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He smiled. “Yeah, you always did have a temper.” Then he rubbed his cheek as if her slap was fresh.
“I’m...sorry about hitting you. I shouldn’t have.”
He shook his head. “Don’t worry about it. I’m sorry about a lot of things that we don’t have time to talk about at the moment.”
She nodded and maybe he was fooling himself, but Ryder thought her eyes looked clearer, less ready to spit ice or fire at him. That was good enough for now.
“Come on. We’ll look in the kitchen.” And that’s where they found June, a few minutes later, curled up under a table, completely hidden by a tablecloth that fell to the floor.
“Oh, thank God,” Angela whispered as she smiled at the sleeping child. “She looks so peaceful, while the rest of us are frantic.”
Ryder scooped the child up into his arms and she snuggled in close, sighing in her sleep. He missed this, he realized. Having a child in his arms, counting on him, needing him.
“Poor baby, she must be exhausted,” Angela said, leaning across him to smooth the child’s hair back gently.
Ryder turned to her, their faces just inches apart. His heart gave a hard thump as he looked into her beautiful eyes. He wanted her to believe him. Needed her to. “There was nothing but friendship between your mother and me, Angela.”
“I really want to trust you, Ryder,” she admitted. “But I need some time to think about all of this.”
It wasn’t a perfect response but it was better than he’d expected. “That’s fair,” he said, and took her hand briefly in his. “I can wait.”
At the touch of her hand, he felt a swell of protectiveness rise up inside him, along with something else that he really shouldn’t have been feeling.
“Come on,” he said abruptly, shattering whatever spell was building between them. “Let’s get her back to her parents.”
“Okay,” Angela said and gave him a soft smile.
For now, that was enough.
* * *
Liam stared at Chloe for a couple of silent seconds, trying to talk himself out of what he was about to do. She was a society woman, he reminded himself, just like the one he’d fallen for six years before. But even as that thought settled in, he had to admit that if he’d been stranded in a flood with Tessa, she’d have complained nonstop.
He couldn’t see her enjoying a picnic of cheese and crackers and warm wine on the floor in front of a gas fireplace. She’d have worried about her hair and her manicure and her makeup. She’d have had him running in six different directions trying to keep her happy. It shamed him now to remember that he had done just that for six long months. Until she’d tossed him aside for a richer, older man desperate for affection.
Chloe wasn’t Tessa. She’d stood up through all of this. She hadn’t complained once. She’d laughed with him, given him the best damn sex of his life, and all in all had forced him to at least adjust his opinion on rich women. Well, this rich woman at any rate. That didn’t mean he was looking for anything permanent, though. He had a lot of work to do on his life before he even thought about having a woman or a family in it. And when it was time, he wouldn’t be looking at women like Chloe.
Because as much as she intrigued him, she came from a world so different from his, she might as well be from Mars. He wouldn’t be forgetting that again. For now though, for a brief hookup with no strings, Chloe Hemsworth was a man’s dream woman.
But she had as much chance of running a ranching camp as he did of playing the tuba with the local symphony. She was a stubborn woman though, so Liam thought the best way to convince her that this camp wouldn’t be an easy task was to show her just what ranching was like, up close and personal.
Forget the romance of the cowboy-cowgirl thing. He knew what she was thinking because her fantasies about the life had been built as a child. While Liam had grown up with the reality, Chloe thought of ranching and saw images of campfires, beautiful horses who never bit or kicked and cattle that followed her around like pet dogs.
What he had to do to end this idea was to show her what the real life was like. The sunup to sundown work. The dirt, the sweat, the bone-aching misery when you finally lay down to go to sleep. That should ease her back from this dream without him having to actually crush it himself.
