Cowboy for Hire
She’d been amused to see that the town’s one bar—how did these cowboys survive with only one bar?—had a sign in the window that said Hungry? Go visit Miss Joan’s diner. Thirsty? You’ve come to the right place. That had told her that there was obviously a division of labor here with territories being defined in the simplest of terms.
Given its size and what she took to be the residents’ mind-set, Connie doubted very much if a place like this actually needed a hotel—which, she had a feeling, had probably been her father’s whole point when he had given her this project, saying if she wanted to prove herself to him, he wanted to see her complete the hotel, bringing it in on time and under budget. The budget left very little wiggle room.
“Newsflash, Dad. I don’t give up that easily,” she murmured to the man who was currently five hundred miles away.
Challenges, especially seemingly impossible ones, were what made her come alive. At first glance, the sleepy little town of Forever needed a hotel about as much as it needed an expert on wombats.
It took closer examination to see that the idea of building a hotel had merit.
Connie could see the potential of the place forming itself in her mind’s eye. She just needed the right approach, the right thing to play up and the hotel-to-be would not only become a reality, it would also be a success and eventually get its patrons.
But it wouldn’t get anything if it wasn’t first built, and she had already decided that while she could have materials shipped in from anywhere in the country that could give her the best deal, to get the structure actually built, she was going to use local talent, so to speak.
She naturally assumed that living out here in what she viewed as the sticks made people handy out of necessity. Unlike in the larger cities, there wasn’t a range of construction companies, all in competition with one another, all vying for the customer’s money. Driving down here from Houston, she had already ascertained that the nearest town, Pine Ridge, was a minimum of fifty miles away. That alone limited the amount of choices available. If anything, out here it was the unhandy customer who wound up searching to find someone to do the work for them.
Just like faith, the right amount of money, she had learned, could move mountains.
She had no mountains to move. But she did have a building to erect, and in order not to be the outsider, the person who was viewed as invading their territory, she would need allies. In this particular case, she needed to have some of the men from Forever taking part in making the hotel a reality.
Granted that, once completed, the hotel would belong to the Carmichael Construction Corporation until such time as they sold it, but she had to make the locals feel that building the hotel would benefit the whole town as well as provide them with good-paying jobs during construction.
Connie knew the importance of friends; she just didn’t exactly know how to go about making them.
But she had done her homework before ever getting behind the wheel of her vehicle and driving down here.
As she drove around now, Connie thought about the fact that on the other side of the town, located about ten miles due northwest, was a Native American reservation. She couldn’t remember which of the tribes lived there, but perhaps they would welcome the work, along with Forever townspeople. Given the local state of affairs, who wouldn’t want a job?
So, armed with her GPS, Connie was on her way there. She was driving slower than she was accustomed to for two reasons: one, she didn’t have a natural sense of direction, and she didn’t know the lay of the land and two, she wanted and needed to get to know this land she was temporarily camping out on.
The reservation was her destination, but something—instincts perhaps—made her closely scan the immediate area she was traversing.
Which was when she saw him.
At first she thought she was having a hallucination, a better-than-average morning fantasy that could easily trigger her latent libido if she let it. The trick to being a driven woman with not just goals, but also the taste of success tucked firmly under her belt, was the way she responded to things that needed life-long commitments. It required—demanded, really—tunnel vision. Eye on the prize and all that sort of thing.
Even so, Connie slowed her pristine, gleaming white BMW sports car down to an arthritic crawl as she stared at the lone figure in the distance.
No harm in just looking, she told herself.
Even at this distance, she could easily make out that the man was around her own age. She was keenly aware that he was bare-chested, that his muscles were rippling with every move he made and that, pound for pound, he had to be the best-looking specimen of manhood she had seen in a very long time.
Moving closer, she could see that perspiration covered his body, causing practically a sheen over his chest and arms.
At first she wasn’t aware of it, but then she realized that her mouth had gone bone-dry. She went on watching.
He didn’t seem to be aware of the fact that he was under scrutiny. The worker turned his back to her and went on doing whatever it was that he was doing. She couldn’t quite make it out, but it had something to do with construction because there were tools on the ground, surrounding an empty tool chest.
As she continued observing him, Connie saw that the man appeared as if he not only knew his way around tools, but he also definitely seemed comfortable working with his hands.
It came to her then.
He was just the man she was looking for to be her foreman, to act as her go-between with whatever men she wound up hiring to do the actual work. Watching him, she couldn’t help wondering how well someone who looked like that would take instructions from a woman.
Or was he the type who didn’t care who issued the orders as long as there was a guaranteed paycheck at the end of the week?
Enough thinking, start doing, she silently ordered herself.
The next moment, she turned her vehicle toward the cowboy and drove straight toward him.
