by Holly Rayner
He sounded a little wistful, Kelsie thought.
They reached the house and Kelsie directed him up the staircase just inside the door. The first thing Kelsie did when they reached the kitchen was find another bowl for Leila and give both of the dogs water from a bottle out of the refrigerator and a dog treat.
She looked up to see Masoud watching her with a smile.
“Thank you,” was all he said, though.
Kelsie quickly made coffee and then cut two pieces of the coffee cake while Masoud looked around at the pictures on her kitchen wall.
“That’s my dad,” Kelsie said, nodding at the photo of a man in a cowboy hat leaning against a fence and grinning at something off in the distance.
Masoud took one of the coffee mugs and a plate from her and sat at the kitchen table. He waited for Kelsie to sit down as well, then took a sip of the coffee, followed by a small bite of the cake. His eyes widened and he looked up, clearly pleasantly surprised.
Kelsie smiled. “The first thing you need to know is that Marge Clark runs the little sandwich shop downtown. Her food is excellent, but her desserts are outstanding. Nothing beats one of Mrs. Clark’s cakes.”
Masoud took a larger bite this time and nodded. “I can see I might not have to cook for myself as much as I first thought.”
Kelsie chuckled. “There are only three restaurants in town, but they’re all good. If you like sandwiches, Italian, and Mexican, anyway.”
“For a small town, it’s quite lovely.”
“We like it here. Everybody knows everybody and we’re all up in each other’s business, but you can depend on pretty much everyone.”
“I’m looking forward to living here. I’m ready for a little bit of peace and quiet.”
“You’ll definitely find that here. It’s our number one export.”
Masoud laughed at her dry tone and Kelsie was thrilled to hear that sound. It was like little sparks of electricity on her skin. She brushed her hair behind her ear, flustered partly by her reaction to him and partly by the fact that she was just wearing jeans and an old tank top.
He was perfectly dressed, even for a walk with his dog, in a fitted polo shirt and pressed slacks. He looked like a model out of some men’s magazine. Plus, he was apparently as rich as a demigod, too, if his clothes and the travel he did were any sign.
“What do you do here, besides take care of dogs and stray humans?”
Kelsie shrugged just a bit. “As it happens, I take care of dogs for a living. And other animals.” He gave her a slightly confused look, so she smiled and explained. “I’m a vet—my clinic is on the first floor of the house here.”
Masoud leaned back and nodded in understanding. “I wondered why you lived upstairs.”
Kelsie nodded. “I grew up in this house, and I’ve been practicing here since I moved back. I converted the first floor three years ago, and there’s enough room for both the clinic and living space, since it’s just me.”
As soon as she said the words, Kelsie regretted them. She didn’t want to sound lonely or desperate, because she wasn’t. But Masoud didn’t seem to take her words that way.
“Do you get a lot of patients here? The town’s not that big.”
Kelsie nodded. “But we have several farms here, and most people in the county come to me.”
“Well, I’ll admit, I’m happy to know there’s a vet close by just in case Leila ever needs one.”
“She really is a beautiful dog. How long have you had her?”
“About three years now. I was living in San Francisco and happened to walk through an adoption fair at one of the local parks. She was a rescue, and even though it was clear she had a sweet temperament, no one wanted her. I’d never had a dog before that because of my travel schedule, but she gave me a look, and I couldn’t leave her there.”
Kelsie liked him even more. Pit bulls were notoriously difficult rescue dogs, because all people knew were their bad reputations. Masoud had seen beyond that, and given the darling dog a home.
Jeez. How many brownie points does this guy have going for him already? she thought to herself.
“So, what are you and Leila doing in our little town?” she asked. “As you might imagine, we don’t get a lot of new people moving here.”
“I’m an investor, just looking for a bit of the quiet life. Thought it was time to get out of the city, maybe catch up on a few other projects. Slow down a bit.”
Something about his answer didn’t sit right with her.
“What do you invest in?”
He waved a hand as he took another sip of coffee. “This and that. High-tech stuff, mostly.”
Kelsie nodded, but wasn’t satisfied by his vague answer. Still, they had just met, so she let it go. His business was his business.
Masoud pointed at the picture of her father. “Your dad must be pleased you moved back home. Does he still live in town?”
Kelsie took a deep breath. Three years, and it was still hard to talk about.
She shook her head sadly and said, “He passed away suddenly a few years ago.”
Masoud leaned forward and lightly covered her hand with his for a brief moment. “Kelsie, I’m so sorry. For your loss and for bringing up that pain. You must miss him.”
Kelsie felt a little light-headed. She wasn’t sure if it was from Masoud’s touch or from his sincere sympathy, but she appreciated both.
“Thank you, and it’s okay. I don’t think it will ever be easy to talk about, but it’s not a subject I try to avoid. I’m happy to remember my dad every day.” She sat back and gathered herself together.
“Was he a vet, too?”
“No,” Kelsie smiled, pride in her voice. “My grandfather worked on a sheep farm and he taught my dad everything about raising and caring for animals. My dad decided to start a farm of his own, so he bought the land, built this house, and started his own farm.”
