by Jeannie Watt
She cast an eye over Travis before saying, “Thank you. So do you.” And not only because of his pressed white shirt, well-fitting jeans, polished boots and the trophy buckle she recognized as the one he’d won for being the Montana High School Rodeo saddle bronc champion.
He’d still been somewhat boyish at twenty-five, the last time she’d seen him, but there was nothing boyish about him now. His dark brown hair was more closely cropped and those blue eyes of his seemed a touch more world-weary. She suspected that her eyes were kind of the same.
He was taller than she remembered, his shoulders broader, and his face had hollowed out in all the right places, giving him cheekbones to die for. Cassie absently touched her own more rounded cheeks, then dropped her hand.
So, he was good-looking. Big deal. She knew a lot of good-looking guys. She was on a peacekeeping mission. Nothing more, nothing less. Therefore, when they reached for the door at the same time and ended up practically holding hands as they vied for control of the handle, she should not have felt that plume of warmth flow through her. Embarrassment? Or something else?
Embarrassment. Travis’s hands might be warm and strong, but they were also off-limits.
A small dust devil whirled by, billowing Cassie’s chiffon skirt and tipping the balance of power. She instantly relinquished her hold on the metal handle to push the fabric into place, and Travis took advantage, opening the door.
“Well played,” she murmured as she walked past him into the foyer, accepting his nanovictory in good grace. She stopped just inside the door, and Travis had to sidestep to keep from bumping into the back of her. “Wow.”
“It’s changed,” Travis agreed.
It had indeed. Gone were the former pizzeria’s red vinyl booths with the duct-taped seats, the sagging red gingham curtains and the worn tile floor. In their place were booths made of dark wood with cream-colored padded cushions. The lighting was low, unlike the glaring zillion-watt bulbs that once lit the place. Cassie hadn’t been prepared for a charmingly intimate pricey steak house atmosphere, which made her not-a-date feel like more than it was. What had Katie been thinking, telling her to come here?
“Ptomaine’s is no more,” she murmured. Travis was close enough that she felt his low laugh more than she heard it and another warm ripple traveled through her.
“Travis.” A stunning dark-haired woman stepped from behind the host’s station, holding menus and a wine list against her chest. “It’s good to see you again.”
“Good to see you, too, Brenna. This is Cassie. Nick Callahan’s sister.”
The woman gave Cassie a bright smile, which closely resembled the smile Cassie gave difficult parents and whining administrators, before guiding them to a table in the corner. Cassie sensed an air of possessiveness, but years of training kept her from saying, Honey, he’s all yours.
Brenna presented Travis the beverage menu after they were seated. “Andie will be here in a few minutes to take your drink orders.”
Travis murmured a thank-you and the dark-haired beauty drifted back to her station.
“There are a lot of people here,” Cassie said as she surveyed the room. There was only one other empty table and it was barely six o’clock.
“Popular place.”
“But maybe not the best place to discuss business.” Really, it wasn’t. “Why are we here?”
“You suggested it,” he said innocently.
“No,” Cassie said as she picked up the drink menu. “My sister suggested it.” A matter they were going to discuss when she got home.
Travis gave a casual shrug. “We can discuss business elsewhere after we eat.”
Prolong the evening? Fat chance of that happening. Not when she was dealing with the unfamiliar sensations of finding Travis attractive. As it was, dinner was starting to feel like a mistake. She hated that he had this effect on her, because she didn’t know how to counter it other than pretending it wasn’t happening.
“I think we can manage to conduct our business here,” Cassie replied coolly. “Make it an early night.” As opposed to dragging things on.
“Do you need to get home?”
“Yes. I... Yes.” Cassie gave a firm nod. Of course, she needed to get home.
She glanced up as the server approached the table, then blinked. Had Brenna changed clothes? Because a moment ago she’d been wearing a black sweater and camel skirt with boots, and now she was wearing dark pants and a white shirt.
Travis laughed at her stunned expression, but not in an unkind way. “Andie. Hi. I’m going to have Jameson. Neat.”
Andie. Not Brenna. They had a twin situation going on.
“Hi,” Cassie said. “I’ll have a gin and tonic. Sapphire.”
After Andie left, Travis adjusted his chair and leaned his elbows on the table. “I assume we’re not here to spend the evening battling over the door handle.”
“I hope not. Nice metaphor, by the way.” Cassie murmured.
“Thank you.” He cocked an eyebrow at her. “I was valedictorian, you know.”
“Yet you ended up working on a ranch.”
A shadow crossed his face, and Cassie was instantly ashamed of herself. “I told myself I wasn’t going to jab at you. I apologize.”
“I told myself the same thing, yet here we are, two jabs in and the score is tied.”
She refrained from reminding him that he’d won the door-handle skirmish. “That’s why we’re here—to work through this.”
His eyes crinkled attractively at the corners. “Do you think we can?”
Cassie forced herself to stop admiring his eyes, but there was something about the way he was regarding her that made her breathing go shallow. “I think we have to. We’re going to see each other more often than before what with Grandma and Will getting married.”
