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“But you are his partner.”
Chase ground his back teeth together. “That’s right,” he admitted.
“And you did come here to get me to either sell, lease, rent or let you use my land.”
He looked at her silently and the tension in the air seemed to crackle with the fire in her eyes.
“Then you have to understand, Mr. McEnroe, you can stand in front of that door until hell freezes over and I won’t believe a word you say.”
A muscle worked in the corner of his jaw and his blue eyes blazed angrily. “Okay, lady, have it your way. I just thought I could help you. Sorry if I wasted your time!”
Chase strode angrily out of the room, letting the door slam shut behind him. The hot night air did little to cool his seething temper as he strode to his Jeep, climbed inside and roared down the long lane leading back to the country road and eventually to Caleb Johnson’s property.
Just a couple of months, he thought with an inward groan, and then I’ll be out of it. I’ll be able to leave Dani Summers, her suspicious kid, and Caleb Johnson. Then they can all go for each other’s throats for all I care!
He slowed as the Jeep reached the main road. When the vehicle had come to a complete stop, Chase cranked the wheel of the Jeep hard to the right. Right now he couldn’t face Caleb Johnson’s smug face or the smell of the old man’s money. Seeing the way Dani Summers lived soured Chase’s stomach. In the distance, the lights of Martinville brightened the night sky. The town wasn’t much more than a grocery store, post office, gas station and a couple of churches, but it did have a bar. Chase decided that the smoky atmosphere of Yukon Jack’s had to be more comforting than the cold intenor of Caleb Johnson’s house. Anything did.
Unreasonably he thought about Dani again and he experienced a tightening in his gut. She was beautiful, no doubt about it. With wavy sun-streaked hair that fell almost to her waist, high, flushed cheekbones and wide sensual lips, she was the most attractive woman he’d met in a long while.
The fact that her eyes could look right through him only added to h
er appeal and innate sexuality. She was trim and lean, probably strong and obviously intelligent; attributes Chase didn’t normally look for in a woman. However, he sensed that Dani was different than the women he’d seen over the past few years and it worried him. It worried him a lot.
“Don’t forget the chip she’s got on her shoulder,” he warned himself, trying to discourage his fantasies of the spitfire of a woman. “And the rifle-loaded or unloaded. A dangerous lady any way you cut it.”
So why then did he think about the photograph on the mantel? A snapshot of a laughing woman and happy child astride a rangy horse in the bright Montana sun. The image lingered in his mind even as he parked the truck, stepped across the concrete sidewalk and strode into the noisy smoke-filled interior of Yukon Jack’s.
Chapter Three
“That’s the last of it,” Dani said, wiping the sweat from her eyes.
“Thank God,” Jake responded with a groan. The lanky boy was one of the two brothers Dani had hired to help her haul the baled hay into her barn.
It was late in the season for cutting hay, but with the unexpected breakdown of her equipment earlier in the summer, she’d been forced to rent a baler from a neighboring rancher after he’d finished with his own fields. Though she couldn’t prove it, she suspected that her machinery had been tampered with—by someone from Caleb Johnson’s place—just as she suspected other problems at the farm had been instigated by Johnson or one of his hands. The stolen gasoline, sick cattle and broken hay baler were just a few of the worries she’d faced in the past year. Maybe they were coincidence. But the fact that the problems had increased since she’d refused to sell all of her farm to Johnson made her uneasy. Very uneasy.
She slid an angry glance toward the neighboring acres and frowned. “You’re imagining things,” she muttered as she put the tractor into gear. “Just because you couldn’t get a part to fix the old baler.” With a roar the tractor started moving again.
Cody, Jake and Jonathon climbed onto the top of the bales stacked carefully on the trailer as Dani drove slowly toward the barn through the straw stubble in the field.
It was nearly twilight, but she had opted to work late rather than face another day painstakingly driving the tractor through the fields and lifting hundred-pound bales of dry hay onto the flatbed trailer. Dani hadn’t wanted to gamble that her cut hay might get ruined in the rain. She looked at the purple sky and noticed the clouds silently gathering overhead. If the weather forecast were to be believed, there was a good chance of thundershowers later.
The old tractor chugged up the slight incline to the barn and Dani carefully backed the trailer into the open door. The boys, though tired and dusty, put on their gloves and began placing the bales on the elevator and stacking them in the loft.
Dani cut the engine of the tractor and hopped to the ground. Climbing into the hayloft, she began to help Cody and Jake stack the bales while Jonathon loaded the elevator. The interior of the weathered barn was dark and musty, but the scent of freshly mown hay mingled with the dust.
“That about does it,” Dani said with a tired grin as Jake shouldered the last bale into place. After climbing down the ladder, she tossed her gloves onto an old barrel and pushed the hair from her face. “Now, who wants a Coke?”
“Make mine a double,” Jake teased, offering Dani a cocky sixteen-year-old grin as he jumped down from the loft.
“Mine, too,” his younger brother agreed.
“Cody?”
“Yep,” her son said with a smile.
“You got it,” she laughed. “And Cody, you’re off duty tonight; I’ll do the chores and clear the table. You’ve worked hard enough for one day.”
Cody beamed, scratched Runt behind the ears and walked with the other boys to the back porch. Dani went inside the house, pulled the Cokes out of the refrigerator and opened the chilled bottles before returning to the back porch and passing them around. Jake held the cold bottle to his hot forehead before tossing back his sweaty head, placing the bottle to his lips and swallowing the contents of the bottle in one long drink.
