It really didn’t matter what the knockout in the sexy jeans that adhered to her like a second skin had in mind or was going to say.
He supposed that, in all fairness, he should hear her out. Let the woman talk. And then he would give her the bottom line: the Rodriguez land was not for sale.
“I guess maybe leasing it would be a better term for what I’m proposing.” She turned to face him directly. Her eyes were dancing and he found them absolutely mesmerizing—not that this changed the situation. “In my opinion, this place is absolutely perfect.”
Well, that certainly echoed his feelings on the subject. He had never experienced an iota of wanderlust. Forever was where he belonged. Specifically, on the family ranch.
“We like to think so,” he responded. “But this has also been in the family for several generations now and we don’t—”
Again, the woman interrupted him before he could finish his sentence and terminate the conversation. “We’d put it back just the way we found it,” she promised. “We’ve got a great cleanup crew.”
He stopped the protest that was on his lips and looked at her. Just who was “we?” And he had another question.
“Cleanup crew?” he asked. “You travel with a cleanup crew?” Who included that in their entourage? Just what did this woman do for a living?
“I don’t,” she clarified, “but the production company does.” And then she laughed, realizing that, as usual, she’d gotten ahead of herself. “Maybe I should start at the beginning.”
“Maybe you should,” he agreed, waiting for her to start making some sense.
Reaching into the pocket of the fringed vest she was wearing, the woman plucked out a business card and offered it to him. At the same time, she told him what was written on it.
“I’m Valentine Jones—Val to my friends,” she interjected. She didn’t expect the name to mean anything to him, although within the business, she was beginning to build up a fairly good reputation. “And I’m a location scout.”
Rafe glanced down at the card she’d handed him. There was a colorful logo on it that looked vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t place it. He only knew he’d seen it before, but on a larger scale. He offered to give her back her card, but she shook her head, silently indicating that he should keep it for future reference.
Not that there would be any, he thought, resigned.
“At the risk of sounding ignorant, what’s a location scout?” he asked.
Rather than laugh at the question, the way he half expected her to, Val flashed a smile at him that was equal parts understanding and unsettlingly sensual.
“I’m surprised you haven’t been approached about this before now. A location scout is exactly what it sounds like—I scout different locations.”
He saw no reason for that. “Why?”
“For movies,” she answered simply.
Her mother had been a starlet with a minor degree of success and fame. She had moved on to be a far more successful casting director, while her father was a well-known and much-in-demand cinematographer. Movies and Hollywood had always been part of her life. At times, it was hard for her to remember that a good many people she dealt with were outside the industry and as such, had to be educated as to what she did.
Rafe was trying to make sense out of what she was telling him. “You mean like for a movie theater? You’re looking to build a movie theater out here?” he asked incredulously. This definitely was off the beaten path. It would make far more sense to put up more movie theaters in the center of town, next to the one they already had.
“No, I’m looking to film a movie here.” That made it sound as if she was the one who made the movie and she wasn’t. “Or rather, my boss is—or he will be once I send him these pictures I just took.” Again, Val realized she was getting ahead of herself. There were questions she had to ask first. “The ranch house I saw coming out here was absolutely perfect for the story, just the right blend of old-fashioned and modern. You are the owner, right?” she looked at him hopefully.
Rafe inclined his head. “I’m one of them.”
Val experienced what she could only term was a slight sinking, disappointed feeling gelling in the pit of her stomach. “Your wife?” she asked, guessing as to who the other owner was.
Rafe laughed as he shook his head. “More like my father and my siblings,” he clarified.
“Siblings,” Val echoed, nodding her head. The sinking feeling disappeared as if it hadn’t been there to begin with. She could feel her mouth curving. “Siblings are good,” she pronounced.
“They seem to think so,” Rafe told her. “And that goes for my father, too,” he added.
Val nodded. She’d heard him specify his father the first time. It looked like she was about to present her case before a committee. Nothing she hadn’t done before. She’d been with Sinclair Productions for a few years now and during that time, she’d encountered a whole range of home owners from a single, hermit-like owner to a holding company she had to spend days tracking down. She’d pleaded her boss’s case before all of them.
“I’d like to meet these siblings and your dad so I could talk to them and see if there’s anything I can do or say to convince them to give their permission to use this ranch as a backdrop of the film we’re making. No sense in my sending on these photos to the director if it’s just to tease him and raise his hopes, only to find out that your siblings and dad won’t let us film here.”
The way she phrased it, he got the feeling that she had just arbitrarily had him throwing in his lot with her. Although he now saw no harm in it, he didn’t want her just taking it for granted, either. He wanted to hear the woman’s pitch first—just in case there was something she hadn’t mentioned or that he was overlooking.
“I didn’t say I’d be all right with it,” he reminded her.
He didn’t have to. She could feel the way he was leaning. But, for the sake of his pride, she played along.
The woman named Val turned her face up to his and it occurred to Rafe that he had never looked into such a soulful pair of eyes before.
