by Camryn Rhys
Too much information for people he’d just met, but it would be hard to keep all that warning inside.
Jamie’s eyes had gone narrow and there was almost a disappointment on her pretty features. He didn’t like that look.
“Sure, I saw her.” He leaned in so only she could hear his whisper. “You’re hotter.” Kyle turned and left her staring with her mouth open.
Brady leaned on the corral, just behind his sister. His face didn’t show open lust like the rest of the poor saps around there. He was clearly worried. Smart guy.
He followed Brady’s gaze to the green-shirted, light-haired guy Lana hung on while she giggled. Something passed between the two men—flashes of eyebrow and tight mouth corners. This was likely the brother who had been caught with Charity. He definitely had the ladies man look. Too pretty for his own good.
And all over Lana. So, apparently, Paul had a type.
Damn, he needed to talk to her. Maybe he could convince her to head back to Denver. Kyle couldn’t afford to have his cover blown, at least not until he could come up with a suitable explanation that wouldn’t cause him to lose the only job prospect he’d had in months. He couldn’t go back to Denver without a decent paycheck under his belt, and until Lana showed up, he’d hoped he could get by without actively lying to anyone.
But now he was in deep shit—not unlike the rest of the men at the Silver Spring Ranch.
Lana’s giggle sounded over the ambient noise, and Kyle fought a roll of his eyes.
“That one’s trouble,” Brady said.
The stern set of his boss’s jaw surprised him. If only he’d had that kind of instinct when he first saw Lana. Instead, he’d been blown away by her beauty and blinded to her faults until he couldn’t ignore them anymore.
“The blonde?” Kyle leaned against the corral next to the angry cowboy and crossed his arms. “You’re probably not wrong.”
“I know I’m not wrong.” Brady spat on the ground in front of him and stamped hard.
Pressure fisted around Kyle’s heart. Swallowing, he tried to sound indifferent. “You know her?”
“I know her type. Plus, she’s already latched onto my brother. That makes her bad news.”
“Your sister insinuated the same thing.”
“She’s still pissed about me firing the last ditz Paul decided to test out. Jamie had it in her head that girl was her best friend, but I could smell that one, too. She was using Jamie, and Paul.” Brady plucked the hat from his head and looked toward the barn door where his mom emerged. “There’s nothing that pisses me off more than when people take advantage of my family.”
Kyle could only imagine the protective brotherly instincts. He was starting to develop some of those himself the more he heard about Charity. “Makes you a good brother.”
“Makes me the only not-dumb one around here, I’ll tell ya.” He tossed the hat on and pushed off the corral, stalking toward the bus.
Jamie tossed him a green staff shirt and tugged one over her tank-top. Brady looked at it for a second and scoffed, throwing it back to his sister. He spread his arms and whistled. Once he had everyone’s attention, he welcomed the tourists.
Kyle stayed near the corral with Mattie, and when the time came for introductions of the staff, Brady did all the honors. When his name was called, he nodded at the group of awestruck on-lookers and avoided Lana’s gaze. But he did seek out Jamie, and found her alternately watching him and watching Lana. Either she knew something was up, or she was jealous. Every part of him rooted for jealousy.
“Kyle?” Jamie called out.
Stunned to have everyone’s eyes on him, he froze. He stood about halfway between Mattie and Jamie, and hadn’t quite strategized a plan yet. “Here,” he said and hunched his shoulders.
She extended a graceful arm to encompass him. “Kyle is our newest staff member, so go easy on him. Ladies, I know he looks delectable, but as staff, he—like me, like Brady, like Paul—is off-limits.”
He breathed a sigh of relief when she stopped talking and kept walking toward the crowd of tourists.
“Besides,” Jamie continued, “he’s married.”
This time, Kyle couldn’t help glancing at Lana. Please, don’t say anything, he silently begged. His plea bored through his brain, as though thinking hard enough would make the words audible to Lana’s ears.
