The smile she's been holding back all morning breaks through for just a second. Unguarded, real and aimed directly at me, and it does considerably more damage than the almost kiss in the kitchen did.
Considerably more.
"Go name your calf," she says.
I push off the fence rail and head toward the barn, telling myself very firmly that I am not in trouble.
I am absolutely in trouble.
Chapter eight
Dangerous Territory
Laney
The problem with Beckett Wilder is that he keeps getting harder to dislike.
I've been managing this ranch for four years and in that time I have developed a very reliable system for dealing with difficult people.
You identify what they want, you figure out what the ranch needs, you find the overlap, then work from there. It's practical, it works, it has never once required me to think about anyone's forearms or the way they look in a saddle or the completely unreasonable thing that happens to their face when they smile.
The system is failing me.
It's been three weeks since Beckett and Maisie arrived at Silver Mesa and the evidence against my original assessment is mounting in a way that is becoming difficult to ignore. He shows up before sunrise every morning without fail. He does what he's asked without complaint.
He asks better questions every day, makes fewer mistakes every week, and the ones he does make he fixes without being told twice.
He moved Maisie into the ranch house and made it a home.
He offered me a cabin without making it about himself.
He stood in a round pen yesterday, got bucked around by a canter, stayed on through sheer stubbornness, then thanked me afterward like I'd done him a favor instead of spent an hour trying not to laugh at him.
I am having a problem.
I sit on the cabin two porch with my morning coffee and look out at the ranch in the early light. Then I try to have an honest conversation with myself about it. The cabin is quiet, clean, with a porch view I've been walking past for four years without ever properly sitting down to appreciate. Beckett was right about that, which is also annoying.
I moved in three days ago.
I told myself it was practical. The cabin is bigger than my bunk. It has its own bathroom, a real kitchen, a porch, considerably more square footage than anything I've had to myself in four years of ranch living. Those are all practical reasons that have nothing to do with the fact that Beckett Wilder noticed I deserved better before I noticed it myself.
Remy knocked on my cabin door the first morning with a coffee and a grin and said absolutely nothing, which was the most eloquent thing he's ever communicated.
Silas said, "Good," and went back to work.
I drank my coffee, stared at my own four walls, felt something uncomfortably close to grateful.
The attraction has been there since the beginning, if I'm being completely honest, which I'm only willing to be at six in the morning on my own porch when nobody can hear me.
It was inconvenient from day one. The bone structure. The forearms. The way he talks to Maisie like she's a real person whose ideas are actually worth listening to. The way he wrote, ask before optimizing, in the margin of his spreadsheet and actually meant it.
The way he looked at me across a bar while another woman had his attention and made me feel like I was the only person in the room anyway.
That's the dangerous part.
Not the attraction. I can manage attraction. I've managed it for three weeks and I'll keep managing it.
The dangerous part is that I'm starting to like him.
