Rocky Mountain Cowboy (31 page)

“We are,” he agreed and kissed her forehead. “Since I’ll be leaving too early to call the attorney tomorrow, why don’t you call him and have him draw up the agreement? Do you want the same terms I had with your dad? Have you had a chance to go over the old document?”

She nodded. “I went over it. The same terms are fine. I’ll call Jack Higgins tomorrow.”

“Okay. But Jenny....”

“What?”

“No money. No personal investment. No bail out. Do not pay off those loans,” he
insisted, tipping her chin up so she had to look him in the eyes. “Promise?”

“Well, where’s the fifty/fifty in that?” she insisted just as determinedly, narrowing her eyes.

“We’ll get clear of this current debt first.” He held onto her stubbornly set shoulders. “Now promise me you’ll stay out of this business with Brad.”

“Fine! I’ll give you some time to try to solve the problems by yourself,” she stated, the
n rushed on before he could argue. “I guess we won’t be able to sign the papers the attorney draws up until I get back from L.A. and you get home again anyway.” She stood on her booted toes to loop her arms around his neck and kiss him. “I’m going to miss you.”

“I’m going to miss you, too, but at least you’ll be here when I get back.”

She shook her finger in admonishment at him. “John Red Hawk Larson, you are one hard stubborn unreasonable man!”

He laughed at her. “And you
, Jennifer Michelle Fletcher, are one beautiful sexy irresistible woman.” He pulled her against his chest, and she wrapped her arms tightly around him. “Now let’s go upstairs so I can show you just how damned hard I am,” he murmured into her hair.

CHAPTER 18

Jack Higgins
, the attorney for the ranch, was very happy that Jenny and Hawk had finally agreed to form a partnership. They were nearly at the sixty-day mark, he told Jenny when she called him on Monday. He had been getting worried that they were going to do nothing, which would leave it to the courts to settle in ninety days. The fact that she was making the same agreement with Hawk that her dad had made also pleased the attorney, since it made the document easier to draw up. He was a little disappointed they wouldn’t be able to sign it for a week or more, though. So he settled for reminding her how important it was they do something in writing before the legal ninety-day timetable. Jenny assured him they’d have the papers signed by then.

When the mail came on Thursday, it contained two notices from the bank. Jenny was working in the study, finishing her preliminary design sketches before her departure. She didn’t have any qualms about opening the notices. She was going to be just as responsible as Hawk fo
r their business accounts soon.

The news wasn’t good. Hawk was two weeks away from a payment in the thousands of dollars. The bank was reminding him that they needed full payments this time. Up until recently, they had always operated in the black, making a profit every year and paying off all their loans,
with the exception of their mortgage. For years Tom had operated that way with this bank. But this year was different. They were in big trouble.

Their expenses had simply been greater than their profits so far. Even if they got lucky and got good prices for the three hundred head of cattle they had
planned to sell, they still might be in a bind. The bank was making it very clear that they weren’t going to give them any more breaks. And, God forbid, if any other problems occurred that cost them money, they could be looking at even more serious financial trouble. Foreclosure was every rancher’s nightmare. The land was the pledge, the security. With Brad at the helm at the bank, it was a looming possibility, if they couldn’t come up with enough money to meet all their obligations. And both Jenny and Hawk knew that he’d be more than happy to foreclose, or at the very least, to demand they sell part of their land, which was always the collateral for any farm loans.

The problems Hawk and Tom had been having since last spring didn’t
discourage her from wanting to form a partnership with Hawk, though. They prompted the opposite reaction, in fact. She was still determined that she was not going to let the ranch be foreclosed on or any part of it sold.

It was her home and always had been. It was also her dad’s legacy. She had the financial ability to resolve these problems. But she had agreed to give Hawk some time
to resolve them himself, and she’d keep her promise as long as she could.

She didn’t completely understand his reluctance to let her invest her money.

Some of his reasons made sense and some didn’t. She didn’t know if Brad Caldwell was personally dangerous to her, but she had to give Hawk the benefit of the doubt since he’d known the man most of his life.

More than likely his refusal to let her
bail him out
, as he had put it, was a male ego thing. He probably thought she’d think less of him if she had to resolve his financial trouble. No doubt, he thought that he could fix it all by himself.

T
here was no accounting for how stubborn and misguided a man could be at times, she supposed. For heaven’s sake, her own father probably hadn’t told anyone he had been having heart problems. It was a wonder men and women ever managed to form any kind of personal or business partnership considering how opposite their thinking processes could be from one another.

But as frustrated as she was with Hawk, she also missed him. He’d been gone for four days and three nights. Her bed was cold without him, but she imagined his was even colder, sleeping on the hard ground, in a tent, at elevations where it wasn’t too early for a snowstorm.

She was expecting him home before dinner, and it was none too soon for her. Unfortunately, she had to fly to L.A. tomorrow, and for the next few days, they’d be apart again.

∞∞∞

Jenny was sitting on the porch on the swing, rocking it idly with her boots when Hawk came out of the barn carrying his hunting rifle and his saddle bags. Even at a distance, he looked exhausted.
Her alarm increased considerably when he got a few feet from the porch. There was a bright patch of blood on his shirtsleeve, near his shoulder.

“Hawk! What happened?” She rose immediately and took his saddle bags from him. “Is that your blood?” Her fingers gently touched the
stain that had dried and discolored his sleeve beneath his quilted vest.

“Someone took a shot at me.”

Appalled, she followed him around the porch to the back door and the boot room. “Someone took a shot at you? When? Are you still bleeding? Is there a bullet in you?”

Hawk sat down, yanked off his dirty boots with her help, and listened to all her questions, then smiled weakly at her. “I’m okay, not bleeding anymore, and no, there isn’t a bullet in me. It just grazed me. One of my clients had a medical background. He cleaned the wound, bandaged it, and sent me home ahead of them.”