“So, you plan to come home every now and then?”
He spoke lightly, but the congenial attitude they’d shared for almost twenty seconds evaporated. Cassie’s jaw muscles began to tighten even as she tried to convince herself that not every word that came out of his mouth was a dig.
“Yes,” she said simply, having learned early in her career that the more one spoke, the more possibilities there were for someone to grab on to something to bolster their argument.
“That will make Rosalie happy.”
Meaning, of course, that her absence was making Rosalie unhappy. Unfortunately, that was true. Cassie could have come forth with her justifications for missing holidays with the family, or for cutting them short, but she wasn’t here to convince Travis that her career and family decisions had been correct.
“That was a statement of fact, not a jab,” Travis said, easily reading her.
Before she could answer, Andie approached with the drinks.
“Thank you,” Cassie murmured, glad that she ordered something alcoholic to help calm her ridiculously jumpy nerves. Andie smiled back at her, then set the whiskey in front of Travis.
“Anything else?” she asked brightly.
“I think we’re good,” Travis said before lifting his glass in a silent salute at Cassie.
“Are we?” Cassie asked, reaching for her drink as Andie headed off to another table.
“For now.”
The gin was sharp on her tongue, but she rather liked the effect. It matched her mood. “So that honestly wasn’t a jab about never coming home?” Because it had felt like one.
“I understand that you have a time-consuming job.”
“More like all-consuming.”
“Do you like it that way?” he asked with a faint frown, as if ranching wasn’t also an all-consuming job.
“I accept it,” she said matter-of-factly. “Because I like my job.”
A silence fell, but Cassie was in no hurry to break it. Instead she gently swirled the ice in her drink as she waited for T
ravis to make the next move.
Travis leaned his forearms on the table and said, “Here’s how I see our situation. We’ve spent so many years in competition that we’ve developed something of a Pavlovian response between us. Time has not softened it.”
“Apparently not.”
“Because we’re working from old data. We don’t know each other—not the adults we’ve become.”
“Good point. What do you suggest?”
One corner of his mouth curved up in an expression close to the smirk she was so familiar with, but this wasn’t a smirk. It was more of a dangerous smile, but dangerous how? Something low in the pit of her belly told her it was dangerous in a way she’d never considered him dangerous before and it had to do with the tug of attraction. “We either pretend we don’t rub one another the wrong way while we’re around family, or we do something about it.”
“Neither of us seems to be very good at pretending,” Cassie pointed out wryly as she smoothed her fingers over the stem of her glass. Which was odd, because she had no issue keeping her emotions in check in the course of her job.
“We need to spend time together. The setting doesn’t matter.”
“It’d probably be best if there were no witnesses, right?” She wasn’t being facetious.
His eyes narrowed thoughtfully as he considered her comment. “Not in the beginning.”
“That way we can duke it out, test our limits? Find out what works?”
“Pretty much.” He held her gaze and Cassie had to remind herself to breathe. Why was he having this effect on her?
“Are we ready to order?”
Cassie jumped. She had been so focused on Travis that she hadn’t noticed the server approaching. She also had yet to crack the menu. “I’ll have what he’s having,” she said politely, noting that the server wasn’t a clone of Andie and Brenna. No triplet.
“I’m going to have a cheeseburger.”
“Perfect,” Cassie murmured. He could have said he was having a sandpaper sandwich and she would have agreed just to get the ordering over with.
“No steak?”
Cassie wondered if he knew that she loved a good steak, or if he’d made the suggestion because they were in a steak house. “A cheeseburger.”
Travis set his menu on top of Cassie’s. “Two cheeseburgers. The works.”
“Excellent choice,” the server said without a hint of irony as she gathered up the menus.
“Cheeseburgers are faster than steaks,” Travis commented as the server walked away. “Easier to make it an early night.”
So true.
“I’m not trying to escape.” Cassie delivered the half-truth with a straight face. “This was my idea, after all. I made first contact.”
He planted his elbows on the table. “Then we best get to it. What’s the next step?” He gave her a look that said the ball was now in her court.
“You’re expecting me to ask you for help with my mare.” It seemed obvious, since it was the one thing that could bring them together.
“And you’d prefer to do it yourself.”
“No. Not at all.” She spread her palms in an I’m-game-for-anything gesture. “I’d be foolish not to take advantage of an expert.”
His eyes narrowed as if he suspected a trap. “Uh-huh.”
She shrugged. “I’ve changed...in some ways,” she added, since it was obvious that she hadn’t changed when it came to sparring with him.
“I noticed.”
Maybe it was the gin—no, it was definitely the gin—but Cassie felt a calm come over her. “How so?”
“Well, for one thing, you used to swagger.”
“What?” Cassie thought about the way she walked, and she did not swagger.
“It was your attitude,” he explained. “You were good, and you knew it.” A faint smile curved his lips. “You had to be good to beat me.”
She made a face at him. The gin again. “And now?”
“Now you’re more...”
“Composed?”
“Stiff.”
