by Cat Schield
“I’m going to open a bottle of wine. Do you want to join me or can I get you something else?” She opened the refrigerator. “I have beer. Or there’s whiskey.”
“I’ll have wine. It wasn’t an I-could-use-a-beer sort of day.”
Brandee popped the cork on her favorite Shiraz and poured out two glasses. “What sort of day is that?”
“One where I spend it in the saddle or out surveying the pastures.” His usually expressive features lost all emotion. And then he gave her a meaningless smile. “You know, ranch work.”
“You don’t sound as if you’re all that keen on ranching.”
Because he seemed so much more focused on his real-estate developments, she’d never considered him to be much of a rancher. He gave every appearance of avoiding hard work, so she assumed that he was lazy or entitled.
“Some aspects of it are more interesting than others.”
With an hour and a half to kill before dinner, she decided to build a fire in the big stone fireplace out on her covered patio. The cooler weather gave her a great excuse to bundle up and enjoy the outdoor space. She carried the bottle of wine and her glass through the French doors off the dining room.
The days were getting longer, so she didn’t have to turn on the overhead lights to find the lighter. The logs were already stacked and waiting for the touch of flame. In a short time a yellow glow spilled over the hearth and illuminated the seating area.
Choosing a seat opposite Shane, Brandee tucked her feet beneath her and sipped her wine. “You do mostly backgrounding at Bullseye, right?”
Backgrounding was the growing of heifers and steers from weanlings to a size where they could enter feedlots for finishing. With nearly fourteen thousand acres, Shane had the space to graze cattle and the skills to buy and sell at the opportune times. He had a far more flexible cattle business than Brandee’s, which involved keeping a permanent stock of cows to produce calves that she later sold either to someone like Shane or to other ranches as breeding stock.
“I like the flexibility that approach offers me.”
“I can see that.”
She’d suffered massive losses after the tornado swept through her property and demolished her operations. She hadn’t lost much of her herd, but the damage to her infrastructure had set her way back. And loss of time as she rebuilt wasn’t the sort of thing covered by insurance.
Shane continued, “I don’t want to give everything to the ranch like my father did and end up in an early grave.” Once again, Shane’s easy charm vanished beneath a stony expression. But in the instant before that happened, something like resentment sparked in his eyes.
This glimpse behind Shane’s mask gave Brandee a flash of insight. For the first time she realized there might be more to the arrogant Shane Delgado than he wanted the world to see. And that intrigued her more than she wanted it to.
She couldn’t actually fall for Shane. Her ranch was at stake. But what if he fell in love with her? Until that second, Brandee hadn’t actually considered the consequences if she won this desperate wager. And then she shook her head. The thought of Shane falling for her in two weeks was crazy and irrational. But wasn’t that the way love made a person feel?
Brandee shook her head. She wasn’t in danger of losing her heart to Shane Delgado, only her ranch.
Five
Tossing and turning, his thoughts filled with a woman, wasn’t Shane’s style, but taking Brandee in his arms for the first time had electrified him. After a nearly sleepless night, he rolled out of bed at five o’clock, heeding her warning that breakfast was at six. The smell of coffee and bacon drew him from the guest suite after a quick shower.
He’d dressed in worn jeans, a long-sleeved shirt and his favorite boots. He intended to show Brandee that while he preferred to run his ranch from his office, he was perfectly capable of putting in a hard day’s work.
Shane emerged from the hallway and into the living room. Brandee was working in the kitchen, her blond hair haloed by overhead recessed lighting. With a spatula in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, she danced and sang to the country song playing softly from her smartphone.
If seeing Brandee relaxed and having fun while she flipped pancakes wasn’t enough to short-circuit his equilibrium, the fact that she was wearing a revealing white cotton nightgown beneath a short royal blue silk kimono hit him like a two-by-four to the gut.
Since she hadn’t yet noticed him, he had plenty of freedom to gawk at her. Either she’d forgotten he was staying in her guest room or she’d assumed he wasn’t going to get up in time for breakfast. Because there was no way she’d let loose like this if she thought he’d catch her.
The soft sway of her breasts beneath the thin cotton mesmerized him, as did the realization that she was a lot more fun than he gave her credit for being. Man, he was in big trouble. If this was a true glimpse of what she could be like off-hours, there was a damn good chance that he’d do exactly what he swore he wouldn’t and fall hard. He had to reclaim the upper hand. But at the moment he had no idea how to go about doing that.
“You’re into Florida Georgia Line,” he said as he approached the large kitchen island and slid onto a barstool. “I would’ve pegged you as a Faith Hill or Miranda Lambert fan.”
“Why, because I’m blond or because I’m a woman?”
He had no good answer. “I guess.”
She cocked her head and regarded him with a pitying expression. “The way you think, I’m not surprised you have trouble keeping a woman.”
He shrugged. “You got any coffee?”
“Sure.” She reached into her cupboard and fetched a mug.
The action caused her nightgown to ride up. Presented with another three inches of smooth skin covering muscular thigh, Shane was having trouble keeping track of the conversation.
