No Ordinary Cowboy

“I’m Amy Graves, Leila’s friend. How do you do, Mr. Shelter?” She extended her right hand toward him.

Leila’s friend? “You’re the accountant?”

Leila was in her early fifties. Amy didn’t look a day over thirty. Didn’t that just knock the wind out of him?

He realized his mouth was hanging open and he clamped it shut.

His fingers tingled and his heart pounded. Slow down, he warned his treacherous libido.

His body wanted to jump a few fences, but his heart balked at the gates.

He set down the two girls hanging from his right arm, then wrapped his fingers around Amy’s hand. It nestled as soft as a calf’s ear in his big-galoot palm and started long-forgotten urges. He dropped it like a hot cow pie.

He cleared his throat. “Ma’am, if you’ll give me your keys, the kids and I will get your luggage.”

The woman nodded.

She’s fragile these days.

She looked fit, but he understood what Leila meant about the fragility. Emotional, maybe.

Take care of her.

Uh-uh. No can do. He set his jaw hard enough to hear his teeth grind.

He walked away from her to get her bags, the children following him like a line of baby ducks.

He opened the trunk of her car and pulled out a suitcase and an overnight bag. There was one more bag, supple brown leather with a brass closure. A laptop. Right, common sense reminded him. She’s here to work, on the books.

Too bad, his libido whispered.

Use every trick in the book to get rid of her, his common sense answered. He needed an attraction to the woman who was here to look at his books like he needed a root canal. Not.

He planned to have her hightailing it back to the city by tomorrow morning.

CHAPTER TWO

AMY ENTERED the house and let the screen door butt her back. Her lungs wouldn’t expand enough for the air she needed. Maybe coming here hadn’t been such a great idea. Sure, she needed to face her fears of illness and dying, but spending time with these children was definitely trial by fire.

She had to do this. Simply had to.

She ran a hand over her face, pulling herself under control. The darkness and cinnamon scent of the foyer helped.

Hank entered the house behind her.

“Kids,” he said to the children following on his heels, “go wash up. Hannah should have lunch on the table any minute.”

They ran down the hall to a room at the far end. Seconds later, someone had the water running.

“That bathroom is across the hall from your bedroom,” Hank said. “It’ll be your own early mornings and late evenings. The rest of the time, the kids have to use it.” He shrugged his apology.

The lemon and soap scent of him drifted by her. Too nice. Her nerves went on high alert. She was here to test herself with the children. Being attracted—okay, very attracted—to Leila’s brother was not in the plan.

Amy followed Hank down the hallway, past a wide staircase leading to the second floor on one side and a closed door on the other. Pastoral landscapes dotted the walls, with not a single abstract in sight. He entered a room at the back of the house, the last one opposite the bathroom the kids were using.

Hank set one of her suitcases onto the floor and the other onto its side on the bed.

“Ma’am, if you don’t mind, I’m going to get those kids settled down for lunch. Join us when you finish freshening up.”

No. She needed to take exposure to those kids in baby steps.

“I’d like to go straight to the office,” she replied. “I’m not hungry.”

Her traitorous stomach chose that moment to grumble.

Hank’s smile looked smug. “That door leads to the kitchen, where you’ll find our housekeeper, Hannah.” He pointed behind himself. “The one down the hall is the dining room.”

The children ran down the hall away from the bathroom.

“You can’t miss it,” Hank continued. “Just follow the sound of those kids. They make enough noise to rouse the dead.”

Amy flinched away from that image.

She put on a smile but knew it didn’t reach her eyes. The psychic pain she’d been carrying for two years wouldn’t quit.

“Dolorous,” Hank whispered, then his gaze flew away from hers.

He backed out of the bedroom, bumping into a small table. He caught a vase of lilacs before it fell but not before water sloshed onto his hand. His shoulder bumped into the door frame when he stepped through it. With the vase still in his grasp, he disappeared into the hall.

Well, he couldn’t be more different from Leila than chocolate from vanilla. Hard to believe they were related. Hank must be fifteen, sixteen years younger than Leila. Funny. Was Hank a late baby? A midlife surprise for his mother?

No, wait. Leila had mentioned that her mother had died when she was young and her father had remarried. Maybe the second wife was a much younger woman.

Hank had whispered one word on the verandah—exquisite. A smile tugged at her lips, the first genuine one she’d felt in ages. She’d pretended not to hear, but it did her soul good that a man found her attractive. Especially these days.

The smile fell from her face.

It doesn’t matter, though. Nothing is going to happen here.

She stepped into the hallway and walked toward the dining room. The vase of flowers from her bedroom sat in a puddle on the hallway floor beside the open dining room door.

The suspicion that Hank was a bit of a bumbling gentle giant eased her low mood.

She entered a room swollen with sound. Hank sat at the far end of the table and an older gentleman, who matched Leila’s description of the foreman, Willie, sat at the near end. A couple of teenagers sat on one side of the table. Camp counselors? The young children filled in the remaining places, save one. Baseball caps hung from the backs of their chairs. She paused, arrested by the sight of all those bare heads lining the table, too vulnerable in their white roundness, like a nest full of goslings.

She bit her lip.

THERE OUGHT TO BE a law against a woman looking so sweet and beautiful, yet having the potential to be so much trouble. Hank shifted in his seat and watched the accountant walk to the chair beside Willie’s, worrying her pretty bottom lip with her teeth.