THE MIXED SCENTS of hay and animal, topped with a healthy dose of dust, hit Travis’s nostrils as he rolled open the big bay door on its squeaky runners. When the wheels hit the bumper at the end of the rails, he stood in the open doorway studying the dusty interior as the enormity of the task ahead of him sank in. What had he been thinking when he came up with the idea of tackling this jumble of junk with Cassie?
That he’d kill several birds with one stone. The barn would get cleaned. He and Cassie would know at the end of the project if she and he could work out their differences or if they’d have to agree to live several hundred miles apart and take turns showing up at family events. And they’d save the cost of the cleaning crew.
He’d explained all that to Will over dinner the night before and Will’s only comments were that he was glad he and Cassie were working things out, and that he’d better not find blood on the walls when they got done. But Travis could tell that his grandfather was grudgingly pleased that they were making an effort.
But where to begin? The big stack of tires? The jumble of parts? All the piles of stuff that had nowhere else to go, but were too good to throw away? A cat appeared from between barrels, blinked at him, then backed out of sight. Travis wasn’t familiar with the cat—as far as he knew they didn’t have a black and white—but it wasn’t uncommon for cats to move in and he wouldn’t be surprised to find that she had a litter hidden somewhere in the junk they’d be moving. If so, she’d have plenty of time to cart them elsewhere, because it was going to take a while to haul it all outside.
He walked farther into the dim interior and stood next to the column that held up the partial loft. The ropes that he and his sister, Amanda, had swung on as kids were still on the small platform above the loft that they’d dubbed the crow’s nest, pulled to the side and fastened to an upright. Their mom had had a heart attack the first time she’d seen them launch themselves over the loft. Their father had thought it looked like fun. He’d just started fighting his battle with rheumatoid arthritis and was fully in favor of taking every opportunity to enjoy life—even the risky ones.
Travis hadn’t known then that his dad’s illness would shape his own life as well as those of his parents. Arizona was kinder to his father’s body than the brutal cold of the Montana winters, so his parents moved south close to the time Travis graduated college. Travis had returned home, and with the exception of the occasional jaunt to Arizona to visit the folks, he’d been on the place ever since. The odd thing was that there was never a time when it was a good time to leave the ranch and see a few things. Last spring, between calving and planting, he’d attempted a trip to Seattle to visit a college friend, but had been called back early by unexpected spring blizzards that stranded some of their cattle.
It seemed that whenever he tried to leave, the ranch called him back.
“And here I am,” he muttered.
“I see that.”
He jumped at the sound of Cassie’s voice and turned to see her standing in the doorway, very much as his grandfather had been standing in the doorway of the Callahan barn the day before. “I didn’t expect you for another twenty minutes or so.”
“I got away early. Didn’t you hear me drive up?”
He shook his head. “The house blocks the sound. I’ve missed more than one signature delivery because of that.”
“You need a dog to alert you.” She smiled wryly. “Or a goat.”
“I have dogs.” He nodded at Will’s two old Aussies sleeping next to the grain shed. “Deaf, both of them. And if I brought Wendell back to the ranch, it would break Lizzie Belle’s heart.” He’d given the dwarf goat to Katie a little over a year ago, to keep her little goat company.
“True. They are inseparable.”
So far so good. No snarking.
And Cassie had on her business face. He imagined she’d spent as much time convincing herself they could do this job peacefully as he had.
Cassie walked into the barn and did the same thing he’d done just a few minutes before, settling her hands on her hips and turning a slow circle. “Wow. I kind of forgot what a really barnlike barn looks like.”
“Yours is in much better shape junkwise,” he agreed.
“My grandfather and dad were nuts about cleaning it out every spring. We did have the neatest barn of any of our friends. The thing is, yours is bigger and I don’t think Grandma wants to get married on the ranch she came to as a new bride.”
“Totally understood.” And since Will’s wife divorced him and remarried when Travis’s dad was a kid, Will didn’t have the same feelings about his ranch. He hadn’t built a life there with anyone except for his kids, whom he’d raised.
“Overwhelming.” Cassie summed up the situation with a single word.
“That’s an understatement.” He came to stand beside her, his unlikely partner. “By the way, I promised Grandpa no blood on the walls.”
“We can wash the walls,” she deadpanned.
He gave a short laugh. “I hope we won’t have to do that more than once or twice.”
She arched an eyebrow at him. “Well, it is us...”
Travis nodded. It was them.
He shifted his attention to the heaps of stuff, ridiculously aware of Cassie standing next to him, her hands resting lightly on her hips as she, too, studied the junk, no doubt developing a plan of attack and wondering how to get him to sign off on it.