“What makes you think I want to keep a woman?”
“Don’t you get tired of playing the field?”
“The right woman hasn’t come along to make me want to stop.”
Brandee bent forward and slid his mug across the concrete counter toward him, offering a scenic view of the sweet curves of her cleavage. In his day he’d seen bigger and better. So why was he dry-mouthed and tongue-tied watching Brandee fixing breakfast?
“What’s your definition of the right woman?” She slid the plate of pancakes into the oven to keep them warm.
“She can cook.” He really didn’t care if she did or not; he just wanted to see Brandee’s eyes flash with temper.
She fetched a carton of eggs out of the fridge and held them out to him. “I don’t know how to make those disgusting things you eat. So either you eat your eggs scrambled or you make them yourself.”
This felt like a challenge. His housekeeper didn’t work seven days a week and he knew how to fix eggs. “And she’s gotta be great in bed.”
“Naturally.”
He came around the island as she settled another pan on her six-burner stove and got a flame started under it.
“So as long as she satisfies what lies below your belt, you’re happy?” She cracked two eggs into a bowl and beat them with a whisk.
“Pretty much.” Too late Shane remembered that their wager involved her falling in love with him. “And she needs to have a big heart, want kids. She’ll be beautiful in a wholesome way, passionate about what she does and, of course, she’s gotta be a spitfire.”
“That’s a big list.”
“I guess.” And it described Brandee to a tee, except for the part about the kids. He had no idea whether or not she wanted to have children.
“You want kids?”
“Sure.” He’d never really thought much about it. “I was an only child. It would’ve been nice to have a bunch of brothers to get into trouble with.”
Her silk kimono
dipped off her shoulder as she worked, baring her delicate skin. With her dressed like this and her fine, gold hair tucked behind her ears to reveal tiny silver earrings shaped like flowers, he was having a hard time keeping his mind on the eggs he was supposed to be cracking. His lips would fit perfectly into the hollow of her collarbone. Would she quiver as she’d done the evening before?
Silence reigned in the kitchen until Shane broke it.
“Do you do this every day?” He dropped a bit of butter into his skillet.
“I do this most mornings. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day and trust me, you’ll burn this off way before lunch.”
Based on the mischief glinting in her eyes, Shane didn’t doubt that. What sort of plan had she devised to torment him today? It was probably a morning spent in the saddle cutting out heavies, the cows closest to their due date, and bringing them into the pasture closest to the calving building.
It turned out he was right. Brandee put him up on a stocky buckskin with lightning reflexes. He hadn’t cut cows in years and worried that he wouldn’t be up to the task, but old skills came back to him readily and he found himself grinning as he worked each calf-heavy cow toward the opening into the next pasture.
“You’re not too bad,” Brandee said, closing the gate behind the pregnant cow he’d just corralled.
She sat her lean chestnut as if she’d been born in the saddle. Her straw cowboy hat had seen better days. So had her brown chaps and boots. The day had warmed from the lower forties to the midsixties and Brandee had peeled off a flannel-lined denim jacket to reveal a pale blue button-down shirt.
“Thanks.” He pulled off his hat and wiped sweat from his brow. “I forgot how much fun that can be.”
“A good horse makes all the difference,” she said. “Buzz there has been working cows for three years. He likes it. Not all the ones we start take to cutting as well as he has.”
Shane patted the buckskin’s neck and resettled his hat. “How many more do you have for today?” They’d worked their way through the herd of fifty cows and moved ten of them closer to the calving building.
“I think that’s going to be it for now.” Brandee guided her horse alongside Shane’s.
“How many more are set to go soon?”
“About thirty head in the next week to ten days, I think. Probably another fifteen that are two weeks out.”
“And it’s not yet peak birthing season. What kind of numbers are you looking at in March?”
With her nearly five thousand acres, Shane guessed she was running around seven hundred cows. That translated to seven hundred births a year. A lot could go wrong.
“It’s not as bad as it seems. We split the herd into spring and fall calving. So we’re only dropping three to four hundred calves at any one time. This cuts down on the number of short-term ranch hands I need to hire during calving and keeps me from losing a year if a breeding doesn’t take.”
“It’s still a lot of work.”
Brandee shrugged. “We do like to keep a pretty close eye on them because if anything can go wrong, chances are it will.”
“What are your survival rates?”
“Maybe a little better than average. In the last three years I’ve only lost four percent of our calves.” She looked pretty pleased by that number. “And last fall we only had two that were born dead and only one lost through complications.” Her eyes blazed with triumph.
“I imagine it can be hard to lose even one.”
“We spend so much time taking care of them every day between feeding, doctoring and pulling calves. It breaks my heart every time something goes wrong. Especially when it’s because we didn’t get to a cow in time. Or if it’s a heifer who doesn’t realize she’s given birth and doesn’t clean up the calf or, worse, wanders off while her wet baby goes hypothermic.”
Over the years he’d become so acclimated to Brandee’s coolness that he barely recognized the vibrant, intense woman beside him. He was sucker punched by her emotional attachment to the hundreds of babies that got born on her ranch every year.
