Page 54 of Second Chance with the Rancher

But he didn’t say anything, and she wasn’t sure if that was better or worse.

Nate brought along a portable speaker and connected it to his phone through Bluetooth, so in a matter of seconds country music was playing throughout the cabin. She cringed. Country music was not her cup of tea.

That didn’t stop her from humming and singing along about a man’s dog running away and his truck getting keyed after he cheated on his girlfriend.

While Nate was busy putting the bed frame together, Mieka went about putting all the dishes in the sink to wash—she remembered to bring over-sized rubber gloves that reached her elbows—and setting up the kitchen chairs. The tables were handcrafted by a local woodworker with live-edge slabs and an acrylic river running through it, but the chairs were just standard IKEA chairs that needed to be assembled with an Allen key.

Triss was going to wash all the towels and linens and have Cal drop them off when he did his next deliveries. So for now, they had towels from the farmhouse and sleeping bags. Nate had thought of everything.

“Wanna come up and help me with something, Minx?” Nate asked from the loft.

She dried her hands on a dishtowel and climbed the ladder to find him sitting on the floor next to a nearly assembled bed frame.

Her belly clenched as images of “breaking in the bed” or “christening” it with Nate took over every other rational thought in her head.

“Brain out of the gutter, Minx,” he said, tossing her another cheeky smile.

She rolled her eyes. “What did you need my help with?”

“Hold on to that piece there so I can slide Peg D into Hole V, please.” His smile grew as he pointed to the long piece of wood he wanted her to grab.

“Fuck off,” she said, turning to head back to the ladder.

“I’m serious, Minx. I need your help,” he said with an obnoxiously sexy chuckle that made white-hot tendrils of lust uncoil through her. “Though, the peg isn’t called Peg D. It’s just a wooden dowel, but I need you to hold the end for me.”

Sucking in a breath she prayed would be fortifying and relaxing, she turned back around, crouched down and grabbed the piece he indicated giving him a look that said she was neither amused nor aroused, but irritated. She was actually all three, but would die before she told him that.

He slid the dowels into the holes, then had her do the same on the other side so he could fit in those dowels, as well.

“Thank you,” he said. “Now for the slats, then we can open up the mattress.”

She stayed in the loft while he put down the pseudo boxed spring, then watched as he slid the blade of his X-Acto knife through the binding of the slats.

Every move the man made, every smile, every glance had her panties getting wetter by the second. She was just heartbeats away from throwing all rationale and caution out the door and into the river and just jumping the cowboy’s bones and making up for the time they were together that she couldn’t remember.

But that was a slippery slope.

Rayma would say that your vagina is a slippery slope.

“Meow!” said her cat.

“Fucking Rayma,” she murmured.

“What was that?” he asked, fitting the wooden slats into the bedframe.

“Nothing,” she said, shaking her head. “Just something my sister said to me. Or would say to me if she was here.”

“Triss?”

“No, Rayma.”

“Oh God, I can only imagine. That woman has no filter.”

“Nope.”

“All right, now that those are done, let’s check out this magical dinosaur mattress you bought us.” He used his X-Acto knife again and sliced through the tape like it was warm butter. Her insides clenched.

Something was obviously wrong with her if she was turned on by the man cutting through a piece of tape. She needed to have her head examined. Maybe she needed to go visit her sister Oona who was a psychologist. Oona could hook Mieka up to some electrodes and pump electricity into her brain, so she stopped thinking that everything Nate Harris did was sexy.

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