The Bachelor's Baby (Bachelor Auction Book 3) (2 page)

“Sure?” he asked. He’d come up from behind her and could see plain as day that the truck was cock-eyed on the road, back tires broken into the heavy snow on the shoulder. “I have a winch. Lemme turn around and pull you out.”

I have a shovel
, she would have protested, but he drove past her, up to where he could turn around. And he had a winch.

Of course he had a winch. She hadn’t even thought to look if Blake had one, and yes, he did. Not that there was anything stronger than a few saplings to hook to. Letting this guy help her would be a heck of a lot easier than doing this herself.

She eyed him as he returned. Money wasn’t terribly prevalent here in Marietta, but this guy was obviously doing well for himself, with his chrome rims holding his top of the line snow tires on his spanking new truck.

He positioned his vehicle in front of Blake’s battered specimen and climbed out.

She eyed his seasoned cowboy hat, new sheepskin jacket without so much as a hayseed on his pristine white collar, faded jeans and worn-in work boots. They weren’t horse-riding cowboy boots. They were hammer-swinging construction boots.

Huh.

“You’re the new guy,” she deduced, staying back since he seemed to know what he was doing. “You bought the Hartstocht’s old place.” The Circle H had been foreclosed five years ago. The ‘sold’ sign had been the talk of the town through Christmas. “Lincoln Brady, is that right?”

He didn’t pause, but his hat tilted up long enough for him to sweep her with an assessing glance that took in her trendy knee-high boots, snug jeans and town coat. Chicago winters were no Sunday picnic, so her dress coat was engineered for maximum warmth, but it was double-breasted wool, royal blue with black embroidery around the collar and a skirted bottom that complimented her figure. She wondered what more depths of opinion he’d form if he knew it was from a vegan-based fashion house, marketed on its cruelty-free fabrics and natural dyes. Blake had mused she could boil and eat this coat if she had to.

“That’s right,” he replied, smoothly clipping on.

“You grew up near Lewiston,” she added, showing off her investigative skills. “Moved to Texas and worked in oil.” Thus the flashy truck, she surmised. Quite the renegade move to throw all that away to hobby farm Montana. “Some people think you should consider going organic, since the place has been sitting fallow so long. Did you know that?”

He cut her another glance.

She shrugged. “It’s a small town. We have a lot of opinions about what people should do and aren’t afraid to express them.”

She was also a naturally curious person who happened to work in news. Digging into people’s backstory was her crack. That’s how she knew he’d been a CEO with really, really big oil. Rumor was, he kept a helicopter in his corral, not horses.

“You the one marrying that ballplayer?” he asked, straightening and motioning that she should move into the driver’s seat to steer Blake’s truck as it was pulled forward.

“No, that’s my friend, Skye,” she said, mouth twitching as she absorbed that he could play the gossip game too. “I’m from the Lazy C.”

“The California girl.”

Her amusement grew. “That would be my brother’s fiancée, Liz. No, I’m the Chicago newscaster.” She gave him a second to reply, but he only backed away, the remote for the winch in his gloved hands. He waved her to get behind the wheel.

Bummer. She was really intrigued by him. For a second she’d thought she’d felt a spark on his side, too.

And since when did she hope for a connection to a local boy?

Although, he hardly fit the profile of a local. The men in her age bracket here in Marietta tended to be fit and strapping, but they were like family. This guy… Wow. Just wow to all that brawn and steely silence.

Climbing behind the wheel, she nodded and seconds later the truck was back on the road. She left the engine running and climbed out to thank him while he unhooked.

“Just being neighborly,” he dismissed. “Chicago, huh?”

“That’s right.”

“In town long?”

“Just a few days, cleaning out my old bedroom for my new niece.”

He nodded, sweeping a slower look over her that was very male and approving. It was like stepping off a plane into the tropics, surrounding her in sultry warmth. She swallowed.

“Why?” she asked, hearing a faint huskiness of receptiveness in her voice.
Ask me out
.

His mouth, which she was starting to think was definitely sexy, pursed in a rueful hint of vacillation. He decided to go for it, saying, “I was going to suggest, if you had time before you left, that you might like to drop by and see the place. If you’re interested.”

Bam. Chemistry. Right there in the steady green stare of sexual attraction he leveled into her eyes.

Global warming struck like a meteor because even though they were surrounded by snow and ice, she melted under a wash of incredible heat. Completely incinerated under his gaze, breath evaporating and face warming.

Oh yes, her hormones were interested. Very interested.

They held the silent connection for a long time, long enough for her heart to begin to flutter with nervous excitement and her brain to throw a panic party. Was she seriously thinking of sleeping with a stranger?

She was so discomfited by her own reaction, she fell back a step, mostly amused, but a little bit stung by how slick he was. That wasn’t an invitation to dinner he’d just issued. And it wasn’t like she hadn’t had her share of smooth lines from fast operators in the city, but she expected better from the men around here, she really did.

“Even though I’m only in town for a few days. Or
because
I am?” she challenged, still trying to decide if she was insulted or flattered.

“I’m not a man for complications.”

Or apologies, apparently. He didn’t look the least bit contrite. More imperturbable.

“It was just a suggestion.” Touching the brim of his hat, he said, “See you around,” and started back to his own truck.

“You know, I could have it all over town that you tried to pick me up out here, but only because I’m passing through,” she threatened, not really serious. It was more like lobbing a snowball to start a play fight.

“You almost said yes,” he threw back, arrogant and knowing as he stood next to the open door of his truck. “Want me telling people that?”

She gave him the ‘die’ look she usually reserved for her nemesis at the competing station.

“It was really nice meeting you…?” He lifted his brows in a prompt.

