by Lisa Jackson
“But I wanted to go fishin’.”
“Later, sport. I’ll be out in a minute to help.”
Cody swung his legs and jumped down from the counter. “Mom?”
She turned on the water. “Yeah?”
“So where does this Chase guy fit in?”
“I wish I knew,” she admitted, squirting liquid dish soap into the sink. She’d wondered the same thing all night long. Her feelings for Chase were hard to define but the tangled web of her emotions was frightening, very frightening. For seven years she’d known exactly what she wanted from life and in just two weeks, he’d upset everything she’d been so sure of.
“Well, I wouldn’t trust him,” Cody said with authority. “Anyone working for Caleb Johnson is trouble.”
“Is that what Isabelle Reece’s pa says?” she asked, looking over her shoulder at her son.
Cody grinned at his mother. “I guess I’ll have to ask.”
“Don’t bother,” Dani said, slinging her arm around the boy and giving him a hug. “Somehow I have the feeling that once school starts, Isabelle will let you know.”
“Yeah. She probably will.”
Cody was laughing as he walked out the back door and called to Runt. The black dog stretched his legs and then followed Cody outside.
Once she was done with the dishes and the kitchen was straightened, Dani took off her apron and grabbed her gloves as she shouldered open the back door. As she walked toward the barn, she glanced across the fence to the spot where Chase and his men were working. Chase was easy to pick out. Taller than the other two men, he was shirtless and bare headed, his blond hair shining with sweat in the summer sun. He was leaning against the side of a dirty dump truck, ignoring the work going on around him and watching her every move.
Dani’s heart leaped unexpectedly and vivid memories of the night before flashed in her mind. She could still smell the rain, taste Chase’s lips, feel his hands sliding between the lapels of her robe....
“Mom?”
Dani nearly jumped out of her skin. She hadn’t realized that she’d stopped walking toward the barn. “Oh, what?”
Cody was sitting on the fence post. He cocked his head in the direction of the barn. “If ya don’t mind?” Hopping to the ground he reminded her, “You’re the one who wants the animals fed early.”
“So what have you been doing?”
“Waiting for you.”
“Cody—”
“It’s hard for me alone,” he said, looking suddenly contrite.
The boy was only nine. “Sorry,” she apologized quickly. The she jerked on her gloves and walked into the darkened interior of the barn.
The cattle were already inside, lowing loudly and shuffling for position at the manger.
“Why were you staring at Johnson’s land?” Cody asked.
“I was just thinking.”
“I know that much.” Cody frowned as he climbed the ladder to the loft and began dropping some of last year’s hay bales to the main floor below. “I saw.” He looked down at her from the loft above and his brows were drawn together in frustration. “You were looking at that guy again.”
She cut the strings on the bales with her pocketknife and began breaking up the hay before tossing it into the manger. “I just can’t figure him out.”
“If I were you, I wouldn’t try.” Cody leaped down from the loft, his boots crunching on some spilled grain as he landed on the dusty floorboards.
Dani shook her head. “Next time, use the ladder—”
“Aw, Mom.”
“I just don’t want you to break your neck. Especially in front of me,” she added, trying to lighten the mood.
“I’m not a little kid anymore,” Cody said firmly.
Dani’s smile was bittersweet “That’s what worries me.” She watched her son as he rationed out the grain for the cattle. His body was changing; he was growing up faster than she wanted him to. “I’ll check the water and you can sweep the floor, okay?”
“Okay,” Cody grumbled.
Dani walked from the barn and into the bright morning sunlight. Stuffing her gloves into the back pocket of her jeans, she began filling each of the troughs near the barn with fresh water. As she waited for the troughs to fill, listening to the cool sound of rushing water pounding against the old metal tubs, she chanced looking at Chase again.
