The Camden Cowboy

But as she drove away she was thinking about the you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours mentality.

And wishing that she wasn’t imagining scratching that back of his quite so literally.

Or quite so vividly …

Chapter Two

“Hey, Cade, it’s Seth.”

“Oh, man, you gotta remember that I don’t keep farmer’s hours,” Cade complained in a gravelly voice. Seth’s call had obviously awakened him.

Seth laughed. It was only 7:00 a.m. on Thursday when he called his brother in Denver. Still he couldn’t resist goading him. “I thought big businessmen had to rise and shine with the sun, too.”

“No meetings today—I was going to get to sleep until seven-thirty, damn you.”

“Them’s the breaks, pal—I had to be up two hours ago to talk to our guy running the Kentucky farm, so now I’m headed out to finish fixing a fence and figured I’d get you before I left,” Seth explained.

Despite the fact that Seth was the oldest of the Camden grandchildren and so had had the option of heading the operation, he’d instead chosen to handle the Northbridge ranch and oversee all the other agricultural aspects of Camden Incorporated, leaving the CEO and chairman of the board positions to brother Cade, who was a year younger.

All of the Camdens except Seth thrived in the city, in Denver, where they’d grown up. But Seth was the country boy of the bunch by choice. When it came to the business end of things, he oversaw the farms, ranches and dairies that Camden Inc. owned. He far preferred getting his hands dirty.

“Did we lose more cattle at the Kentucky place?” Cade asked. They’d been talking frequently about a vandalism problem that had been ongoing on the Kentucky farm.

“No, actually they caught the culprits—it was just kids,” Seth said. “Kids whose family owned some of the land once upon a time and decided to make a statement—you know the song.”

“Somebody has an old grudge against us and they passed it down,” Cade said without surprise.

“That’s the one,” Seth confirmed.

“What are you doing about it?”

Since the agricultural portion of Camden Inc. was Seth’s baby, he made any decisions that didn’t require a vote by the entire board of directors—which was comprised of himself, Cade and their other eight siblings and cousins. Petty vandalism was not a matter for the board of directors; he was merely letting Cade in on how he was handling the situation.

“The kids are locals. It’s a small town like Northbridge, and I don’t want any more bad blood than we already have there. I’m having them work off the damages, and if they do that there won’t be any charges filed against them, so they walk away with a clean slate. The guy I have managing the farm knows the kids. He’s willing to put them to work so they don’t end up with a record, and we’ll just hope that takes care of it.”

“Sounds good,” Cade said.

Seth could tell by his brother’s voice and the background sounds coming through the phone that Cade had gotten out of bed and was making coffee.

“You’re coming for GiGi’s birthday in three weeks, right?” Cade asked.

GiGi was what they called their grandmother—short for Grandma Georgianna. She’d raised them and their cousins after the death of their parents, and she was turning seventy-five.

“Wouldn’t miss it,” Seth assured.

“Anything else going on there?” Cade inquired conversationally.

And just like that the image of Lacey Kincaid came to mind. That had been happening on and off since she’d left him out in the field yesterday.

“I met Morgan Kincaid’s daughter,” Seth informed his brother. “I’m pretty sure she thinks we bought that last piece of property just to get one over on her old man.”

“Same song, different verse,” Cade said.

“Yep.”

They were accustomed to the distrust that came with their last name.

“Did you tell her you just wanted the property?” Cade asked.

“Nah, it wasn’t an overt accusation, just an attitude—you know it when you run into it.”

“I do,” Cade agreed.

“Now they need a road to come through here somewhere and I think that the fact that I didn’t instantly buckle under made her more suspicious. As if I somehow knew they would need to build an access road there and positioned us so we could stick it to them.”

“We’re a cunning lot, we Camdens,” Cade said facetiously. “So she’s a ballbreaker, this Lacey Kincaid?”

Seth laughed. “No, I don’t think so,” he said, disabusing his brother of that unpleasant notion. He didn’t like hearing Lacey Kincaid referred to that way, for some reason.

“I think she would have been a match for old H.J. and Granddad,” Seth went on. “Drive, determination, all business—that seemed to be what she was about. She found me clear out at the north end and hiked from the road about a quarter mile to get to me. In the heat, in a suit, in high heels.”

“Just to talk about a road?”

“That and to tell me we left some stuff in the attic and the barn over at the old place. And to ask if she could stay in the guesthouse so she doesn’t have to waste fifteen minutes driving to her site.”

Cade laughed. “Fifteen minutes is too much?”

“According to her. I know I haven’t heard the last on the road issue, but I didn’t come away feeling like she was trying to squeeze me. To tell you the truth, it was more like when the girls were little and they’d play dress-up and clomp around in GiGi’s heels—seems like Lacey Kincaid might be trying to fill shoes her feet aren’t big enough for.”

But she had been a sight to see walking away from him across that field yesterday. At first he’d simply watched to make sure she didn’t break her neck on her way back to her car, but then he’d found his eyes glued to a tight, round little butt that had nearly made him drool.

Of course that had only been the frosting on the cake because nothing about the front view of her had escaped him either …

“We left things at the old place?” Cade said, pulling Seth away from his wandering thoughts.

“That’s what she claims. I thought everything was out of there, but apparently not. It can’t be much, though. I’ll take care of it.”

“And what was that about her staying in the guesthouse?”

“She wants to rent it. I told her she could just use it, that I didn’t care, but she’s insisting on paying us something for it.”

“You don’t care if she stays in the guesthouse?” Cade said with an edge of suspicion to his tone. His curiosity was clearly piqued suddenly, because he added, “So somewhere between ballbreaker and little-girl-in-too-big-shoes—what’s this Lacey Kincaid really like?”

“I only talked to her for about five minutes—just long enough for her to say what she wanted to say. I told you—she was all business. I can’t tell you more than that.”

“What’s she look like?”

Oh yeah, Cade was suspicious, all right …