“And how did you get shot?” Jenny asked as she went into the kitchen with him.

“What the holy hell?” Eli said as he saw Hawk enter.

Hawk sank onto a ladder-back chair. “I think it was probably a careless hunter. We couldn’t find the shooter, but the bullet was from a rifle and it came from a ways away.”

He told Eli and Jenny
that he’d been standing in an open field, wearing his red down vest, in plain sight. He hadn’t been in the bush or behind a blind, so it didn’t seem likely that he could be mistaken for a buck, but no one in the hunting party had found any other reason for the shooting.

“You oughtta go to the ER to have someone take a look at it,” Eli suggested.

“I’m not going to spend the rest of the evening in the emergency room at the hospital,” Hawk protested. “I’m tired, and I don’t want to waste the time and money.”

Though they tried all through dinner, n
either Jenny nor Eli managed to change his mind. After dinner, she followed him upstairs and made him strip off his shirt so she could examine the wound for herself. Afterwards, he insisted on a shower, so when he came out of the bathroom, wrapped only in a towel, she made him sit on the edge of the bed while she removed his wet bandage and replaced it with a dry one. The wound was clean and didn’t require stitches, but it was oozing a little blood and it was deep enough to have wedged out a good piece of skin. It scared her to realize how close the bullet had come to burying itself in his shoulder, or worse yet, in his heart. She was so deeply shaken, tears blurred her eyes as she re-bandaged the wound.

Hawk saw one slide down her cheek. “I’m fine,” he reassured her yet again and reached over to pull her onto his lap. “It’s okay, honey, really.” Wrapping her in the half-circle of his good arm, he pressed her head to his uninjured shoulder and stroked the back of her hair.

“It’s not okay, damn it!” she protested angrily, lifting her head. “Someone tried to shoot you!”

“It could have been an accident— some near-sighted, careless fool of a hunter.”

“Bull! You don’t believe that.” Unappeased and unconvinced, she scooted off his lap to stand in front of him with her hands lifted palm up. “With all the things that have been happening around here, how could this just be a careless hunter? That’s too much coincidence for me! I’m not buying it! Didn’t you just tell me last Sunday that there were too many accidents happening around here?”

Hawk grabbed her around her belted waist and pulled her back onto his
lap. “You’re beginning to sound just as paranoid as me now.”

“Well, you can hardly blame me.” She looked at him mutinously, then beseechingly. “Don’t go on any
more of these hunting trips. Let me help, and come with me to L.A.”

“I’ve got commitments to keep, Jenny.”

“Well then, let’s get Brad and his bank off our backs,” she pleaded. “Let me at least make the loan payments. We got more notices from the bank this week, while you were gone.”

“I’m not overdue yet. I’ll make the deadline.”

“I hate to see you under this kind of pressure.”

He gave her a slow grin that told her he appreciated her concern. “I’ll live.”

She wanted to be supportive, especially since he was working so hard to solve these problems, so she didn’t press him any further, but she wasn’t happy.

“How ‘bout losing some clothes and coming to bed? I could use an early night.” Hawk rolled her onto her back for a thorough kiss, hooking his uninjured arm around her to lock her against his half-clothed body.

Jenny pushed away, too frustrated and worried to be appeased or distracted by his love play. “Let me help Eli clean up. I’ll be back after my shower.” She needed a little time to think and calm down.

Hawk shot her a disgruntled look, then scooted up against the headboard and the pillows. With his long legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles, he laid his head back and closed his eyes with a sigh.

She bent to give him a kiss at his hairline, then pulled the covers up to his waist. “Don’t wait up for me. You look exhausted.”

“Don’t be too long,” he mumbled without opening his eyes.

But Jenny was still too filled with anxiety to really focus on his sleepy attempts to entice her into surrendering to him later that night. She just wanted to hold onto him and keep him safe. After losing her father, she couldn’t lose this man, too. In the month and a half that she had been here, he had become the center of her life; as important as this ranch was to her. It was pretty clear to her now that she was really in love with him.

S
he wondered if it was the right time to tell him how she felt about him. She decided it wasn’t. He had so much to deal with right now. And she was a little afraid to tell him because she didn’t know exactly how he felt about her yet. What besides sexual attraction did he feel for her? She wasn’t sure, and it was probably too soon to ask. It might be better to wait until some of these financial pressures were off; until he wasn’t working so hard and had time to reflect on his feelings for her.

∞∞∞

The instant Jenny saw Hawk waiting for her in the Denver airport, her face broke into a big grin. God, she had missed him! She’d only been gone four days, but it seemed liked years.

Outside on the tarmac where the adjacent small plane runways were located, Hawk led Jenny to his twin engine Cessna. On the copilot’s side, he opened the door and set her two suitcases inside, in the back, then turned and lifted her into the front passenger seat, handing her the large portfolio case she carried her work in. She moved it into the back of the roomy little plane that seated six, with additional cargo room in the tail end. It was big enough not to be buffeted around a lot by the wind, which could be treacherous in the mountains. Sudden down drafts claimed at least one small plane a year in the Colorado Rockies.

She was a frequent flyer, an
d she’d been in small planes before when she’d been sent to some pretty remote set locations, but it wasn’t her favorite mode of travel. Hawk’s airplane was a beauty, and it must have set him back a pretty penny. It was still in superb condition inside and out, with a luxurious, comfortable interior, and a sleek, polished exterior.

On the flight to Denver, four days ago, he
had told her that George Caldwell had actually taught him to fly when he had turned fourteen. It had been the one good thing the man had done for him, but he suspected he’d done it to goad his only son into taking lessons, but Brad had never liked flying in his dad’s small plane.