Bodyguard Rancher
Автор
Kacy Cross
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Chapter 1
Charli could feel the ranch hand watching her. Not in the I’m-being-paid-to-keep-you-safe way, like she’d expect given the fact that he’d been employed to do exactly that. But in the way a man watched a woman when he wanted her to know he was interested.
Well, she wasn’t interested.
She refused to so much as glance in his direction as she strolled from the back door of the house to the barn. Heath McKay was the opposite of easy on the eyes. The man was so hot he could burn a woman’s retinas if she stared directly at him.
He knew it too. He was in that category of male who could charm a nun out of her habit. Who always had the next woman waiting in the wings—or maybe even right on stage at the same time as his current woman. How did Charli know? Because Heath McKay was Exactly Her Type in huge ten-foot-tall letters and she had crappy taste in men.
Her sister, Sophia, whom Charli secretly called Super Sophia, had hired him to make sure no one kidnapped any other Lang women from the ranch. After Sophia’s harrowing experience of being taken from their home at gunpoint, she’d laid down some serious cash to ensure there were no repeats. Charli could have saved her the trouble. No one paid enough attention to The Other Lang Sister to bother kidnapping her.
She was about to change things, though. She had a plan. A good one. She was going to rise from the ashes of her old life and be the superhero of her new life. Maybe not Super Sophia, because her sister already had that locked. But someone else just as good, like Black Widow.
That was it. Charli could be Black Widow, eater of men, completely and utterly fearsome to the opposite sex. Black Widow was also awesome at her job and beautiful.
She could dye her hair red and buy some black outfits. It could work. She’d been telling herself to have a goal, hadn’t she?
Now she just needed the right man to complete this picture.
“Paxton,” she trilled as Heath’s partner, the lean computer whiz, exited the new barn directly in her path. Lucky break. “Exactly who I was looking for.”
Or rather, he was good enough.
“Me?” Paxton Pierce pointed at himself, a thin sheen of panic glazing his eyes that could be considered offensive if she let herself stop and think about it. “I was just...uh, Jonas is expecting me to move the horses from the south pasture with some of the other guys.”
“You still have to do cowboy stuff even though you’re technically doing security now?” she asked innocently, despite knowing that Paxton, Heath and Sophia’s boyfriend, Ace Madden, were still working undercover as ranch hands. The fewer people who were aware of their real jobs, the better. “What if I have a security emergency? I might need you to subdue an intruder.”
Heath was still watching her. She could feel his gaze between her shoulder blades, and it set off something inside that she could only describe as delicious. But she’d take that to her grave.
Charli let her fingertips graze Paxton’s arm the way Black Widow might when she was being coy and flirty. It wasn’t a chore. He was so cute with his clean looks and even cleaner Stetson, which looked like it had never hit the dirt. When she’d decided to move to the ranch and find a nice cowboy, Paxton Pierce was exactly what she’d pictured in her head.
Paxton could be the one to break her streak of cheating SOBs. He was clearly a great guy, one who called his mother every Sunday and had likely never seen the inside of a jail cell. Probably. This was her fantasy, and he could totally star in it.
Paxton’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he stepped just out of her reach. “If you have a security emergency, that’s what McKay is for.”
Yeah. Heath McKay was the problem, with his square jaw sporting a perpetual five o’clock shadow, and hooded gaze with even more shadows, and biceps that could make a woman drool. There was not one lick of nice anywhere in that man’s body.
“Can’t I switch babysitters midstream if I want to? Ask Ace to assign you to me instead?”
Man, there was an idea. Why hadn’t she thought of that before now?
“Because—well, actually...” Poor guy swallowed so fast that he almost choked. “I’m what you call the brains. McKay is the brawn. Not that he’s not smart, but his talents are definitely in the physical realm.”
Oh, there was absolutely no question about the validity of that statement. But seriously. They’d caught the guy who had been terrorizing Sophia. The university people had squirreled away the gold coin she and Ace had found. What was there, really, to protect Charli from?
“I like a man with brains,” she said with a little laugh.
Paxton did not seem bowled over by her charm. That was deflating. Maybe she should reel it back a little. Come at this from another angle. What would Black Widow do? She wouldn’t sit around and wait for a man to figure out how awesome she was.
“Maybe you could find some time to ride with me out to the west pasture?” Charli fluttered her lashes. “I need to do a practice trail ride run before the guests start arriving next week.”
That’s when she’d start being taken seriously around the ranch. When people would see her as the other Ms. Lang instead of Charli, the screwup sister of the boss. As soon as she and Sophia welcomed the first guests, this place would stop being an inheritance and start being a dude ranch.
