. I know I talk a lot. I guess maybe it’s culture shock for both of us. I’m used to being around my friends who love to communicate. I enjoy it. And you live out here”—she gestured widely around the room—“by yourself.”

  “I do talk,” Roan assured her, trying to curb his smile. Picking up his coffee, he added, “I talk to Maud. She’s a woman.”

  “More than two words?”

  “Yes, many more than two words.” Again, confusion came to her face. Shiloh was one of those people who liked to figure out how a person worked, who they were and what made them tick. It was her writer’s mind at work. Roan couldn’t fault her on that.

  “Well, then,” she said defiantly, “why can’t we hold more than a one- or two-word conversation, then?”

  He raised a brow as he sipped the coffee. “I was trying to give you room, Shiloh.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maud told me you were stressed out because of this stalker. You were coming into a strange house with a strange man in it.” Shrugging, Roan said, “I didn’t want to put extra pressure or stress on you. I wanted to be a shadow in your life until you settled in here, the stress left you and then I’d become more chatty, I guess.”

  Snorting, she muttered, “You’re chatty?”

  Wrong word. Roan quirked his mouth. “I’m not a writer, Shiloh. Maybe ‘chatty’ was the wrong word. I meant to open up a bit more to you once you were happy in here.”

  “Is that how you see me? As chatty?”

  Oh, this was going sideways and Roan didn’t want it to go there. He sat up and pushed his plate aside, folding his hands, holding her mutinous stare. She looked lush when her lower lip drew into a pout. He wanted to kiss it, run his tongue across it, feel Shiloh respond, feel her start melting into his embrace. “You’re a highly intelligent woman with a very keen intellect. I don’t know how you could say you’ve been chatty with me. We’ve barely spoken a paragraph to each other at any given time. Right?” he asked, and drilled a look into her widening eyes. Some of her pout and mutinous look dissolved.

  “Oh. Well, you’re right about that. We don’t speak much to each other. Like two ships passing in the night, if you ask me.”

  What a little hellion. Roan swallowed his grin and remained serious for her sake. If he did grin she’d probably think he was laughing at her and he wanted to avoid that at all costs. “I don’t have a problem speaking more than a paragraph to you, Shiloh. But I need you to give me the signal. Only you know when you’re settled in around here, feeling safe. Comfortable.” And more than anything, Roan’s protectiveness was always there where Shiloh was concerned. “I guess we’ve reached that point?”

  “Yes,” she said, the frustration leaving her voice. “I don’t want to have to pick and pry away at you all the time, Roan.”

  A corner of his mouth drew upward. “Pry and pick?” He saw a hesitant smile burgeoning across her lips. “I must be a nightmare to the writer in you, then? Being a man of few words and all?”

  “That’s putting it mildly.”

  The hellion was back and Roan saw the glint in her eyes, as if he were the target and she had him in her gunsight. His grin grew. “Why don’t you tell me how you really feel, Shiloh?”

  She blushed and then laughed. “Touché.”

  Roan laughed with her, feeling his heart swell in his chest. Shiloh was part pert teen, sometimes a willful, pouting child, but always a woman in his heart. Roan wished he could be more like her, but he had one speed and that was serious and responsible. Not that she wasn’t, Shiloh was, but her ability to be utterly herself mesmerized him. She made him laugh. Made him feel lighter. Hell, even happy, if he’d admit it to himself.

  She opened her hands. “Truce?”

  “Sure, I don’t mind surren
dering over to you.” That was a loaded statement with layers upon layers on it, but Roan saw her take it at face value.

  “More than a yes or no?”

  He stood and picked up the dishes and flatware, taking them to the sink. “What do you want to talk about?”

  Shiloh stood and went to the sink and grabbed the dishcloth. “You. Your family. How you grew up. Why you went into black ops.”

  “I might have known you’d have a list,” he said drily, watching her wipe the table off.

  “I’m a writer.”

  “I’ll bet you hide behind that label a whole lot, gal.”

  She grinned and washed the cloth out beneath the sink faucet. “It serves a purpose.”

  He grunted. “Maybe too much so.” Giving her a glance as he placed the rinsed dishes into the dishwasher, Roan said, “I’d like to get to know the woman behind the writer label.” Roan saw it hit Shiloh directly, her eyes widening a bit, her pupils growing black and large in response to his growling words.

  She hung the cloth between the two sinks and pulled a towel off the rack and dried her hands. “Because?”

  He pushed the door shut on the dishwasher and straightened, a few feet separating them. “Because you interest me. Isn’t that good enough reason to pry and pick at you?” Her lips twitched. Shiloh tried not to smile, but failed. Roan decided it was fun sparring with her. Despite everything, the stresses still on her, Shiloh was able to be free and spontaneous. He found himself wondering how he’d lived in this big house alone for so long, without her vital presence, her sunshine smile, her quick intelligence that kept pace with his. Roan didn’t want to see Shiloh leave. And he knew she was here for only two months.

  “That’s a good enough reason,” she said mildly, hands on her hips. “And you won’t have to pick and pry at me, either.”