“And there’s nothing I can say to get you to throw your lot in with us? We pay well. I’ve looked at a great many different places and this is the first one that struck me as being perfect. It’s so unspoiled and pristine—”
He could all but channel what his father and siblings would say. Money had never been their prime motivation and even less now, since they were no longer strapped.
“And we’d like to keep it that way,” he told her. That was what was important, keeping the land productive and beautiful.
“I completely understand and we can write that into the contract. That if we don’t leave this place exactly as pristine as we found it, then the fees for using it while filming our movie will be doubled.” Val detected some resistance in his face. “I might be able to get my boss to triple it.”
Given what she was saying, Rafe could only come to one conclusion. “Then he will leave it in bad shape.”
“No,” she said firmly, “he’ll be triply inspired to make sure no one leaves behind so much as a candy wrapper tumbling about in the wind.”
She moved just a shade closer to him. “What do you say?”
If ever someone had deserved to hear the word yes—
Rafe’s eyes widened as the thought suddenly froze in his mind.
Observing him, for a second, Val was certain that she had him. But then he grabbed her by the shoulders, pushing her to move ahead of him. “I say, run!”
Chapter Two
Stunned, Val held her ground. His response made no sense to her. What did it have to do with what she’d just asked him?
“What?” she demanded.
“Run!” Rafe repeated, this time shouting the word at her.
Was this some so
rt of a joke? Val stared at the cowboy in confusion. She still didn’t understand why he’d say something like that.
“Run?” Val echoed incredulously. “Why would you tell me to...?”
This was no time for a debate. Instead of biting off a few choice words of explanation, Rafe grabbed her hand. Rather than pushing her ahead of him, he went the other route. He pulled her in his wake.
Hard.
And then she finally heard it. She heard the cause for his alarm. The sound of something pounding on the ground felt as if it reverberated right through her, like an earthquake in the distance.
The “earthquake” felt like it was coming closer by the moment.
Val turned her head in the direction the sound was coming from.
That was when she saw it.
A bull.
A huge, black bull was charging directly at them.
At her.
Val needed no further incentive to take flight. A veteran of several marathons—every one of them undertaken for some sort of a good cause—she immediately upped her game. With her pouring it on, Rafe no longer had to pull her in his wake. Despite the situation, a hint of admiration at her speed filled him when he realized that she was now keeping up with him and that at any moment she was going to pull ahead of him.
“He’s gaining on us!” Val cried, beginning to realize that just maybe this competition between the charging bull and them might not end well after all.
Less than a minute later, Val saw that they were not just running from something, they were running toward something. Directly up ahead was a long stretch of wire fencing.
“Will that keep him from trampling us?” she managed to ask as she continued running alongside of Rafe for all she was worth.
“It damn well better,” was all he allowed himself to say.
There was no point in telling her that he had a plan B. That if worse had come to worst and Valentine had frozen with fear, he’d been prepared to divert the beast, to get the bull’s attention so that it would run after him rather than attack the woman who had turned up on his property unannounced like this. Rafe hadn’t been raised to subscribe to the “every man for himself” school of thought. His father would have never allowed it.
But luckily, the woman with the improbable first name was not only sexy as hell, she was fit, which in this case meant that she was capable of keeping up with him and—for now—keeping ahead of Jasper, the whimsical name that Alma had awarded the bull that they had bought a year ago to breed with some of their cattle.
Reaching the fence less than a minute ahead of the charging bull, Rafe quickly pushed his uninvited guest up and over the fence. The next second, he dove over it himself. Rafe managed to clear it—all except for his left boot, the tip of which got caught on the very edge of the fence.
What began as a clean execution became less so as he found himself falling short of his intended mark.
Rather than hitting the grass, Rafe landed on top of Val, who was just in the process of turning around. Instead of gaining her feet, she gained added weight. Enough weight to push the air right out of her.
A startled cry, comprised of protest and surprise, echoed through the morning air, riding on the air he had knocked out of her.
As for him, Rafe was acutely aware that what he was on top of bore no resemblance to either the ground or the grass. It was soft, warm, enticingly fragrant and damn stirring. His body absorbed the sensations before his mind could even frame them.
Banking down the major part of his reaction, he allowed his concern to come to the foreground. Though he’d attempted to buffer his weight, he had come down rather hard on her.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
Right now she couldn’t help thinking she was really far from all right, but not in the sense he meant it. Generally warm and outgoing, Val still kept a part of herself in reserve. The part that had, at the age of nineteen, run off with Scott Walters, a ruggedly handsome stuntman with the gift of always saying the right thing. He’d been her first love and she had loved him fiercely. Until, recklessly, he’d unintentionally broken her heart.
Since that day, she had carefully guarded her heart and kept a tight rein on her emotions. That went hand in hand with not trusting any physical reaction she might have to a good-looking man. Even a good-looking man who was trying to save her from being gored.
