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“Ah. You should talk to Marco. Em’s husband. He’s in that same field.”
“Marco? Do you possibly mean Marco Santini? I know the name. He has a fine reputation.”
“Marco did the guest wing you guys stayed in last night.”
“Are you two talking about me?”
Luca and Travis looked toward the other end of the table. Marco Santini, Emily’s husband, smiled at them.
“We were,” Travis said. “Luca’s a builder, too. He says he’s heard of your terrible reputation.”
Luca grinned. “Don’t listen to him,” he said. “Of course I’ve heard of you.”
“Actually,” Marco said, with a little smile, “I have heard of you, too. A fellow Sicilian, a man who owns one of the biggest construction companies in Europe…”
“How nice for you both.”
The female voice, though low-pitched, even husky, cut through the pleasant conversational buzz.
All heads swiveled toward the door where a woman stood, hands on her hips, legs apart. She was tall—five nine, five ten, Luca thought as he stared at her.
Hell.
A man would have to be dead not to stare.
She was beautiful.
Long, straight, lustrous black hair pulled back from her face. Eyes the color of the Mediterranean. Cheekbones that could cut glass. An elegant nose above a full mouth.
His glance dropped lower.
The rest of her was as stunning as her face.
High breasts pressed against a white T-shirt. Curved hips cradled by faded jeans. Long legs that ended in what seemed to be the sole deviation from her no-nonsense look: chestnut leather boots with heels so thin and high no cowboy in his right mind would ever have worn them.
“Shit,” Travis said under his breath, but he smiled politely as he rose to his feet. “Good morning, Cheyenne.”
Cheyenne? Was she Native American? What Luca knew of American Indians he’d learned watching Western movies as a kid. The high cheekbones. The slight arch to her nose. Perhaps she was.
And… He frowned. Was there something familiar about her? No. There couldn’t be. Any man who’d met her before would surely remember the encounter.
Every man in the room was staring at her. Then, as if on signal, they scraped back their chairs and rose to their feet.
The woman ignored them. Instead, she cast a deliberate look at the grandfather clock in the corner.
“Morning? It’s almost afternoon.”
Luca glanced at the clock. It was barely ten.
“Yeah. Well, I’m sorry I’m late, but—”
“You were due at my place an hour ago. I have a full schedule today, but I went out of my way to accommodate you.”
Travis blinked. “You went out of your way to accommodate me?”
“Uh, Travis,” Travis’s wife, Jennie, said quickly, “why don’t you introduce—”
“I can introduce myself, thank you,” the woman said, her tone making a mockery of the polite words. “I’m Cheyenne McKenna, and I sincerely hope the rest of you have heard of an invention called the telephone. You know. A thing that makes it possible to contact someone and say ‘Sorry, I’m going to be late.’”
“Okay,” Travis said tightly, “okay, Ms. McKenna, that’s e—”
Jennie shot to her feet.
“Everybody,” she said brightly, “Cheyenne bought a piece of land a few miles east of our place. The old Sweetwater Ranch? Anyway, we met in town and got to talking and it turns out that she’s going to run horses—Arabians, wasn’t it, Cheyenne—and the Sweetwater’s barns and outbuildings need work and she said she had some questions about what could and couldn’t be repaired and I said, well, my husband knows all there is to know about ranches and horses and barns and that I was sure he’d be happy to drive over to check things out and make some suggestions and…”
Jennie’s words trailed away. She flashed an imploring look at her husband. He sighed, his expression softened, and he went around the table to her, tilted her face to his and kissed her gently on the mouth.
“It’s okay, honey,” he whispered. Then he straightened up and looked at Cheyenne McKenna. “So,” he said briskly, “tell you what. Why don’t you join us, have some coffee while I—”
“I had plenty of coffee, thank you very much, while I waited for you.”
Travis’s eyes turned icy.
“Listen, Ms. McKenna—”
“I have a better idea.”
Everyone stared at Luca. Cristo, if it were possible, he’d have stared at himself.
What was he doing?
The answer was that he was walking toward Cheyenne McKenna. She watched him approach from under a sweep of dark lashes almost too full to be real, but he’d have bet they were real.
As real as the rest of her.
That attitude.
That mouth.
That body.
A tightness formed low in his belly.
Ridiculous.
He had not been with a woman in a while. Still, he was not some teenaged idiot with an out-of-control libido. He was only trying to ease a tense situation. That was all. Things were difficult enough at El Sueño this morning without adding this nonsense to it.
“And who,” the McKenna woman asked coolly, “are you?”
Despite her height, despite the nosebleed-high heels, she had to tilt her head back to look at him. He liked that. Liked that she had to give up a little of her arrogance in deference to him.
“I am Luca Bellini.”
Her smile was lethal. “Am I supposed to be impressed?”
“I know something about construction as well as ranches and horses.”
She took her time looking him over, head to toe and back up again. He knew what she saw: a man in a four thousand dollar suit, a man she was sure had never had dirt under his fingernails or horse manure on his custom-made shoes.
“I believe there is an American adage,” he said softly. “Never judge a book by its cover.”
“And?”
“And, rather than take Travis from his breakfast, I’ll go with you and look at your property.”
“There’s another old saying, Mr. Whatever-You-Said-Your-Name-Is. Talk is cheap. And,” she said, waving him off as if he were a pesky housefly, “I’m not in the mood to play games with a make-believe carpenter or cow—”
She caught her breath as Luca wrapped his fingers around her wrist.
“You have a short memory, Ms. McKenna. My name is Luca Bellini. I am not a make-believe anything.” His hand tightened on her, just enough to draw her closer. “And if I choose to play a game, I am the one who issues the invitation.”
The people gathered at the table had gone silent.
They were all staring.
Staring at her, Cheyenne knew.
She felt all those eyes on her as surely as she felt the pressure of Luca Bellini’s encircling fingers on her wrist.
She’d made a fool of herself.
She knew that.
Bursting in here the way she had…
The housekeeper had politely suggested she wait in the living room, but Cheyenne, angry as hell—unreasonably angry, though she had not wanted to admit it—had brushed past her and said she was tired of waiting
Well, she was. But that really had nothing to do with the Wildes.
It had to do with her and her life, and why she’d decided to let her anger out on people who had no part in any of it was beyond her.
So what if she’d waited an hour for Travis to show up? Really, did she have anything else to do?
Not anymore. No deadlines. No shoots. No interviews.
Her time was her own.
Another adage and a bad one. Who wanted their time to be their own? People needed to have commitments. Things to do. Places to be. That was one of the reasons she was buying Sweetwater Ranch. She needed to feel as if she had purpose, dammit, and because she was on shaky ground when it came to that, she’d taken it out on these absolute strangers.
And on this man.
His hand still clasped her wrist.
She looked up, and their eyes met. His were blue, so blue they were almost black. He had what her makeup stylist would have called a Roman nose. His mouth was full; his chin was square and had an almost indiscernible cleft.
She came from a world filled with handsome men, but this man wasn’t handsome. He was beautiful in the way a hawk or a wolf is beautiful, as if there were a tightly contained wildness in him, a kind of savagery.
Something hot hummed through her blood.
The sensation shocked her. It had been a long time, a very long time since anything or anyone had made that happen.
Logic warned her that the smart thing to do was turn down his offer, but it had been an equally long time since she’d paid attention to logic.
“Very well,” she said. “I accept your offer.”
“What offer is that?”
“The one you made. To take a look at my land.”
“Are you asking me to look at your land, Ms. McKenna?”