Finally, she broke the silence. “In the old days I would have taken one half of the barn, you the other, and we would have raced to see who could get it done first.”
“But this isn’t the old days.”
“No.” She sounded almost wistful. “But wouldn’t that have been fun and easy?”
He got it. Their old relationship hadn’t required much effort. They simply fed off one another. It was irritating and invigorating and...predictable in an odd way. Now they had to come up with a whole new way to deal with each other and he’d be the first to admit that he had a lot to learn. More than that, he wanted to learn.
She gestured at the larger equipment parked in front of them. “Let’s get that stuff out of here, then lay out a plan for the rest. What we can hide, what we have to move. Like that.”
“What we have to wash down.”
“Oh, that will be everything. Do you have a fire hose?” She craned her neck as if expecting to spot one somewhere.
“That’s quite possibly the one thing we don’t have.”
“What a shame.”
“But I have a pressure washer and we’ll be using it.”
“Do you have a plan in mind?”
“I thought we’d develop it as we go.”
“That seems a little loose to me. I think we should have something concrete in place, because as I see it, our biggest obstacle is a mutual need to be the boss.”
“You don’t say,” he stated dryly.
“The Ray Quentin affair perfectly demonstrated that need.”
His eyebrows came together. “I wasn’t trying to boss you in that bar, Cassie. I was trying to protect you.”
She looked as if she expected him to suddenly say, “Ha. I’m kidding.” When he didn’t, she said, “It appeared to me that you were trying to take control of a situation I already had under control. I didn’t need to be protected until you showed up.”
“How, in a thousand years, could you have thought that?” he demanded. She hadn’t had the situation anywhere near under control.
“I thought it because you pushed your way into the situation and tried to take over,” she replied, missing the point entirely.
“Do you think I did it for fun?” He tapped his cheek beneath his sore eye, then, remembering his objective, dropped his hand. Still, it took him a second to ask, “What are we gaining by rehashing this?”
Her mouth tightened, but to her credit, she didn’t push on.
“I have an idea,” he said. It was getting late and he still had stuff to do that afternoon. “For today, and today only, you take that half of the barn and I’ll take this one. We clear out the big stuff, then tomorrow we will come up with a plan of action.” His lips twisted. “The concrete kind.”
“Great,” Cassie said on a sniff. “We’ve wasted enough time.”
Because someone wanted to argue...
Travis kept the thought to himself. And that seemed to be the best strategy moving forward—to keep their mouths shut. Tomorrow, as he’d said, they’d give it another go.
He made a sweeping gesture. “Pick your side.”
She pointed to the side she was standing on and he said, “Cool. We work until eleven, then I have to go to town.”
“Fine.”
“Okay, then.”
For several long seconds they stared one another down, then Cassie did a pivoting turn and headed for the stack of old asphalt roofing shingles. Travis sucked in a breath, then turned and headed toward his side of the barn.
At least there wasn’t any blood on the walls.
EVEN THOUGH SHE was driving, Cassie closed her eyes in relief as her truck bumped over the McGuire ranch cattle guard on the way home. She opened them again when the tires hit gravel.
The day was done.
Her clothes were dusty, her shoulders were stiff and her jaw ached from not talking while working in the barn. Tomorrow they could talk, work out that concrete plan. Today she’d needed time to collect herself, and it wasn’t only because they’d managed to morph their initial conversation into another argument about the Ray Quentin situation; it was because she was working out how to deal with a guy whom she found unexpectedly attractive.
Her peers would have laughed their behinds off at the idea of her, the great negotiator, having to have a self-imposed time-out because she couldn’t control her mouth—or her eyes.
Being hyperaware of his black eye, she couldn’t help but study it in the same way one touched a sore tooth. Yep. Still there. Still appears to be painful. And he kept catching her. Generally, she was immune to embarrassment, but that wasn’t the case with Travis—thank you, unexpected attraction—and after the third or fourth catch, she almost said, “I’m watching your eye, not you, buddy.” Instead she’d lifted something that was too heavy and almost fell over.
Saying she was only checking out his eye would have been a lie, of course. She also noticed the way his muscles moved under his T-shirt, the easy way he walked. The way the sunlight caught the brown stubble on his jawline and how his cheeks had hollowed under those ridiculously high cheekbones. She noticed things that had never been on her radar before, and the more she noticed about him, the more she was tempted to do something to drive a wedge between them.
Unfortunately, wedge driving was not on the agenda. They were working together to learn to do just that—work together; therefore, working in silence seemed her safest bet.
But what about tomorrow? They couldn’t clear out the entire barn in silence, could they?