The wait was agonizing, but his ex stayed impressively quiet. It was unlikely she had any compassion for him. More likely, she wanted to get some leverage.
Hot damn, I’m in trouble.
Finally, Jamie continued with her instructions about sleeping arrangements, and Kyle released the breath he’d been holding. Just get to the end.
Still, a growing part of him hoped his singleness would be revealed. He would get fired from the Silver Spring Ranch, but sleeping on the street might just be worth a chance with Jamie Banfield.
Jamie was happy to leave her brothers to fit the tourists with their mounts and took the team back to the kitchen to hook up the wagon. She opened the bed with a loud thunk and switched on the light, fully expecting to find a complete mess or nothing done at all.
Kyle was no slouch. Crates of food sat atop flats of water bottles, nestled between the equipment boxes.
She knocked the side of one. Also full. In a matter of hours, he’d found his way around the kitchen, packed the wagon, and saved her the work.
Had he also managed world peace and solved string theory? Damn. Charity had been there three months, and she’d still been asking one of them for the safe code until her last day.
Kyle was a different animal altogether. He was on his shit.
She fingered the tender spot on the back of her head and re-lived the moment that ground had been rushing toward her in the corral. Then his body had cushioned her, held her. He hadn’t seemed a particularly soft man—in fact, he looked every inch a cowboy with his hard-corded muscles—but he sure made a nice place to land.
Her heart thumped in her throat, and she swallowed. If he hadn’t been there when she lost her seat…then again, if he hadn’t been there to surprise her, she never would have fallen.
Jamie Banfield was never unseated.
Really, it had been Kyle’s fault. Didn’t he know not to get in the corral with a wounded animal? He was closer than I thought. That’s all.
“I think I’ve got everything ready.” He appeared around the side of the wagon and leaned against the bed. “I found your packing lists in one of the drawers. Brady said on the phone we had fourteen guests plus two staff. Seventeen?”
Jamie quirked an eyebrow at him. “How is fourteen plus two seventeen?”
“Fourteen guests.” He held up three fingers. “Two staff and me.”
She laughed and pushed one finger back down into his fist and touched the first one. “You.” She moved to the middle finger and held the tip. “Me. We are the two staff.”
She stared for a moment and the air seemed to charge between them.
Jamie looked up and fell into those sparkling eyes. Her whole body warmed, starting from her abdomen and radiating outward. She leaned toward him, all anticipation and forgetting.
“We’re the only staff out there for a whole week?” Kyle’s breath feathered against her face and smelled slightly of mint.
A hard lump formed in her throat. We shouldn’t be going out on the trail like this. He’s married, and I’m…
She backed away. “Brady and Paul will come out with us to help set up camp, and they generally eat the first night. And they’ll bring supplies out once in mid-week beause our freezer isn’t big enough for a whole week’s supplies. But the guests help tear the camp down the last day.”
Kyle’s face screwed up in thought. “So you run the program stuff? I don’t have to help with the….” He moved his left hand around in the direction of the barn. “Y’know, the matchmaking or whatever?”
Jamie sighed. This was exactly what she missed about Charity. Since her brothers worked a ranch during the w
eek, they kept the staff to help with cattle and sheep, and they were only on the trail occasionally. But Charity had been excited. She wanted to get involved in the programs. She was the only one who showed any enthusiasm about Jamie’s ideas.
They had planned for months. But Kyle probably didn’t want to do any of it. She’d be stuck executing plans by herself, and by the end of the week, she’d probably hate matchmaking more than she hated Kyle.
If she could just make herself hate him.
Chapter Five
The campsite sidled up next to a narrow river they called Sage Creek, in a heavily wooded area about four miles into the wilderness, hills covered in white wood. And according to Jamie, the Banfields still owned all this land and more to boot.
Since this would be their center of operations, Kyle assumed they could go at least the same distance farther and still be on Banfield land.
