Chapter Two
“That escalated quickly,” Finn Patrick drawled in reply to what might not have been a salacious proposition, but one that left him reeling all the same.
He dropped his hand from Kitty’s arm, reluctantly. He liked touching her—more than liked it—but unless he’d had some kind of concerning mental break right here in front of Mountain Mama Pizza, the woman he’d been obsessed with since he’d come to Cowboy Point had just proposed to him.
“Let me tell you why I think this is a good idea,” Kitty said at once.
She was frowning up at him, which at least confirmed that he wasn’t off with the fairies somewhere. She really had asked him to marry her.
And the thing about Kitty Bennett was that she was always frowning.
If he’d been asked, back before he’d begrudgingly followed his family here, he would have said that it was entirely impossible that he would find himself tangled in knots by a woman who always had that damned furrow between her eyebrows.
Finn liked bright, happy women. He liked big smiles and soft words, not deep frowns and shouted orders from behind busy counters.
But then again, Kitty had some spectacular eyes. They were hazel—the kind of hazel that changed colors depending on what she was wearing. Or maybe her mood. Maybe even the position of the stars, for all he knew.
What he did know was that tracking those different shades had become something of a spiritual exercise where he was concerned.
Until Kitty, he would not have called himself anything but practical. That was how pretty she was, with those eyes, those stubborn shoulders, her auburn hair that he’d never seen out of her haphazard bun on top of her head, and that distracting mouth that made him… hungry.
Deeply and distractingly hungry.
“My landlord agreed a long time ago to sell the property to us,” she was telling him, with a certain brisk urgency.
“The big house I share with my sisters, the restaurant, even the house they live in. That was why we decided to stay here and get the restaurant up and running. Yet just today I was told that they no longer thought it was a good idea, because the three of us are likely to find husbands and go off with them somewhere.” Her frown deepened.
“That will never happen. Not only because my sisters and I are not dogs on leashes who trot off the minute some big, strong man whistles—”
An image Finn did not need in his head. Good lord.
“—but because we like to stick together. That has always been the way. Our landlords know it, because they’re friends of ours, not just landlords. This whole thing is ridiculous.”
There were a lot of things that Finn could have said to that, but this was the first time that Kitty had actually talked to him in the nearly six months he’d been in Cowboy Point.
Aside from comments exchanged here and there that were entirely about the food he’d purchased in her restaurant, that was.
The food he spent entirely too long thinking about while he was eating it because she was the one who made it.
She was the one whose hands were all over that food that he then ate, and yes, every bite was always delicious.
He was also the one who had to address the uncomfortable fact that he found pizza dough a little more exciting than a grown man should, thanks to this woman.
The standing Wednesday night meeting he had with his newfound siblings to keep on building those family ties was also an exercise in torture. She never looked at him. She never looked as if she noticed he was there at all.
Finn wasn’t sure she even knew who he was. This was not the response he usually got from women. To put it mildly.
Meanwhile, Finn knew exactly where Kitty Bennett was at all times. What she was wearing. The depth of the frown on her face. The flour she always wiped on her forehead, leaving white fingerprints she never seemed to notice.
The sound of her laughing with people who weren’t him.
Now that she was actually talking to him, even if what she was saying didn’t make a whole lot of sense, he wasn’t about to stop her.
“The obvious solution is for me to marry someone and then stay right here, so I can prove my landlord wrong,” Kitty told him then. She blinked at him, as if she found it annoying that he wasn’t nodding along already. He was sure she did.
“I’m not disputing the decision-making process,” he drawled. “But it seems to me that if any other man had run into you on the sidewalk, you might just as well have considered him the perfect husband for the job.”
She blinked again, then frowned even more, and he was forced to conclude that he liked it even better up close.
“Why me is all I’m wondering,” he added.
“It would not be just any man on the street,” she said, and now her tone seemed to suggest that only someone remarkably foolish would suggest such a thing.
Finn supposed that he should have been taken aback by that, but he wasn’t.
This woman was unknowable. Prickly, disinterested, and downright ill-tempered half the time.
