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“About that.”
“You must be tired.”
“You get used to early hours on a ranch. I’m up before dawn every day.”
She looked around again. “I don’t know why anyone would stay in bed and miss dawn out here. It must be wonderful.”
Reese thought about it. He could remember how spectacular the dawns were, but it had been a long while since he’d had the time to notice one. “Like everything else, you get used to them. I know for a fact that there are dawns in New York, too.”
She chuckled at his dry tone. “I seem to remember them, but my apartment faces to the west. I see sunsets, not dawns.”
It was on the tip of his tongue to say that they would watch a lot of dawns together, but common sense stopped him. The only dawn they would have in common would be the next day. She wasn’t the woman he would choose for a wife.
He reached into his shirt pocket and got out the pack of cigarettes that always resided there, shaking one free and drawing it the rest of the way out with his lips. As he dug in his jeans pocket for his lighter he heard her say incredulously, “You smoke?”
Swift irritation rose in him. From the tone of her voice you would have thought she had caught him kicking puppies, or something else equally repulsive. He lit the cigarette and blew smoke into the cab. “Yeah,” he said. “Do you mind?” He made it plain from his tone of voice that, since it was his truck, he was damn well going to smoke in it.
Madelyn faced forward again. “If you mean, does the smoke bother me, the answer is no. I just hate to see anyone smoking. It’s like playing Russian roulette with your life.”
“Exactly. It’s my life.”
She bit her lip at his curtness. Great going, she thought. That’s a good way to get to know someone, attack his personal habits.
“I’m sorry,” she apologized with sincerity. “It’s none of my business, and I shouldn’t have said anything. It just startled me.”
“Why? People smoke. Or don’t you associate with anyone who smokes?”
She thought a minute, treating his sarcastic remark seriously. “Not really. Some of our clients smoke, but none of my personal friends do. I spent a lot of time with my grandmother, and she was very old-fashioned about the vices. I was taught never to swear, smoke or drink spirits. I’ve never smoked,” she said righteously.
Despite his irritation, he found himself trying not to laugh. “Does that mean you swear and drink spirits?”
“I’ve been known to be a bit aggressive in my language in moments of stress,” she allowed. Her eyes twinkled at him. “And Grandma Lily thought it was perfectly suitable for a lady to take an occasional glass of wine, medicinally, of course. During my college days, I also swilled beer.”
“Swilled?”
“There’s no other word to describe a college student’s drinking manners.”
Remembering his own college days, he had to agree.
“But I don’t enjoy spirits,” she continued. “So I’d say at least half of Grandma Lily’s teachings stuck. Not bad odds.”
“Did she have any rules against gambling?”
Madelyn looked at him, her mouth both wry and tender, gray eyes full of a strange acceptance. “Grandma Lily believed that life is a gamble, and everyone has to take their chances. Sometimes you bust, sometimes you break the house.” It was an outlook she had passed on to her granddaughter. Otherwise, Madelyn thought, why would she be sitting here in a pickup truck, in the process of falling in love with a stranger?
IT HAD BEEN a long time since Reese had seen his home through the eyes of a stranger, but as he stopped the truck next to the house, he was suddenly, bitterly ashamed. The paint on the house was badly chipped and peeling, and the outbuildings were even worse. Long ago he’d given up trying to keep the yard neat and had finally destroyed the flower beds that had once delineated the house, because they had been overrun with weeds. In the past seven years nothing new had been added, and nothing broken had been replaced, except for the absolute necessities. Parts for the truck and tractor had come before house paint. Taking care of the herd had been more important than cutting the grass or weeding the flower beds. Sheer survival hadn’t left time for the niceties of life. He’d done what he’d had to do, but that didn’t mean he had to like the shape his home was in. He hated for Madelyn to see it like this, when it had once been, if not a showplace, a house no woman would have been ashamed of.
Madelyn saw the peeling paint, but dismissed it; after all, it wasn’t anything that a little effort and several gallons of paint wouldn’t fix. What caught her attention was the shaded porch, complete with swing, that wrapped all the way around the two-story house. Grandma Lily had had a po
rch like that, and a swing where they had whiled away many a lazy summer day to the accompaniment of the slow creak of the chains as they gently swayed.
“It reminds me of Grandma Lily’s house,” she said, her eyes dreamy again.
He opened her door and put his hands on her waist, lifting her out of the truck before she could slide to the ground. Startled all over again, she quickly looked up at him.
“I wasn’t taking any chances with that skirt,” he said, almost growling.
Her pulse began thudding again.
