Rode Hard, Put Up Wet: Cowboy Romance (Rebels & Outlaws 2)

Business. It was something that he knew pretty well. He'd had to deal with it for a long time. Now he'd done a real good job fucking that up.

Business and dating aren't the same thing. What's worse, they rarely mix. When they do mix, they mix to everyone's detriment. So in the first place, he's barking up the wrong tree. But the temptation is just a little too real.

Callahan takes a deep breath. he made a mistake last night, but he's not going to have a woman finishing off a business dinner with the first part of his payment.

If it's because she wants him, then she can want all she likes. But if it's anything else—he'd rather not.

And there's never been any sign that he's anything other than fooling himself thinking there's going to be anything else on her mind.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Morgan Lowe isn't thinking too hard about what she's doing. It's an old trick that she's learned over the years. As long as she doesn't think it through, she doesn't have to face the fact that she's making a big mistake.

Maybe going to the ranch was a mistake. There were plenty of reasons that she hadn't gone sooner after their last… interlude. Plenty of reasons.

And yet, here she was now, and here she was going to be as long as she could.

Her stomach twists and flips in her gut. Once she got home—and, she adds surreptitiously, after she took care of her little problem—it was dead easy to understand what had happened. She shouldn't have expected any different.

How sketchy was it, exactly, to be looking into buying a man's land, and then try to slot yourself right into his bed? With an objective lens, it was easy to see that she must have seemed like she was trying to seduce him.

The problem was, she hadn't been looking at it objectively before that. It was actually the first time she'd even considered the idea for a moment. Which is to say, it was a big surprise, even if it shouldn't have been.

Morgan's head feels light from the embarrassment. You always make mistakes. That's true in business, and it's even more true in life. But you get over them—eventually, if you're lucky.

Well, Morgan wasn't lucky, but she was prepared to deal with the fallout from her actions. And thanks to her business career, she was also prepared to make the first move.

She wanted the land, and that wasn't going to change. But the days spent with Philip Callahan were among the better days since her father left the company and left her alone almost six months ago.

Was she willing to trade that for a business win?

Morgan's throat tightens and her breath catches in it. She eases the car onto the old dirt road that leads past the Callahan ranch. If she gets the land, she'll have to renovate it, put in a blacktop road surface.

The place isn't busy. It never is. Who would come here? Maybe someone looking to buy a horse, but it's doubtful that there would be a good deal of media attention, and it's doubtful that you would have more than one or two people coming at a time.

Which means that, fundamentally, it's never 'busy,' not in the sense that places in Vegas are busy. There's work being done, but it's not the kind you see from the street.

What is less usual, though, is the fact that there's nobody visible from the front. Neither Philip nor the boys are working in the yard. The horses aren't out in the yard.

And, more noticeable, none of the vehicles are there. It's easy to jump to conclusions, to say that they must be out. That there must be some other place that they've gone. Maybe they're picking up feed.

Not likely that anyone would need four people to do it. Probably, it just gets forklifted up into the bed of the truck, and they unload it at their leisure when they get back.

It's possible, though, that there's something else going on entirely. Maybe they're doing work with heavy stuff, in the back of the yard. Where she can't see. The property is ten acres or more; she's not going to see the whole thing from the seat of a sports car, her head no higher than a man's waist.

She slips out. Either she's the only one here, and they're off somewhere mysterious, or all she has to do is just look around and she'll see them. Either way, it can't hurt to get out and stretch her legs.

From higher up, she's able to get a little angle on the rest of the ranch. And again, she's able to confirm—there's nobody here. At least, nobody that she can see.

Morgan lets out a breath. Well, if higher can see better, it doesn't take long to figure out where the best vantage point is going to be. The hill. The one with the little sapling on top of it. That's where the best view is going to be.

It's not a long walk. It's only a hundred feet past the house, after all. Five minutes. The soft grass beneath her feet crackles a bit, a little dry from the lack of rain the past couple days.

As she gets closer, the hill looms a little larger. It seemed like a real small hill from far away, but it might be twenty feet up. She scrambles up the side, the last little bit steep enough that her shoes threaten to slip off with little or no purchase.

But once she's up, she's got a good view of the ranch. She can see all the way down the road, all the way to where the country road turns off the main road and breaks suddenly through the Callahan land.

She follows that line with her eyes. She can almost make out, a few miles down, a second house. That one is owned by Lowe, now. It's not going to mean a hell of a lot without Callahan's ranch, but when they've got the entire block…