He wasn’t leaning on the dump truck any longer. Instead he was shoveling mud from the bottom of the creek and supervising the planting of several trees near the deep hole he was creating. The morning sun caught in his blond hair and gleamed on the sweat of his back. His back and shoulder muscles, tanned and glistening in the sun, stretched fluidly as he worked.
“Hey, Mom, watch what you’re doing!” Cody yelled as he walked out of the barn.
Shocked out of her wandering thoughts, Dani noticed that the trough was overflowing; precious water was swirling in the tub before running down the hillside in a wild stream.
“For crying out loud,” she chastised herself as she turned off the water and looked over her shoulder to the other trough where Cody was furiously twisting the handle of the spigot.
Frowning, he wiped his hands on his jeans as he approached. “You’ve got the hots for that guy, don’t you?”
“Cody!”
He shrugged and pouted. “Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you about him.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Dani remarked. “Hey . . . wait a minute. You’re warning me? What do you know about ‘the hots’?”
Knowing he’d managed to goad his mother, Cody looked slyly over his shoulder before saying, “Isabelle Reece says her pa—”
“I’m not sure I’m ready to hear this—”
“Just kidding, Mom,” he said, a grin growing from one side of his boyish face to the other before he sobered again. “But . . .”
“But what?”
“You haven’t forgotten about Dad, have you? He is coming home.”
Not wanting to cause her son any further pain or confusion, Dani had trouble finding the courage to tell him the truth and burst his bubble of hope. “When your dad gets here, we’ll talk. All of us.”
Cody visibly brightened.
“But you have to understand that we don’t love each other anymore; not the way a man and wife love each other.”
Doubts filled his eyes. “But you were married!”
“Unfortunately people change.”
“Or give up,” he accused, his small jaw tight, his dark brows pulled together and his eyes bright with challenge.
“Or give up,” she agreed. “I’m not saying I was right—”
“You weren’t! You should have stayed married to him!”
“Believe me, I tried.”
“Not hard enough!”
“Cody—”
Tears filled his eyes and he tried to swallow them back. “Can I go fishin’?”
“Now?”
“Yeah.”
“I think we should talk about this.”
“What good will that do?” he threw back at her. “Nothin’s gonna change. I still don’t have a pa. Just like the kids say!”
“That’s not true!”
His defiance eased a bit. “I just want to go fishin’, okay?” Pain twisting her heart, guilt washing over her in hot waves, Dani nodded tightly. “The sooner, the better,” she said before her anger subsided. “Just be back by noon, okay?”
“Sure.”
He started to tum, but she stopped him by touching his arm. He jerked it away. “Where are you going fishing?”
“Probably the hole near the south fork.”
“Okay. Do you want to take something to eat?”
Forcing a smile, he fished in his pocket and pulled out three candy bars. “I’m all set.”
“For nutritional suicide.”
Cody swiped at his tears and Dani pretended not to notice. Turning his back to her, he went to the back porch, grabbed his fishing pole and stained vest and whistled for Ru
nt. Then he was off, running through the fields toward the foothills with the dog racing ahead, frightening grasshoppers, birds and rabbits in the stubble of the pasture.
With a tired sigh, Dani walked up to the porch, reached for her hoe and leaned on it while watching her son until Cody was out of sight. What had she done to the boy? Should she have stayed married to a man she didn’t love, a man who had done everything in his power to hurt and embarrass her for the sake of her son?
Without any answers to her questions, she looked across the fence to the Johnson field. Chase was there, standing with his muscled back to her and staring at Cody’s retreating figure as the boy crawled under the fence separating one of her fields from another before disappearing through the brush at the far end of the pasture.
* * *
Chase watched the boy and dog sprint through the dry fields and, for a moment, he remembered his own youth and the warm Idaho summers.
The boy ducked under the fence and disappeared into a thicket of blackberries and brush, the lop-eared dog on his heels. Chase couldn’t help but smile. Cody and his beautiful mother made him feel dangerously younger than his thirty-four years.