More land than Kyle had ever seen one family own, but that was the way with these ranchers. Thirty thousand acres might’ve been the norm out here, but he hadn’t owned land in his entire life, so it was pretty foreign to him.
But food? That he could do.
Lana spent too much time flirting with Paul Banfield, which led to Brady extricating his little brother from her blonde clutches on multiple occasions as they set up the site. But once they sat down to his barbecued pork chops with spiced twice-baked potatoes and buttered, dilled green beans, all with different versions of Mattie’s spice rubs, a nice hush settled over the crowd. And he hadn’t even finished the apple crumble.
Kyle liked it when people shut up while they ate his food—meant they were concentrating enough on the meal, they didn’t need to talk.
The little corner of the camp they’d set up as the kitchen tent area wasn’t far from the giant campfire pit, and had more prep space than his home kitchen had before he’d moved out.
Glancing at Lana, he couldn’t help remembering the kitchen in their old house—the one she owned outright and still occupied. The granite countertops, professional grade range and oven, the giant refrigerator. The walk-in pantry. God, he missed that kitchen.
Of course, the Banfield ranch house was great, but if he was only going to be out here, he’d have to get used to this. The ovens built into the barbecues weren’t very big, and it took both of them to bake his potatoes in one shift then the apple crumble in the second.
But he’d make it work. He always made it work.
The one thing he didn’t know yet was how Jamie felt about his cooking. That shouldn’t be a topic of interest, but he spent all night watching for her.
She was nowhere to be found. He saw Brady with Paul and Lana and counted the rest of the guests. All present. For some reason, Jamie had disappeared.
Kyle took one more look at his egg timer, checked the temperature on his dessert, covered the remaining food with foil, and set off to find her.
He wandered the camp, keeping his eyes peeled for movement and finding none. The individual tents were spread far enough apart he could walk between them, and still no sign of Jamie.
Brightly-colored nametags adorned each tent—shades of pink for women and shades of blue for men. That would make night prowling way too easy.
His and Jamie’s tents were set several feet apart from one another in the back of the camp, farthest from the kitchen, nearest the river.
A small clump of white trees rose just behind his tent, partly separating it from Jamie’s. That had to have been on purpose, and was for the best.
Up the side of the hill was a small corral where they’d put all the horses for the night. Tied to one side were two saddled horses.
Still, no sign of Jamie.
He roamed back through the camp and looked even more carefully for signs that she was sitting somewhere. Could he have missed her in the crowd of eaters back up by the campfire? If it was possible for him to miss her gorgeous honey skin and chestnut hair…. Nope. Impossible. His eyes were already attuned to her, wherever she was in a crowd. He couldn’t stop himself from looking for her.
Off to his right, Kyle noticed a tiny movement. The river wound along the back of the camp, and just beyond the last tents, the bank was a little higher in one place at the edge of the floodlights. He walked to the top. It was just high enough to hide Jamie, sitting on a rock with her bare feet in the water, head in her hands.
Maybe I should leave her alone. She obviously had taken pains to find the one place in camp where she couldn’t be easily found. And picked the one time when everyone else had gathered in one place.
The part of her head she cradled was the part that had hit the ground earlier that morning. If she was hurt….
“Jamie?” he said, his voice as quiet as he could make it, above the quiet rush of the water.
She jerked around and her red-rimmed eyes made his insides lurch like a seatbelt stop.
God, she’s gorgeous, and not in the delicate, dainty way of girls like Lana. Jamie had this stoic, almost equine beauty that called out to something wild in a man.
“What are you doing here?” Kyle climbed down the riverbank and closed in on the rock she occupied.
She inched away from him with each step. “Sorry. You startled me.”
“You didn’t show up for dinner. I figured something was wrong.” Kyle reached for her head, and she turned away. “Y’okay?”
The stark, almost frightened look in her eyes faded, as though she willed it away, and the smile returned. “I’m fine. Just not very hungry.”
“You missed your brothers fighting over Lana.”
