He looked surprised by her questions. “You don’t have anywhere to stay?”

She gave him a surprised look of her own. “Of course I don’t. I figured a farmhand would need to live onsite to help with all the—” She had no idea at all, really, about what the list of chores would be, apart from cleaning and dealing with chickens. “—farming.” When her comment fell into a weighted silence, she said, “If you don’t need anything else right now, I’ll go get my things out of my car and take them to the cottage.”

“You can’t stay in the cottage.”

She stopped halfway to the door. “You can’t kick me out. We had an agreement. If I did a good job with the chores, then I could have the job.” She lifted her chin. “And we both know that I did a kick-ass cleaning job.”

He ran his hand through his hair, leaving the dark strands standing on edge. Darn it, even that was sexy. Clearly she sucked at being immune to gorgeous men, even when it was imperative for her mental and emotional health.

“The reason you can’t stay in the cottage,” he gritted out one tense word a time, “is because it doesn’t have a roof on it.”

It only took a second for alarm to hit her. “I can’t stay here. In this house.” She swallowed hard. “With you.”

Without saying another word to her, he picked up the phone and made a quick call to what sounded like a local bed and breakfast. He was polite enough to the person he was speaking to, but when he hung up a minute later, the phone slammed so hard into its cradle that the whole thing vibrated.

When all she could do was shake her head at the idea of sleeping here with Grayson, he said, “If you can’t stand the thought of staying here with me, you’re welcome to the barn. Mo used to like it just fine.”

God, what had happened to her life? All afternoon, he had been trying to get her to give up on her farmhand goal, but she was far too stubborn to give in. Only, she hadn’t counted on sleeping only one wall away from a man she knew next to nothing about besides the fact that he was grumpy, and gorgeous, and didn’t much seem to like her.

But she’d already walked away from one job this week. She couldn’t stomach leaving another one so soon. Besides, she was the one in charge of her life, damn it, and right now she was hellbent on trying her hand at farming.

So she was going to stay.

And didn’t people always say that everything looked better in the morning?

“While the barn sounds simply lovely, I’ll bring my bags into the guest room.”

At least she knew the sheets were clean, because she’d had the privilege of changing them herself. And even though any man with a hint of manners would have insisted on carrying in her heavy suitcase, Grayson let her drag it from her car and up the porch steps all by herself.

Chapter Five

Grayson couldn’t believe the way things had turned out. Not only had Lori dealt well with the chickens, but she’d also cleaned his house as if she’d been working as a maid at a five-star hotel her entire life. He’d searched every corner for dust, had prayed for so much as a pillow to be out of place, but he hadn’t been able to find one single thing to complain about.

And now, based on that stupid deal he’d made with her, he had to let her stay.

He hadn’t shared a house with a woman in three years, had been perfectly happy to have the farmhouse to himself, until today, when a beautiful stranger had blown into his life like a hurricane. And now he was going to have to put her up until she found another place...or until she gave up on her ridiculous farmhand dream. Frankly, at this point, he wasn’t sure which was going to come first. Hell, he hadn’t thought she’d last this long.

He silently cursed as he watched her struggle with her bags and had to forcefully push away the urge to help her. The last thing he needed to do was to make things easy for her. Or, God forbid, let her think he actually wanted her here.

Just because she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, didn’t mean that he was softening toward her. The exact opposite, in fact. All that beauty made him wary, made him remember another beautiful woman...

He couldn’t go there, couldn’t fall back into memories of his wife. Not tonight. Not when he needed to stay completely on his toes to make sure Lori didn’t get under his skin any deeper.

The best thing would be to keep his distance from her. Completely. But after the work she’d done all day, he knew he had to at least feed her. Which was going to mean sharing a meal together on top of everything else, damn it.

He heard the water go on in the guest bathroom and scrunched his eyes tight to try to force away the vision of Lori stripping off her clothes and getting into the bathtub. Bad, bad, bad. Those kinds of thoughts were evil. He knew it...and yet he was still a man, with a man’s needs. Needs that he’d gone out of his way to ignore for three years, with only a few random moments of stolen pleasure along the way when he’d known there was no chance of any serious connection or lingering attachments to the women he’d slept with.

He was covered in dirt, too, and would have gone in to his master bath to take his own shower, but the thought of being only a wall away from Lori while both of them were naked did things to him that he couldn’t deal with rationally. On a curse, he went back outside to use the outdoor shower he’d installed at the far end of the barn. It was a cold night and showering outside didn’t sound even remotely good. But it was either that or slowly lose his mind at every sound he heard while thinking about Lori in the tub with soap and—

Shit. He needed to stop thinking about her like that.

He stripped off his shirt and threw it on the porch, unbuckling his belt as he walked past his animals. Even they seemed to look confused by what he was doing, coming out in the dark to wash off in their space.

How, he wondered as he yanked off his pants and boots and hung them over the wooden wall he’d erected to give the outdoor shower a little privacy, could a person cause so much havoc in just one short afternoon? Was it because she had so many siblings? Was she that afraid of being invisible that she went out of her way to be louder, more stubborn, just plain more there than a normal person?

