Page 78 of A Forever Kind of Rancher

“I don’t look mean?” she asked, forcing her eyebrows together, feeling her forehead crinkle. She was risking fine lines for this guy, what the eff was wrong with her? He held out his hand and planted his thumb between her brows, smoothing out her forehead. “Not so mean.” She should be annoyed that he’d touched her. He didn’t know her. What right did he have to touch her?

“I...”

His gaze dropped to her mouth and all the words got completely sucked out of her head. Every word she knew in English and Mandarin. And the little bit of high school Spanish she remembered, too.

All with his eyes. Those were some very powerful eyes.

And he started leaning in. Oh...no. What was she going to do? This man that she didn’t even know was about to press his mouth to hers, and she wanted him to. Oh...oh...shoot.

The cab pulled up to the curb and stopped.

“My stop,” she said, jerking back from him, her hand searching for the door handle. She reached into her purse and pulled out a twenty. “Just...keep the change. I...yeah.” She started to get out.

“Wait,” he said.

She turned, his absolutely perfect face stopping her in her tracks for a moment. “What?”

“Your phone.”

She reached in and grabbed the phone off the seat. “Thanks. See you...well, I won’t see you.”

She closed the door and headed toward her office building, her hands shaking. Her whole body shaking. She’d just been saved by a timely stop.

Saved from making a huge mistake.

She curled her hands around her phone, the picture of the fox pressed up against it. Yes, it would have been a mistake.

And she didn’t have time to linger on it. She had work to do.

Chapter Two

Grace whipped her phone out as soon as she hit the elevator. She swiped the slider and the phone opened, without asking for a code or pausing to recognize her face.

Weird.

The email icon at the bottom showed two hundred unread messages. Just the sight made her insides recoil in horror. “What the...”

She scrolled through the icons and saw...an app containing sex facts, and one containing information about beer.

What. The. Hell.

Then she opened the mail client. Mostly, it was junk. A couple of read messages with the subject line Urgent from someone named Marsha Colbert.

This was not her phone. It was Zack Camden’s phone.

“Argh!” she said to the elevator, her frustration echoing back at her as it came to a stop. The doors slid open and she pasted a smile on and slipped the phone back in her bag.

“Hi, Grace.”

Carol, her boss’s PA, greeted her brightly. “Hi, Carol,” Grace answered, doing her best to keep smiling.

Always appear unruffled. Always.

That was her motto. She never, ever wanted to appear like she was drowning, even if she was paddling like hell beneath the water to keep her head from going under.

You didn’t get anywhere in life by complaining. You didn’t get anywhere cutting corners. If you worked harder, better than everyone else, that would win in the end. It always did. She lived by that, always. And she would live it now.

“Doug was looking for you,” Carol said.

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