Wrangling the Rancher Page 12

  * * *

  AS A HORSEMAN, Cole knew the power of touch—with animals and with humans. But he hadn’t expected the gut-level jolt triggered by the simple act of touching Taylor’s face. Or the feeling of connection. And wanting.

  It bothered him.

  He’d formed an idea of who Taylor was. Of what she was—someone he didn’t want to feel a connection with. Yet it had happened, and now he had to contend with it. The best way to do that was to focus on something other than touching and connecting and bullshit like that. So he would go to work and pretend nothing had happened. Because nothing else was going to happen.

  Cole fully intended to put Taylor to work on the farm. He needed help. The knee he could deal with. He’d hurt it before and knew what to expect. The wrist was going to be a problem. It throbbed whenever he moved, which wasn’t helping his low-grade headache. Nor was the sight of Taylor leaving the bunkhouse dressed in jeans and a hoodie and crossing the driveway on her way to his house.

  Time to go to work.

  Time to shove aside idle thoughts about what it would have felt like to put his mouth where his thumb had been less than an hour ago. He hadn’t been laid in a month of Sundays, and that was clouding his judgment. His body wanted what it couldn’t have...well, his body was just going to have to deal.

  Taylor seemed surprised to see him standing near the gate as she approached, and a guarded look slid in over top of the thoughtful expression she’d worn as she’d walked toward the house, her chin low, her gaze down.

  Vulnerable wasn’t a word he would have used to describe her before this morning, but when an overachiever was no longer able to achieve, when everything the person knew turned out to be wrong...it had to be a rough adjustment.

  Not that Taylor would purposely show weakness. Her chin lifted and she met his gaze head-on...but he couldn’t say she looked enthusiastic.

  “What’s on the farming agenda?”

  Nope. Definitely not enthusiastic. Cole had a grudging employee on his hands. Cool. All the better to give her back a little of her own.

  “We’re not farming.” The seeds were in the ground, and until he had to deal with weed control and mowing along the ditches and roads, he didn’t have a lot of farmwork to do.

  Her eyebrows lifted in surprise. “Then how do you plan to work my ass off?”

  “We’re tackling the boneyard.” The area where the scrap metal, wood and wire were collected had been long neglected, and part of his lease agreement with Karl had been to put the area into a semblance of order.

  Her mouth opened, then closed again, telling him that he didn’t need to explain the task any further. If he’d had any doubts about whether she understood what they were going to do, it was answered by the distasteful curl of her lips. She asked, “How are ‘we’ going to do that, when half of ‘us’ are injured?”

  “The knee’s already feeling better.” As long as he was wearing his brace and iced the joint every few hours.

  “How about the wrist?”

  “I’ll manage.”

  “Fine,” she said darkly. “Just don’t hurt yourself again, because I’m not above demanding eight months of free living.”

  “And I’m not above forgetting I ever made a deal.”

  She wrinkled her nose at him. He guessed she had no idea that it came off as cute rather than the sneer she was probably shooting for. “What’s the goal for today?”

  “To tackle the boneyard?” He thought he’d made that clear.

  “No,” she said with a slight roll of her eyes. “What is the specific goal?”

  “I thought we’d start by dragging out the T-posts and stacking them, and then maybe go after the scrap wood.”

  “Are we only organizing? Or are we also sorting and discarding?”

  “Sorting and discarding.” He waited to see whether they needed to write a formal plan of action, delineating objectives before embarking on the cleanup, but Taylor seemed satisfied with a verbal.

  “You’re not really up for this, are you?” And was he horrible for rather enjoying her discomfort?

  “A deal is a deal,” she said stiffly. She looked down at her pretty painted nails. “I need gloves.”

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out his extra pair and handed them to her.

  “Thank you.”

  They walked around the barn to where Karl had stacked debris for the past thirty years on top of the debris he’d inherited from his father.

  “You know what a T-post looks like?”

  “A ‘T’?”

  “Just checking,” he said. “After insulting you with the Angus cow incident—”

  “I did an oral report on cattle in the fifth grade. I have good recall.”

  “No report on fence posts?”

  “Unfortunately, no.”

  He dug into the jumble of fence posts and grabbed a bent T-post. After fighting it for a few seconds, he managed to free it from its buddies and hold it up. “It’s these ones with the spade on the end. If you find a bent one, we’ll chuck it into the back of the truck.” Which he did, one-handed. “If it’s straight, we’ll stack them here.”

  “Got it.” She stepped onto the junk at the edge of the debris, and her foot slipped. Cole reached out and caught her arm with his good hand, steadying her. “You good?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Up to date on tetanus?”

  “If I say no, I guess that means you can’t work my ass off.” She shot him a hopeful glance.

  “And then you’ll have to move.”

  She gave a mock sigh. “Totally up to date.” She reached down for a T-post tangled in wire and a mishmash of other bent posts. It didn’t move. She let go to choose another, which also refused to budge. “You?”

  “Likewise.” Handling as much rusty wire as he did while fixing fences, he couldn’t afford not to be up to date.

  Taylor propped her hands on her hips and surveyed the tangled mess with a deep frown.

