“That’s what I’d like to know! You should have let me pop that jackass. He deserved it.”
“That jackass,” she said through her teeth, “happens to be a very good friend of mine.”
“Some friend!” he retorted. “Does he always insult you that way?”
“He wasn’t insulting me!”
“No? Then what would you call it?”
He looked so indignant that Lise couldn’t help but be touched. But he couldn’t go around hitting people just because they didn’t treat her the way he thought they should treat a woman. “Look,” she sighed, “I appreciate the Sir Galahad routine, but you really don’t have to protect my tender sensibilities. Gene wasn’t being intentionally rude. He just doesn’t think of me as a woman. And neither do the rest of the guys. And that’s okay. It’s more important that they treat me as an equal.”
“They can treat you as both while I’m around,” he snapped, “or they’re going to find themselves picking themselves up off the floor. Now that we’ve got that settled, why don’t you bring the truck around to the loading dock so I can load this stuff and we can get out of here?”
Rolling her eyes, Lise could see that there was no arguing with the man. “Fine. Just try not to get in trouble while I’m gone, okay? I’d have to bail you out, and that wouldn’t make me very happy, and you don’t want to see me when I’m not happy.”
Grinning, he said, “I’ll be an angel. I promise.”
When Lise snorted at that, he winked at her and just that easily made her heart thump crazily in her breast. Angel, my eye, she thought, irritated with herself as she turned and fled for the truck. The man was a handsome devil and too good-looking for his own good. If he thought he was going to take her in with just a wink and a boyish grin, he could think again. She wasn’t that stupid.
Satisfied she had her emotions under strict control, Lise drove the truck around to the loading dock and backed into place. Before she’d even turned off the motor, Steve had pulled on the work gloves he’d brought with him and started loading the fence posts and barbed wire into the back of the truck.
“Here, let me help you,” she said as she quickly joined him. “You can’t do that all by yourself.”
“No.”
She was already reaching for some of the fence posts. She had hardly picked two of them up before he took them away from her. “Hey, give me those! What are you doing?”
“Loading the truck,” he retorted. “That’s why you brought me along, remember? So why don’t you grab a seat in the shade and let me do my job?”
Lise couldn’t believe he was serious. “Don’t be ridiculous. I can help.”
“Maybe so, but you’re not going to. I’m perfectly capable of doing it myself.”
His jaw set at an angle she was just beginning to realize was as immovable as Gibraltar, he gave her a hard look and just dared her to argue with him further. She told herself he was kidding, but there was no glint of laughter in his steely gray eyes, no smile on his mouth. Obviously not caring that they might be drawing the eye of everyone on the store’s huge loading dock, he glared at her, silently daring her to pick up so much as a box of nails from the supplies still waiting to be loaded.
Standing toe to toe with him, she should have told him she was the boss and could load any damn thing she wanted. It would have been the wise thing to do. After all, who was supposed to be giving whom orders? But the darn man didn’t play fair. He’d done it again, made her feel like a dainty, feminine woman, and she didn’t know how to handle it. Without a word, she found a seat on a nearby wooden crate to watch him work.
That’s when alarm bells clanged in her head. What was she doing? she wondered wildly. Just because the man had opened a few doors for her and wanted to wrap her in cotton like a china doll didn’t mean he was interested in her. No one had ever looked twice at her before, and she didn’t expect that to change just because this cowboy had walked into her life. He might have told her stories about his childhood, but what did she really know about the man himself? Nothing. For all she knew, he was just a charming drifter who never stayed anywhere long and left a string of broken hearts behind him. He wouldn’t break hers, she promised herself. She wouldn’t make an idiot of herself over him and have every cowboy within a hundred miles laughing at her.
That didn’t mean, however, that she couldn’t enjoy watching him work. With an ease that stole her breath, he picked up a heavy role of wire as if it weighed no more than a matchbox and tossed it into the bed of the truck. Muscles rippled in his arms. His back strong and straight, his broad shoulders handling the task with no effort whatsoever, he didn’t even break a sweat. Fascinated, Lise had to admit that he really was something to see.
Chapter 3
From the outside, the Flamingo Café looked like a dive that would blow away in a stiff wind. Constructed of rusty corrugated tin with faded pink flamingos painted on the side, the entire building leaned slightly to the left. It had no class and very little eye appeal, and Steve loved it. The second he followed Lise inside, he couldn’t help but grin. Everywhere he looked, there were pink flamingos.
“This is great!”
Surprised, Lise arched a brow. “You like it?”
“Are you kidding? It reminds me of a place back home—the Lily Pad.” He laughed just at the thought of it. “God, I’d forgotten about it. It was wild! There were frogs everywhere, from all over the world. And the best frog legs you ever tasted in your life. On Friday and Saturday nights, they had a band, and you could forget about getting a table if you didn’t get there by seven o’clock.”
“Don’t tell Mabel about that,” she warned as a waitress arrived to show them to one of the few empty tables in the space. “She’s the owner,” she explained when he lifted an inquiring brow. “And she’s always trying something new—which is how she got hooked on flamingos to begin with. Someone gave her some as a gag, people commented on them, and the next thing you knew, the place was full of them. If she thought she could do the same thing with frogs and actually sell frog legs, the place would turn into a zoo.”
From what Steve could see, it was that already. Every available inch of space was taken up by either a table or a flamingo, and whatever Mabel was serving, the locals were eating it up with a spoon. Picking up a menu, he flipped it open and blinked. Beef Wellington, steak tartar, grilled fresh salmon with dill sauce. Who would have thought it out here in the middle of nowhere?
Glancing up from her own menu, Lise smiled slightly. “Mabel likes to surprise people. Believe it or not, she studied in Paris. You name it, she can cook it.”
Steve didn’t know about the other items on the menu, but he soon discovered Mabel knew what she was doing when it came to the salmon. Taking his first bite a few minutes later, he groaned as it all but melted in his mouth. Swallowing, he told Lise, “Do you realize I’ve only been in this country two days. Two days! And I’ve already had the two best meals of my life! This is incredible.”
Suddenly noting that she’d hardly touched the beef Wellington she’d ordered for herself, he frowned. “What’s the matter? You’re not eating.”
“Nothing,” she said with a shrug. “I’m just not as hungry as I thought I was. I ate a big breakfast.”
Steve didn’t doubt that—he had, too. With Cookie’s cooking, who could resist pigging out? But breakfast was hours ago, and they’d left the station just as lunch was about to be served. Since they’d arrived in town, they’d been so busy collecting supplies that they hadn’t even