LITMIR.BIZ

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that she wasn’t suitable, and moved on to interview other, more qualified women. But each time he ended a conversation with one of them, his thoughts kept straying back to his phone call to Tori. There had been something about her soft, Southern voice as she told him about her time on the family farm that compelled him to choose her, instead of using his head to select one of the more obvious candidates to be his bride.

      Now he had a beautiful wife who he would bet everything he owned had no experience at all with livestock. What she did have were the softest lips he’d ever had the privilege to kiss, as well as a voice that set his pulse to racing each time he heard it.

      “So much for keeping a romantic attraction out of the equation, genius,” he muttered to himself.

      Not at all comfortable with the direction his thoughts were taking, he decided to analyze his reaction to his new wife a bit later. He lightly touched her shoulder. “Tori, we’re home.”

      Her long dark lashes fluttered once, then opened to reveal her extraordinary violet eyes. His lower body tightened as she gazed up at him. She looked soft, feminine and so damned desirable that he barely resisted the urge to release her seat belt and pull her into his arms.

      “We’re here already?” She sat up in the bucket seat. “How long was I asleep?”

      “About an hour and a half.” He forced a smile. “You wanted me to wake you when we got to the ridge above the ranch.”

      He heard her soft intake of breath and knew the moment she caught sight of the Rusty Spur Ranch in the valley below. He forgot all about his lapse of judgment as a sense of satisfaction filled him at the expression of awe on her pretty face. She was clearly impressed by the size of the operation.

      “How big is your ranch?” she asked, her voice filled with amazement.

      “You’re looking at the ranch headquarters. There’s about ten thousand acres here and another twenty thousand of pastureland outside of the valley. I also lease another fifteen thousand acres from the Bureau of Land Management.” He pointed to the big log home his great-great-grandfather had built. “That’s where we’ll live, along with Buck. He tends to the house and cooks now that he’s retired from ranch work.”

      “It’s gorgeous and so big,” she said, unbuckling the shoulder harness to sit forward for a better look out of the windshield. “I can’t tell from this distance. What are all those buildings behind the house?”

      Her almost childlike enthusiasm and questions caused his chest to swell with pride. The Laughlins had settled in the valley over a hundred and twenty five years ago and each generation had made the ranch bigger and better than the last.

      He pointed toward the buildings directly behind the house. “Those are the barns. There’s one for the work horses, one for storing grain and hay, another one for ranch trucks, tractors and other equipment. That one we use for treating sick and injured livestock and that big one is where we keep the tractor trailers we use for transporting cattle to market and to some of the farthest pastures.” Pointing to the far side of the valley, he added, “That smaller house over there is where the foreman and his wife live and the bigger one next to it is the bunkhouse where the single men stay.”

      “There’ll be a woman I can talk to from time to time?” Tori asked, brightening even more.

      “When she has time, you can. Sally Ann is usually pretty busy cooking for the men and she sometimes helps Buck take care of the ranch house when his arthritis is acting up.” He grinned. “She and her husband, Jack, have lived on the ranch for as long as I can remember. I’m sure she’ll enjoy having another woman around after having to deal with men all these years.”

      “So she’s a bit older?”

      “I don’t know exactly how old she is and I’m for damned sure not going to make the mistake of asking her,” he said, laughing. “But if I had to venture a guess, I’d say she’s somewhere in her early to mid-fifties.”

      Tori seemed to digest that a moment before she pointed to the corral and holding pens. “Are those…” She stopped, and he could tell she was searching for the right word. “…corrals?”

      “There are a couple of corrals for the horses when we let them out of their stalls for some fresh air and exercise, a round pen for breaking them to ride and about eight holding pens for the cattle,” he explained. “We use those when we bring the heifers in from the pastures at calving time and to separate the stock during roundup.”

      As he watched Tori take in the vastness of his ranch, Eli couldn’t help but marvel at the difference between her reaction and the first woman that he’d brought home to see the ranch. That had been ten years ago when he brought his college girlfriend home for Thanksgiving and it had turned out to be the beginning of the end of their relationship.

      The woman had taken one look at the remote location and the amount of snow that was already on the ground and hadn’t been able to get back to Los Angeles fast enough. She hadn’t liked the stark beauty of the mountains, didn’t like the smell of the pines surrounding the valley and couldn’t believe anyone would want to live in something as primitive as a log home. Never mind that the house had all the latest conveniences, as well as satellite hookup to television and the internet. She hadn’t even appreciated that at night the stars looked brighter and seemed almost close enough to touch. Or that there were so many they couldn’t be counted. All she could do was complain about how dark it was at night and question why his father didn’t consider selling off the land to a developer. He’d tried to give her the benefit of the doubt, but that was before he found out about her lies and the scheme that would have eventually parted him from a good chunk of the Laughlin fortune.

      “How many people live on the Rusty Spur?” Tori asked, bringing him back to the present.

      Eli started the truck and began to navigate the snow-packed road leading over the ridge to the valley floor below. “Counting me, you and Buck, there are ten of us that live on the ranch year-round. But during the summer months, I usually hire another five to ten men to help out with cutting and storing hay and mending fences, as well as working during fall roundup.”

      “I would have thought you’d need more than that from the size of this place,” she said, her soft voice still filled with amazement.

      “Contrary to popular belief we don’t do everything on horseback or we would need more hired hands.”

      “Really?”

      She sounded almost disappointed and confirmed his suspicion that she had little, if any, knowledge of how a modern ranch or farm operated. But he wasn’t going to call attention to the fact. For one thing, they were already married—he had taken the plunge and planned to give it a shot. And for another, he wanted to see just how long it was going to take before she admitted that she knew nothing about rural life and what excuse she was going to give him for misrepresenting herself.

      Her false claims might have been cause for concern, were it not for the iron-clad prenup they had signed before the wedding ceremony. That was his insurance. It not only protected his assets—the one-month get-acquainted period also gave him the time to figure out why she had answered his ad when she clearly wasn’t qualified, as well as why he couldn’t seem to bring himself to confront her about it.

      “We use pickup trucks and four-wheel ATVs for a lot of the things that we used to have to do on horseback,” he explained, noticing that she was paying extremely close attention to what he said. “But we do ride horses to move some of the herds to the summer pastures in the upper elevations. Most of those are areas that can’t be reached on wheels.”

      “Herds?” She looked intrigued. “How many cows do you have?”

      He laughed out loud. “I have four herds of cattle—two of registered Hereford and two of Black Angus. And since we raise our own working stock, I have a herd of quarter horses, as well.”

      “I meant cattle.” Her cheeks colored a pretty pink and he knew she realized she had slipped up.

      When

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