Homecoming Ranch by Julia London Page B

ticked up a notch.
    She would have been very suspicious had he not seemed so surprised to see her. How was it possible that a man who looked like that, whom she’d met briefly on the road to Pine River, would end up outside Jackson Crane’s office?
    He looked at her, then at Jackson’s office, then at her again, and his eyes narrowed slightly. Something changed in his expression. It seemed to tighten somehow. “You’re the highlighter—”
    “The what? I’m Madeline. The flat, remember?” she said, and fluttered her fingers in the vague direction of where the flat had occurred.
    “I remember,” he said, and pointed in the opposite direction of where she had fluttered her fingers.
    She smiled. “Luke, right?”
    “Right. Are you here to see Jackson?”
    “Do you know him? I mean, I guess you do, seeing as how you are here. You do, right?”
    “Sort of,” he said, and looked at the office again, like maybe he wasn’t in the right place.
    “What a coincidence!” she said, feeling a little off kilter. “Are you from Pine River?”
    “I was,” he said, his gaze settling on her again. Now he looked at her as if he was seeing her differently. “I’m in Denver now. I’m here visiting family.”
    “Oh.” She laughed nervously, her gaze flicking between his eyes, his shoulders, his mouth. Holy smokes, but the air felt weird. Sort of electric. She needed a script, something to follow. But since she didn’t have one, she blurted, “So tell me, is there anything to do here? I have a three o’clock meeting and I am looking for something to do until then.”
    Luke shifted, peered closely at her. “There’s a
lot
to do in Pine River.”
    “Like what?”
    “Well,” he said, his gaze sliding down to her shoes and up again, “Do you fish?”
    Madeline snorted. “No.”
    “Hike?”
    She’d never even
contemplated
hiking, much less done it, and shook her head so that a strand of dark hair escaped the claw and bounced down on her face. His gray eyes were fixed on hers, making her feel just the tiny bit woozy.
    “What about riding horseback?” he asked.
    For some reason, that made Madeline laugh. “I don’t have a horse.”
    He arched a brow. “You don’t have to have a horse to know how to ride.”
    “But if you don’t have a horse, how would you know how to ride?”
    He studied her curiously, as if he’d just discovered a dinosaur bone. “So basically, you came to a mountain town, but you don’t do mountain stuff.”
    “Yes. I mean,
no.
I’m only here for a couple of days to tend to some business.”
    He nodded, almost as if he knew what her business was. “Well,” he said, “there are a couple of souvenir shops in town. If you aren’t here for recreation, I’m not really sure what else there is.”
    Souvenirs? He was telling her to go buy a souvenir? “Oh. Okay. Thanks.”
    “You bet. If you will excuse me, Madeline, I’m a little late for an appointment,” he said, and stepped around her, all six foot plus, impossibly broad shoulders of him. Had she missed his shoulders yesterday? “I’ll see you around, okay?”
    What did that mean?
Would
he see her around? “Okay,” she said, trying to sound airy and unconcerned. She walked on, got in her ridiculously tiny car, and surreptitiously watched him walk into Jackson’s office. This much could be said—that man knew how to fill out a pair of jeans.
    “That is enough of
that,
” she muttered to herself, opened the file Jackson had given her, and removed the hand-drawn map to Homecoming Ranch. “Get a grip, Madeline. You are not here for fun and games. Or ogling.”
    She would start, she thought, by comparing the map Jackson had given her to the map of the area she’d picked up at the visitor’s center. She certainly hoped this map didn’t include any “sometimes” passes over the mountains. In her humble opinion, roads should be clearly labeled and marked on all maps.

SEVEN
    Luke almost kicked my
ass
on “Hounds of Hell,”