Understanding lit up Masoud’s eyes. “So, the sheep are yours. You may have to introduce Leila to them; she seemed fascinated last night.”
Kelsie chuckled. “I’ll have Cowboy give her herding lessons.”
She got up to pour some more water from the bottle into each of the dog bowls and heard Masoud ask, “Not that I’m complaining, but do you always give your dogs bottled water?”
Kelsie turned and leaned against the counter. “Only when my kitchen plumbing is giving me fits. The sink is broken and I haven’t had a chance to fix it yet.”
“Want me to take a look at it?”
Kelsie held up a hand and shook her head. “You don’t have to do that, really.”
“It’s no problem. I don’t have the time to get into fixing up my own house yet, but your sink shouldn’t be a problem. Where’s your tool box?”
Kelsie decided there was something intensely attractive about a man who didn’t question if she could fix something, and simply offered to do it for her just because he could. She got the tool box and handed it to him.
Masoud looked around in the box and asked, “Is it leaking?”
“Yeah. I’m not sure if it’s the pipe itself or the gasket.”
“Got a flashlight?”
Kelsie reached up to the top of refrigerator and pulled down a large square flashlight. “Here. This should help.”
“Thanks.” He sat the light down inside the cabinet and then sat down on the floor in front of the sink.
Kelsie watched him work, sticking his head inside the cabinet and checking the pipes and gasket. “I really appreciate this,” she said.
There was laugh from inside the sink cabinet. “You told me about the best places to eat in town, so I think we’re even.”
“There are only three. You would have figured it out eventually.”
“Yes, but I wouldn’t have known to make friends with Mrs. Clark.”
Kelsie grinned. “That’s true.”
“Why does that name sound familiar?”
“Ah, probably because Josh Clark was your realtor.”
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br /> “Right, of course.” There was a small grunt from inside the cabinet and then Masoud said, “Okay, try it now.”
Kelsie reached over him and carefully turned on the sink. Immediately, water squirted out of the pipe and all over Masoud.
“Crap. Hang on, let me turn it off!”
“No, wait. Hang on, just a bit there…got it.”
The water stopped spraying, and Masoud ducked out of the cabinet. Kelsie looked at him in dismay.
“Oh gosh, I’m so sorry. You’re soaked.”
He laughed and quickly pulled the polo shirt over his head.
Kelsie thought her brain might have blacked out just a little bit at the sight of his bare chest and shoulders. The man really did have the body of a demigod, and it was all Kelsie could do not to reach out and touch his skin.
Masoud squeezed water out of his shirt into the sink and then held it up.
“Yeah, that’s going to have to dry out before I put it back on.”
Kelsie managed to apologize again but he waved it off. “Don’t worry about it. I’m glad I could help.”
“You are definitely my hero for that. Thank you.” Her phone chimed and Kelsie looked at the clock. “And I have to head downstairs to open the clinic for the day. I’m so sorry to drench you in water and then run.”
He laughed. “All in a day’s work. And speaking of work, I’ll let you get to it. I’ll see you around, neighbor?”
Kelsie wondered if he was asking if they would see each other across their yards or if there might be something more to the question. From the look on his face, she thought he might be asking himself the same question.
“Thank you. I’ll definitely see you around,” she said.
Chapter 4
Masoud
Masoud left Kelsie’s house feeling a little self-conscious about the wet shirt slung over his shoulder. But there really was no one around to see him walk back to his house, Leila happily trotting along beside him, so it didn’t really matter.
He hadn’t expected to run into his new neighbor on their morning walk, and although he’d admired her beauty the day before, he certainly hadn’t been prepared for the sizzle of attraction he felt around her.
Which had nothing to do with the fact that he’d taken off his shirt in her kitchen. He hadn’t thought before he’d acted; he just hadn’t wanted to drip water all over her kitchen floor.
Masoud sighed and Leila looked up at him.
He shook his head as he said, “I know, girl. Wouldn’t the board be delighted to see me now? The big, bad, sopping-wet, sink-fixing CEO.” Leila shook her ears at him and he laughed. “You’re not impressed either, are you?”
Back at his house, changed into a dry shirt, Masoud sat down at the computer and pulled up his project checklist. His assistant had sent him more of the county surveys last night; he made a note to stop by the courthouse later that day to talk with the county assessor. He needed additional information on who owned certain plots of land, and what that land was worth.
He and the board had already agreed to a project budget that included buying out Rancho Cordero. His lawyers and accountants were working on individual offers based on how much of the land was owned and what that land was used for.
It was possible that some of the townspeople might want to stay and keep running businesses there, although the actual locations of those shops and restaurants would probably need to be moved. It wouldn’t be a problem to hire miners to work the mine, but it would give him an advantage to be able to offer the workers access to amenities. But no one would be allowed to live within a certain distance of the mine; that area encompassed the entire limits of the town.
