She’d arrived right on schedule, and as per instructions, followed the driveway between the ranch house—or more precisely, the mansion—and an enormous garage. At that point, the paved drive converted to a dirt lane that led to a machine shop and several outbuildings, then curved downward to the bottom of the lawn.
She backed the truck into the space in front of the machine shed doors to turn it around so she could back down the lane. She’d bought the extended cab truck secondhand and it had a few quirks. One of those quirks was that the tailgate didn’t always stay latched. She hit a bump and it dropped.
“Poopy-sticks,” she muttered under her breath, then shifted the truck into park and got out to close it.
“All this time, you’ve been jerking me around?”
Hannah looked up. The voice was high and so angry it carried. The accusation wasn’t leveled at her, though. The garage door was open and a woman stood in it with her back to Hannah, shouting at someone inside.
Hannah recognized her. It was Simone, a casual friend who hung out in the taproom at the brewery far more than she should. Hannah drove her home on a regular basis—often enough that she might have to start charging for what had initially been intended as an emergency courtesy shuttle service. Right now, Simone was getting the “It’s not you, it’s me”speech from someone much more soft-spoken.
Hannah winced in sympathy. She’d suffered through the humiliation of that particular speech. The last thing she wanted was to be caught witnessing Simone’s. She slammed the tailgate again—it couldn’t be helped—and dove for the driver’s door of the truck.
The truck door, unlike the tailgate, had a tendency to stick. She tugged at the handle, but it was no use. She’d have to climb in through the passenger side. She practically hurdled the front of the truck in her haste, but as she rounded the hood, Simone emerged from the garage and there was nowhere for her to hide. Two red flags rode high on Simone’s cheeks. She reeked of outrage.
Behind Simone sauntered an Adonis sporting a mass of black curls badly in need of a trim. He crammed the tail of his rumpled med school, navy-colored T-shirt into shorts, leaving no confusion as to what had just taken place.
Their gazes collided—surprise in his, no doubt horror in hers. A broad smile of pleased recognition stretched across his too-handsome face. “Hey, Hannah. Fancy meeting you here in Grand.”
“I—” Hannah said, lost for words.
“You two know each other?” Simone asked, not looking particularly pleased by the discovery.
“We’re both from Sweetheart. Hannah’s sister is married to a good friend of mine,” Dallas replied. “We met at their wedding.”
Hannah blushed. She couldn’t help it. His tone said they’d done a lot more than meet—which they had.
Simone wasn’t stupid. She took one look at Hannah’s hot face and put two and two together. “A word of advice,DoctorTucker,” she said, sticking her nose in the air. “Don’t even think about playing games with the women in Grand. We talk amongst ourselves.” On that cryptic note, she stalked off.
A crowd had formed at the side of the house facing the garage. It looked like Dan McKillop was giving an interview. The tall, pretty girl with the short, spiky blond hair at his side must be Jazz O’Reilly, the manager who ran Custer County airport’s new smoke jumping base. Everyone was talking about her. They’d have a whole lot more to talk about now. A few keen observers who’d overheard Simone’s parting words politely pretended they hadn’t.
“Why don’t I give you a hand unloading the truck?” Dallas suggested, apparently oblivious to the negative energy swirling around them. When they’d first met, she’d admired his ability to ignore other people’s opinions. Now, not so much.
Since he was the customer, however, she didn’t have a whole lot of choice. “Thanks.”
She backed the truck down the dirt drive. He met her at the foot of the lawn and opened the finicky tailgate. She climbed in the back of the truck and rolled the keg dolly to Dallas, who lifted it to the ground. They unloaded the first two kegs without any trouble.
She wiped the sweat from her forehead with the back of her gloved hand and tried to ignore the clammy feel of it trickling down the gully of her spine. It seeped through her white cotton shirt and puddled at the waistband of her shorts. Long, sticky tendrils of hair, freed from her braid by exertion, clung like wet spaghetti to the sides of her jaw and neck.
Jeez, but Grand, Montana, was hot in the summer.
She lowered the third of ten pony kegs from the tailgate of her pickup into Dallas’s waiting hands. He loaded it onto the keg dolly and she watched him wheel the dolly across the carefully coiffed lawn. Ninety pounds didn’t sound like a whole lot until multiplied by ten.
Two hundred and seventy pounds down, six hundred and thirty to go.Would this day never end?
She wrestled the fourth keg to the lip of the tailgate. Dallas trotted toward her. He dragged the now-empty keg dolly behind him.
He was every bit as beautiful as she remembered. So many more memories emerged. His quiet voice, coaxing her into easing already lowered inhibitions thanks to a few fortifying drinks. His hands on her thighs. His warm breath on her skin. His tongue on her…
And he’d just been with another woman.
She lost her grip on the keg. It toppled just as Dallas bent down to adjust the wheel lock on the dolly. It bounced off his shoulder, knocking him flat, and hit the ground on its side, then rolled a few feet.
She was far less concerned about the keg than she was for Dallas, who sprawled in the dirt. A ninety-pound pony keg, dropped from a height of four feet, could pack quite a wallop. She didn’t think she’d dropped it on purpose, but she couldn’t be sure. She scrambled from the back of the truck, hoping she hadn’t damaged or killed him. It would cause her one more regret where he was concerned. “Are you hurt?”
He was already on his feet again, however, and rubbing his shoulder where the rim of the keg had struck him.
“I’m fine,” he said. He smiled at her to prove it.