Big Sky Country

“In the kitchen!” someone sang out.

Joslyn Kirk?

Oh, hell, Slade thought. It hadn’t occurred to him that he might run into her, though he supposed it should have, since she lived on the property and she and Kendra were good friends. He cleared his throat, debating between sticking around and beating it.

Before he’d decided either way—he’d been leaning toward the first option because the second seemed pretty chickenshit—Joslyn appeared in the big arched doorway joining the office area to the formal dining room.

She had flour in her hair. Slade’s heart did a weird little jig and then seized up briefly.

“Oh,” Joslyn said, her eyes widening slightly and a blush climbing her cheeks. “It’s you.”

Slade gave a raspy chuckle. “It’s me, all right,” he agreed. “Is Kendra around?”

Joslyn shook her head, and her soft brown hair seemed to dance around her oval face. Her eyes were wide-set, her mouth full....

Why was he thinking about her mouth?

“She finally sold the chicken farm,” Joslyn said. “She’s off delivering contracts.” She hesitated, moistened her lips briefly before going on and thus ignited an achy flame in Slade. “Is there something I can help you with?”

Oh, yeah, Slade thought, grimly wry. But it probably isn’t the kind of help you have in mind.

“I wanted to talk to her about the Kingman place—see if she’d get in touch with the owners and ask them about renting the house to me. I’ll catch up with her later.”

Joslyn swallowed, nodded. He wanted to touch his lips to the pulse leaping at the base of her throat.

Glad he’d brought his hat with him instead of leaving it in the truck, Slade held it in both hands at belt-buckle level. He hoped the move seemed casual.

“I’ll tell her you stopped in,” Joslyn said.

He took some consolation in the fairly obvious fact that he wasn’t the only nervous person around.

“That would be great,” he said. It was the perfect time to leave, but, probably for the same reason he was holding his hat in a strategic position, he didn’t.

Joslyn dusted her hands together. “I don’t know how to contact the owners,” she said, “but if you want another look at the ranch house, I’m sure the lockbox keys are around here somewhere. I could get them and let you inside.”

In the next moment, she looked confounded, as though she hadn’t planned to say what she had.

Slade didn’t need yet another tour of the ranch house—he’d been there with Kendra a dozen times. He knew every inch of the place, which floorboards creaked and the state of the plumbing. He knew just how each room would look, once he’d completed the necessary renovations, which he’d planned in detail.

“I’d like that,” he said, careful not to let his gaze drift any lower than the base of her throat. He was already in over his head; no sense making things worse.

CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_377760e0-bed4-5a37-898a-ddc7f95957d6)

JOSLYN WASN’T A LICENSED real-estate agent; she’d been hired, she reminded herself sternly, as a receptionist—a job she hadn’t even started yet. For all that, here she was, having just tracked down the lockbox keys to a hook in Kendra’s office-supply closet, heading out to show Slade Barlow through a house he’d already seen a dozen times, by his own admission.

She could have simply handed him the keys and sent him off to the Kingman place on his own—he was, after all, the county sheriff and could certainly be trusted to enter an empty house unsupervised—but that didn’t seem like the right thing to do, either. Every business had its protocols. There were ways to do things, steps that had to be taken, procedures to follow.

“No sense in taking two rigs,” Slade said practically, opening the passenger-side door of his extended-cab truck and gently herding Jasper, who had been sitting in front, over the console and between the seats to the back. With a blush that might have arisen from self-consciousness, the cowboy-lawman brushed off the seat, raising a little red-gold cloud of dog hair in the process.

Amused—and strangely touched—Joslyn forgot her own concerns for the moment and indicated, with a gesture of one hand, that she was wearing old jeans and a T-shirt and therefore wasn’t worried about getting a little messy.

Slade stepped back, still holding his hat in one hand, and waited for her to climb inside the truck.

Joslyn did so. Felt a blush of her own rise along her neck to the backs of her ears as she made a major production of fastening her seat belt.

Jasper, evidently glad to see her even if he had forsaken her temporary care to appoint himself Slade’s dog, greeted her by nuzzling her cheek once with his cold, moist nose.

“Hello to you, too, you traitor,” Joslyn said fondly, smiling, while Slade rounded the front of the truck and got in on the driver’s side.

Even being in the same room with this man minutes before had all but jolted Joslyn back on her heels, as if she’d grabbed hold of a live wire or poked a finger into a light socket. Being in the same truck, sitting side by side, ratcheted the sense-riot to a level of intensity that nearly took her breath away.

What had she been thinking to suggest this particular outing in the first place, let alone agreeing to ride with Slade instead of taking her own car? The answer was all too obvious: she liked the risky, even dangerous, feeling of being so close to all that quietly uncompromising masculinity. She was electrified, her heart pounding, every nerve in her body thrumming with all sorts of unwise instincts, each more primitive than the last.

Slade was as handsome in profile as he was head-on, and while she couldn’t quite resist a glance in his direction, she made sure it was a short one and shifted her gaze to the windshield as soon she could tear it away.

Not usually a prattler, Joslyn prattled. “I’m afraid all I can really do is let you into the house, once we get out to the ranch,” she said unnecessarily. The silence was simply too volatile to endure, for her at least, though it didn’t seem to bother Slade at all. “I mean, I’m not a broker or an agent, so of course I couldn’t make any binding agreements—”

A corner of Slade’s mouth quirked. He was looking straight ahead, concentrating on his driving. Having a conversation with him would probably be like trying to herd cats into a culvert.

Having sex with him, on the other hand—

Well, never mind—better not to think about that. At all.

Except she couldn’t seem to help it. It was a thrilling prospect—one that brought another hot blush surging into her cheeks and made certain her insides felt as though they were melting.

Get a grip, she told herself silently.

“That’s all right,” Slade said, in that slow, easy drawl of his. By then, Joslyn had forgotten what they were talking about, and he seemed to realize that, because he added, “That you can’t actually sell me the ranch, I mean.”

Pause. Joslyn felt as though she’d suddenly wandered onto a field of ice; inwardly, she was flailing for balance.

“I understand you’ve looked at the place before,” she said presently, striving for a normal tone, and then wished she hadn’t spoken at all. He might think she was implying that he was indecisive, what people in the real-estate business called a looky-loo.

Again, she caught herself. So what if he did think that? Who really cared what Slade Barlow thought, anyhow? Besides you, you mean? she asked herself.

Joslyn huffed out a sigh of pure frustration. She was, it seemed, carrying on two parallel conversations, one with Slade and one with herself.

This was unlike her. She was a self-possessed, independent woman. Why should this one man’s opinion matter to her at all, let alone enough to rattle her so?

He chuckled—it was almost as though he’d guessed what was going on in her brain and body—and gave her another of those lethal blue-denim glances, the ones with all the impact of being sideswiped by a speeding car.

By then, they were on Main Street, nearly at the town limits. They passed Parable High School and the conveniently located hamburger franchise next door to it, and then they were in the country.

“I’d pretty much decided on buying the Kingman place,” Slade told her, “but then—well—another opportunity came up, one that complicates things. I’m thinking of renting the house short-term, since my stepdaughter is coming to spend the summer with me and I basically don’t have anywhere to put her.”

Joslyn was still digesting what, for Slade anyway, amounted to a lengthy discourse as they cruised on by Mulligan’s Grocery and the Curly-Burly Hair Salon on the opposite side of the highway. Both parking lots were semi-full.

Slade honked the horn once, probably saying “howdy” to his mom, Callie, who ran the salon, though he didn’t look in that direction.