Chapter Two
He’d been aware of the slow-moving, blindingly white sports car for some time now. It was a beauty—much like the woman who was driving it.
But unlike the woman behind the wheel, the vehicle, because of its make and model, stuck out like a sore thumb. Regardless of the season, Forever and its outlining area didn’t see much through traffic. Every so often, there was the occasional lost traveler, but on the whole, that was a rare occurrence. Forever was not on the beaten path to anywhere of interest, except perhaps for the reservation and a couple of other tiny towns that had sprung up in the area. On its way to being a ghost town more than once, the town stubbornly survived despite all odds. Like a prickly-pear cactus, Forever, a few of the much older residents maintained, was just too ornery to die.
The owner of the sports car, Finn decided, had to be lost. Nobody driving that sort of a vehicle could possibly have any business being in or around Forever. Even Dan, the doctor who had initially come to town out of a sense of obligation mixed with a heavy dose of guilt, hadn’t been driving a car nearly that flashy and unsuitable for this terrain when he’d arrived.
As the vehicle came closer, Finn tossed down his hammer and approached the car. The woman, he couldn’t help noticing, was even better-looking close up than she was at a distance.
“You lost?” he asked her, fully expecting her to sigh with relief and answer “Yes.”
She didn’t.
Instead, she shook her head and said, “No, I don’t think so.”
Finn regarded her thoughtfully. “In my experience, a person’s either lost or they’re not. There is no gray area.”
The woman smiled at him. “Didn’t think I’d find a philosopher all the way out here.”
“It’s not philosophy, it’s just plain common sense,” Finn told her.
To him, so-called philosophers referred to the gaggle of retired old men who got together every morning and sat on the sun-bleached bench in front of the general store, watching the rest of the town go through its paces and commenting on life when the spirit moved them. He was far too busy to indulge in that sort of thing.
“Well, if you don’t need directions, then I’ll get back to my work,” he told her. The woman was clearly out of her element, but if she didn’t want to talk about what she was doing out here, he wasn’t about to prod her. Lost or not, it was strictly her business.
“I don’t need directions, but I do have a question.” She raised her voice as if to get his attention before he began hammering again.
Finn turned back to face her. She looked rather fair. He could see a sunburn in her near future if she didn’t at least put the top up on her car. Skin that fair was ripe for burning.
“Which is?” he asked casually.
“Did you build this yourself?” The woman got out of her car and crossed to the freshly rebuilt front steps of the house.
Thanks to Brett, honesty had always been at the core of his behavior. His older brother expected and accepted nothing less than that. Anyone can lie, Brett maintained, but it took a real man to tell the truth each and every time, even when it wasn’t easy.
“No,” Finn replied. “The ranch house was already here. I just changed things around a little, replaced what needed replacing, added a little here, a little there—that kind of thing,” he told her simply.
He made it sound as if he’d hammered down a few loose boards, but one look at the exterior told her that the man with the impossibly appealing physique had done a great deal more than just that. The structure looked brand-new. She knew for a fact that this part of the state was hard on its buildings and its terrain. Summers could be brutal, and they left their mark on practically everything, especially structures. The ranch house she was looking at had been resurfaced, replaced and renovated—and recently.
Connie couldn’t help wondering if that craftsmanship extended to the inside of the building, as well.
There was only one way to find out.
“Could you take me on a tour of the inside of the house?” she asked brightly.
“I could,” the cowboy answered but made no effort to follow through on her request.
“But?” she asked.
She made him think of a stick of dynamite about to go off. He was about ten inches taller than she was, but a stick of dynamite didn’t have to be very big to make a sizable impression.
Just who was this woman, and what was she doing here? “But I don’t even know who you are.”
“I’m not dangerous, if that’s what you’re thinking,” she told him.
Like he believed that.
Finn’s mouth curved ever so slightly, the left side more than the right. He wondered just how many men this woman had brought to their knees with that killer smile of hers.
“There’s dangerous, and then there’s dangerous,” he replied, his eyes never leaving hers.
She raised her chin just a little, doing her best to generate an air of innocence as she assured him, “I’m neither.”
The cowboy continued looking at her. The image of a human lie detector flashed through her mind for an instant. She discovered that breathing took a bit of concentration on her part.
“I don’t know about that,” he said. But the next moment, he seemed to shrug away his assessment of her and said, “Okay, why not? Don’t lean against anything,” he warned before going up the porch steps. “The paint’s still fresh in places.”
She had no intentions of taking away any part of this house on her person. “I’ll keep that in mind,” she told him.
Connie waited for her tour guide to open the front door. If the inside looked nearly as good as the outside, she was ready to be blown away.
“After you,” the cowboy told her once he’d opened the front door.
Connie crossed the threshold, taking it all in at once.
