felt immediately uneasy, as if he’d somehow earned an advantage.
“Lane.” Eric reached for the pens and aligned them in a new, precise arrangement on the left side of the blotter. “This is Sarah Landon, our new public relations consultant. We’re glad you could make it.”
“Are you?”
Lane stared at Sarah with an unwavering and decidedly hostile gaze. She wished she had some pens to fool with, but all she could do was tighten her interlaced fingers in her lap and hope the heat in her face didn’t show. The man was so loaded with pheromones that his gaze burned like a branding iron. She told herself the tugging low in her belly was just a reaction to the famous Carrigan charm, but her inner hussy was sashaying around in her belly like the boogie-woogie love child of Richard Simmons and Maksim Chmerkovskiy.
It took all her self-control to give Lane a cold, formal nod. Normally she would have offered her hand, but his gaze made it clear they were already in a fight of wills and she wasn’t about to give him the chance to snub her and score a point.
“Nice to meet you.” He pushed his chair further back and crossed his scuffed cowboy boots at the ankles. They weren’t the tooled, polished fashion statements the wannabes wore to happy hour. They were plain brown leather, rough, scuffed, and unadorned. Workingman’s boots.
But he didn’t work, she reminded herself. He played, riding real-life rocking horses like a three-year-old on steroids.
She worked her way up the faded denim of his jeans, flicking her attention to his face when she found herself eying his belt buckle. His answering gaze slid down the lapels of her jacket and dove into the modest neckline of her camisole. From there, it drifted from side to side, making her renegade nipples perk up and stand at painful attention.
He probably expected her to flutter girlishly like Dot and fall apart, but instead she looked away, pretending something outside the window was holding her attention. There was a cloud shaped like a duck drifting in the wide blue sky.
Think about the duck. Think about the duck.
“So.” Eric shifted uneasily. “I understand you have a problem with the drilling on the Carrigan Ranch.”
Lane hacked out a sound that might have been a laugh but sounded more like the bark of an angry dog. “I sure do. But it’s not the Carrigan Ranch anymore. It’s the LT.”
“It’ll always be the Carrigan Ranch.”
“That’s not your decision,” Lane said. “It might be family land, but the ranch operation’s a partnership now.”
Sarah quickly turned her attention to Eric. He was a master of the poker face, but it was obvious the news surprised him. He’d told her the ranch was everything to Lane. So why would he sell out to someone else?
Maybe he needed money. Maybe he had some kind of gambling addiction, or a drug problem. Her eyes lingered on the bulge of his biceps. Were steroids addictive? Were they expensive? Because he was way more muscular than your normal rodeo cowboy. Riding and roping gave a man long, lean muscles. He was built like a weight lifter, solid and powerful.
His eyes fixed on the hem of her trim tapered skirt. The fabric ended just an inch above her knee, so she didn’t know what he was staring at, or why it made her so uneasy. Checking out an associate’s clothing was a valid means of judging their professionalism, but his gaze followed the line of her calves as if he was assessing her for some other purpose, and she doubted he was judging her chances in the Boston Marathon.
She clenched her knees together reflexively, regretting the reaction when faint crow’s-feet gathered at the corner of his eyes. He’d goaded her into reacting—again.
By her count, the score was Lane three, Sarah zero.
Chapter 3
“So why is she here?” Lane spoke to his brother, deliberately turning away from the woman in the chair beside him. He didn’t know who she was, or what she was doing there. Did Eric want a witness to this conversation for some reason? Or was this his latest floozy? He normally went through women like Kleenex and seemed to have about as much respect for them. But maybe this one was better at gold digging than the past dozen or so. She certainly looked a lot smarter than any of them, so maybe she’d conned her way into the boardroom.
Well, she wasn’t staying. He’d see to that.
“I’m a public relations consultant.”