For the first time in what seemed forever, a woman had gotten under Chase McEnroe’s skin. It had been only hours since he’d left Dani but, despite his promise to the contrary, he was already restless to be with her again. The fact that she was near enough to see only made it worse.
He jabbed his shovel into the soft ground near the bank and cursed quietly to himself. The memory of touching her had made the rest of the night excruciating. He’d lain awake for hours, twisting and turning on sweat-dampened sheets and feeling a gentle but insistent throb in his loins. A throb that reminded him of her willing, warm body, softly parted lips and perfectly rounded breasts. Hell, he’d felt like a horny kid all over again. Just because of one damned woman!
Dissatisfied with life in general, Chase continued to dig, throwing the power from his tense shoulders and arms into each jab. The ground around the creekbed gave way under the thrust of his shovel. Swirling muddy water filled the hole.
Still he couldn’t get Dani out of his mind and it sure wasn’t for lack of trying. Telling himself that he had to avoid her at all possible costs, he plunged into his work with a vengeance, thrusting his shoulders and mind into the task of working the creek and getting the hell out of Montana as soon as he could.
All morning he’d made impossible demands on the men and himself, trying to exorcise Dani’s image from his mind.
But each time he looked up from his work, she was there. Whether she was standing at the kitchen window, working with the cattle, or as she was now, hoeing that miserable patch of ground she considered her garden, she was there; only several hundred yards away.
The effect was devastating for Chase. Torture, he thought angrily to himself, working so close to her was sheer torture. “She’s just a woman,” he grumbled to himself, “just one woman!”
“Hey, Chase! Over here!” Ben Marx, one of his employees, shouted, dragging him out of his fantasies about Dani.
“What?”
“I don’t know,” Ben said. He was a young, bearded man who had been with Chase for nearly two years, ever since Eric Conway had walked out on Relive to start a rival company. Ben’s hat was pushed back on his head, sweaty strands of sandy hair were protruding under the brim and the man himself was staring at a large ten-gallon metal drum that he’d pulled from the creek. Rotating the drum on the ground, he gave out a long, low whistle just as Chase approached.
“Looks like an old barrel of some kind of herbicide,” Ben said.
“Herbicide?” Chase repeated, bending to examine the can. “Wait a minute. There it is. Dioxin.”
“And you found it in the creek?”
Ben glanced up at Chase. “Buried in the creekbed.”
“How deep?”
Ben shrugged his shoulders. “Hard to tell. We’ve been working here for quite a while, so I can’t be sure, but probably four, maybe six inches. And look here,” he pointed to what would have been the lid of the barrel. “It’s been punctured.”
“Intentionally?”
“I don’t think a woodpecker made those holes, do you?”
“Son of a bitch!” Chase jerked his gloves from his back pocket and rotated the metal drum again. The label was scratched and muddy, but some of the letters were still visible. The lid of the drum had a few barely visible holes in it. “No wonder there’s no fish in the creek . . .” His eyes narrowed on the empty can.
“You reckon it wasn’t empty when it was buried?” Ben asked, reaching into his breast pocket and pulling out a crumpled pack of cigarettes.
“Hard to tell.”
“Who would bury a drum so close to the creek?” He lit the cigarette and inhaled deeply.
Chase’s mouth pinched. “I can’t hazard a guess,” he said sarcastically. “Show me exactly where you found this.”
After wrapping the drum in oilcloth and placing it in the back of his Jeep, he followed Ben back into the water and stared at the hole Ben had been digging when he’d unearthed the barrel of poisonous herbicide, if that’s what it was.
“I was just smoothing the bottom of the creek out, makin’ it ready for more gravel when I decided to deepen it near the bank. My shovel struck metal, so I worked to find out what it was.”
“Don’t touch anything,” Chase commanded. “I want to take some samples of the water and the soil.” He returned to his Jeep for his hip waders and sterile vials and set about collecting the samples, careful to label each specimen. Then, muttering under his breath, he crawled through the rusted wires of the barbed fence and began taking soil and water samples a few feet inside Dani’s boundaries.
