Victoria Dahl - Too Hot to Handle

“You’re all cowboyed up again,” she said.

He frowned a little at the delight in her voice. Did she think this was Disneyland, where people played dress-up and tried on a drawl?

“The hat,” she clarified.

“The hat is for shade. I’m not a cowboy.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said, waving a hand as her earbud cord bounced.

“What are we going to do today?”

“What are we going to do? This is so exciting!”

Oh, God. Fine. Shane took a deep breath and tried to let his grumpiness go as he followed Merry toward the saloon. He couldn’t put a finger on when it had sunk so deeply into his flesh. He used to be able to let a bad mood go. He used to be able to forget his family and the years of betrayals and stress. He could work to forget. Or hang out with friends. And if that didn’t work, there were always women. But the past year had made forgetting damned difficult.

“You should get some spurs!” she said, walking backward now. “A little jingling would really liven this place up.”

He opened his mouth to respond, then realized he had no idea what to say to that. “Right,” he finally said in defeat before closing his mouth again.

She nodded solemnly. “Yeah.”

Shane suddenly had to consider that Providence might be a ghost town in an old episode of the Twilight Zone. It had to be. There was no other explanation for this odd woman plunked down in the middle of the dustiest part of Jackson Hole. There was no way to explain why she’d stumbled into his problems this way.

“I brought the estimates,” he said, then jumped forward to grab Merry as she tripped over her own feet and almost went down on her ass. “Hey. You okay?”

“Sure!” Her laugh tripped over itself like a broken toy.

Shane frowned, sensing there was something more there, but if her reaction was simple embarrassment at her clumsiness, he didn’t want to press further. When the warmth of her waist soaked into his fingers, Shane realized he was still holding her and stood back with an awkward pat of her ribs. “So…”

He slipped the envelope from his back pocket and handed it over. “There’s the estimate. Why don’t you take a look at that while I sort through the spare wood, then we’ll make a plan.”

Even as he spoke, Merry tore open the envelope and unfolded the papers. True fear twisted her brow into lines of tension.

Why? It wasn’t her money. Hell, he’d expect that spending the money of a trust would be damn fun, especially when you were irritatingly excited about the project in the first place. “Not what you expected?” he asked. He was experienced, and not cheap, but he didn’t think his hourly wage was exorbitant.

“Oh,” she breathed, her eyes darting over the page before she flipped to the next. “No, of course not. It’s…just…”

He kept his mouth shut, waiting for a clue as to what was going on. As he expected, Merry couldn’t bear the silence, and she jumped to fill it.

“It’s just… We’d better start with the first one. Just the porch. Then hopefully…”

Shane cocked his head.

“The thing is, can I pay you half now and half next month? I’m sorry. I don’t know how you normally do it, but I’m having a little trouble getting funds, uh, released.”

Whoa. Very interesting. So interesting that Shane finally found the strength to shove down his grumpiness and turn on the charm. This was exactly the kind of information he needed, and he needed it before Merry turned in an invoice. Shane would be fired quicker than he could say legal espionage.

So he smiled. And shifted a little closer. And turned on the Western charm that had worked before on cute tourist girls. “What’s wrong, darlin’?”

“Nothing! I can pay you! It’s not that. It’s just…” The envelope slipped from her fingers, and Shane knelt to pick it up.

When he rose, he let his eyes drag over her body. There was nothing wrong with her body, after all. She wasn’t stick-thin like the rich women who rolled through town with skis and fur boots. She was strong and tall and curvy. As his gaze dragged over the curve of her hip, he was struck with the sudden thought of what she might look like naked, and got lost in that for a moment before he remembered his charm and turned his smile up.

“It’s just what?” he pressed.

Merry was watching him with slightly parted lips, as if she’d sensed his thoughts. “It’s just… The board members are…”

He tipped his head a little closer, holding her gaze as he slid the envelope back into her grasp. His fingers brushed over hers. He let them rest there, just beneath the angle of her knuckles.

And then there was her mouth. Those slightly parted lips. A little too wide for beauty, maybe, but suddenly so soft. And inviting. And…

Merry edged back, her eyes narrowing. “It’s nothing,” she said firmly, the words wedging distance between them.

Shane found himself standing there alone, blinking in surprise. “Huh?”

“It’s nothing. If you’re okay with half now and half later, you’ve got a deal.”

“Okay,” he said. “Sure.”

Merry smiled. “Perfect. Then get to work. What are you waiting for?”

Shane, charming smile still in place, found himself treated to the sight of Merry’s ass as she walked away from him. Her hips swung. Her ass tipped side to side. He watched. By the time she disappeared around the corner of the little house she’d claimed, Shane found himself shaking his head and wondering what had just happened.

CHAPTER FOUR

“MS. KADE, THIS is Levi Cannon. We have a bit of a situation.”

Merry stood so quickly that her hair blew back. Phone clenched in a suddenly sweaty fist, she looked toward the makeshift parking area of Providence, then toward the saloon. How could they have found out so quickly? Maybe she could—

“Ms. Kade?”