Her eyebrows lifted. She was not stiff. She was professional.
Her eyes narrowed as she fought with herself, and then she gave in to temptation. “Okay. I may have developed...stiffness...but your cocky attitude seems to have stood the test of time.” Even as she used the word, she knew it wasn’t accurate. Travis wasn’t so much cocky as confident.
His lips curved in a way that made a crazy tremor go through her. “Guilty.”
Cassie sighed and leaned back into her chair, then gave him a small salute before draining the contents of her glass. “I’d like help with my mare.” She set the glass back on the table as if to seal the deal.
“I will give you that help.”
“When do we start?”
“Tomorrow. Before the wedding prep gets in the way. Say ten o’clock?”
Cassie gave a slow nod, then met his gaze. “Very well. Thank you.”
“You might not want to thank me until we find out whether we can work together.”
“I’ll just retreat behind my stiffness and we’ll be fine.”
“Can you do that?” His lips curved into a smile that made her want to keep staring at his mouth. She tore her gaze away.
“Can you tone down the attitude?”
“I’ll give it a shot.”
They both looked up as the server approached the table and set two plates containing huge cheeseburgers, each with a heap of golden fries, in front of them.
“Anything else?” she asked brightly.
Travis glanced at Cassie, who shook her head, then said, “I think we’re good.”
“Better, anyway,” Cassie said in a low voice as the server started checking the nearby tables.
Travis caught her meaning and smiled before placing the bun on top of the burger, lifting it and taking a huge bite.
After he put the burger back on his plate and wiped his mouth, Cassie said, “How’s your dad doing?”
“Okay,” he said. “I mean life is never going to be a picnic with RA, but Arizona agrees with him. He and Mom have a community of friends...and yeah. He’s doing well.” He picked up his burger. “How are your folks?”
“If things go according to plan, they’ll start easing their way out of the clinic and then make the big move back to the States.”
“Your stepmom is okay with that?”
Cassie gave a small shrug before taking a bite of the best burger she’d had in forever. She set the thing down to deal with the juice that had dribbled down her chin. “Messy, but excellent. And yes, as far as I know, Frances is fine with emigrating.” The deal was that she and Pete, Cassie’s dad, would live in Australia until she retired from the veterinary clinic she’d established there, then they would sell and move to the States to be closer to Pete’s family, since Frances had no family of her own.
A silence settled in as they dealt once again with their ginormous burgers, then Travis said, “Hear anything from Shelby or Darby lately?”
“I plan to see Darby next week. She’s driving up from Salt Lake.”
“Ah.”
Another silence. Cassie dabbed at her chin again. “How are Amanda and the kids?” Travis’s sister had moved out of state a few years ago.
“Good. Good.”
It was the first polite conversation they’d engaged in probably forever, and it stretched on between bites—the weather, the new bridge her family had recently put in, Rosalie’s store. Superficial topics to which they could give superficial answers.
It was polite. And boring.
Cassie played along, but she was itching to dig deeper, to ask Travis more personal questions, like was he glad he came back to the ranch? From the way he reacted when she’d brought up the ranch, she wondered. But she wasn’t going to be the one who broke prot
ocol, although she began to suspect that something else was going on as the topics became more mundane.
“You’re trying to out-polite me,” she said after he brought up the expansion of the public library.
“Not everything is a competition, Cassie.”
“This is. It’s like the blinking game. If you bring up enough boring topics, I’ll have to choose between firing off a zinger or having my head explode.”
“You’re right.” Travis smiled as he spoke, sending the crazy tremor back into action, but Cassie was ready for it and firmly told herself to get a grip. “We’ll delve into deeper topics when we’re alone.”
“Something to look forward to,” Cassie said as she folded her napkin. Oddly, that was true, but only because she wanted to practice not triggering.
They split the check, then made their way to the exit. In the name of peaceful relations, Cassie stood back as Travis opened the door.
“Nice restraint,” he said when she didn’t make her own grab for the handle.
“Thanks. I’ll get the next one.” Despite the show of cooperation and camaraderie, she felt unsettled. This had been too easy, and there was something else at play here. Something she didn’t quite understand, just like she didn’t understand her reaction when Travis’s hand casually grazed the small of her back as they stepped out into the sunlight. It was nothing really. Just a small brush of the fingertips, probably an accident, but it sent every one of her nerves into high alert. Yes, he was an attractive guy, but her reaction was over-the-top.
He walked her to her car, stopping next to her door. When he stayed put longer than necessary, she sensed something was up.
“Do you want to get a drink?” he said at last. “Practice some more? Dig into deeper topics with less of an audience?”
Cassie was shaking her head before the last word left his lips. They could spend time together tomorrow after she had time to dissect the reaction she was having to him. Doing so tonight, when she hadn’t had time to develop a game plan that involved these new facets of their relationship, was not a good idea.
“I need to get home.”
“That was for real?”
She nodded rather than lie aloud. Although, it was real regarding her peace of mind. Travis was triggering her in a different way than before and she needed to figure out how to deal.