She toyed with the idea of being candid and telling him that, in a very technical sense, she found him attractive. Physically attractive. Therefore, if he caught her staring, that was all it was.
Right.
No way was she giving him that kind of ammo. He could just catch her staring and wonder why. Best-case scenario, he’d think she was plotting something against him.
The thought made her smile. A little. Then she was back at the conundrum.
She wasn’t feeling herself—or rather, she wasn’t feeling like the person who’d left Wisconsin for a visit home before classes. She didn’t know if it was the time off, being back in Montana or being in close contact with her former nemesis, but she wasn’t as securely buttoned-up as she had been only a few days ago.
Travis thinks you’re stiff, and Katie thinks you’re there but not, so at least you appear to be all buttoned-up. They didn’t have to know that she was wrangling unfamiliar feelings and sensations. She was a good actress.
Taking comfort in the thought, she turned onto the county road. She might feel different inside, but it was just because of all the changes raining down upon her.
Her phone rang as she rounded a corner and seeing the name on the screen, she pulled over on a wide spot to answer the call from Darby.
After a quick hello, Darby said, “I didn’t get the job.”
“At least you heard back.” In the current job market, it wasn’t uncommon to not hear.
“I have a friend who works there, so that was probably why. There was no offer to keep my résumé on file.”
“Maybe your current company can turn things around. They hired a new CEO.”
“Death throes,” Darby said darkly. “But I’ll hang on until the bitter end, or until I find something else. I want to be back in Montana, but now I’m going to broaden my search. If my company goes south, I can’t afford to be picky.”
“You don’t care what you do as long as you’re close to home?”
“Let me put it this way—I currently live in a vibrant city with lots to do, and I still miss Gavin. Yes. I’d like to be closer to home.” She hesitated, then said, “I thought about applying at Hardwick’s Grocery store, but they only have part-time positions. I need more income than that.”
“Something will come up.” Cassie wasn’t a huge fan of platitudes, but she knew when her friend needed to hear one.
“Thank you,” Darby said softly. “I’ll keep you posted. Have you seen Travis since...you know?”
“As a matter of fact, I’m leaving his place. He and I are cleaning out the barn in case it rains on Grandma’s wedding day.”
“You and him and no one else?”
“You mean like a referee?” Cassie asked dryly.
“Pretty much.”
“Nope. It’s just the two of us.” And since she was still embarrassed at being taken to task by Will McGuire, she didn’t delve into the details of how it all came about. “It needs to be done, and it saves Will and Grandma the cost of hiring a crew.”
“I’m surprised that Travis has enough free time to do that with Will living in town. Did they hire help on the ranch?”
“No,” Cassie replied with a thoughtful frown. “We’re only working a couple of hours a day.” But Darby brought up a good point. On their ranch, Nick and Brady would start haying soon, and there were the pivots to tend and the fences to mend. When did Travis find the time? And why hadn’t she thought of that?
Perhaps you are a little too focused on yourself...
Perhaps.
“How’s his eye?”
“Swollen and colorful.” And he was still ridiculously good-looking.
“No grudges?”
“We worked through that,” Cassie said, hoping she sounded casual instead of shifty. There wasn’t much that she kept from Darby, but this thing with her and Travis... It felt too personal to share.
“I bet that was interesting.”
Cassie laughed, glad that her friend was letting her off the hook. “Keep me posted on your job search, okay?”
“Will do.”
“And call me anytime you need to. Promise?”
“Only if you do the same.”
“I will.” Maybe.
There were some things, like negotiating peace with a former nemesis, that a person simply had to handle alone.
“THIS COULD PROVE INTERESTING,” Rosalie said as she pulled the cozy off the teapot. She and Will had developed a nice routine of having beer or wine before dinner and tea after, often on the front porch of his new house, where they sat together and watched the world go by. Every now and then, Gloria would walk the two blocks down the street with her new rescue dog, Sylvia, and join them.
“Interesting in what way?” Will asked as he accepted the cup of tea and then leaned back in his chair. He hadn’t been much of a tea drinker when they’d started seeing one another in a serious way, but he’d become a convert after she’d made him his first chai latte. He’d also sworn her to silence. “Travis would poke fun at me in an unmerciful way,” he’d said. Rosalie doubted that, but she agreed that it would be their secret.
“I believe you know what I mean.”
“Oh. The barn going up in flames.”
“What?” She nearly dropped her teacup.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean that literally. I meant the two of them working together could cause some friction.”
