Page 74 of A Forever Kind of Rancher

Chapter Ten

Epilogue

Chapter One

Grace Song tightened her hold on her bag and swore internally as another cab passed her, a passenger in the back.

The bag was heavy, she didn’t want to pay surge prices for a rideshare and she was running late after her disastrous lunch meeting. She did not need this right now. Not with her boss breathing down her neck like he had been. Not with the client from hell leering at her boobs and making comments about what she could do with his financials ifyouknowwhatImean.

And then had come the wholly unsubtle: If you want the account, you might want to make this lunch date end in dessert.

If he wasn’t such a valuable potential account she would have kneed him so hard his balls would have gone back up inside his body. Okay, she wouldn’t have done that. Because her default position was to freeze up. Because in her mind, inaction was often better than making the wrong move.

Somehow, she’d managed a curt, cold response and extricated herself.

And now she was going to be late for her next appointment because apparently, there were no cabs. She leaned toward the road and signaled again, a little more vigorously. She was just getting irritated now. And she knew if she let herself get too irritated she would get blotchy. And she didn’t want to meet a client while blotchy.

Her bag was heavy. It had her laptop, her tablet, her phone and a legal pad, because even though she had about a million electronic devices to help her organize things, she still needed to write things down physically most of the time.

She liked notebooks and shiny electronics. Everyone had their quirks. And she no longer had anyone in her life, taking up space in the apartment, telling her she had too many pens and things. So there was that.

She could have as many pens as she wanted. And framed pen-and-ink drawings of flowers and other frilly things. Independence was hers.

A cab, sadly, was not.

Another bright yellow car whizzed by and she resisted the urge to flip them her middle finger. She was flipping the world the bird on the inside, it was something she would never do on the outside. All vulgarities would be kept to herself.

Apparently, there was still someone who told her what to do. The calm, steady voice of her father, still in her head guiding her actions even though she hadn’t lived at home in twelve years.

She lifted her hand again when she saw another cab approach, and groaned when she saw the silhouette of someone in the back. Then the cab crossed a lane, cutting through traffic like a demolition-derby driver, before stopping at the sidewalk in front of her.

The driver lowered the window on the passenger side. “Where are you going?”

“The Stanton Building.”

He looked over his shoulder at the man in the back. “That’s out of your way.”

“I don’t care.”

The voice from the backseat was deep and masculine, kind of rough. And if Grace was into that sort of thing she might have been intrigued. But she didn’t have time to be into that kind of thing. She was into career advancement.

So exciting.

And getting a cab. She was seriously into getting a cab even if she had to share it.

She opened the passenger door and got inside, dragging her giant bag with her and closing the door, running her hand over her hair to make sure it was still in place.

“Thank you,” she said, barely looking over at her companion. She leaned forward and started digging through the aforementioned giant bag. Her phone was in the top inner pocket, where she always put it. She hadn’t checked her email for ten minutes and she was feeling a little twitchy.

It felt all weird in her hand. Too hard and square. Plus, it was just plain black. Not at all to her taste. Since her pretty Kate Spade case had bit the dust in a freak trip-and-fling-the-phone-across-the-room incident a couple of days ago, she hadn’t had the time to go and replace it.

She unlocked the phone and punched the email icon, then waited while it connected to the server...and waited...and oh, gosh. Could it be any slower? They were in the middle of Manhattan for heaven’s sake. There should not be a black data hole right now.

“Busy?”

She looked to her left, her eyes landing on a denim-clad thigh that was...well, it was muscley. That much was evident even with the jeans. Then she looked up, and saw his hat. Skipped right over his face and to the white cowboy hat on his head.

And then she looked at his face. Blue eyes, dark brows, a square jaw dusted with some rough-looking stubble. Very interesting lips. Again, if she was into that sort of thing.

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