Roped In

by Crystal Green

  “I’m afraid I might have dressed for the wrong occasion,” she said. “I didn’t expect you to be outfitted for a horseback ride—I was just going to take you out in the Jeep for that tour. But I can…”

  “No, no need for you to change. It’s good to get out of the office and the suits every so often.”

  “I didn’t think you rode, anyway.”

  “I’ve got some experience. My uncle raised me, and he lived on a ranch, so that’s why I’m on this project—because I’m familiar with the territory.”

  She hadn’t been expecting that from him, either. “Good to hear. Before we go, would you like to have some coffee? There’ll be brunch, too, after the tour.” Cook was planning a secluded picnic that she would pack up and bring out to a spot by the stream, where Candace meant to sit Russell down and make one last pitch to him for the sake of the W+W—if she sensed he was open to it.

  “I’ve had my caffeine already,” he said. “I’m ready to go if you are.”

  She inclined her head toward the waiting Jeep by the side of the house, then, with a grin, went to the passenger’s side and held open the door for him.

  Amused, he took a seat, and she shut the door, assuming the driver’s position.

  She maneuvered onto a trail that led to the woods, wanting to go back to the community event barn first, where she would paint a vivid mental picture for him of all the dances and craft days and activities that could be held there.

  The wind blew through her hair, and she pushed it back, driving one-handed, careful of the ruts in the trail. “The Wades have owned this place for going on four generations now. Our great-great-granddaddy came out here in 1855.”

  “I did my research on this place.” His smile made her wonder if he’d put her name into any kind of search engine, as well.

  He continued. “Due diligence is part of my job, and I need just the right property for this project.”

  “It sounds like it means a lot to you.”

  “It does. A dude resort was my idea, and it was challenging to get the higher-ups in the Lyon Group to see the merits of it in these times.”

  With a glance, she saw how proud he seemed.

  “You’ve got quite a bit riding on this?” she asked.

  “Only my reputation in the industry and my future.”

  She turned back to her driving, wishing she was as one-hundred-percent invested in his brainstorm as he was. Sure, welcoming his investment would “save” the ranch, but what would the W+W become?

  They drove by a couple of ranch kids exercising the horses. They waved to Candace, and already, she missed what the W+W had once been during those wonderful summers she’d spent here with family and friends, wished it would never have to go corporate in order to survive….

  Masking her true feelings, she steered them toward the barn. Candace had been out here earlier, polishing it up, even though the always-responsible Nicki had already cleaned after last night’s pirate games.

  She pulled up to the old structure. She’d put jack-o’-lanterns in front of it, in the spirit of the holidays. Just a nice little touch.

  “You don’t seem much like a country girl,” Russell said, continuing their conversation. “What brought you to Pine Junction?”

  “My story is complicated, and not particularly thrilling.”

  “I doubt that.”

  They got out of the Jeep, but he wasn’t done with her.

  “What did you do in the city?” he asked.

  “Wait—didn’t you research everything about this place?”

  “Not everything.” His grin momentarily disappeared, as if he realized that he might be veering too far from their purpose in being out here today. “I was only wondering.”

  Heck, no harm in this small talk, right?

  “I did my time in college,” she said. “I came out with a business degree, then started the long corporate climb at a job that didn’t pay off in the way I’d hoped it would.” She wandered toward the barn. “Unfortunately, I was one of the newer employees when it came time to lay off some of the staff.”

  “So here you are?”

  “For now.”

  He wandered over to the door, too, just before she opened it.

  “I have the sense that you’d be good in business,” he said.

  Why did it seem as if he meant…other things, too?

  Good in business. Good in…bed.

  Candace shook it off. Was she imagining these signals he was sending? The way he phrased things?

  Not that it mattered, because she wouldn’t go there. Not yet, at least. Russell Alexander would be someone to file away in her mental black book, for a time when all this business with the ranch was taken care of. And then…

  Then it could be playtime. She’d promised Nicki as much.

  She opened the barn door, but one glance at the area only made Candace aware of what Nicki had been up to with Shane last night. By now, however, there was no trace of those lanterns Candace and Nicki had talked about using for ambience, or the covered hay bales and blankets—all meant to evoke the slightest hint of a pirate’s cabin on a ship.

  Candace blew out a breath, her mind starting to spin with what could happen with a man like Russell in a barn like this. With him so near to her, she could smell his skin—he didn’t use cologne, like a lot of other men she’d known. She could actually feel him on her, even with the polite distance between them, and the sensation smoothed over her skin like a caress.

  “Here’s a better look at our communal barn,” she said, gesturing around, her voice laden with a quiver that she overcame. “It’s a great place for inside activities. And there’s plenty of land on the ranch, in general, for developing guest cottages and cabins, plus a meal and community hall.”

  He went to the middle of the barn, and a slat of sunlight from the open door bathed him. A tall drink of water—that’s what he was, and Candace was so damned thirsty.

  He took it all in, seeming to appreciate the rustic comfort of the barn as much as she always had, city girl or not.

  Maybe he could love the W+W, too, she thought. Was it possible that, with some urging, he might keep it from going too dude?