“I don’t think anything’s broken.” She saw him nod with relief, but other than that, he seemed to be making no attempt to get up. Was the man posing for a still life? “You can get off me now,” Val prompted.
The moment the words were out of her mouth, Rafe realized that he was not just partially on top of her, he was completely on top of her, the way a bodyguard might be with the person he was trying to protect at the very first sound of gunfire.
The imprint of her body was telegraphing itself to his torso in big, bold, capital letters. It took him a second to come to.
“Oh, yeah, right.” Rafe paused for half a beat to look over his shoulder and make sure that the bull had come to a stop and was still on his side of the fence.
Jasper was indeed there, and whatever pending rage had sent the animal charging right for them had clearly disappeared. The bull had stopped charging, stopped running and instead of pawing the ground as expected, the bull was now docilely examining what appeared to be a dandelion nestled in the midst of a light green carpet comprised of new shoots of grass.
Belatedly, Rafe replayed the woman’s words in his head and this time, he scrambled up to his feet, separating their two bodies despite the vast appeal of remaining pressed together for the duration of the morning.
Once up, he offered his hand to her.
Val looked at it for a moment, as if she was debating ignoring it and just bouncing up of her own accord. But this was no time to establish boundaries and if he wanted to help her up, she knew she should just accept it without making a fuss.
Val wrapped her fingers around the offered hand, trying not to dwell on the fact that her body was still tingling. It made her acutely aware of the fact that their two bodies had mingled as much as was physically possible, given the fact that their clothes had remained on and they weren’t engaging in any sort of a romantic liaison.
The moment she was up on her feet, Val quickly dusted herself off. She watched the bull warily out of the corner of her eye. As incredible as it seemed, the animal appeared to be almost subdued. Given his previous behavior, how was that even possible?
“You train him to do that?” she finally asked her so-called rescuer.
Rafe had no idea what she was talking about. “Excuse me?”
Val jerked a thumb in the bull’s direction. “Did you train him to come charging up out of nowhere like that?” she asked.
If he had trained the bull, there might be a position for this man on the set, she thought. They could never have too many animal trainers on board when they were filming this kind of movie.
Rafe looked at her uncertainly. He’d heard about Hollywood types, about how they lived in a world of their own making, but this was his first encounter with someone from that city and he was the type who always wanted to make sense of things, to understand them.
That caused him to ask, “Why would I do something like that?”
Val continued to brush bits and pieces of dirt and grass from her clothing and hair. “I would think that might be self-explanatory,” she told him, looking at Rafe pointedly.
Maybe she meant nothing by it. At any event, he supposed he should count himself lucky that she wasn’t screaming at him, or having a tantrum. So he laughed, shaking his head.
“I’m not an animal whisperer, if that’s what you’re getting at,” he assured her. “Jasper is his own bull and does whatever he wants to. My father bought him not that long ago for breeding purposes.
So far, he’s shown more of an interest in playing poker than in mating with any of the candidates we’ve paraded in front of him. To tell the truth, this is the most alive I’ve seen Jasper since his former owner dropped him off.”
The bull, from what she could see, was now wandering off again. Feeling a little safer, her heart stopped beating wildly.
“Maybe he’d behave a little more macho if you changed his name to Bruce,” she suggested, watching the animal retreat.
Rafe grinned at the proposal. He sincerely doubted that the bull understood English. “A bull by any other name...” His voice trailed off as his grin grew in size.
She cocked an eyebrow at the attempted quotation. “Shakespeare?”
“Paraphrased,” Rafe allowed good-naturedly. “Anyway, I don’t think his name has very much—if anything—to do with his behavior.” The grin faded slightly as he became serious. “You sure you didn’t hurt anything?” His eyes swept over her.
She could almost feel them passing right over her body. This man, she had a feeling, would have fit right in with the men back in Hollywood. Something about him stirred the imagination—as well as her blood.
“Just my pride,” she answered.
His brow furrowed slightly. Pausing, Rafe bent down to pick up his Stetson and dusted it off. “I don’t think I understand. What does your pride have to do with anything?”
“I’m not exactly accustomed to being tossed over a fence and landing on my butt,” she replied, nodding at the fence.
From where he stood, there was nothing to be embarrassed about. Survival came first. “My guess is that you’re probably not accustomed to running from a charging bull, either.”
She laughed. “Can’t say I am,” Val admitted.
The woman was being an awfully good sport about this, Rafe thought, feeling magnanimous toward her. “You want to come up to the house?”
“To talk to your father?” she asked a little uncertainly.
Having grown up in the world that she had, acting and masking her thoughts were second nature to her. Otherwise, her uneasiness at the invitation might have been evident. She did want to meet with whoever it was that could give her permission to use this property for the film, but how did she know for certain that there’d be anyone there? The prospect of being alone with a man she found more than a little attractive made her feel somewhat nervous.
His Forever Valentine Page 2