Rosalie knew that Will thought Cassie and Travis’s habit of butting heads upset her, but the truth was that Will was the one who seemed to find it the most upsetting. She didn’t know if he was projecting his feelings onto her, or if he was simply trying to keep her happy by negotiating peace between their grandchildren.
Rosalie took her seat next to Will and balanced her cup on the arm of the chair. Cassie and Travis were both grounded individuals, college educated, successful in their chosen fields...and they still triggered one another.
She waved at their neighbor across the street as the woman left her yard to go on her exercise walk, then glanced at Will. “I have a hard time, given Cassie and Travis’s history, believing that they volunteered together for this task out of the blue.” She gave Will a sideways glance. “Especially after the incident at the Shamrock.” Cassie had called to explain how Ray Quentin had given Travis a black eye, but Rosalie was certain that she hadn’t been told the full story.
Will shifted in his chair and Rosalie pretended not to notice. So much for them “volunteering.” Will obviously had something to do with it, but if Cassie and Travis had agreed to the plan, she thought it was a great way for the two of them to get their mutual need to take one another off at the knees out of their systems. They hadn’t been particularly kind to each other during their teen years and now, thanks to her and Will, they were going to be seeing more of one another.
On the plus side, anything that distracted Cassie from the job that was eating her from the inside out was A-OK in her book. Rosalie hoped it took two weeks to clean the barn. Maybe by that time, Cassie will have developed some perspective. Or maybe she’d continue her no-holds-barred career path.
“But here’s the thing,” Will said, drawing her attention back to him. “The hay is almost ready to cut and if we’re looking at rain at the end of the month, we need to get it taken care of.”
“And Travis is busy with the barn this week.”
“Exactly. So I’m going to handle the haying.”
“Do you have enough help?”
He smiled that smile that made her knees go a little weak. Will was one handsome man. “Lester has volunteered.”
“In the same way Cassie and Travis volunteered to clear out the barn?” she asked mildly.
Will laughed. “Les offered to help.” He patted her knee. “I won’t be seeing you so much before the wedding.”
“I’m going to be busy with preparations.” And not only her own. Katie wanted her Christmas wedding to be a small affair, but there was still a lot to do. Two weddings in a matter of months did keep one hopping.
“I could drive into town, of course, but sometimes we work at night.”
“I know the drill,” Rosalie said with a gentle smile. She had reason to, having been a rancher’s wife for over three decades. “And if you need help, I drive a mean swather.”
“I thought you hated ranch work.”
“I prefer town work, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have skills.” She looked over her teacup at her man. “Skills that I am not afraid to use.”
“Well, if Lester’s wife isn’t as understanding, then I may be calling on you.”
She smiled at the man who’d somehow slipped into her heart. “You do that,” she said softly. “Anytime you need me.”
CASSIE ARRIVED AT the McGuire ranch at exactly eight o’clock, ready to discuss next steps in the barn project, which meant negotiating and not arguing. She’d slept like the dead thanks to all the tugging and lifting and hauling she’d done the day before, and there was nothing like a good night’s rest to help one gain perspective. Unfortunately, the perspective she gained when she was alone seemed to shift when she was with Travis. If that happened, she’d deal.
The driveway gravel crunched noisily under her running shoes as she approached Will’s old dogs, who were sleeping next to the stuff they’d stacked on opposite sides of the open bay door yesterday—her pile and his pile. She leaned down to stroke their heads, earning herself canine smiles, then cleared her throat before entering the building just in case Travis needed a warning to stop talking to himself. She needn’t have bothered.
The barn was empty—of human beings, that is. Something small and furry scurried for cover near the rear door. Whatever it was, it had a lot of hiding places. Despite a good two hours of hauling things out the previous day, there was still plenty of junk to tackle today.
So where was the guy who’d been so gung ho to start at eight o’clock on the nose?
She heard another faint scuffling noise in the junk, but when she moved toward it, the noise stopped. She definitely had company. A cat or a rabbit maybe. It wasn’t a pack rat, or she would have smelled it. Pack rat was possibly the only smell, other than skunk, that this old barn didn’t carry. She hoped the pressure washing did its job.
The sound of an ATV caught her ear and she walked out of the barn to see Travis coming across the field. He stopped to open the gate, drove through, got off and closed it again before once again mounting the machine.
“Busy morning?” she asked after he pulled to a stop a few feet away from her.
“Fencing problem,” he said after turning off the engine.
“Something you need to deal with now?”
He pulled off his gloves. “I’ll handle it after we’re done.”
Cassie casually slipped her hands into her back pockets. “Need help?”