“Meg,” she provided on a chortle of amused outrage. “You might learn that much about a woman before you proposition her.”

“Like I said, I like to keep things simple.” He was teasing now. She could tell by the way the corners of his mouth had deepened with suppressed laughter. “And I prefer Linc. Drive careful.” He winked and got into his truck, then drove past her to where he could turn around, coming up behind her and following her into town.

“Jack ass,” she called him under her breath, unable to resist watching him in her rear view mirror.

Unable to deny she
was
tempted. Very, very tempted.

‡

W
hen he was
in his new, albeit run-down home, Linc was comfortable with his choice. Happy as a pig in shit, really, which wasn’t a far-off analogy. The house was a neglected wreck, the barn needed a new roof and the tractor was shot. But bringing the house back to livable, assessing the work needed around the ranch, planning for spring and critters—it was as close to meditation as a roughneck like him could get.

Then he drove off his new property and saw himself as the world saw him. Who threw away six hundred thousand a year to ante up against blizzards, mad cow disease, and any number of other financial or physical hardships that could hit in a single year?

Him. That’s who.

And not for a woman either. Not for the mother he should have stayed in one spot for. No, he’d chased the money for too long, always trying to find his way back to something he barely remembered and now here he was.

And he was damned pleased to be on the ground. Not in a plane, not on an oil rig in the middle of thirty-foot swells, wind whistling and gulls screaming. He was living alone in the middle of nowhere. It was quiet. No one to answer to. No urgency or crisis, just a solid day’s work and what didn’t get done today, got done tomorrow.

Simple.

But not really something others might understand.

And he sure as hell would love to get laid once in a while.

He was used to going without sex on the rigs, waiting until he had a week out. He knew how to get his ass into a bar, buy a woman a drink, turn it into a weekend. Sometimes it even worked out for longer. Then he didn’t have to go to a bar when he had time off. He went straight to her place.

But women tired of a man who wasn’t there most of the time, and when he did show up, he had dirty laundry and a surly attitude to shake, so he’d be in the bar again.

The bars around here weren’t the same as the ones in Miami and Dallas and Edmonton. Here, when a woman left with a man who wasn’t her husband, brows went up. He’d watched. Hookups weren’t simple in these parts.

So Meg had looked like a gift from heaven.

The truck Meg was driving was held together with spit and baling twine, but she’d looked right out of the pages of one of those women’s magazines he used to thumb through at the doctor’s office, waiting for his mom. The magazines always smelled nice and the women in them didn’t wear much. He could probably trace back his fetish for that kind of polished, high-maintenance woman to those perfumed pages he’d studied so closely in his pre-teen years.

He’d taken one look at Meg and felt a serious pull below the belt. Wavy red hair had poked from beneath the turned up brim of her frou-frou hat. Naked strawberry lashes had framed eyes as blue as the sky. A handful of freckles decorated a slender, haughty nose. Her figure was long-legged and undeniably feminine. Overall, she was prettier and more sophisticated looking than any other woman he’d seen here yet.

He’d deduced she was probably someone’s wife and told his libido to stand down.

Then they’d drilled to the heart of the matter and he’d seen possibility. He didn’t make assumptions about any woman’s willingness to sleep with him, but there was such a thing as playing odds and he’d voted her as most likely to successfully be drawn into the kind of short-term, lighthearted, needs-based relationships he preferred.

If she had been looking for diversion before heading back to a life in Chicago, she might have been his perfect match. He hadn’t been able to resist putting the idea out there.

And she’d shot him down.

Which shouldn’t bother him. You win some, you lose some. He knew that. He’d probably only reacted to her so strongly because he’d been going without for a while.

Still, he was nursing serious discontent with the outcome.

And the whole point in hooking up with a woman who didn’t live here was to avoid bump-into awkwardness afterward.

No such luck today. Meg parked at the very grocery store where he intended to pick up a few frozen dinners before he hit the lumber yard and got himself back to work on the room that would become his office.

Thankfully, she bumped into someone else, a woman who called her into conversation near the grocery carts. He walked by them and picked up a hand basket inside the door, filling it with frozen roast beef dinners and cans of soup so efficiently, he was checking out at the twelve-items-or-less lane before Meg had started her own shopping.

She glanced at him as she went by, something in her manner making him suspicious. That had been a smug little grin on her shiny pink mouth. Her bottom lip really was a forbidden fruit all in itself, plump and juicy and delectable—

“Mr. Brady?”

He yanked himself back from lascivious thoughts to the friendly smile of the woman Meg had stopped to talk to outside. She was quite a looker herself with long dark hair and eyes dark as pansies. Her gaze was direct and vaguely cocky, like she had read all two pages of the How-To manual on dealing with men, but there was enough reserve about her that he knew right off that whatever she wanted from him was business, not pleasure.

He pocketed his credit card and gathered up his sack of groceries, stepping out of the way for the next customer. “Yes,” he said, adopting the veneer he wore for a boardroom full of lawyers. Something about her air of determination made him feel like he was being subpoenaed.

“I’m Lily Taylor.” She held out her hand and seemed to read him as they shook, changing from a wilted offer to a firm, no-nonsense pump, standing a little straighter—not to push out her chest, but to get the height she needed to better meet his gaze.

A good negotiator, this one. Knew when to use her wiles and when to use her smarts. Proceed with caution, he thought, wondering what she wanted.

“Meg just mentioned that you might be the right person to approach for a fundraiser we’re hosting for a local boy who was hurt recently. Josh Dekker? Have you read about him? He has a spinal cord injury from a fall while he was on a scout trip last year. His mother, Molly, is a friend of mine. She’s a single parent and they’re in quite dire straits, trying to ensure he gets the care he needs and refitting the house.”