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They both pulled back like they'd touched the stove.

It was nothing. A half second of contact in a kitchen at nine at night between two tired people. But it went up his arm and landed somewhere behind his sternum with a force that had no business belonging to anything that small, and he saw the same thing go through her, the small sharp recoil, the breath she didn't quite take.

For a second neither of them said anything. The kitchen was very quiet.

He shut it down. Felt the open thing in his chest and put his shoulder against it the way he put his shoulder against everything, and when he spoke his voice had gone flat.

"It's late," he said. "You should get home. Helen can manage the kids' breakfast."

She looked at him, and whatever had been in her face folded itself away as neatly as he'd folded his own. She was good at it too, he registered, distantly. As good as he was.

"Of course." She shouldered her bag. "Goodnight, Mr. Royston."

"Goodnight."

She went. He heard the screen door, the truck, the engine turning over, the long crunch of gravel getting smaller, and then nothing.

He stood in his clean kitchen with the plate she'd left going cold for the second time that night. He did not eat it. He did not sit down. He put both hands flat on the counter and bowed his head between his arms and breathed.

He'd wanted her gone this morning, and he'd wanted her gone just now, and he was tired enough and honest enough, alone in the dark, to know they were not the same wanting.

CHAPTER FOUR

She was back at the ranch by seven, boots on, before she'd fully decided how she felt about the night before.

That was the trouble with the night before. It had two halves and they didn't fit together. There was the Dean who'd come in grey and wrung out and said thank you like the word cost him something, who'd stood in his kitchen and looked at the plate she'd warmed like she'd done something he didn't have a category for. And there was the Dean who, a breath later, had gone flat and cold and all but walked her out the door. Same man, same kitchen, ten minutes apart. She'd lain awake trying to reconcile them and gotten nowhere, and shown up anyway, because the work was real and the work she understood.

She found him in the kitchen, and she knew before he said a word which of the two she was getting.

"Ms. Baxter." Not Lara. He had a coffee in his hand and his hat already on, dressed for a day on the ranch, a man halfway out his own door. "I'll show you the office. Then I've got to get to work."

So that was how it was going to be.

He showed her the office the way you'd show a contractor a job site. This was the desk. This was the filing situation, such as it was. The accounts were a mess; his father had done them out of a checkbook and his own head for forty years and there was no system she'd recognize. Bills came here. The mail piled up there. He talked in short flat sentences and he didn't once look at her longer than he had to, and she understood that the not-looking was deliberate, the same way the too-quick handshake yesterday had been deliberate. She kept noticing things about this man she'd rather not have noticed. It was becoming a problem.

"Most of it's self-explanatory," he said. "You found your way around it well enough yesterday."

There was something in the way he said yesterday.

"I did what needed doing," she said.

"So I gathered." He set his coffee down on the edge of the desk. Looked at her for the first time since she'd walked in, and there was nothing warm in it, nothing of the man who'd said thank you in this house twelve hours ago with his voice gone rough. "You move fast, Ms. Baxter."

She didn't follow. "...I'm sorry?"

"One day on the job." He said it lightly. Conversationally. The way you'd remark on the weather, or remind someone to pick up milk. "My father in the hospital, the house in an uproar, and by suppertime you've got the office running, the children fed, the dogs sleeping on your feet. That's fast work."

It took her a second to hear what he was actually saying. When she did, it landed cold and clean, right under the ribs.

"My father isn't in any condition to renegotiate the terms of your employment," Dean said. "In case that's where this is headed. So you can ease off."

There it was. This man, whose children she'd fed and whose floors she'd scrubbed and whose whole sinking ship she'd bailed all day without being asked — he thought she'd done it to angle. That she'd looked at a family on the worst day of its year and seen an opening.

She set down the folder she was holding. Slowly. The way you set something down when the alternative is throwing it.

"Let me make sure I've got this," she said. "You think I fed your six-year-old a grilled cheese as the opening move in some long con to… what, exactly? Marry into a cattle operation? Embezzle the casserole fund?"

His jaw tightened. "I didn't say —"