His first step was to dig a test site, something he’d chosen this house for. If he was correct, this part of town was built on an old dry lake bed. The lake had been gone for many hundreds of years when the town was built—in fact, the lake had probably been dry since long before Europeans came to this continent.
Lithium wasn’t a difficult mineral to mine, and it was incredibly valuable. But the process was disruptive to the local area, since multiple wells had to be dug, groundwater was pumped up through the wells, and then the mineral was separated and the water pumped back into the ground or left to evaporate.
There weren’t many towns in the county, and Rancho Cordero was the only one sitting more or less on top of the potential mine site. The next closest town was twenty miles away, and although Masoud expected to have to play nice with their town government as well, it would most likely be the place where the mine workers would live, so he didn’t expect it to be a problem.
His business partners hoped to build a processing facility here as well. That would be even more lucrative, since they wouldn’t have to pay to ship the raw mineral somewhere else to be turned into usable lithium. He already had several American and Canadian companies lined up for potential contracts to buy everything they could produce.
The state government was aware of his interest in building a mine in the area, as he’d already starting the permitting process, and had already agreed to smooth the process along, knowing the jobs it would bring to the state.
In any other place, he would have marched into the town and made the people who lived there an offer. It would have cost an insane amount of money, but given how much he potentially stood to make from the mine, it would have been worth it.
He was prepared to assert eminent domain if some of the town’s residents refused to accept his offer. The governor has assured him that as long as Masoud’s offer to the town was fair, his company would have the backing of the state government. That wasn’t his first choice; seizing the land instead of simply buying it would be a long, messy process. He’d rather overwhelm the town with an offer they wouldn’t want to refuse.
At the same time, he wasn’t sure how much lithium was actually there. And doing a normal mineral survey would tip his hand before he was ready, thus the stealth operation to gauge both the potential yield of the mine and the mood of the town. He would dig a small test well on his new property, and there was the state-owned land he’d been given permission to survey, as well.
It would take a few weeks to get a better idea of how much of the mineral the land actually held. In that time, he could also learn what incentives might tilt the town in favor of selling. The sheer amount of money should do it, but he was also prepared to offer other concessions to sweeten the deal. If town was going to have to sell and move, he was prepared to do whatever it took to make that happen.
But he hadn’t expected to find a sense of history in the place, or be charmed by the beauty of the land.
Or the beauty of his neighbor.
Kelsie obviously cared a great deal about her hometown. She loved her home and her clinic and was providing a much-needed service to the area. But with the money he was prepared to offer the townspeople, she could go anywhere and practice. She could open another clinic and maybe even move the sheep to another, bigger farm.
He shoved aside the doubts and focused on the positives. If the lithium was there, he could change the lives of the townspeople by offering them a chance to do better someplace else.
Chapter 5
Kelsie
Kelsie changed into clinic scrubs and headed downstairs, where she remained distracted and scatterbrained for the first hour or so after Masoud left her house. She hadn’t been attracted to a man like that in some time. Her last boyfriend had been nice, but there hadn’t been the same kind of instant sizzle she’d felt with her new neighbor.
If he was only in town for peace and quiet, as he claimed, then eventually he would go back to the city and his regular life. That didn’t mean Kelsie couldn’t have some fun with him while he was there, but it didn’t bode well for anything long-term, which was what Kelsie really wanted.
Between patients—a cat who had gotten caught in a fence and had a sprained leg from trying to get out, and a horse that wasn’t eating—Kelsie checked her email. There was a message from
her mother, which made Kelsie sigh.
Suzanne wanted her to come to Las Vegas for a weekend. There was a big fashion expo, and she wanted to buy her daughter some fabulous new clothes. Kelsie knew that the shopping trip would come with a heaping side of guilt for continuing to stay in Rancho Cordero. Her mother would spend the whole weekend dropping hints about how wonderful Las Vegas was, how many single men lived there, and about the darling little building she’d seen that would make a perfect vet’s office.
That was, if the trip even happened. More than once, Kelsie had planned to visit her mother, only to be told at the last minute that plans had changed. Suzanne had forgotten that she was already going out of town, or that her best friend was coming into town and she just didn’t have room, and of course Kelsie couldn’t stay at a hotel.
She’d seen her mother about once a year since her parents had divorced, when she was fourteen. Suzanne always sent extravagant presents on Kelsie’s birthday and at Christmas, usually things that Kelsie couldn’t use or didn’t really want.
As a teenager, Kelsie had worried that she didn’t like her mother’s presents. She’d saved them all and had sent her mother pictures of her wearing them—even when the clothes and jewelry made her miserable, or she wrote long notes about using the purses and perfumes and makeup—even when she hadn’t. It wasn’t until her mid-twenties that she learned that Suzanne almost never read her notes or kept her pictures.
Since then, Kelsie had adopted an arm’s length policy for dealing with her mother. She didn’t ignore her, but she also didn’t take anything Suzanne said seriously, and she didn’t make plans around her mother’s proposed visits. If she wanted to go to Vegas, she’d plan to see friends and stay with them, and if she saw her mother on the trip, that was fine.
She typed a quick reply.