Unless he had Photoshop done on his actual face, he just looked like that. And that smile? That was a smile. Smiling was rare in her world lately. So rare it seemed almost like a mirage.
When Dan reappeared, he was wearing jeans. The dark-wash kind that looked like they’d never seen a day of work. A little too tight around the thigh to make riding a horse comfortable.
A little too tight around muscular, yummy thigh to make her comfortable.
“Maybe we should start over,” he said, sounding sincere for the first time since he’d opened his door. No condescending drawl of partner, and no lame sexual innuendo.
“Yeah. We should.” She turned back to the coffeepot. She was definitely not thinking about sexual anything right now. She most certainly wasn’t blushing.
Liar, liar, pants on so much fire.
She hated him for this. The good-looking thing, the weird-sexy-charm thing. Things she didn’t know what to do with. Hockey players were supposed to be all toothless lunkheads, right? Instead, he looked like fiction. Black hair long enough to run fingers through, green eyes the color of mountain sage, sharp nose and cheekbones, strong jaw, all his teeth.
Plus, an incredible body. Yes, he was obviously a professional athlete with that body. The T-shirt he was wearing was practically a screaming invitation to ogle his shoulders. Broad and muscly and…
No. She was not this girl. Even before, when she’d had the time and inclination for that sort of thing, tongue-tied and blushy had never been her MO.
Everything with her one and only romantic entanglement had been easy and sweet and not…confusing. She did not do confusing.
So, yes, they needed to start over.
She took a deep breath, trying to push the nerves away. “The first thing we should do is take a ride around. Get the lay of the land. Then I can help you draw up an overall ranch plan, a daily schedule.” She handed him his coffee—black, because he hadn’t had any cream in his old, whirring, rusty refrigerator.
She’d been surprised to find the house in about the same shape as that refrigerator. Old, poorly running, heavy with disuse. Every part of the place she’d seen was kind of a dump, really. She’d expected a famous hockey player who could drop a bunch of money on a consultant would also drop a lot of money on fixing up a place before he stayed in it.
“You’ll also want to go grocery shopping, if you have any hope of eating today. Have you spent any time getting acquainted with Blue Valley?”
“Is there much to get acquainted with?”
She shook her head. While she hadn’t expected the disrepair, she wasn’t surprised to find Dan Sharpe was kind of useless. She pulled the little notebook and pen that she used for taking notes around the ranch out of her front pocket.
“You eaten breakfast?” she asked.
“Nope. Just crawled out of bed, remember?”
“What were you planning on eating?”
He glanced around the kitchen with a thoughtful look on his face. “You know, I hadn’t given it much thought. McDonald’s nearby? I haven’t had one of their hash browns in years.”
She stared. And stared. And stared a little more.
Dan grimaced. “No McDonald’s, huh?”
“Buck said this was your family place. They didn’t clue you in to anything?”
“My grandparents moved to Florida over twenty-five years ago, and they aren’t in the best shape to clue me in.”
She scratched her pen across the top of the page until the ink gave, then she started her list. “We’ll go to town first. We should go ahead and pick up some fencing supplies—from the looks of it, that’ll be your first order of business. Then we can do a grocery run before coming back.”
“Fencing?”
Jeez. He really was clueless. As much as she’d expected him to be spoiled by money and fame, she thought if he wanted to run this place, he’d actually know something.
“Maybe, before we do anything, we should figure out just what you’re wanting to do here.”
“I want to start a ranch.”
“In your mind, what does that entail?”
He shrugged, starting to paw through cabinets. “I dunno. Riding a horse. Humming the Bonanza theme song.”
She swore under her breath, but when he lifted one eyebrow, she knew he’d heard her. “I need the twenty grand, don’t get me wrong, but I’m not here to get your ranch going only to have you screw it six ways to Sunday once I’m gone. Or once you are.”
He found a tin of crackers and pulled it out, lifting the lid and sniffing before slapping it back shut and tossing the whole thing into the garbage can.
The garbage can that didn’t have a garbage bag in it. This guy was a serious mess. Twenty grand. Twenty grand. She needed to repeat that over and over. Nothing mattered. Nothing but getting to the end of this three-month job and getting that paycheck.