pride of a caveman returning from the hunt. “Or maybe you could use a hand getting that chair broke to ride.”
Great. She had the bastard son of John Wayne and Martha Stewart for a neighbor. And he thought he was funny.
Worse yet, he thought she was funny.
“Thanks.” She took the casserole. “I’m Libby Brown. Are you from that farm with the big barn?”
“Farm? I’m not from any farm.” Narrowing his eyes, he slouched against the truck and folded his arms. “You’re not from around here, are you?”
“What makes you say that?”
“You calling my ranch a farm, that’s what.” A blade of wheatgrass bobbed from one corner of his mouth as he looked her up and down with masculine arrogance. “There’s no such thing as a farm in Wyoming,” he said.
“Well, what do you call this, then?” Libby gestured toward the sun-baked outbuildings that tilted drunkenly around her own personal patch of prairie.
“A ranch.”
“That’s not what I call it. I call it ‘Lackaduck Farm.’” She pointed to the faded letters arched over the barn’s wide double doors. “That’s what the people before me called it too. It’s even painted on the barn.”
“Yeah, well, they weren’t from around here either. They were New Yorkers and got smacked on the bottom and sent home by Mother Nature. Thought they’d retire out here on some cheap real estate and be gentleman farmers. They didn’t realize there’s a reason the real estate’s cheap. It’s tough living.” He looked her in the eye, no doubt judging her unfit for a life only real men could endure. “You think you’re up to it?”
“As a matter of fact, I am.” Libby hoped she sounded a lot more confident than she felt. “This is what I’ve always wanted, and I’m going to make it work.”
She didn’t mention the fact that she had to make it work. She didn’t have anything else. No career—not even much of a job. And no boyfriend. Not even a dog.
The dog died in September, right before the boyfriend ran off. Lucky couldn’t help it, but Bill Cooperman could have stuck around if he’d only tried. He just had a wandering eye, and it finally wandered off for good with a hotshot editor from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The hotshot editor was also Libby’s boss, so she basically lost everything in the space of about six weeks. All she had left was a broken heart, a cherry red pickup, and the contents of her desk in a battered cardboard box.
Since her professional and romantic aspirations were a bust, she’d sold her one-bedroom condo in downtown Atlanta and literally bought the farm. She was now the proud owner of thirty-five acres of sagebrush and a quaint clapboard farmhouse in Lackaduck, Wyoming. At the moment, tumbleweeds were her primary crop and grasshoppers her only livestock, but the place was as far from Atlanta as she could get, and she figured a fresh coat of paint and a flock of free-range chickens would make it her dream home—one utterly unlike the one she’d left behind. So far, Wyoming was like another planet, and that was fine with her.
“I’m definitely going to make this work,” she repeated, as much to herself as to her new neighbor.
The cowboy reached over the truck’s battered tailgate for the dinette chair, which freed itself from the toaster cord the minute he touched it.
“Guess you’ll be glad to get some help then.”
He swung the chair over his shoulder and headed for the house.
Libby sighed. She had her pride, but she wasn’t about to turn her bad back on an able-bodied man who was willing to tote furniture for her. Beggars can’t be choosers, and Luke Rawlins wasn’t really such a bad choice, anyway. She wasn’t in the market for his brand of talent, but it sure was fun to watch him move furniture. Those chaps, with their swaying leather fringe, must have been designed by the early cowboys to highlight a man’s best assets.
***
Luke set the chair in the kitchen, then traipsed back out and scanned the contents of the truck bed. He’d been worried when they sold the Lackaduck place, but the new neighbor seemed all right. More than all right. When he’d first seen her, tussling with her furniture in the back of the pickup, he’d thought love might have finally come to Lackaduck. Then he’d realized all he could see was her backside and decided it was probably just lust.
Besides, her sofa was definitely a deal breaker.
It was enormous. And hideous. Once