“Yes. Hi, Mr. Cannon. What seems to be the problem?” The distant sound of boards being dropped filled up Merry’s ears. She ducked inside the little house she used as a base, so panicked she didn’t even look for spiderwebs first. One of them clung to her arm. She shook it like mad, swallowing her panicked cries.

“Mrs. Bishop—Kristen Bishop—came outside this morning to find that her mailbox had been destroyed.”

Merry sucked in air so quickly that she choked on it and started coughing. The mailbox must’ve tipped over in last night’s wind.

“Oh, don’t worry. Destroyed was her word. A little further investigation revealed that it had only been pulled from the ground and left in the dirt. Not exactly mayhem.”

“Right. I… That is…Mr. Cannon, I—”

“Kristen thinks it’s an act of retaliation.”

Merry snapped her mouth shut. Retaliation? She hadn’t been that mad. And she’d tried not to convey any anger at all to the arguing seniors.

“Personally I think a drunk cowboy ran into it, but the Bishop house is damned isolated, so she might have a point. She thinks it’s a warning.”

Merry’s throat finally unlocked. They didn’t know it was her.

She drew in a deep breath. “I can’t imagine that,” she managed to say. “Maybe it was bored teenagers. Mailboxes. Baseball bats. It happens.”

“It’s a ways out of town for joyriding. And nothing like this ever happened before we hired you. I can’t discount her suspicions.”

Right. Nothing like that had happened before they hired Merry. That was for damn sure. She cringed and chewed her thumbnail. “But why retaliation? I’m sure it’s nothing. I started two weeks ago, so the timing—”

“Oh, we just filed a new motion with the judge, letting her know that Providence is now actively being managed as a historic site. That was about a week ago, but it’s possible the other side just found out about it. You can’t think of anything else, can you? Maybe your work put you on their radar.”

Merry cleared her throat and darted a look at Shane’s truck. Had he told someone he was working for her? Just how pissed would the board be if she admitted that—? Wait a minute. She was buying into the conspiracy theory about mailbox destruction she’d committed.

“I can’t think of anything. But listen, Mr. Cannon, if hiring me improves the visuals of this case, wouldn’t moving forward with some of the renovations be even better?”

“Well… Yes, in theory. But we really hadn’t planned for you to…um.” His words, which had started out awkward and hesitant, died into pregnant silence. Her skin crawled with humiliation, but she forced herself to ignore that.

“I understand now that you may have hired me as more of a figurehead than a curator. I’m not saying I’m okay with that, and we’ll have to have a different conversation about it later, but I can do this, Mr. Cannon. I may have only been at my previous position for a year, but I was a workhorse, and my superior was…” As old as you. “She was easing into retirement, so I carried a lot of responsibility.” She took a breath.

“I’ve already sorted through the wood we have on hand here. I’m not going to go wild and head out to a lumber store for new pine and woodscrews. We’ll use the original wood, and I even found a bucket of handmade nails. They’re rusty, but I’ll be sure that Sh—um…any contractor is up-to-date with tetanus shots, and I’m sure they use gloves, anyway, right? And when we run out of those nails, I found a place online that forges them.”

When she finally stopped to catch her breath, Mr. Cannon sighed. “Merry, listen. I can tell how much you want to work, and I admire that, especially in someone your age, but we—”

“I just want a chance. Please. I need a chance. We could get this place up and running faster than you think. The house I use as a base of operations is totally safe. And the saloon only needs a little work. And the church! The church is beautiful. I’m brainstorming a brochure now and—”

“Work on the brochure,” he interrupted, latching onto that idea with a sigh of relief. “Work on that, and I’ll…I’ll talk to the others about freeing up a little money. A little.”

“Oh, my God. Thank you. Thank you!”

“I’m not promising anything! You just sit tight, okay?”

“Sure,” she said, her face flushing with guilt.

“And work on a brochure. Holding something like that in their hands could help the board loosen up the purse strings a little.”

“Thank you, Mr. Cannon. I’ll get right on it.”

Merry dragged her chair inside and sat at the beat-up old table Mr. Bishop must have moved in at some point. She’d found little clues like that all over the house, proof that Gideon Bishop had been using the house as an office, gathering up ideas for the ghost town. She’d only poked around gingerly before, too afraid of spiders to settle in, but the sunlight was too bright to do this kind of work outside, so Merry set her iPad on its stand, fired up her portable keyboard and got to work.

She worked so hard she nearly forgot entirely about Shane. She noticed when he stopped in that night to say he was leaving. And she vaguely noticed the next day when he came by around 5:00 p.m. to do a couple of hours of work. She even wandered out once or twice to be sure he was doing only the work they’d agreed on.

But she didn’t go out to watch him hammer, or to marvel at the wide stretch of cloth across his shoulders or the tight wonder of his jeans. She didn’t notice the way hair glinted on his strong forearms when he moved. She didn’t notice any of that until he stopped by on the second night and delivered a moment of grace that hit her like a wave of lust.