  They got back into the Jeep, and Candace decided to test him out.

  “Can we be honest with each other?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  “I’d like to know where we stand,” she said, then quickly corrected herself. “With the ranch.”

  The corners of his lips tilted. “You’re in a good place.”

  “Who else are you seriously considering besides the W+W?”

  “Now, you know I can’t tell you that, Candace.”

  “All right.” She tried again. “Can you tell me what they might have that we don’t?”

  He rested a gaze on her, sending shivers straight to her core.

  “Truthfully?” he said. “They don’t have anything on you.”

  The shivers spread into glimmers that sparked under her skin, and she smiled, trying hard to stick to business.

  7

  AFTER AWAKENING AND then working for a few hours, Nicki showered and dressed for the rest of the day in jeans and a white T-shirt.

  Just as she was putting on her socks, there was one knock on her bedroom door and then—boom—there was Candace, who stood in the entrance with her hands on her hips.

  “I didn’t close any deal,” she said, coming the rest of the way in and dropping onto the bed, her black-and-white skirt huffing down around her.

  “Things didn’t go well with Alexander?”

  “I tried to sell this ranch to him like you wouldn’t believe, and still…no commitment from the guy.”

  Nicki slumped against her wall.

  “So no progress at all.”

  “Not really.”

  Outside, Nicki could hear laughter—children who loved the W+W, just as she and Candace always had.

  Candace obviously heard them, too, judging from her wistful expression. “Something goo
d will happen for us. It has to, Nic.”

  “You mean to say that the dude resort deal will come through after all?” Because with every day that went by, she still wasn’t convinced she was making the right decision.

  But what other choice did she have?

  She went on. “What if Alexander did make an offer, but he refuses to keep everybody on? And what’s this place going to look like with a spa and a fancy restaurant? It won’t be the same.”

  “You can’t think that way.” Candace sent one last look at the window.

  Now she was wearing an expression that made Nicki think that not only was she glum about the ranch’s fate, she was probably worried about not being able to find a job or even get any other kind of deal going nowadays.

  “Candy, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say you’re not used to many people handing you a hard time in any shape or form. But you’re doing your best for us, and that’s all I can ask.”

  “It’s not enough.”

  “It’s more than I could ever hope for.”

  Nicki suspected that a ranch deal meant just as much to Candace as it did to her, and not only because it provided Candace a place to recover. Her cousin had lost a lot of mojo along with her job, and it could be that she needed some of that back.

  Candace smiled a little, looking away from Nicki.

  That’s when her gaze caught on the two items that Nicki had draped over one of her dressers, just this morning.

  Nicki almost pulled down both the red pirate sash and the bandanna from Shane’s outlaw costume so she could put them into hiding.

  But too late.

  “What’s this?” Candace asked, rising from the bed and going toward the dresser.

  “Oh. I just haven’t put those away yet.”

  As if to prove that, Nicki ignored the sash and bandanna, making no move to stuff them into a drawer.

  But Candace was still waiting for some share time from Nicki, probably because it was easier to talk about Shane than the anguish tied in with the ranch.

  Share time wasn’t going to happen, though. She’d passed some kind of point of no return last night, determined to keep everything private, especially after Shane mentioned his dad. It’d been a fragile moment—one that he probably regretted—and she wouldn’t betray him by being indiscreet.

  Besides, she didn’t have to tell Candace every detail, did she?

  “Okay, I get it,” Candace finally said. “What you have going on with Shane is becoming serious. That’s why you’re zipping your lips.”

  “It’s not serious.” Nicki wasn’t sure that Shane had ever been serious with anyone. And as much as her body loved him, she was no fool—a youthful crush was a youthful crush, and those didn’t always translate well into real life.

  That’s what she’d come away with when she’d seen that look in his eyes after talking about his father, anyway. It was one thing to want more from him during the heat of the moment, but later, when the fantasies vanished and relationships went back to being complicated, it was entirely another.

  As much as she’d grown up believing that life could be a possible romance, where everything would work out beautifully, it had never quite turned out that way.

  But last night…

  Last night stoked that innocent hope in her, something that never seemed to die, in spite of everything that went wrong.

  Thinking that it was time to leave this discussion behind, Nicki opened her bedroom door and started for the stairway. “So what should we do about Russell Alexander now?”

  Candace followed her out. “During brunch, Russell mentioned that he’d be going back to his hotel room for the rest of the day, ‘reviewing his materials,’ then stopping by the Jackrabbit Bar for a meal. I can only guess that he’s making his list of pros and cons for his recommendation to his bosses.”

  Nicki had gotten a call today from a neighbor who’d told her that Russell Alexander had been to the Flying J across the county, as well as three other ranches this weekend.

  It was crunch time, then, if she really wanted this to happen.

  But it had to. People were depending on her for homes, for jobs. And the Wades had always been there—a fact that Nicki would damned well live up to.

  “What do you think about a night out?” Nicki asked, pausing at the bottom of the stairs. “I haven’t had a meal at the Jackrabbit in months.”

  Candace grinned and, fleetingly, Nicki imagined her cousin as a business barracuda.