Maybe more like all the time, if he was honest. As far as he’d been able to tell, she was both a fixture in the community and a loner, who spent most of her time expressing her feelings through her food.
Yeah, he had it bad.
“The fact is, you’re not going to stay here forever,” Kitty Bennett announced, as if this was common knowledge.
“I’m not?” Finn felt his eyebrows hike up high. “That’s news to me.”
“You used to run a ranch, didn’t you? In Colorado, or something like that.”
Finn didn’t think that Colorado was the kind of place that could be confused for other places, with all those spectacular mountains and the blue-sky glory of it all, but he suspected she wouldn’t like it if he pointed that out.
He answered the question instead. “I did.”
Also, his love of the state of Colorado couldn’t change what had happened there. It had been months now, but that sting of betrayal hadn’t faded any. Finn was beginning to wonder if it ever would.
“Men who are used to running ranches don’t settle down in tiny little towns in the middle of nowhere,” Kitty told him with great authority.
She flapped a hand in his direction. “You look like the kind of man who is always doing something. Physical, I mean. Whatever it is men do on all these ranches. Build fences, right?”
“There’s a lot of fixing fences, yes,” Finn agreed, and he could feel himself grinning. “I could tell you about the horses, and the cattle, and the bitter cold winters that somehow turn into spring out on land that most humans never see. But sure. Let’s focus on the fences.”
If he thought she might look a little abashed at that, well. This was Kitty Bennett. She didn’t seem to register the possibility that she should be abashed. By anything.
“If you can’t go back to the ranch you left, I’m sure you’ll find a new one,” she said, again in that brisk tone, as if she was just reciting well-known facts here. “But you can probably go back, can’t you?”
“I appreciate your faith in my transferable ranching skills,” Finn replied, not sure if he wanted to laugh at this or not. “But no. I won’t be going back.”
He hadn’t talked much about what happened in Colorado, not to anyone.
Mostly because the whole thing left him feeling sick.
He had spent the whole of his adult life working on that ranch.
He’d met old Jimmy Grant by accident at a rodeo in Wyoming.
They had gotten to talking and Jimmy had convinced eighteen-year-old Finn not to chase the rodeo around, but to come work for him on his spread in the Colorado Rockies instead.
Finn had been there ever since. He’d been there while Jimmy’s own sons went off to various cities to chase down dreams that had nothing to do with their birthright, and he’d risen through the ranks on that ranch to foreman.
He’d also become another son to Jimmy in the process.
It was as simple as that. They had talked about it often.
It didn’t take a psychiatrist to figure out that Jimmy missed his own sons or that Finn hated his own father.
Over time, the relationship they’d forged went a long way toward healing them both.
Or so Finn had thought.
They had always had an understanding that Finn would take over when Jimmy couldn’t work the land anymore.
But Jimmy hadn’t gone gently into his old age.
He had dropped dead one cold morning, his city slicker sons had come back for the funeral, and they hadn’t given one shit about any understandings between their father and a man it turned out they’d never much cared for.
Finn wasn’t sure he was ever going to get over it.
And he didn’t have the slightest idea how to talk about any of it. It had happened so fast. Jimmy’s douchebag sons must have been planning to sell that land for years, because it had all been in motion before the old man was lowered into the cold ground.
They’d given Finn twenty-four hours to leave the only home he’d ever had as an adult.
Maybe he wasn’t over that, either.
“You look very ranchy,” Kitty was busy assuring him. “And there are a lot of ranches around here, too. I’m sure you can figure something out.”
“I appreciate the interest in my career, truly.” Finn ran a hand over his jaw, mostly because he would have preferred to put it on her. “But I’m not actually looking for a job at present.”
“That works, then.” Kitty looked delighted. “Because I have a job for you.”
“This gets better and better,” Finn said, and he really did laugh then. “So this is a husband for hire affair?”
She was dressed in what he considered her uniform.
Always a pair of overalls, with fingers stuffed into every pocket.
It was June now, and the sun was out, but this was still the mountains.
So instead of the tank top she wore beneath her overalls in the summer, she was wearing a sweater he suspected she might have knit herself.