A surprised look crossed his face, giving her a whisper of satisfaction. She did love to catch him off guard, but that wasn’t why she offered. She’d offered because that was what neighbors—and people who were trying to prove points to themselves—did. She could spend time with Travis and have a normal, noncontentious relationship. That was the perspective she’d gained from her good night’s sleep. She only hoped it didn’t change as she spent time around the man.
“I might,” he allowed.
“Depending on how well we do today?” she guessed.
“Pretty much.”
Great, because she planned to have a nice cooperative day. “I came up with a tentative plan of action.”
“So did I.”
“After you,” Cassie said with a gracious gesture, even though it was harder than it should have been. He was right. She did love to take control, but there were times and places and she needed to differentiate between needing to take the helm and wanting to. At work she needed to. With Travis she wanted to.
“My plan is to not mention Ray Quentin or anything relating to the Shamrock Pub.”
So, he’d done some thinking, too. Her gaze strayed to his bruised eye, which looked only slightly less swollen than the day before, and for some unknown reason her cheeks began to warm. Guilt? She shook it off and drew herself up another half inch or so. “I agree.”
Not only had the incident itself gotten in the way of their truce, rehashing it had done the same. Plus, there was no way she was ever going to get him to admit that if he’d simply stepped back when she’d asked, none of it would have happened. Even Darby agreed that while Ray might look scary and shove furniture, he was unlikely to hit someone weaker than himself. But in the long run, as much as she loved being right, what did it matter?
“And your plan for the barn?” she asked.
“Pretty straightforward. We move everything out and pressure wash the heck out of the interior, sort through the junk and put the essentials back.”
“And we’ll hide the ugly stuff with some kind of paneling,” Cassie added. She simply couldn’t see a wedding venue with the things a barn kept out of the weather in plain view.
“Do you have panels?” Travis asked.
“We can come up with something.”
His eyebrows rose as he silently mouthed, “We?”
Somehow his lips were even sexier when no sound came out.
Get a grip.
“Yes, we, working cooperatively,” she said, sounding very much like a substitute teacher who had no idea how to talk to kids.
Travis frowned at her overly bright tone, giving her the uncomfortable feeling that he could tell that she was playing a part in the hopes that acting would become reality, as in, she was here to do a job and she was not attracted to a guy who drove her nuts.
Her defenses started to rise, and she firmly squished them back down again. “No blood on the walls, remember?”
Travis’s forehead cleared at her more normal tone of voice. “Right. I guess we can brainstorm on that later.” He gestured with his chin toward the upper part of the barn. “We’ll also have to clean the loft so that dirt and debris don’t rain on the guests when the kids run around up there.”
“Kids...” Cassie glanced up at the loft above them, thankful that (a) he wasn’t looking at her so that she could get that grip, and (b) her normal voice had come back. “I don’t suppose we can block entry?”
“Could they have kept you out of the loft with a mere barricade back when you were a kid?”
“Unlikely,” she agreed. Especially if she’d been dared to do something. She kind of missed those damn-the-torpedoes days.
She glanced up to find Travis studying her, and again her cheeks began to warm. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d blushed, but here she was, two blushes in and the day had barely begun. It was putting her in a bad mood.
“Tell you what,” he said thoughtfully, “if you help me string the wire for the fence when we get done, if there’s still no blood on the walls, I’ll go to your place, haul your mare back here and work her when I have some free time.”
Cassie stared at him, wondering what had prompted the out-of-the-blue offer.
“Well?”
She cleared her throat as self-conscious blush number three threatened. “That would be excellent. I’d pay you, of course.”
He looked like he was going to give her a flat negative to the payment option, but instead he said, “We will come to some kind of a cooperative solution in that regard.”
She mouthed a silent “We?” and he grinned, his eyes crinkling at the corners.
“Look at us. We’ve made a couple of decisions that haven’t involved raised voices or fisticuffs.”
The unexpected intimacy in his voice tugged at her a little too strongly and she once again felt the need to drive that wedge, protect herself, before she freaking blushed again.
But before she took action—or talked herself down, she wasn’t certain which would have happened first—Travis stepped back and turned to face the interior of the barn. Cassie let out a silent breath.
“Where do you want to start?” he asked.
“There,” she said, pointing to the corner closest to them which was jammed with metal containers holding who-knew-what.
“Fine with me. Unless you want to work on separate areas again.”
He shot her a questioning look and she shrugged, even as her brain was shouting, Yes, yes, yes.
“I think it’ll go faster if we work together.”
He gave a low laugh. “One would hope anyway.”
“Yes. One would hope.” And she hoped she got through the day without either picking a fight or making a fool of herself. She had a lot to learn about navigating these new waters, but as he said, they were doing better.