  “I think I’m hungry for some bar and grill action, too.” She passed Nicki on the stairs, no doubt on a mission to comb through her closet for a smashing outfit.

  A listen-to-what-I-have-to-offer dress.

  Or, Nicki thought, also grinning, the perfect disguise in which to conquer.

  SHANE SAT AT THE long bar at the Jackrabbit, a place that had been built in the mid-1950s, when an affluent man, Darius Alger, had come through Pine Junction with his wife, Cynthia, and they’d fallen in love with the rustic landscape. To hear the tale, Cynthia had nursed some kind of Hollywood fixation for cowboy movies, and Darius had built her a small-scale town that had been used a couple of times as an actual film set near the silver mine side of Pine Junction.

  The Jackrabbit Bar itself was located in this quaint corner, next to the fanciest place in town—the two-level Hacienda Hotel, a home in which Darius and Cynthia had lived at one point. The movie set area also consisted of a dance hall, which was now a small department store, the Grand Hotel—the second-fanciest place in town and the only other lodgings—plus a general store that still sold goods. There was also a fake sheriff’s office, which the town had kept intact, with a stuffed prisoner dummy in a tiny jail cell that kids could look into from the outside. On the weekends, when tourists came through to sample the apple pies and jams that Pine Junction had a reputation for, a caretaker would turn on the recorded snoring noise that the stuffed dummy made.

  Here in the Jackrabbit, though, it was all true business, all the time, with distressed wood floorboards, a polished bar and a long gilt-edged, golden-veined mirror behind the bottles that stood ready for the drinking.

  Shane was just getting into one of those bottles—whiskey—and he kept it near him as Nicolas the bartender checked in on him.

  Shane nodded to the salt-and-pepper-haired, burly man, who also served as bouncer when it was needed. He hated to think of how many times Nicolas had thrown his dad out on his ass when he was alive and ornery.

  But, as Nicolas left Shane alone now, he told himself that he hadn’t come here to think about Dad. That’s why he’d gotten away from the ranch tonight, so he wouldn’t remember him and his harsh words and threats every time he looked at his father’s recliner in the family area.

  As he took a slug of whiskey—his first of the night and probably his last before he had to go back to the bunkhouse he’d elected to stay in with the ranch employees—something kept biting Shane. His father.

  God, he wished he hadn’t gone and blabbed more than he should’ve to Nicki last night.

  Why had he felt as if it was okay to do that?

  Was it because she’d been familiar with his dad and it hadn’t seemed so unnatural to say something about him to his next door neighbor?

  All Shane knew was that, from now on, his personal life should be on one side of the fence and his relations with Nicki on the other. The error wouldn’t happen again.

  Next to him, someone took a seat. It was Lemuel Matthews, whom Shane had learned was the Jackrabbit Bar’s most frequent customer. He had the reddened nose of a man who liked his drink, the stark white shoulder-length hair of a guy who’d seen quite a few years pass in Pine Junction.

  “Carter,” he said, before flagging down Nicolas for a bottle of tequila and pulling out a well-worn leather journal, immediately scribbling in it, as if in the middle of a stream of consciousness.

  Lemuel had been a very successful yet low-key paperback writer back in his day, creating what the towns-people referred to
as “gumshoe pulp fiction” under a pen name. He’d retired in Pine Junction to write what he called The Great American Novel.

  Shane said his hellos, and just as he was erasing the aftertaste of the whiskey with a bite of a hamburger that waited beside him on a chipped porcelain plate, his mood began to improve—enough so that he didn’t mind the thought of going back out to the Slanted C tonight.

  Then the last thing Shane needed walked in.

  Russell Alexander.

  Shit.

  And—wasn’t it just Shane’s luck?—the businessman headed straight for the bar and took the stool one seat away from Shane’s on the opposite side of where old Lemuel was hunched.

  “Evening, Carter,” Alexander said, as affable as could be as he grabbed a plastic one-page menu and scanned it.

  In the mirror behind the bar, Shane could see that Alexander was dressed in normal clothes tonight—jeans, a Western shirt. Odd, but he looked a whole lot less of a prick this way.

  “Evening,” Shane said, refusing to be broody. His dad would’ve been that way, especially while putting the whiskey down his gullet.

  Shane pushed the rest of the bottle away.

  Alexander put down the menu, ordering his own burger, rare, from Nicolas. Then he remained seated, facing forward, elbows on the bar just like Shane.

  “I got an interesting phone call today,” he said in a low tone. “From a friend in the industry.”

  “Don’t people like you ever take a weekend off?” Shane asked.

  “People like me work 24/7.” Alexander got straight to his point. “My friend told me about the creditors. He said they’re going to be calling in your loans.”

  Shane’s fingers wrapped around his empty shot glass.

  He’d known the banks were getting restless, and he wasn’t sure how much time he might have before they were no longer working with him on the payments.

  Sliding a gaze to Lemuel on his left, Shane saw that the older man wasn’t paying any mind to the conversation, and the bar itself was just busy enough to provide a buzz of conversation that covered any talk between him and Alexander.