“The blonde?”
Oh shit.
Was he not supposed to know her name yet? He racked his brain to remember if they’d introduced the guests to each other yet. He was pretty sure they had.
“Yes, the blonde.”
Jamie shook her head. “They’re not fighting over her.”
“It sure seems like it. Paul will hang on her for a few minutes then Brady steals her away. Then Paul comes back. Like dogs fighting over a bone.”
“Brady is just trying to keep Paul away from her. Paul has bad taste in women right now, but he can’t help that.”
He remembered Brady’s words about Charity. Sentiments, which Jamie obviously didn’t share. “You don’t think he does?”
“In this case, yes.”
“Well, I won’t disagree with you there.”
Jamie snorted. “Don’t lie. You eyed her for a good five minutes when she stepped off that bus.”
Kyle tried not to let the fear into his face, but it gripped him. He liked this job more than ever. This moment with Jamie by the river, it was so…seductive. He wanted more minutes like this.
“Not in the same way.” Not the way I eyed you when I first saw you, he wanted to say. “If she had all her own parts and put on a few pounds, that might be another story altogether.”
“Who thinks that?” She threw her hands in the air. “No man honestly thinks, ‘gee, I wish she was a little fatter and her boobs sagged a little more.’ Give me a break.”
Jamie’s mood shifts threw him for a loop. One minute, nice and sweet; one minute, angry and bitter.
Of course, Kyle couldn’t tell her what he actually thought when he’d seen Lana this morning because, while he did like her body a little bigger and her boobs a little more natural, it was because she had been a better person before she became obsessed with her image. Telling Jamie that would definitely set off alarms.
“Women who are too perfect and whose boobs are too perky don’t look natural,” he said instead. “When you know something’s not real... You can’t have as much affection for a fake body or person as you can for a real one. Trust me.”
She went quiet, and for the first time all night, he felt like all her guards were down. Her hand shifted back to her head, and she grimaced.
“See, you’re not okay.” He finally sat next to her, and the cool, rough surface of the rock under his fingers was a sharp contrast to the warmth shooting throu
gh his body at her nearness. He reached for her head again, and this time, she didn’t pull away. When he moved her hand, he saw a patch of purpling skin and a swollen spot. A cord inside him tightened. He’d tried to save her from injury that afternoon but hadn’t managed it.
More than anything else, Kyle wanted to gather her in his arms and hold her. Something about the moment just demanded it. He studied her face, searching for a sense of which Jamie sat next to him.
She just looked back, blankly, like a little girl caught in a lie, while his fingers probed her injury.
“Ouch.” Jamie jerked back a tiny bit when he reached the apex of the lump.
That was a good sign, at least. If the only sore spot was the point of impact, it was probably just a bruise. Hard to read, that one.
But whether it was because he couldn’t decipher her every thought or because he hadn’t been laid in three years, he didn’t think he’d ever wanted to know a woman more in his entire life.
Jamie heated under Kyle’s scrutiny. All men are sweet until they get in your pants and they disappear.
Except, the way he watched her—like nothing else existed—it was intoxicating.
Stop it, Jamie.
Charity’s text about not being able to find the cabin had thrown her for a loop. And then the headache. And she was hungry. And all kinds of crazy.
The cabin was close to town, on the northwestern-most corner of Banfield land, but far enough from the main ranch itself that Brady wouldn’t be out there through the week. It wasn’t heated, but had a wood stove and plenty of firewood, and they would replace the canned goods Charity used.
Still. If Brady caught her….
Jamie hadn’t texted Charity back yet, and didn’t know what she’d say. Brady hadn’t been this angry about a staff person’s actions before, but Charity had really gotten under his skin.
If there was any way to remain neutral… because every time she talked to Charity, it felt like she was taking sides against her brother, and she hated that. Brady had been like a father to her, all her life. He was almost ten years older than she was, and always reminded her that he was there to take care of her.