  This was going to take all day if Taylor kept grabbing posts and letting go of them. “Look, if you find a post that’s—”

  Taylor made a dismissive gesture, then reached down, grabbed the end of a post and pulled. When it didn’t give, she started shaking it up and down and then twisting it sideways until finally she yanked it free, almost falling over backward in the process.

  “Way to work out your aggressions,” Cole muttered.

  She ignored him and tossed the post toward the bed of the truck as he had. It hit the side with a clang and landed on the gravel. Cole gave her a look.

  “Sorry,” she muttered. “I’ll do better next time.”

  “Or maybe you think if you beat up my truck that you’ll get put on another detail?”

  “Show me the dent,” she said.

  Okay. She had a point. The truck was so dented from years of work that it would be almost impossible to find the new ding.

  Cole tipped back his hat. “I’m getting the idea you really hate this.”

  “I hate busywork.” She lifted her chin at him, clearly challenging him to deny that was what they were doing. “This yard has been here since I was a kid. No one has ever done anything but add to it. Why are we sorting it?”

  “I promised your grandfather.”

  She gave him a disbelieving look. “So this isn’t something you cooked up to make me miserable?”

  “I didn’t cook it up,” he said, without addressing the “make her miserable” part. He didn’t really want her to be miserable...but he didn’t mind seeing her get her hands dirty. “If you don’t want to work, you can move. You agreed to farm labor.”

  “I’m not going to move.”

  “Then I guess you have to adapt.”

  She gave him a long look that he couldn’t even
come close to reading. Then she gave a small nod. “Good idea.”

  “How’s that?” Cole asked automatically.

  She reached down for another post. Cole stood back, not wanting an elbow to the lip, but this time she lifted and twisted and eventually worked it free of the pile without doing either of them any damage.

  She held up the post. “Johnson.”

  Cole stared at her. “You’re naming the posts?”

  “I’m working out my aggressions, as you suggested. Johnson always made me ask for information I needed twice. Or three times. Power game.” She heaved the post toward the pickup, where it landed square in the middle of the bed with a rattling bang. “Take that, Johnson.”

  “Good aim this time,” Cole muttered. “Who’s next?”

  Taylor grabbed another post and didn’t bother pulling, but instead twisted. And twisted some more. “Melanie. Didn’t do her job. Talked about me behind my back. Still...” yank “with...” twist “...the company...” A few seconds later, Melanie joined Johnson.

  Cole tipped his hat back. “Anyone else?”

  Taylor propped her gloved hands on her hips and pursed her lips as she considered the roster in her head. “One more.” She took hold of a gnarly rusted post, twisted, yanked, pulled, tripped and fell backward on her ass. She got back up, took another crack at the post, then eventually worked it free. Perspiration beaded on her forehead. “Erickson.”

  “Ex-boyfriend?”

  “My supervisor, who encouraged me to believe I was irreplaceable and that I should continue to work eighty-hour weeks.” She heaved the post. It hit the bed of the truck on end and ricocheted out, landing on the ground. She climbed off the pile and retrieved Erickson.

  “He always was a slippery dude, but I thought he was on my side.” She threw the post back into the truck.

  “Do you maybe want to bend him a little?” Cole asked, gesturing to where the post now lay.

  She met his eyes, wiping her glove over her forehead, leaving a rusty smear. “You have no idea,” she said grimly.

  He reached down and started working a post free with his good hand. “Did you like anyone you worked with?”

  Taylor also started working on freeing a post, more gently this time. “Of course.” She gave him a sidelong look. “Some people even liked me.”

  Cole let out a snort. “Imagine that.”

  “Watch it,” she said pleasantly. “The next post might have your name on it.”

  “I’ll take care.”

  “You better.”

  Cole pulled his post free and handed it to Taylor. “Pretend it’s Johnson.”

  Her gaze held his as she took the post from him. Are we playing?

  Maybe a little.

  She heaved the post. It landed perfectly in the bed of the truck, and then she reached into the pile and chose her next victim. “I’m still not convinced this isn’t busywork.”

  “Ask Karl.”

  “Oh, yeah. I’m going to call Grandpa to ask if you were supposed to clean up the boneyard. Then he’ll ask why, and I’ll have to come up with a watered-down version of what’s going on.”

  “Why watered down?”

  Her hair spilled over her shoulder as she turned toward him. “Because I don’t like to upset him, and I think you’re using that to your advantage.”

  “No, Taylor. I’m striking while the iron is hot.” She smirked as he echoed her words. “You’re the one who chose to land here.”

  “And I’m the one who agreed to this deal.” She went to work on another post that slid free with relative ease because it was one of the few straight ones. She held it up, and he pointed to the place where they’d stack the salvageable posts. She laid it down and went to work on another.

  “I’m a hard worker,” she said as she methodically twisted and pulled a pretzel of a post, “but this isn’t the kind of work I do.” She shot him a look. “Don’t you have any financial stuff you need advice on?”

  “Uh...”

  Her expression darkened as she caught the reason for his hesitation. “We addressed that.”

