True Love at Silver Creek Ranch(23)

That’s when she chose to straighten out from beneath the hood, dipstick in her hand. She followed his gaze to his boots and shook her head.

“I thought you might not have the proper gear,” she said. “There’s an old pair of Nate’s boots in the cab, along with some coveralls and a couple hats. That cowboy hat’ll fly right off your head in this wind.”

“Thanks.” He looked past her. “You’ve already loaded the hay.”

She shrugged. “I like to get an early start, especially since this retriever burns oil like crazy, and I have to keep checking it. And the stackyard would be a sinkhole of mud if I wait until the sun hits it. You’ll figure everything out.” Then she ducked back under the hood.

He studied her while she wasn’t looking. He knew there might be men who thought what she did was unfeminine. He wasn’t one of them. He could see the rope of her braid down her back and imagined what it looked like all spread out in chestnut waves around her shoulders.

Uncomfortably aroused, he opened the retriever’s cab door and donned all his gear. By the time he was done, she slammed the hood down and walked swiftly back inside the shed. When she came back out, she got up inside the driver’s side of the cab. He hopped up beside her.

“Where’s Josh?” he asked.

“We drew straws,” she said as she started up the engine. “I lost.” She gave him a dubious glance. “I get to train the greenhorn today, and Josh gets to do some horse doctoring.”

It was going to be an awkward day if her attitude was any indication. She started to drive down the bumpy dirt road, away from the buildings and out onto the rolling pastures enclosed with barbed-wire fence. He couldn’t see grass for the white depth of the snow, and the wind swirled it across the windshield. Brooke drove like she could have done it with her eyes closed.

“We’re feeding the yearlings first, farthest from the house,” she said.

She stopped at a gate and just looked at him, one brown eyebrow lifted. After a second’s incomprehension, he jumped out of the warm cab and into the cold, even more biting out there, where it came off the mountains with no trees or buildings to hinder it. He opened the gate, and after she drove through, he closed it again before getting back into the cab.

The several dozen yearlings looked like fully grown cattle but much smaller, steam rising as they breathed. Their heads came up when they heard the retriever coming, their lowing growing louder.

“They’re expecting us,” Adam said.

She nodded, pulled out a bungee cord, and affixed it the steering wheel, then climbed out the door and onto the runner, leaving the cab driverless. The retriever was still moving, but now in a slow, wide circle.

She ducked her head back inside and gave a wicked grin. “You coming?”

Grinning back, Adam opened his door and clambered up onto the bed of the retriever. The bales took up almost all the space, and he could only hang on to the chains and pull himself on top of the double stack of bales. The ground looked fifty feet away.

“If you fall, make sure you push yourself away from the truck,” she advised, still smiling. “Those are big wheels.”

And he did fall, several times that morning as they ripped the string off bales of hay and together unrolled them so that they fell in a long, uneven line, startlingly green against the white snow. It was grueling work, each bale eight hundred pounds and frozen solid. The yearlings didn’t seem to care as they chomped happily.

On the drive back to the truck shed for lunch, Adam glanced at Brooke with new respect. He might have been unloading cargo ships the last few months, but much of it was done by cranes and modern equipment. This was a more intense manual labor, and Brooke did it with ease.

She saw him looking at her. Her skin was red from the wind, tiny curls of escaped hair framing her face.

“What?” she demanded.

“You impress me.”

She looked back at the road that only showed their previous tire tracks. “Surely you’ve seen some impressive women overseas.”

“A few. You could handle yourself among them.”

She didn’t say anything, didn’t look at him.

“You’re blushing,” he said.

Brooke felt the heat of that blush spreading across her cold cheeks. “I’m not.” But she was. He sounded like he admired her strength. She didn’t want to think that because it didn’t lead anywhere she could go. “So tell me about the job you took after you were discharged. It must have needed strength because you handled yourself okay for a greenhorn. Or was it all that Marine training?”

“I worked in the shipyards on the coast of Louisiana.”