She smiled. It wasn’t as if she’d never encountered that before. “Is that what you’d like me to call you?” she asked. “Junior?”
He didn’t look like a Junior anything. Tall, with wide shoulders, rather appealing small waist and hips, with wavy, thick black hair that made her fingers unexpectedly itchy, he was definitely in a class all his own.
“Mike,” he told her, his voice striking a note of command. “Call me Mike.”
“Mike,” she repeated, her smile once again mesmerizing him and all but freezing his brain, making it impossible for him to form a coherent thought. “I like that.”
“Yeah, me, too.” The words fell flat and were incredibly lame.
What was going on with him? Mike silently demanded of himself. He’d never sounded like a blithering idiot before, not even in the presence of a drop-dead knockout like that starlet that Ray was so crazy about.
Why was this particular woman numbing his brain and completely negating his ability to think in near complete sentences?
“And what do I call you?” he asked, wanting to say at least one semi-intelligent thing in her presence. “Ms. Monroe, or—”
“Sam,” she told him, cutting off any further speculation on the cowboy’s part. “Everyone just calls me Sam.”
“Sam” was way too masculine-sounding a name for someone who was the absolute antithesis of masculinity, he couldn’t help thinking. But she obviously seemed to like the name and for no other reason than to go along with whatever the woman wanted, Mike nodded and repeated the name.
“Sam.”
Then, remembering that he was supposed to be a walking, talking, functioning adult, Mike forced himself to follow up the single word, and say something more.
“Let’s get your baggage.”
It came out more like a gruff order, but Mike preferred that to sounding like some mesmerized half-wit incapable of stringing four words together into a discernible whole.
“This is it,” Sam informed him, indicating the two pieces of luggage she had with her. The larger piece was most obviously a suitcase on wheels, the kind that easily fit into overhead compartments on planes; the other case was much smaller and in all likelihood contained her laptop inside. A wide, fringed dark brown hobo purse hung off her shoulder.
“You don’t have anything else coming down the chute onto the carousel?” he asked, surprised.
Sam shook her head, her straight chin-length golden hair swaying to and fro as if to reinforce her denial. “No, I travel light.”
Mike took that to mean that the rest of her things were being shipped out—which only bore out what he’d complained about to his father: that the woman was going to be moving in indefinitely.
And while Sam was admittedly a great deal prettier than Ray, the brother who was still living at home, Mike had to admit that he still didn’t really like the idea of having a stranger moving into their ranch house for an indefinite period of time. Indefinite sounded too much like “forever”—the eternity, not the town.
“The rest of your things being shipped out?” he asked her, an accusing note in his voice.
“There is no ‘rest of my things,’” she told him, then added, “This is it,” indicating her meager belongings with a quick sweep of her hand.
Mike stared at the suitcase. “How much can you fit in there?”
“Enough,” she replied with a smile that was both tranquilizing and yet seemed to be able to get an unsuspecting heart racing at the same time.
It certainly did his.
The next moment, Mike cleared his throat and said, “Then I guess if we have everything, we’d better get going.”
“I guess so,” she agreed, doing her best to keep a straight face. She didn’t want this man to think that she was laughing at him or having fun at his expense.
But she did flash a smile in his direction.
Without a word, Mike took possession of her suitcase from her and claimed the black faux-leather briefcase with his other hand.
Mike took exactly two steps before he abruptly stopped walking and turned around to look at her. Not expecting the sudden halt, Sam managed to just barely catch herself just in time to keep from plowing straight into him.
“Is something wrong?” she asked him, doing her best to appear unaffected by this whole venture. Her tall, handsome driver had no way of knowing how many knots currently resided in her stomach and she was going to keep it that way.
“Do you know what you’re getting into?” Mike asked.
Until he’d just said the words out loud, it hadn’t even occurred to him to ask. But this Sam woman appeared delicate to him. Moreover, she looked like someone who was accustomed to having all the amenities that places like New York, Los Angeles, Dallas and cities of that size had to offer a woman like her.
Forever didn’t even have a hotel and there was just one movie theater in town, known simply as The Theater, and it ran second-run movies. And while they weren’t exactly backward here in Forever, they certainly weren’t considered cutting-edge, either. Not by a really long shot.
A “crime spree” here meant that Donnie Taylor and his younger brother, Will, carved their initials on the sides of two barns, or spray-painted those initials on the sides of someone’s garage.
There was nothing modern or even noteworthy about a town like Forever. And most of the people who lived here liked it that way.
“Yes, I’m going to be reading and organizing some journals and diaries written by one of your ancestors. Your father said that this woman had been carried off by some Native Americans and spent a year with them before managing to escape. I’m assuming that she couldn’t write anything down in a journal while it was happening, but once she was able to return home, she put everything down on paper as best she could, doing it in such a way as to make it seem that it was happening as she wrote.” She looked up at the cowboy’s tanned face. “Did I get that right?”
The wide shoulders rose and fell in a careless shrug. “I don’t know, I didn’t look at the books.”
Maybe it was his imagination, but Sam seemed both surprised and a bit confused by his answer. “Oh, but how could you help not looking through the books?” she asked him. Had she stumbled across something like that herself, she knew she wouldn’t have closed her eyes until she’d read all—or at least most of it—herself.
But then, she had always been hungry for family connections, something she’d never really had outside of her mother.
The next moment, realizing that her question might have sounded somewhat condescending or judgmental, Sam quickly withdrew it.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything by that,” she apologized.
He shrugged off both her apology and the question that had come before it. “That’s not what I’m referring to,” Mike told the young blonde.
“Then what are you referring to?” she asked him pleasantly, giving every indication that she wanted to hear him out no matter what he had to say.
“I just wanted to make sure that you knew what this place was like. Forever, I mean,” he clarified in case she wasn’t following him. He was still tripping over his own tongue, he thought in disgust. “We don’t have a hotel,” he began.
Sam nodded. “I gathered that,” she replied. “Your father very generously invited me to stay at the ranch while I worked. But then you’re probably aware