“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 of that,” she realized, thinking out loud.
“Yeah, I am,” he told her, then went back to listing the town’s shortcomings. He honestly didn’t know if he was trying to chase her away with the facts, or telling her this so that she was forewarned as to what to expect now, while she was still fresh and hot on the idea of pursuing this restoration project. “There are no fancy restaurants here.”
“I didn’t come here to eat, I came to work,” she pointed out simply.
Mike found himself being reeled in by the woman’s smile, despite his best efforts not to be. He wondered if she even knew how magnetic that smile of hers was. The next moment, a mocking voice in his head asked, How could she not?
“All we’ve got is a diner,” Mike told her, continuing to list what he assumed a stranger would see as Forever’s shortcomings.
“That sounds more than adequate for anything I might want,” Sam assured him.
Since he’d mentioned Miss Joan’s—how could anyone spending more than ten minutes in Forever be oblivious to Miss Joan’s?—he felt it only right to give a little equal time to the only place in town that served alcohol.
“There’s a saloon if you feel the need to unwind,” he heard himself telling her. He slanted a glance in her direction to see if this piece of information would be welcomed, or barely registered. It turned out to be the latter.
“Good to know,” she murmured. “Although I probably won’t be visiting it,” Sam speculated. “I’ll be too busy with the journals.” She looked up at him again, waiting. “Anything else?”
He thought for a moment, then said, “There’s no nightlife here.”
She didn’t know what he was getting at. She could only make an educated guess that he thought she was something she wasn’t. That she required entertainment and special treatment, like she was “high maintenance.”
Nothing could have been further from the truth—and Sam was proud of that fact.
But for now, she tried to set his mind at ease as best she could.
“Mr. Rodriguez, I’m not exactly sure what it is you’re saying or what you expect me to be, but I was raised in a small town in Maryland where they rolled up the sidewalk at seven-thirty every night. I don’t require a ‘night life.’ What I require is a comfortable work atmosphere and an occasional conversation with friendly, decent people, something I’m assuming won’t be difficult to encounter here.
“Now, if you find any of that objectionable or believe that any of it wouldn’t be to your father’s liking, tell me now so we can iron all this out before I get down to work.”
Mike frowned as he listened to her, unable to believe that a woman who looked the way this Sam person did would be satisfied with so little.
“You’ll be bored,” Mike predicted.
Sam smiled at him in response. A wide, amused, guileless smile that sent ripples of unnamed anticipation through his gut.
“I am never bored, Mr. Rodriguez,” she told him. “If need be, I make my own entertainment. Now, is there anything else?” she asked.
He blew out a breath and picked up the suitcase handle again.
“No,” he told her, then added as an afterthought, “You can call me Mike.”
“Mike,” she echoed with a pleased nod of her head. She’d found the first chink in the wall. Sam considered it her first victory.
The first of many, Sam promised herself.
Chapter Three
“This is really beautiful country,” Sam commented as she stared out the window of Mike’s truck.
They’d been driving for about half an hour and in that time, the rather stoic cowboy behind the steering wheel had said nothing. Oh, he’d grunted a couple of times in acknowledgment of something she had said, but only after she’d deliberately addressed the remark or question to him.
As far as forming actual words on his own, he’d stubbornly refrained from that.
Obviously, the man had used up his less than vast supply of vocabulary at the airport. Determined to get more than a noise in response, she tried again, hoping that commenting on a preferred topic would get the taciturn man to speak.
“It probably hasn’t changed all that much since the first settlers came out here in their covered wagons,” she speculated when he still said nothing. “It looks untouched,” she added, glancing in Mike’s direction. When he still gave no indication that he was going to comment on her observation, she piled on another word. “Pristine, even.”
Mike snorted.
“What?” she asked, eager to prod him. “Did I say something wrong?”
He made another noise and she thought that was all the interaction there was going to be, in which case she had gotten more of a response from a squeaky floorboard. But then Mike surprised her.
“Pristine,” Mike repeated with a mocking tone. “All except for the electrical wires and the phone wires that’re buried underground,” he pointed out crisply.
“All except for that,” she agreed, doing her best to keep a straight face. But her tone betrayed her when she told him, “Some progress is actually a lovely thing, Mike.” Was he the type who had little patience with any kind of modern advancements?
“Never said it wasn’t,” Mike replied, keeping his eyes on the road despite the fact that there was nothing moving in either direction and most likely wouldn’t be for most of the drive back to his ranch. They were twenty-five miles into their journey and the only thing on the road was more road.
After the sparse exchange between them, there was more silence.
Sam suppressed a sigh. This man would have no trouble with solitary confinement, she thought. As for her, she didn’t relish silence.
She gave conversation another try. Eventually, the man would have to do some talking, if only in self-defense.
“So, is it just you and your father on the ranch?” she asked him.
He spared her a look that was completely unfathomable. “What makes you say that?”
“No reason,” Sam said with a careless shrug. “I don’t have anything to go on, really, so I thought I’d make a guess.”
He glanced back at the road. Questions about this woman were beginning to pile up in his mind, but he deliberately shoved them to the side, telling himself he didn’t care one way or another.
“You guessed wrong,” he told her in a monotone.
“Obviously,” she allowed good-naturedly. “Okay, why don’t you fill me in?”
It seemed to her as if he turned his head in slow-motion to look at her. “On what?”
Since