The Cowboy Experience. It had been her idea, one that she was secretly so proud of that she sometimes danced around in a circle of glee that Sophia had taken the suggestion.
Soon, she’d be able to forget she’d gotten fired from her last job at a pet store. A pet store for crying out loud. Where she’d been in charge of cleaning birdcages.
“Uh.” Paxton glanced around feverishly. “I’d love to go on a trail ride but I, uh, I have to go do a thing with Jonas?”
“Are you sure? You don’t sound sure.”
Paxton edged away, pulling at his shirt collar as he practically tripped over his own two cowboy boots. “I’m sure. Ask McKay to ride with you on your trail ride, uh...thing.”
She watched him go, the sun beating down on her back, vaguely disappointed Black Widow channeling had not gone well. But what did she expect? That she’d magically figure out in the course of two minutes how to not be a train wreck when it came to her love life? More practice needed, stat.
But when she turned around, Heath was standing a scant two feet away.
Not the sun on her back, then. Him. It was always him, right there, leaning against the fence, arms crossed in that insolent slouch that screamed Lock Up Your Daughters. His battered hat had seen more than its share of action, as had the very lived-in body underneath it. A scar ran along the base of his neck as if someone had tried to slice his throat but then abruptly stopped.
The man reeked of promise and next-level decadence.
Heath tipped his chin, his heated blue eyes tracking her with a lazy, practiced sweep. “Maybe you should try on someone your own size.”
“Like who? You?”
She crossed her arms and stared him down in kind, but she had a feeling her own sweep of his cut torso and legs that went on forever had a lot more intensity in it than she’d like. It wasn’t fair. No human should be that perfectly put together.
“Yeah. You could do worse.”
“I have,” she informed him sweetly. “That’s how I know exactly what I’d find inside your box of chocolates. No interest in a repeat, thanks. You can toddle off and go do whatever undercover security agents do when they’re pretending to be cowboys. I’m sure you’re bored out of your mind watching me anyway.”
“Bored is not the word I’d use.”
Nonchalance rolled from him in waves, as if nothing bothered him, which pushed every single one of her buttons. A man this hot must have a volcano under his skin and she’d pay money to see it erupt. It would serve him right for harassing her.
“Well, when you think of the right word, don’t come find me,” she shot back and pivoted to walk away, speaking to him over her shoulder. “I’m going back to the house. Where I’ll be doing very boring things that don’t need your attention.”
“Pierce is all wrong for you,” he called, and she could almost hear his mouth tipping up in that amused smile that fooled no one. “You need someone you can’t run roughshod over.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
She escaped into the house, shutting the door of the blue Victorian behind her, then leaned on it, her lungs curiously unable to drag in air all at once. That man drove her bananas. But that didn’t stop the frappé mode activating on her insides whenever he was around.
There had to be a cure for that. She’d tried going out with him once, just to see if she could burn off the attraction by feeding it. No dice. She’d spent the whole time with a heightened awareness that it wouldn’t take Heath McKay more than about five minutes to break her heart. And she’d yet to patch it back together after the last loser had finished with it.
Careful to stay away from the windows in case he was peering through one, Charli skirted the kitchen island and dashed for the front door. Her babysitter was likely still stationed near the back door, his gaze trained on it in the event she made a reappearance.
Joke was on him. She lived to give him the slip.
No one put Charli in the corner. Well, except for the times she did it to herself. Which was most times. But that was the beauty of her brand-new plan. She was reinventing herself. No more screwing up. The time for that had long passed.
Skipping out the front door was a piece of cake. She had a lot of practice exiting a building without making a sound. She’d done it as a teenager plenty of times—it was easier to sneak out than it was to upset her single mother who was doing the best she could to raise three daughters after Charli’s deadbeat dad had taken off.
Then there was the time she’d had to back up quickly after coming home to her apartment early to find Toby in bed with a very enthusiastic woman who was not Charli. Definitely not the time to hit a squeaky floor joist.
Better to stay off that subject before she forgot she was over Toby’s cheating hide.
Back outside, Charli rounded the house near the long drive and headed for the woods. She really did have to scout the area for her trail ride, but she’d skip the horse this time. Too visible. Heath would insist on coming along and she wasn’t about to fall for that trap. The more time they spent together, the harder it would be to convince herself she wasn’t attracted to him.