This really was her passion. And every time he approached her about selling, he’d threatened not just her livelihood but her joy.
“My dad used to go ballistic if that happened,” she continued. “I pitied the hand that nodded off during watch and let something go wrong.”
“Where’s your dad now?”
Her hat dipped, hiding her expression. “He died when I was twelve.”
Finding that they had this in common was a surprise. “We both lost our dads too early.” Although Shane suspected from Brandee’s somber tone that her loss was far keener than his had been. “So, your dad was a rancher, too?”
She shook her head. “A foreman at the Lazy J. But it was his dream to own his own ranch.” Her gaze fixed on the horizon. “And for us to run it together.”
Shane heard the conviction in her voice and wondered if he should just give up and concede the wager right now. She wasn’t going to sell her ranch to him or anyone else. Then he remembered that even if he was faced with a fight he could never win, there was still a good chance she’d sleep with him before the two weeks were up. And wasn’t that why he’d accepted the wager in the first place?
* * *
At around two o’clock in the afternoon, Brandee knocked off work so she could grab a nap. It made the long hours to come a little easier if she wasn’t dead tired before she got on the horse. Normally during the ninety-day calving season Brandee took one overnight watch per week. She saw no reason to change this routine with Shane staying at her house.
Brandee let herself in the back door and kicked off her boots in the mudroom. Barefoot, she headed into the kitchen for a cheese stick and an apple. Munching contentedly, she savored the house’s tranquillity. Sharing her space with Shane was less troublesome than she’d expected, but she’d lived alone a long time and relished the quiet. Shane had a knack for making the air around him crackle with energy.
It didn’t help that he smelled like sin and had an adorable yawn, something she’d seen a great deal of him doing these last three days because she’d worked him so hard. In the evenings he had a hard time focusing on his laptop as he answered emails and followed up with issues on The Bellamy job site.
Today, she’d given him the day off to head to the construction site so he could handle whatever problems required him to be there in person. She didn’t expect him back until after dinner and decided to indulge in a hot bath before hitting her mattress for a couple hours of shut-eye. It always felt decadent to nap in the afternoon, but she functioned better when rested and reminded herself that she’d hired experienced hands so she didn’t have to do everything herself.
Since receiving Maverick’s blackmail notice, she hadn’t slept well, and though her body was tired, her mind buzzed with frenetic energy. Disrupting her routine further was the amount of time she was spending with Shane. Despite questioning the wisdom of their wager, she realized that having him in her house was a nice change.
Four hours later, Brandee was fixing a quiet dinner for herself of baked chicken and Caesar salad. Shane had a late business meeting and was planning on having dinner in town. He’d only been helping her for three days, but already she could see the impact he was having on her building project at the camp.
He’d gone down to the site and assessed the situation. Last night he’d studied her plans and budget, promising to get her back on track. As much as she hated to admit it, it was good to have someone to partner with. Even if that someone was Shane Delgado and he was only doing it to make her fall in love with him.
There’d been no repeat of him making a play for her despite the way she fixed breakfast every morning in her nightgown. Standing beside him in the kitchen and suffering the bite of sexual attraction, she’d expected something to happen. When nothing had
, she’d felt wrung out and cranky. Not that she let him see that. It wouldn’t do to let him know that she’d crossed the bridge from it’s never going to happen to if it didn’t happen soon she’d go mad.
Shane returned to the ranch house as Brandee was getting ready to leave. Her shift wouldn’t begin for an hour, but she wanted to get a report on what had happened during the afternoon. As he came in the back door and met up with her in the mudroom, he looked surprised to see her dressed in her work clothes and a warm jacket.
His movements lacked their usual energy as he set his briefcase on the bench. “Are you just getting in?”
“Nope, heading out.” She snagged her hat from one of the hooks and set it on her head. “It’s my night to watch the cows that are close to calving.”
“You’re going out by yourself?”
She started to bristle at his question, then decided he wasn’t being patronizing, just voicing concern. “I’ve been doing it for three years by myself. I’ll be fine.”
“Give me a second to change and I’ll come with you.”
His offer stunned her. “You must be exhausted.” The words slipped out before she considered them.
He turned in the doorway that led to the kitchen and glared at her. “So?”
“I just mean it’s a long shift. I spend between four to six hours in the saddle depending on how things go.”
“You don’t think I’m capable of doing that?”
“I didn’t say that.” Dealing with his ego was like getting into a ring with a peevish bull. “But you have worked all day and I didn’t figure you’d be up for pulling an all-nighter.”
“You think I’m soft.”
“Not at all.” She knew he could handle the work, but was a little surprised he wanted to.
“Then what is it?”
“I just reasoned that you don’t...that maybe you aren’t as used to the actual work that goes into ranching.”
“That’s the same thing.”
Brandee regretted stirring the pot. She should have just invited him along and laughed when he fell off his horse at 2:00 a.m. because he couldn’t keep his eyes open any longer.