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“Thanks, but that’s okay. I’ll unearth my tablet and get caught up tonight.” He slid her offering back across the table. He’d dated women for months who wouldn’t let their phone out of their sight for more than ten seconds at a time, let alone share it for his personal use.
There was something different about his mother’s caretaker.
“So.” She peered at him hopefully. “You will stay with Everett?”
“About that.” His brain hadn’t even made the leap yet, but obviously she didn’t want him to crash in his old room for the night. “I actually don’t have a key for his house.”
She nibbled on her lower lip again. A gesture he might not have seen as erotic if she had more clothes on. Or if he hadn’t been starving, tired and etcetera.
“It is after one a.m., so I hate to startle Gramp in the middle of the night,” he pointed out. “And my room is on the opposite side of the house from the guest room. You won’t even know I’m around.”
She drew a breath as if to argue. Then, leaned forward slightly, her blue eyes narrowing.
“If I agree, perhaps we could not mention to your mother the little mix-up with the rifle?”
“Deal.” He reached to shake on it, pleased by how fast they came to terms.
And, as his hand enveloped hers, he was unexpectedly turned on by the soft feel of her. He helped himself to a tiny stroke along her knuckles before he let go and called it a night. He’d go to bed hungry—that was for damned sure. But for the sake of sweet dreams about a woman who hadn’t once mentioned baseball…
It wasn’t a bad trade at all.
Chapter Two
Sleep proved impossiblewith a strange man in the house.
Josie had checked and double-checked Calvin Ramsey’s face against the framed photos of him in Hailey Decker’s dining room—family pictures from long-ago Christmases and ski trips. Sure, the man who’d been standing in front of the refrigerator had been older and surlier than the boyish face in the photos. But there’d been no denying the resemblance. The Ramsey men had all been blessed with absurdly good looks, and Cal in particular, as far as she was concerned.
Which was why she’d spent the night too restless to sleep even behind the locked guest room door. Josie knew her own weakness when it came to a handsome face. The one time in her life she’d made a truly rash decision, she’d been egged on by an attractive man. And the swindler hadn’t possessed nearly the swoon factor that Cal Ramsey did.
So she rose at dawn, determined to carry on in her caretaker duties the same way she had before he arrived. Hard work settled her nerves and gave her a sense of purpose. Plus it meant less time to ruminate. She’d been struggling to keep deer out of Hailey’s garden this week, and in the process she’d let the weeds get ahead of her. She could fix that today.
She had blisters on both hands by the time she heard the screen door slam on the main house. Sweat poured in a steady stream down her back thanks to the Texas sun. The wide-brimmed straw hat she wore was as much a staple of weeding as the hoe in her hands, but the hat was old and ill-fitting, poking her forehead through the worn lining.
Her surprise housemate looked none the worse for wear, however. Cal Ramsey strode down the back steps with a coffee mug in hand, his green eyes surveying the big backyard and the cottage garden that took up almost half of it. With his brown hair still damp from a shower, and the scruff shaved off his face, his rugged good looks were even more obvious. On most men, the deep scowl on his face would have been unattractive. But Cal wore a touch of hostility as well as his jeans. Which was to say, to damnably good effect.
“Good morning,” she said amiably, hoping to avoid new drama, no matter what was eating at him.
She returned to hoeing a row of yellow squash, careful not to tangle the tool in any of the long vines that spilled over into the bean patch.
She’d planted more marigolds and sunflowers to try and deter deer, but she could see signs of them tromping through the bean plants.
“It’s after noon,” he informed her. “Shouldn’t you take a break?”
“I’m okay.” She was a bit thirsty, actually. But she had hoped to work outdoors until he vacated the premises.
“You don’t look okay. You look ready to drop from heat exhaustion.” Stalking closer, he sounded even surlier than when she’d greeted him with the rifle. “I think you’ve weeded enough for one day. You should come inside and have something to drink.”
She stopped chopping a particularly long root and leaned on the hoe like a walking stick, caked dust crumbling off her gardening glove.
“I’m from Florida. The heat doesn’t bother me and I know all about proper hydration.” She really thought he would be long gone by now so she could return to the peace of her pre-Cal days, carefully reassembling her life and her dignity in the quiet anonymity of Hailey Decker’s farmhouse.
Unfortunately, she couldn’t expel him with the same efficiency that she’d tackled crabgrass and tree roots. A mosquito whined near her ear and she fanned it away.
“You’re from Florida,” he mused as he bent down to twist the nozzle on the hose coiled near the back steps. Her gaze greedily followed him, his every movement a study in athletic grace. “How did you find out about a caretaking job in Texas?”
He dumped the water from the dogs’ water dishes and ran a cool stream through them from the hose. She happened to know the Labs were snoozing in the dirt under the porch, but Kungfu roused herself from her spot and padded out to take a drink.
“Your mom posted the position online.” She toed aside an overflowing bucket of weeds she’d pulled, the green leaves already wilting in the hot sun. She was unprepared for an inquisition when she was thirsty and—she now realized—ravenous.