This circular path to the woods meant she had to veer close to the encampment where all the university people lived. They had said it would be temporary, but it was starting to feel like they’d never leave. Over two dozen tents lined the south pasture, most of them housing archaeologists or anthropologists or some other kinds of ologists with names that were largely unpronounceable by regular humans. There were some museum people thrown into the mix too, or at least that was her understanding, after they’d found the jade beads from some dead guy’s tomb in Mexico. Pakal the Great.
Apparently, her deadbeat father had actually found some kind of treasure during his frequent jaunts to the Yucatan. The whole time he’d been busy ignoring his family, he’d scored some priceless artifacts and then buried them in various places around his father’s ranch.
Grandpa Lang had died, then left the ranch to Sophia, Charli and their baby sister, Veronica, who had yet to check out her inheritance. Ergo, they now owned the treasure too, for whatever good that did when Sophia had unilaterally decided all the stuff should go back to Mexico.
As long as the ologists left before the guests got here, they could have the dead guy’s tomb decorations.
And then Heath would be free to leave the ranch. No more laser beams between her shoulder blades. No more lying awake at night fantasizing about threading her fingers through his almost shoulder-length thick, curly hair, mussed from a day of hat-wearing, cowboy things.
“Hello, luv,” a silky voice said from behind her.
Charli glanced over her shoulder to see one of the university guys with his eyes glued to her butt. He wore a Harvard T-shirt and a smirk that he’d likely developed around the silver spoon in his mouth.
“Hey. My eyes are up here.” She pointed with two fingers to her face. “And it’s Ms. Lang.”
“Ah. You’re one of the sisters.” His gaze traveled up her front to land on her face as instructed, but his attention still felt a tad...off. “I’m Trevor Longley. Which Ms. Lang are you, Sophia or Charlotte?”
“Neither one.” Not that she owed him any sort of explanation, but she couldn’t stand it when someone called her Charlotte. “I’m Charli. Charlotte is a spider or a princess, take your pick, but don’t address me that way if you expect an answer.”
“Charli, then,” he adapted smoothly, catching her hand in his and bringing it to his mouth in some kind of weird eighteenth-century mannerism that she’d seen a dozen times on Bridgerton.
In real life, it wasn’t so charming. It was kind of creepy. Plus, this guy wasn’t British. He did have that moneyed New England look about him, though, so maybe he thought that counted for some reason?
“Well, see you around, Trevor,” she said in hopes he would take the hint.
He didn’t. He fell into step beside her, hooking their elbows together as if they were old pals and she’d invited him along on her trail ride scouting trip. This was getting a little tiresome and a lot out of hand.
She disentangled their arms and scowled at him, which obviously didn’t mean the same thing to Harvard guys as it did to everyone else, since he just laughed.
“That’s no way to be,” he said with what felt like forced cheerfulness. “We’re going to be good friends, I can tell.”
“Because I’m giving you all sorts of come-on-to-me vibes?” she asked witheringly. “Maybe you need your vision checked.”
Trevor’s smile got a little less friendly and developed an edge she didn’t like. “That’s no way to speak to a guest.”
No, it wasn’t. Should she reel it back? Practice being a little more friendly? She kind of sucked at that. But there was something off about Trevor that tripped her radar.
“You’re not a guest, Trevor,” she emphasized. “You’re a grad student who is quickly wearing out his welcome.”
Where was everyone else? There were supposed to be approximately nine trillion dig nerds around here. Every time she left the house, she tripped over more than her share, yet there was no movement from the temporary campground. The woods behind her felt eerily quiet.
Why hadn’t she thought to scout for a trail in the front part of ranch land where the grad students usually didn’t go? Because she’d been thinking about Heath, not anything that mattered.
“You’re going to want to watch your mouth, Charlotte,” he said sharply and that’s when he grabbed her.
His fingers bit into her arm as she yelped. What was this guy’s problem?
She couldn’t get free. No amount of yanking pulled her arm loose and the last tug wrenched her shoulder. “You’re hurting me.”
And if she didn’t figure this out, he could do a lot more than that. Genuine fear coated her throat.
“Good,” he snarled, all traces of his previous cheer gone. “I’m trying to be nice to you but you’re obviously a bi—”
“Take your hand off Ms. Lang.”
Heath. His voice saturated the tense atmosphere, flooding her with relief.
His expression as hard as his body, Heath materialized at her side, towering over her. And Trevor. Who didn’t seem to be aware of the fact that Heath McKay stood a head taller and outweighed him by fifty pounds of muscle.
“Find your own amusement, friend,” Trevor tossed out, his fingernails cutting into her skin. Also known as not following orders.
Heath cracked his neck, his gaze lethally honed into Trevor’s face. “Looks like I have.”