She hadn’t missed her guess. The inside of the house was simplistic and all the more captivating for that. It was a house that emphasized all things Western, with just the right touch of modern thrown in to keep the decor from being completely entrenched in the past.
There were only a few pieces of furniture. For the most part, the house was empty, but then, she hadn’t asked to come in just to see the furniture. She was looking to take stock of the workmanship firsthand.
She hadn’t been wrong.
This cowboy did have a gift for bringing things together—and apparently, a knack for knowing just when to back off.
“How long have you been working on this?” she asked, wanting as much input from the man and about the man as she could get.
“Awhile,” Finn replied vaguely, as if wondering just what her end game was.
* * *
WHILE THIS WOMAN had apparently been taking stock of the house as he went about showing her around the two floors, Finn did the same with her. So far, he hadn’t come to any useful conclusion. She hadn’t really volunteered anything except a few flattering comments about his work. He still had no idea what had brought her to Forever, or even if she meant to come to Forever, or was just passing by on her way to somewhere else.
“Awhile,” the woman repeated, going back to what he’d said about his timetable. “Does that mean six months or six years or what?”
“Awhile means awhile,” he replied in a calm voice, then added, “I’m not exactly keeping a diary on this.”
“Then you’re just doing this for fun?”
“Not exactly.” Because he could see that she intended to stand there, waiting, until he gave her some sort of a more satisfying answer, he told her. He saw no reason not to. “It’s a wedding present.”
“For your bride?” she guessed.
Finn nearly choked. He didn’t intend to get married for a very long time. Possibly never.
“No,” he denied with feeling. “For my brother. It’s his wedding.”
“And this is his house?” she asked, turning slowly around, this time taking in a three-hundred-sixty-degree view. No doubt about it, she thought. The work done on the ranch house was magnificent.
“He says it belongs to all three of us, but Earl Robertson’s will left it to him.” And as far as he and Liam were concerned, this was Brett’s house.
“Honor among brothers. That’s refreshing.”
He thought that was an odd way to phrase it. “Don’t know one way or the other about refreshing. Do know what’s right, though, and this house is right for Brett and Lady Doc.”
“Lady Doc?” she repeated, slightly confused.
“That was the nickname my brother gave Alisha when she first came to Forever. Alisha’s a doctor,” he told her by way of a footnote. “Look, lady, I’d love to stand around and talk some more—it’s not every day that we see a new face around here—but I really do have to get back to work.”
The woman raised her hands in mock surrender, showing the cowboy that she was backing off and giving him back his space. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to take you away from your work.”
Having said that, she turned on her heel and headed back to her vehicle.
As he watched her walk away, Finn found himself captivated by the way the woman’s hips swayed with every step she took. It also occurred to him at the same time that he didn’t even know her name.
“Hey,” he called out.
Ordinarily, that was not a term Connie would answer to. But this one time, she made an exception. People acted differently out here. So rather than get into her car, Connie turned around and looked at him, waiting for the cowboy to say something further.
Raising his voice, Finn remained where he was. “You got a name?” he asked.
“Yes, I do,” Connie replied.
With that she slid in behind the steering wheel of her car, shut her door and started up her engine.
Always leave them wanting more was an old adage she had picked up along the way, thanks to her grandfather. Her grandfather had taught her a great many things. He had told her, just before he passed away, that he had great faith in her. The only thing her father had ever conveyed to her was that she was a huge and ongoing source of disappointment to him.
Her grandfather, she knew, would have walked away from her father a long time ago. At the very least, he would have given up trying to please her father, given up trying to get him to take some sort of positive notice of her.
But she was too stubborn to give up.
Knocked down a number of times for one reason or another, she still got up, still dusted herself off and was still damn determined to someday make her father actually pay her a compliment—or die trying to get it out of him.
* * *
CONNIE SPENT THE rest of the afternoon driving around, getting marginally acquainted with the lay of the surrounding land. She took in the reservation, as well—if driving around its perimeter could be considered taking it in. She never got out of her vehicle, never drove through the actual terrain because even circumnavigating it managed to create an almost overwhelming sadness within her.
Her father had been right about one thing. She was a child of affluence. The sight of poverty always upset her. But rather than fleeing and putting it out of her mind, what she had seen seemed to seep into her very soul. She could not imagine how people managed to go on day after day in such oppressive surroundings.
It also made her wonder why the reservation residents didn’t just band together, tear some of the worst buildings down and start fresh, putting up something new in their place.
Not your problem, Con. Your father issued you a challenge. One he seemed pretty confident would make you fall flat on your face. It’s up to you to show him once and for all that he’s wrong about you. That he’s underestimated you all along.
* * *
THAT THOUGHT WAS still replaying itself in her head when she finally drove back into Forever late that afternoon. She was hungry, and the idea of dinner—even one prepared at what she viewed to be a greasy-spoon establishment—was beginning to tempt her.
