LITMIR.BIZ

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formed an idea of who Taylor was. Of what she was—someone he didn’t want to feel a connection with. Yet it had happened, and now he had to contend with it. The best way to do that was to focus on something other than touching and connecting and bullshit like that. So he would go to work and pretend nothing had happened. Because nothing else was going to happen.

      Cole fully intended to put Taylor to work on the farm. He needed help. The knee he could deal with. He’d hurt it before and knew what to expect. The wrist was going to be a problem. It throbbed whenever he moved, which wasn’t helping his low-grade headache. Nor was the sight of Taylor leaving the bunkhouse dressed in jeans and a hoodie and crossing the driveway on her way to his house.

      Time to go to work.

      Time to shove aside idle thoughts about what it would have felt like to put his mouth where his thumb had been less than an hour ago. He hadn’t been laid in a month of Sundays, and that was clouding his judgment. His body wanted what it couldn’t have…well, his body was just going to have to deal.

      Taylor seemed surprised to see him standing near the gate as she approached, and a guarded look slid in over top of the thoughtful expression she’d worn as she’d walked toward the house, her chin low, her gaze down.

      Vulnerable wasn’t a word he would have used to describe her before this morning, but when an overachiever was no longer able to achieve, when everything the person knew turned out to be wrong…it had to be a rough adjustment.

      Not that Taylor would purposely show weakness. Her chin lifted and she met his gaze head-on…but he couldn’t say she looked enthusiastic.

      “What’s on the farming agenda?”

      Nope. Definitely not enthusiastic. Cole had a grudging employee on his hands. Cool. All the better to give her back a little of her own.

      “We’re not farming.” The seeds were in the ground, and until he had to deal with weed control and mowing along the ditches and roads, he didn’t have a lot of farmwork to do.

      Her eyebrows lifted in surprise. “Then how do you plan to work my ass off?”

      “We’re tackling the boneyard.” The area where the scrap metal, wood and wire were collected had been long neglected, and part of his lease agreement with Karl had been to put the area into a semblance of order.

      Her mouth opened, then closed again, telling him that he didn’t need to explain the task any further. If he’d had any doubts about whether she understood what they were going to do, it was answered by the distasteful curl of her lips. She asked, “How are ‘we’ going to do that, when half of ‘us’ are injured?”

      “The knee’s already feeling better.” As long as he was wearing his brace and iced the joint every few hours.

      “How about the wrist?”

      “I’ll manage.”

      “Fine,” she said darkly. “Just don’t hurt yourself again, because I’m not above demanding eight months of free living.”

      “And I’m not above forgetting I ever made a deal.”

      She wrinkled her nose at him. He guessed she had no idea that it came off as cute rather than the sneer she was probably shooting for. “What’s the goal for today?”

      “To tackle the boneyard?” He thought he’d made that clear.

      “No,” she said with a slight roll of her eyes. “What is the specific goal?”

      “I thought we’d start by dragging out the T-posts and stacking them, and then maybe go after the scrap wood.”

      “Are we only organizing? Or are we also sorting and discarding?”

      “Sorting and discarding.” He waited to see whether they needed to write a formal plan of action, delineating objectives before embarking on the cleanup, but Taylor seemed satisfied with a verbal.

      “You’re not really up for this, are you?” And was he horrible for rather enjoying her discomfort?

      “A deal is a deal,” she said stiffly. She looked down at her pretty painted nails. “I need gloves.”

      He reached into his pocket and pulled out his extra pair and handed them to her.

      “Thank you.”

      They walked around the barn to where Karl had stacked debris for the past thirty years on top of the debris he’d inherited from his father.

      “You know what a T-post looks like?”

      “A ‘T’?”

      “Just checking,” he said. “After insulting you with the Angus cow incident—”

      “I did an oral report on cattle in the fifth grade. I have good recall.”

      “No report on fence posts?”

      “Unfortunately, no.”

      He dug into the jumble of fence posts and grabbed a bent T-post. After fighting it for a few seconds, he managed to free it from its buddies and hold it up. “It’s these ones with the spade on the end. If you find a bent one, we’ll chuck it into the back of the truck.” Which he did, one-handed. “If it’s straight, we’ll stack them here.”

      “Got it.” She stepped onto the junk at the edge of the debris, and her foot slipped. Cole reached out and caught her arm with his good hand, steadying her. “You good?”

      “Yeah.”

      “Up to date on tetanus?”

      “If I say no, I guess that means you can’t work my ass off.” She shot him a hopeful glance.

      “And then you’ll have to move.”

      She gave a mock sigh. “Totally up to date.” She reached down for a T-post tangled in wire and a mishmash of other bent posts. It didn’t move. She let go to choose another, which also refused to budge. “You?”

      “Likewise.” Handling as much rusty wire as he did while fixing fences, he couldn’t afford not to be up to date.

      Taylor propped her hands on her hips and surveyed the tangled mess with a deep frown.

      This was going to take all day if Taylor kept grabbing posts and letting go of them. “Look, if you find a post that’s—”

      Taylor made a dismissive gesture, then reached down, grabbed the end of a post and pulled. When it didn’t give, she started shaking it up and down and then twisting it sideways until finally she yanked it free, almost falling over backward in the process.

      “Way to work out your aggressions,” Cole muttered.

      She ignored him and tossed the post toward the bed of the truck as he had. It hit the side with a clang and landed on the gravel. Cole gave her a look.

      “Sorry,” she muttered. “I’ll do better next time.”

      “Or maybe you think if you beat up my truck that you’ll get put on another detail?”

      “Show me the dent,” she said.

      Okay. She had a point. The truck was so dented from years of work that it would be almost impossible to find the new ding.

      Cole tipped back his hat. “I’m getting the idea you really hate this.”

      “I hate busywork.” She lifted her chin at him, clearly challenging him to deny that was what they were doing. “This yard has been here since I was a kid. No one has ever done anything but add to it. Why are we sorting it?”

      “I promised your grandfather.”

      She gave him a disbelieving look. “So this isn’t something you cooked up to make me miserable?”

      “I didn’t cook it up,” he said, without addressing the “make her miserable” part. He didn’t really want her

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