As he scrubbed himself hard with the bar of soap, keeping the water just this side of cold so that his growing arousal couldn’t come fully to life, his stomach started growling. He cranked off the shower and shook his hair out like a dog before grabbing one of the towels he always kept in a nearby container for just such an occasion. He’d been planning on a steak tonight, and grilling up some vegetables with it. If she didn’t like red meat, too bad.

When he was fully dry, he pulled his jeans back on and stuck his feet into his boots. He still couldn’t believe she’d been running around with bare feet. City girls like her should be afraid to get their feet dirty, to mess up their pedicures, or, God forbid, get a cut from something sharp like the edge of a rock. Pampered girls also shouldn’t know how to clean.

The only way he could deal with having Lori around, even just for the short time it would take for her to give up her crazy plan and leave him alone again, was to view her as a spoiled woman out for a lark in the country for a few days.

He wished like hell that it wasn’t so hard to ignore the evidence to the contrary.

Dinner. That was what he’d focus on now, rather than the fact that she was probably also drying off from her bath and slathering her toned and smooth legs with lotion.

Grayson took off his muddy boots on the porch, stepped into the kitchen via the side door, and stopped so quickly that it slammed into his back. “What are you doing?”

Lori was supposed to be in her room, damn it, not already out of the bath and in his kitchen looking and smelling better than anything ever had. Her dark hair was still wet, falling past her shoulders almost to her hips as she stood at his kitchen island chopping a bell pepper. She’d put on a pair of jeans that did shocking things to her ass, and even though her T-shirt shouldn’t have been the least bit sexy, he now realized that anything she wore would be sexy. Hell, he could have given her a burlap sack to wear and he’d still be salivating over the curve of her neck, the bright paint on her toes, the spark that never quit in her big blue eyes.

“Making dinner.”

She said it without turning to look at him, clearly still pissed off at their conversation about where she was going to stay. And possibly the fact that he’d been a jerk about not helping her with her bags.

He hadn’t expected her to clean his house and make him dinner tonight, but now that she was, he certainly wasn’t going to complain. Unless, of course, she didn’t actually know how to make a decent meal, and was just doing this to get back at him.

“Do you know how to cook?”

She sighed, deep and long, at his question, seeming to be at least as irritated with him now as he’d been with her earlier. “I wouldn’t be making dinner if I didn’t.” She’d found the steak he’d had marinating and sliced it up, along with the vegetables. “I thought I’d make a stir fry.”

When he didn’t respond, when he couldn’t seem to get his throat to work right, when he couldn’t seem to do anything but stand there like a fool in the doorway and stare at her, she finally turned to him.

“Look, I’m starved and I didn’t think it would be a problem if I made us din—”

Her words fell away and her eyes widened as she finally looked at him. As her gaze moved over him, she licked her lips and he nearly groaned aloud at the sight of her tongue coming out to wet her gorgeous lips. She wasn’t wearing makeup anymore, having washed it all off during her bath, and if anything, she was even prettier than she’d been when her lashes had been darkened with mascara and her mouth had been glossy with lipstick.

“Grayson.” His name was little more than a husky breath from her dampened mouth. “You’re not wearing your shirt.”

He’d completely forgotten that he only had his jeans on, without the top button even done up, for God’s sake. Defensively, he told her, “You weren’t supposed to be in the kitchen.”

“And you weren’t supposed to be walking around without your clothes on!” she shot right back.

He shouldn’t like the way she looked at him, as though she was barely able to keep herself from reaching out to touch him. But since he wouldn’t be able to hide just how much he did like it for more than the next couple of seconds, he finally got his feet to obey the order to move again and headed for his bedroom.

Damn it, he thought as he barely stopped himself from slamming his bedroom door shut, he needed another cold shower even though he’d just gotten out of one. Fat lot of good it did, though, when all it took was one look at Lori, one breath of her hair, her fresh clean skin, one lick of her tongue across her lips, for him to forget every rule he’d lived his life by for the past three years.

Normally, Grayson made it a point to keep his memories deeply buried. Tonight, he deliberately pulled them out and made himself face them. He’d known his wife, Leslie, since college, had fallen for her on the first day of English Lit in freshman year. They were supposed to be the perfect romance, the ideal fit—the finance major and the elegant girl who had grown up in a world where she’d learned how be the perfect hostess and fundraiser. She was a woman who never said the wrong thing, who was always there for him for whatever he needed.

Their college years were good, but once they’d graduated and entered the real world, both of them had been miserable. Because even though the world of finance wasn’t nearly as interesting as he’d hoped it would be—and he missed being outside for more than the hour it took him to do his daily run through Central Park—he’d worked longer and longer hours at his firm to avoid coming home to her false smiles, to perfectly made dinners he had no appetite for, to one event after another full of people he didn’t know...and didn’t want to get to know.