But as much as she wanted to eat, she wanted to finish up her homework even more.
In this case, her homework entailed checking out the local—and lone—bar to see the kind of people who hung out there. She wanted to meet them, mingle with them and get to know them, at least in some cursory fashion. She was going to need bodies if she hoped to get her project underway, and Murphy’s was where she hoped to find at least some of them.
Right now all she knew was that her father had purchased a tract of land within Forever at a bargain price because no one else was interested in doing anything with it. A little research on her part had shown that the town was deficient in several key departments, not the least of which was that it had nowhere to put up the occasional out-of-town visitor—which she just assumed Forever had to have at least once in a while. That particular discovery was confirmed when she went to book a hotel room and found that the nearest hotel was some fifty miles away from the center of Forever.
The hick town, her father had informed her through Emerson, his right-hand man, needed to have a hotel built in its midst. Giving her the assignment, her father washed his hands of it, leaving all the details up to her.
And just like that, it became her responsibility to get the hotel built for what, on paper, amounted to a song.
Her father had hinted that if she could bring the project in on time and on budget—or better yet, under budget, he might just take her potential within the company more seriously.
But she needed to prove herself worthy of his regard, of his trust. And until that actually happened, he had no real use for her. He made no effort to hide the fact that he was on the verge of telling her that he no longer needed her services.
Connie had every intention of showing her father just what a vital asset she could be to his construction conglomerate. She also promised herself that she was going to make him eat his words; it was just a matter of time.
Stopping her vehicle behind Murphy’s, Connie parked the car as close to the building as she could. The gleaming white sports car wasn’t a rental she was driving, it was her own car. She wasn’t superstitious by nature, but every good thing that had ever happened to her had happened when she was somewhere within the vicinity of the white sports car. It was, in effect, her good-luck talisman. And, as the embodiment of her good fortune, she wanted to keep it within her line of vision, ensuring that nothing could happen to it.
She intended on keeping an eye on it from inside the bar.
However, Connie quickly discovered that was an impossibility. For one thing, the bar’s windows didn’t face the rear lot.
Uneasy, she thought about reparking her car or coming back to Murphy’s later, after dinner.
But then she reminded herself that her car had a tracking chip embedded within the steering wheel. If her car was stolen, the police could easily lay hands on it within the hour.
Provided they knew about tracking chips and how to use them, she qualified silently. She took measure of the occupants within the bar as she walked in. The first thought that crossed her mind was that the people around her could never be mistaken for the participants in a think tank.
Still looking around, she made her way to the bar, intending on ordering a single-malt beer.
A deep male voice asked her, “What’ll it be?” when she reached the bar and slid onto a stool.
The voice sounded vaguely familiar, but she shrugged the thought away. She didn’t know anyone here. “What kind of beer do you have on tap?” she asked, continuing to take inventory of the room.
“Good beer.”
The answer had her looking at the bartender instead of the bar’s patrons. When she did, her mouth dropped open.
“You,” she said in stunned surprise.
“You,” Finn echoed, careful to hide his initial surprise at seeing her.
Unlike the woman seated at that bar, he’d had a couple of minutes to work through his surprise. It had spiked when he first saw her walk across the threshold. Disbelief had turned into mild surprise as he watched her make her way across the floor, weaving in and out between his regular patrons.
When she’d left the ranch this morning, he’d had a vague premonition that he would be seeing her again—but he hadn’t thought that it would be this soon. He should have known better. The woman had asked too many questions for someone who was just passing through on her way to somewhere else.
“So what are you?” The woman posed the question to him. “A rancher or a bartender?”
“Both,” he said without the slightest bit of hesitation. Around here, a man had to wear a lot of hats if he planned on surviving. “At least, that’s what my brother says.”
“The one who’s getting married,” she recalled.
So, she had been listening. That made her a rare woman, Finn concluded. The women in his sphere of acquaintance talked, but rarely listened. “That’s the one.”
“You have any more brothers?”
“Yeah, he’s a spare in case I wear the other one out.”
The woman looked around, taking in the people on either side of her. The bar had its share of patrons, but it was far from standing-room only. Still, there were enough customers currently present—mostly male—for her to make a judgment.
“Something tells me that the men around here don’t wear out easily.”
“You up for testing that theory of yours out, little lady?” Kyle Masterson proposed, giving her a very thorough once-over as he sidled up to her, deliberately blocking her access to the front door.
Chapter Three
Although he remained behind the bar, Finn’s presence seemed to separate the talkative cowboy from the young woman who had wandered onto Brett’s ranch earlier. Finn was 85 percent certain that Kyle, a rugged, rather worn ranch hand, was harmless. But he was taking no chances in case Kyle was inspired by this woman and was tossing caution to the wind.