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Her eyes connected with mine as she grabbed her bag from the back of the truck. She was comfortable in her own skin. Maybe this woman wasn’t afraid to get dirty. Maybe she wasn’t the prim and proper little girl I had seen yesterday.
I waited for her to come to me. I knew that little trick she’d pulled in front of Hank yesterday. Holding out her hand until I shook it. She played a good game in front of him, but she was no match for me. I was the one running the show here. This was my life. My home. My ranch. My schedule. My career.
She didn’t own it, and neither did Hank.
Soon enough, she stood in front of me. Staring up at me with her big doe eyes as wisps of her honey blond hair fluttered around her cheeks. She was as pretty as she was yesterday, and that was dangerous. A woman who could be pretty even when she wasn’t trying, was almost any man's downfall.
“I’m already late gettin’ into the field,” I said. “The cattle need milkin’, and the chickens need to be fed. Fertilizer needs to be laid, and some of the empty fields need to be tilled again. The horses have been runnin’ all night, so they need to come in for breakfast. I’ve got a couple of foals that’ll need to be groomed, and their hooves’ll need to be picked ou—”
“Mr. Blackthorn, I’m your personal assistant, not your ranch hand. I’ll be helping you with your schedule and various other things that have been brought to my attention.”
Her voice was steady and girded as I leaned against the doorframe. I slowly slid a grin across my face, deadly and conniving. I watched my reflection in her eyes as she took a small step back, bracing herself as I loomed over her. She was small, which meant she was explosive. But even a firecracker made a loud boom before it was rendered useless.
Stone called it my ‘get ‘im smile.’ It showed people who was in charge. I leaned in real close to her ear. I felt her turn her head slightly, so her eyes never left my face.
“You work for me now,” I said. “And when I’m not on tour, I’m a rancher.”
I stood back up as her eyes followed me, big and bright as I turned on my heels. I could feel her eyes on my back as I opened the door, walking back into the house.
Then I turned my lips over my shoulder as I grabbed the flask from my pocket.
“You might wanna hurry up. We’re burnin’ daylight.”
CHAPTER 6
Delia
“Pompous ass.”
I watched as he turned back around and made his way to the house. I rushed to catch up with him, pissed at the game he was playing. I’d dealt with enough manipulative men during my short career as a personal assistant to recognize what he was doing. He was trying to establish his dominance over me in order to prove a point. He didn’t want anyone changing him, and he thrived on people following him around, obeying his every order while making sure they understood he was not to be controlled.
Soon, I found Drake thrusting a massive shovel into my hand.
“Get in there and dig it out,” he said.
I looked at the horse stall and sighed at the sheer amount of shit in it. Surely this wasn’t what Hank had in mind. I was a P.A., not a ranch hand. But I refused to show any sort of weakness, so I stepped into the stall and began shoveling the horse shit, tossing it out into the main hallway of the barn since I’d been given nothing to put it in. It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to do the work. I was very familiar with it, despite how people thought I was raised. But I was supposed to be handling this man’s addiction and his fucking schedule.Not doing his fucking job. However, if I wanted him to know he couldn’t scare me off, this was the game I needed to play. For now.
“I need a horse.”
I saw a man running into the stall, huffing, and puffing as Drake turned his head.
“What’s up, Paul?”
“One of the calves got loose,” Paul said.
“Fuck. Seriously? Did you not drink your coffee this morning?” Drake asked.
I looked out the window to the pasture and saw the calf stumbling toward the broken fence line near the woods. By the time those two idiots were done arguing over what had happened, that calf was gonna kill itself wandering over to the woods, where
animals of prey were typically lying in wait. I dropped my shit scooper and took off, my boots carrying me as fast as I could across the field as I tried to get to the calf that was wandering to its death.
I kept my breathing under control as I ran after the animal. The stumbling thing didn’t look to be any older than a few weeks, far away from the comfort of its mother. How the hell it got out of the grasp of someone like Paul was beyond me.
I huffed and puffed, wrangling the calf in and getting it moving back in the right direction. This was not what I signed up for. This was not what I was being paid to do. I turned toward the barn and set off, moving toward the herd of cows as the men stood at the horse barn. Their arms were crossed across their chests, and I could see the sly grins on their faces.
Holy fuck. I’d been set up.
I watched the calf rejoin with the herd as I shook my head. This was not going to happen much longer. So long as I was around, things were going to go differently.
