Now to consider her “boss.” A bachelor with too much work on his hands. A man who slept in the field with his sick cows.
A shiver of excitement slipped into her belly. Why that sounded so good to her, she had no idea. Of course, it had nothing to do with the picture painted on the canvas of her brain, of Aidan Bellamy stretched out in the grass under the star-spangled sky, his hat over his face and his long legs stretched out.
She realized she pressed her fingertips to her mouth to still the fast breaths panting out at the image and dropped her hand. So her boss would be easy on the eyes.
Question was could she live with another man who gave her orders?
With no strings attached, maybe it wouldn’t feel like being ordered around. Plus, she was no longer the pushover she once was—her ugly divorce forced her to stand up for herself. Therapy taught her that she was a people pleaser, and it took her six full months before she could assertively recite aloud, “I will not be walked on.” Now she meant it.
She shielded her eyes with a hand to gaze at the fields. Cattle grazed, and in another pasture, the horses swished their tails.
Liberty sighed. If she couldn’t own the Windswept right now, she could still work with animals and learn. Surely that would help fill up the hole inside her and refresh her soul until her time came to move on.
She turned for the messy, dusty house to find her new boss and tell him she’d stay—but she wouldn’t be picking up his damn dirty socks.
* * * * *
“Did you always deal with cows and horses?”
Liberty’s voice held a breathless note as she jumped into the passenger seat of the truck. Aidan tossed her a look. If she was already breathing hard from exertion, she wouldn’t last a day. They hadn’t even started the feed routine.
“Pretty much from the start, yeah.”
“That’s unusual,” she said.
“What is?” He rubbed his fingertip along his jaw. He wasn’t much of a talker. Spending most of his days alone, his only chance to converse happened when he visited the Bellamy and spent time with his uncle and cousins.
“Most ranchers focus on one or the other.”
“That’s true enough, but I’m not most ranchers.”
Her stare landed on him and skated away. “Well, it seems like you’re making a go of it. Must be difficult on your own. You don’t have any workers?”
“My cousins lend a hand now and then. In fact, they’ll be up tomorrow bright and early to separate some mommas from their calves.”
“Why do you do that?”
“That time o’ the summer to vaccinate them.”
She nodded. At some point after making her decision to take him up on his offer, she’d implanted her things in the spare room, changed into faded jeans and a T-shirt and boots. She also pulled her hair off her face in a ponytail and added a wide-brimmed cowgirl hat. He’d been looking at her in that hat a few times too many and that was only while loading the truck with supplies.
The hat softened her features, taking her from pretty to stunning. Or maybe it was the other way around—she was stunning without the hat and pretty with it on.
He drove the dirt lane between pastures. As soon as the cows heard his truck, they started to move. “They know it’s feeding time,” he told Liberty.
She watched with interest, looking left and right. “You said there’s a hundred head?”
“Give or take, yeah. I lost one the other night before I realized it was sick. It’s why I slept in the field—to keep watch over them.”
Her head swayed in a slow shake. She didn’t speak, so he had no clue what that gesture might mean. He braked as he reached the end of the pasture, and some empty water bottles rolled out from under the passenger seat and hit Liberty’s feet.
She looked down.
“Sorry. I’m not much of a clean truck guy.”
She snorted and kicked at the bottles. He already knew her stance on cleaning up after him. Not that he asked her to.
After throwing the truck into park, he cut the engine and jumped out. As he headed to the rear to fetch a bucket full of items including a voltmeter to test the electric fence he’d been having issues with, he heard Liberty’s door close more softly. He glanced up to see her drifting toward the fence.
“Don’t touch it—it’s live wire,” he called out.
She threw him a look. “I’ve been on a ranch before, Mr. Bellamy.”
“Aidan. If we’re gonna work together, call me Aidan.”
Without responding to his request, she turned to the cattle again. They clustered around the feeding spot, waiting for their daily supplements.
Gripping the bucket, he moved up to the fence. He put the voltmeter onto the wire and saw it had full juice here.
“What are you doing?” Liberty asked.
“I keep having some loss of power along this fence. Haven’t figured out the problem yet, but today it seems to be fine, at least right here. I’ll check the rest in a bit.”
“What happens if the power’s down?”
“Then I got cows with no reason to stay inside the fence and they’ll break through.”
“Has that happened before?”
“Coupla times. I don’t want a repeat.” He edged up next to her to check the fence, forcing her to tolerate his close proximity or move away.
She stepped aside.
He didn’t know why that bothered him, but it did. Women her age were generally known to be on the prowl for husbands, though she hadn’t flirted once with him. Maybe he wasn’t her type.
Not to be a cocky dick, but he was pretty much every woman’s type. At least that had been his experience since the age of sixteen when he started garnering notice from the females not only in school but older women in town too. Being a teenager that all his friends’ moms stared at had been a hell of an ego boost.
In his twenties, he had his share of pretty ladies vying for his attention. When he hit thirty and still wasn’t tied down with a wife and kids, the single ladies seemed to make it their personal goal to lasso him.
The more time he spent alone, the more he realized when he got into company that he didn’t mesh with that life. He didn’t want to stand around chatting after church—he strode to his truck and made a quick getaway before he was forced to discuss mundane things that didn’t interest him. And if a man wanted a damn coffee, he should be able to walk into a shop and buy a cup without having a waitress write her phone number on his paper cup.
However, Liberty hadn’t done more than glance his way. He saw no indication that she thought him attractive or wanted anything from him.
Some of the calves milling around their momma’s legs started a game of chase, romping through the pasture. Aidan found such a sight impossible not to smile at, and when he glanced over at Liberty, he saw a smile had lit her features too.
He never saw her smile before now.
The expression changed her face. Her high cheekbones seemed to become more pronounced, bringing more notice to her freckles. He hadn’t realized how wide and full her mouth was either.
What he wouldn’t give to plunder those wide, sweet lips just once.
Damn, he must have grabbed onto one too many live electric fences in his lifetime. The last time he even thought such a thing about a woman, he barely had hair on his balls.