  “Yes.” He carefully freed a post and laid it in the straight-post pile. “I don’t blame you for trying to pay off student loans and feeling bulletproof.”

  “But you still think I’m entitled.”

  “If our positions were reversed...”

  She let out a breath. “Things look different on the outside.”

  “What?”

  She put her hand on her hip. “I guess I’m saying walk a mile in my shoes. Your perspective might change.”

  “I guess that goes both ways.”

  “I guess.”

  The conversation ended there and, oddly, the tension between them seemed to dissipate as they worked in an almost companionable silence. Almost. He was too damned aware of her noncompanionable assets for it to be fully companionable.

  “Did you live alone in the city?”

  She stopped pulling on a post and shot him a frown.

  “Yes.” The word came out cautiously, as if she were expecting a setup, but this time he was just curious.

  “Then living alone in the bunkhouse isn’t a big change.”

  “No. It is a big change. Being alone is the only part of my life that’s the same.”

  Over the course of the next hour, they sorted through the worst part of the web of bent and tangled posts. He heard Taylor’s stomach growl a couple of times, but when he asked if she wanted to stop for lunch, she shook her head. “I don’t eat much when I’m stressed.”

  But she did work. Cole would give her that.

  “You should eat something.”

  “Thanks, Mom, but I’d just as soon finish my hours and be free of this.”

  “I need to eat.”

  She shrugged. “Whatever.” The post she was working on finally came free, and she tossed it into the truck bed. “I don’t mind continuing.”

  “I mind.”

  She rubbed her shoulder. “Fine, but you should know that once I stop, I may never get going again.”

  “Maybe you can pretend the next posts are the assholes who robbed you.”

  He caught the flash of amusement in her eyes, there and gone. He wished it had stayed. There were layers to Taylor. A woman beneath the princess exterior whom he thought he could like. He just needed to find her.

  What the hell was he thinking?

  He didn’t need to find a hidden side to Taylor. He needed to focus on the job at hand and his life ATL—After Taylor Leaves.

  * * *

  BY THE TIME the day was over, Taylor would have happily killed for a long, hot soak. She briefly thought about negotiating for use of the tub—Cole was showing signs of being reasonable—then decided that maybe she didn’t want to be naked that close to him, even if there was a door between them.

  The guy set her on edge. And every now and again a random hot thought would flash into her head. What did he look like naked? Pretty damned awesome.

  So, no bath. Instead she stood under a shower head that drizzled more than it sprayed, rolling her shoulders, soothing her sore muscles and feeling thankful that the hot water tank worked well. Small blessings.

  Damn but she didn’t want to go back to that filthy post pile and dig out pieces of metal and wood. The best thing would be to hire heavy equipment to come in and haul the whole mess to the dump. To hell with recycling. Chances were the posts they were saving would merely become the beginning of a new boneyard.

  Useless busywork. Done because Cole could make her do it. Maybe her grandfather had asked him to clean up the yard...but she didn’t think he expected anyone to sort through the whole damned mess. The waste in man-hours was ridiculous.

  The next morning Taylor’s body creaked as she got o
ut of bed. She loaded the coffeemaker, which she’d been too tired to deal with the night before, and then lowered herself down onto the plank floor and reached for her toes. She put her chest to her knees, then straightened back up, rubbing her shoulders. Her hammies were fine, but her traps, delts and pecs were killing her. Maybe she shouldn’t have let that gym membership lapse. She got to her feet, opened her laptop and looked up shoulder stretches. She did not open her job links or check her email. She couldn’t face it today.

  She’d hit the job hunt hard again soon. Her student loans weren’t going away, but they also wouldn’t ruin her if she was living rent-free. She could scrape by. In a day or two, she’d send emails to Paul and Carolyn, confessing about the job and renewing her request to keep their eyes open for her. Right now, she’d focus on stretching her aching upper body.

  And she might think about that guy she’d worked side by side with.

  The guy who was going all power trip on her just because he could.

  That didn’t take away from the fact that Cole was hot. Annoying, but hot. His face, his shoulders, his very fine ass. The way his eyes kind of crinkled when he let loose with a grudging smile. She reminded herself yet again that hot yet annoying men were nothing new in her world, but she didn’t seem to be able to disregard the hotness factor as easily as she did with all the other Ken-doll guys. Maybe because Cole wasn’t a Ken doll.

  He was waiting for her when she’d finished her stretching and her coffee, and she had the feeling that he would have been pacing if his knee wasn’t giving him issues.

  “Anxious to get going?”

  “Debating the next move.”

  “I thought we agreed on the scrap wood pile.” Which should be doused in gasoline and burned rather than sorted by hand. Taylor rubbed her sore shoulder again.

  “I was thinking of something more fun.”

  Fun?

  Heat began to bloom in her lower abdomen—exactly where she didn’t want it to bloom.

  “Ever drive a tractor?”

  Oh, thank goodness. She swallowed as she lifted her chin and tried to appear as if her thoughts had not headed straight for the gutter. “Yes. But it’s been a while.”

  He cocked a dark eyebrow at her. “You’re not being facetious, right?”