“Tell the men to take the rest of the day off,” Chase said. “And I don’t want any of them in the creek without waders.”
Ben nodded.
“As for drinking from the creek—”
“No one does.”
“Let’s keep it that way. And don’t say anything about this,” Chase warned, looking at the man on Johnson’s side of the fence.
Ben took a final drag on his cigarette before flipping it onto the muddy bank of the creek where it smoldered and died. “You can count on me. I’ve heard tales about that one,” he said, nodding in the direction of Dani’s house. “If she finds out you’ve been on her land again, there’ll be hell to pay.”
Despite the cold dread stealing through him, Chase forced a sly smile. “No reason to disturb the lady, right?”
“Right.” Ben chuckled, took off his gloves and grinned lazily. “Leastwise, not by steppin’ on her land.” He looked at Dani’s house again and his gaze grew distant. “But there are other ways I’d like to bother her.”
A muscle tightened in Chase’s jaw and his blue eyes turned stone cold. “Not a good idea, friend,” Chase said.
“No?”
Chase was spoiling for a fight and he knew it. But having it out with Ben Marx was just plain stupid. He ground his back teeth together and said, “Considering how she feels about Caleb, I think it’d be best if you left her alone. Don’t you?”
Ben read the message in Chase’s glare. His lazy smile dissolved under the intensity of Chase’s cold eyes and he reached for another cigarette. “Whatever you say; you’re the boss.”
“Then it’s understood that Dani Summers is off-limits to anyone working for me.” Chase could hardly believe what he was doing; acting like some fool male dog staking out his territory. With his own men, no less! And yet he couldn’t stop himself or the feeling of possession that ripped through him any time another man said Dani’s name.
“Sure, sure,” Ben said hastily. He’d been on the receiving end of Chase’s wrath enough times to know that he didn’t want to cross McEnroe. Especially about a woman. Chase was a fair employer but if pushed hard enough, he had a temper that wouldn’t quit. In Ben’s opinion it didn’t make much sense to get him mad.
“Good. Make sur
e the rest of the men get the word. And don’t tell anyone about the drum of dioxin or whatever the hell it is. I want to check it out first.” And then there’ll be trouble. Big trouble.
Ben lit his cigarette, shoved his hat over his brow and nodded mutely.
Chase glanced uneasily up the hill to where Dani was working in the garden, but, as usual, she seemed disinterested, as if she weren’t paying any attention to what was happening on the property adjoining hers. He hoped to God that it wasn’t an act and waded farther downstream to the middle of Dani’s land before taking more samples.
* * *
Dani pursed her lips in frustration as she watched Chase slip through the fence. Seeing him out of the corner of her eye, she leaned on her hoe, wiped the sweat from her forehead and wondered if she really wanted to make a scene in front of his crew. Not that she wanted to, but damn the man, he was forcing the issue! She watched him walk backward, downstream, farther onto her property.
And just last night he’d promised to stay away. Now he was breaking his word, pushing her to the limit in full view of his workers. After her argument with Cody, she was in no mood to get into another fight. But she really didn’t have much of a choice.
With a sigh she put the hoe on the porch, wiped her palms on her jeans and started through the gate and down the sloping field to the creek.
Chase was there, just as he had been the first time she’d come across him, except for the fact that he was about a hundred yards away from Caleb’s land and right in the middle of hers. He was digging on the bank and taking samples of the water. Her water.
She felt her pulse begin to race but assured herself that it was because she was furious with him as well as Caleb Johnson.
“I thought you understood that I didn’t want you here,” she said as she approached the bank.
“I did.” He looked up, smiled, and then went about his business.
Infuriated, Dani planted her hands on her hips. “I wasn’t kidding about calling the sheriff.”
“Go ahead—call him.”
“Chase—”