A Kiss to Seal the Deal / The Army Ranger's Return: A Kiss to Seal the Deal / The Army Ranger's Return

‘The arrangement I had with your father was not just about him. It has the backing of the Shire Council. There’s district funding attached to it. You cannot simply opt out, no matter how tragic the circumstances.’

‘Watch me.’

Slamming the phone down was the most satisfying thing he’d done all week. It gave him an outlet. It gave him focus. Blaming someone helped; it meant he didn’t have to blame the man he’d lost. The man he’d been estranged from for nineteen years.

Nothing Grant did could bring back the father he’d walked away from as soon as he’d hit legal age. But he could do one thing for him—the thing his father had died wanting.

He could save the farm.

He could not run it. He was no more equipped to do that now than the day he had walked away from it when he’d been sixteen. But he could keep it ticking over. A week, a month, however long it took to get it ship-shape and ready for sale to someone who could make it great. Probably not what his father had left Tulloquay to him for, but he’d never buckled to his father’s demands before and he wasn’t about to start now.

He’d never been farmer material growing up and Leo McMurtrie dying hadn’t changed one part of that.

Kate Dickson had stood on this rustic porch one time too many, readied herself for this argument once too often. It had taken twelve solid months of negotiating—almost pleading—for Leo McMurtrie to agree to let her team conduct their three-year research study on his property. And now in the final, crucial year of operations she was right back where she had started.

Up against a lawyer, no less.

An hour on the internet had tracked down Leo McMurtrie’s only son, Grant. He was some contract specialist from the city, and he was angry and still grieving, if his manner on the phone last week was any indication.

Hopefully the personal touch would do the trick.

She knocked on the freshly painted timber door then smoothed her hands down her best business outfit. Pencil skirts and fitted blazers weren’t really her thing but she had two of them in her wardrobe for occasions just like this one.

The door didn’t move. Kate glanced around nervously. Should she have called ahead or would he have just ignored that? Someone was home; she could hear the thump of loud music coming from deep inside the farmhouse. She knocked again and waited.

‘Come on, McMurtrie …’ she mumbled.

When the son still didn’t materialise, Kate tested the door. It swung happily open and the music-level surged.

‘Hello?’ she shouted down the long hallway over the doofdoof of heavy metal. ‘Mr McMurtrie?’

Nothing.

Cursing under her breath, Kate moved down the hallway towards the deafening noise. The smell of paint hit her immediately and she saw old floral-patterned sheets draped over furnishings in the freshly coated rooms that she passed. The sheets struck her as incongruous on a property belonging to a man’s man. Leo McMurtrie had been as tough as nails. Even once they’d finally come to an arrangement regarding access for her team, he’d still been as surly as a mule, with a sailor’s vocabulary. The fact he slept on old-fashioned, floral sheets just didn’t fit with the man she knew.

Then again, she barely knew him at all. Leo hadn’t wanted to be known.

‘Hello?’ Jeez. Lucky there wasn’t an emergency or something. She tiptoed forward.

‘What the hell—?’

Out of nowhere, a solid-rock wall stepped out and slammed into her, sending her reeling backwards, a damp weight dragging on the front of her suit. Kate lunged for the paint bucket that tipped between them just as a pair of masculine hands did the same, and the two of them ended up half-crouched on the floor like a badly-gone-wrong game of Twister. But they did manage to right the bucket and stop any more paint from sluicing down onto the timber floorboards.

The second thing Kate noticed—after subliminally absorbing the sensationally manicured pair of hands that relieved her of the bucket—was the intensity of a pair of eyes the colour of sea grass. They blazed at her from under a deep frown.

She struggled for something else to focus on. Paint pooled at her feet, dripping wildly off her clothes onto the floor.

‘Oh …’

‘Don’t move!’ Leo McMurtrie’s son barked, blocking her passage with his body and placing the tin carefully to one side. It took him a few minutes to wipe up the worst of the mess at her feet with a series of cloths but, as fast as he wiped, she dripped. Paint thickened and blobbed off the pointed seams of the tailored fabric.

‘Get that jacket off.’

Kate bristled at his autocratic tone but couldn’t ignore the fact that her jacket had taken most of the paint and it was very clearly still streaming onto the floor. She stripped it off, bundled it up with no further concern and tossed it over to the growing pile of paint-covered rags in the corner.

Two sets of eyes went to her beige-stained skirt.

‘That stays on,’ she said unequivocally.

His tight lips wanted to twitch but his scowl wouldn’t let them. Kate saw it all play out on his face in the seconds before he masked it. He crouched before her and, without so much as a word, he hand-scraped the paint off the tight fabric of her skirt, off the thighs underneath that stiffened with surprise, reaching around behind her legs to hold her steady as he did it.

Kate stood compliant and mortified until he’d finished, feeling every bit like the child she’d worked so hard to grow out of. The girl who just did what others told her. McMurtrie junior straightened up and glared at her. Those captivating eyes were evenly set in an oval face framed at the top by short, sandy-blond hair and at the bottom by a matching two-day growth. His eyes perfectly matched the khaki shirt that flared open halfway down his chest and which revealed a gold band hanging by a leather thong around his neck. More sandy-blond hair scattered across his tanned collarbone.

His lips tightened further as he noticed the direction of her gaze.

Desperate to get things back on a professional footing, Kate pushed her thick hair back from her face and wedged her ‘game on’ glasses more firmly up her nose. She straightened as best a paint-covered woman could and held out her hand to shake his.

Too late, she noticed the slap of wet paint on her right hand—which meant it was on her hair and probably her glasses too. The hand dropped limply.

Nice one, Kate.

But the pragmatist in her whispered that what was done was done. Nowhere to go but up. ‘Mr McMurtrie …’

‘Never heard of knocking?’ He glared at her, unimpressed.

Her eyes narrowed. Maybe he wasn’t grieving. Maybe he was just an ass most of the time. Like father, like son. Even if she’d come to feel great affection for McAss senior, he’d been pure hard work at the beginning.

‘Never heard of a perforated ear-drum?’ she shouted back, eyebrows lifted.

It was only then he seemed to realise that the stereo was still pounding out. He turned away and killed the sound with the flick of a nearby switch. It took her heart a few beats to realise it had lost its synching rhythm. When he returned, his shirt was fixed two buttons higher. The tiniest part of Kate mourned the loss of that manly chest.

‘Thank you,’ she said, her voice overly loud in the new silence. ‘Do you always enjoy your rock at full blast?’

‘Better than drinking.’

Kate frowned. How were the two remotely connected? She took a deep breath and started again. ‘I’m Kate Dickson. I assume you’re Grant McMurtrie?’

‘You must be top of your game with scientific deduction like that.’

She ignored the sarcasm. ‘You haven’t returned my calls.’

‘No.’

‘Or my email.’

‘No.’

‘So I came in person.’