Nervous laughter spilled from her as Will Hampton stepped into the beam of light caused by the flood lamp mounted above the front door. “You nearly scared me to death!” she chided.
“Sorry, ma’am,” he replied with a tip of his tattered hat.
Will was a walking cliché, the very image of a taciturn cowboy. From the hat to his craggy, leathery face, jeans, bowed legs and scuffed boots—you name it, he had it. Along with a personality that bordered on nonexistent. He barely ever spoke, and when he did, it was in one-or two-word sentences that almost always ended in a polite “ma’am.”
Smiling, Taylor acknowledged the other man. He wasn’t familiar, but they were at the launch of the spring calving season, so there were any number of men drifting in and out of steady employment. “I brought you dessert.” She handed the tray to Will, glad to rid herself of its weight, and smiled at the other man. “Hi, I’m Taylor.”
“LukeAdams,” he stated, offering her a perfect smile.
Too perfect, she thought. Ranch hands didn’t normally spend that kind of money on cosmetic dentistry. Nor, she noted, did they have tattoos across their knuckles. Nor, ink marks aside, were they usually so attractive. Luke didn’t have the sun-aged skin of a tenured hand. He was just shy of six feet, with neatly trimmed hair—what she could see of it beneath his hat—and light eyes. Maybe he was just what she needed to get her mind off Shane. Not the brightest approach to filling her final weeks on the ranch, but it wasn’t as if she had any plans for a future here.
“Welcome to the Lucky 7.”
“Thank you,” he said politely.
“When did you sign on?”
“A couple of days back,” Luke answered.
He had a nice voice—not as deep as Shane’s—and he was definitely checking her out. “Where’d you work before?” Taylor’s curiosity was, pathetically, only marginally piqued.
“Here and there,” he said with a shrug of acceptably muscled shoulders. Shane’s were broad and sculpted. She knew this because she’d seen him shirtless. A half-dressed Shane was a thing of beauty.
“…Mrs. Landry?”
She shook off her Shane-brain and asked Luke to repeat the question.
“Are you Mrs. Landry?”
“I’m not,” she answered quickly, hating that she hated saying it. “But there are six of them around. Can’t help but run into one eventually.”
“Six wives? Is this one of those pluralist families I’ve read about?”
“We gotta go, Luke,” Will interrupted, clearly irritated by the mildly flirtatious tone of the conversation. “Ma’am.”
Then again, everything about Taylor seemed to irritate Will. They hadn’t exactly bonded during her time at the ranch. At first she’d tried killing him with kindness, but that didn’t get her too far. Now she just settled for civil exchanges whenever the two of them shared the same space.
Taylor couldn’t fathom why it was that Shane adored Will. As she walked back to the house, she recalled the countless times he had praised the foreman, who’d been working at the ranch in some capacity or another for more than forty years. She suspected Shane thought of the older man as a substitute father. Made perfect sense, considering that Will had stepped in to handle things during Shane’s father’s absence. Good thing, too, since none of the other brothers had any interest in the actual day-to-day running of the ranch.
She thought about the gaggle of Landry men. Sam preferred the world of high finance. Seth and Cody were in law enforcement, Seth as the sheriff of Jasper and Cody as a federal marshal. Chance was a doctor, a general practitioner in town. Clayton had a law office in Missoula, crusading to save others from the horrible ordeal that had robbed him of four years of his life. And Chandler, well, he was a big, important author now. Taylor smiled, remembering how stunned she’d been to learn of his well-hidden, secret persona.
Shane was the homebody. He adored everything about the ranch, including Will, who he obviously looked to as a friend and mentor. That alone was almost enough of a reason for Taylor to keep trying with the crusty old guy. She had a pretty good idea of what it must have been like for Shane to return to the Lucky 7 after so many years, only to find his parents gone.
Now he knew they were dead. She felt great empathy for the Landry clan. Especially Shane, since she knew precisely how he was feeling even if they never talked about that sort of thing. Actually, they never talked, period.
The concept of parental abandonment hit close to home, Taylor acknowledged as she stepped off the pathway in order to avoid another mud puddle. She knew what it felt like from firsthand experience.
That was only a minor reason why Shane was off-limits. In addition to a strong physical pull, she suspected, they had too much else in common. They had—
Taylor didn’t get to finish her thought. Not when she found herself suddenly flying facefirst into a deep puddle of mud. Turning her head to the side just in time, she spat out grit, then let loose a colorful curse.
She opened one eye to see a pair of size thirteen boots inches away from her nose. “Is that any way for a lady to talk?” Shane chided.
“Are you going to help me?” she demanded, glaring up at him as she struggled to her hands and knees in the cold slime.
His face contorted in what she was sure was a very gallant attempt to keep from laughing. “Only if you ask nicely.”
She glared daggers up at him, feeling the globs of mud slide down the front of her shirt and into her bra. “I would rather gnaw off my own muddy tongue.”
“Suit yourself,” he sighed, shifting his weight and crossing his arms over his chest.
Taylor did a humiliating Three Stooges thing where she’d almost make it, then lose her footing and fall again. But she refused to ask for his assistance. Arrogant and…stupid. Neither of those things normally described her, yet Shane seemed to bring them all out in spades.
With the grace and balance of a two-legged giraffe, she finally pulled herself out of the puddle and back onto dry land. She was soaked, and filthy, smelled like earth and was so cold her teeth started to chatter.
Shane mumbled something unflattering about her being hardheaded as he removed his coat and placed it around her shoulders.
“It’ll get ruined,” she complained.
“So will you, if you don’t get out of those wet things before you catch cold.”
She wrapped herself in the coat, feeling the warmth of his body transfer to hers. “You don’t catch a cold from the weather. A cold is a virus and—”
“Can’t you ever just say thank-you?” he grumbled as he took her by the elbow and led her toward the back door.
She practically had to jog to keep pace with him. Shane didn’t seem to realize that their height difference meant she had to take two steps to his one. “Sure. Thank you for not helping me out of the puddle.”
He chuckled softly. As always, the sound comforted her in ways it shouldn’t and at a time it shouldn’t.
“You’re a real smart-ass, Taylor.”
“One of us has to be smart,” she retorted, glancing up to bat her eyelashes at him. “Get the door so that I don’t have to wash the mud off it in the morning.”
“A competent housekeeper wouldn’t wait until morning.” He reached around her and grabbed the knob, then yanked open the door.
“A competent housekeeper wouldn’t work for the pittance you pay me.” Which was totally unfair, she acknowledged rather guiltily. Sometimes she had to find ammunition when no ammunition was available.
“Free