Page 26 of The Cowboy’s Reckoning

“Nope,” Burke said on a note of pride.

“Are you sure?”

Burke pulled in an audible breath. “I would have, but Lizzie came back from the ladies’ and wanted to go. You can’t say no to Lizzie.”

Jordan wouldn’t know about that, but he sent a silent thank-you to the lady. “Hey, I know that if this was said in the Wolf Den, it’ll be all over town, but I really want to keep it quiet for a while, okay? As much as you can?”

“I can be quiet,” Burkey said.

“I know. We’ll have a beer one of these days and I’ll fill you in, but for right now …” Don’t help me out.

“You got some big plan for the place?”

“I’m still figuring them out. I’ll tell you about it when I can.”

Jordan hung up the phone after promising Burke another night out, being careful not to name a date, then leaned back against the hard sofa cushion. After dealing with Connery, he decided that until he had a firm plan in place, he didn’t want to go public.

He reached for the phone and dialed Lil’s number.

When she answered, he said, “Hey, it’s Jordan. I’m coming over if it’s convenient. Landlord stuff.”

“Yeah?” she asked warily.

“Nothing bad,” he assured her. Not for her anyway. “I’ll be there around six.”

*

Landlord stuff, he’d said. Nothing bad.

The best-case scenario was that Jordan was going to let them stay without a hassle. Maya was already sharpening her lawyer claws in case he had other ideas. As entertaining as it was to watch Maya take down an opponent, Lil had too much skin in this game to want that to happen.

Whatever the news might be—it might be something trivial—she hoped the warm beer she’d popped into the freezer didn’t explode before he got here. If he got there. He’d said he would be here at six. It was now ten minutes past … not that she was nervously watching the clock or anything. Things happened. People got waylaid. Beer exploded.

Lil went into the house and took the now cold bottles of beer out of the freezer and popped them in the fridge. She looked around the neat kitchen, felt the need to move, and headed back outside to check the cattle that didn’t need to be checked. They were grazing peacefully on the correct side of the fence today. She’d ridden the perimeter on the ATV that morning after finishing the chores. No breaks. No loose wire. No strangers. She’d scanned the trees as she drove past the place where she’d seen the hiker, but there was no sign of anyone having returned to the area. The boot print was fading from the soft soil and there were no new prints.

Maybe it had been a coincidence, several fence breaks in a row. Her cattle trespassing on land where they could be held for lien if caught by the owner. An actual lien was a stretch, but she could still be heavily fined. She didn’t have a heavy-fine category in her budget book.

After riding the fence, she’d put in extra time on Dudley and decided that she was making headway despite their trauma the day before. Would he revert to old habits once he went back to his owner? Judging from what she’d seen of the owner’s riding capabilities, probably. But that wasn’t something she could control. All she could do was return the gelding and hope for the best.

She was about to head into the barn to feed the kitten Meg had adopted a couple of weeks ago as part of their future rodent control program, when she heard a truck pulling in. She hurried into the barn, scooped food into a dish and set it on a low stack of hay so that Betty the Pyrenees didn’t help herself if she happened by. The kitten emerged from cracks between the bales and rushed the dish.

By the time she left the barn, Jordan’s truck was pulling to a stop. The truck door slammed hard because the window was down, and Jordan’s boots crunched on the gravel as he came around the hood, little details that jumped out as Lil waited for him to tell her about this landlord business.

“I’m not selling to this buyer,” he said simply. “You can stay put without a hassle.”

For a moment she stared at him, hesitant to believe she’d heard correctly, that Maya could sheath her lawyer claws.

“You okay?” he asked.

She let out a shaky laugh. “I thought you were going to make me wait for beer.”

His answering smile was borderline breathtaking. “I’m not that kind of guy.”

Which begged the question, what kind of guy was he?

There was a definite difference in the man now standing in front of her, as if a weight had also been lifted off his shoulders. How? He’d just put a stop to a sale which, by his own account, made his life easier on a couple of fronts.

“What happened with the potential buyer?”