Wind River Wrangler (Wind River Valley #1)(51)

“Was your dad always a rancher? I thought he was in the Army at one time?”

“He was in for thirty years before he retired, came home, and took over my grandparents’ ranch.”

“Oh,” she murmured, tilting her head, studying him. “Then . . . you’re a military and ranching family?”

Nodding, Roan picked up his mug of coffee and took a sip. “The Triangle Ranch has been in my family for over a hundred years.”

“Wow,” Shiloh murmured. “That’s amazing!”

He grinned. “Why is it amazing?” Roan couldn’t help but tweak her, see where her plotting and planning to get info out of him was going.

“Well,” she said, pushing the pie away, “I’m just trying to construct a story about who you are.”

“Ah, truth at last.”

She blushed. “Oh, come on, Roan! I’ll have you know, you’re the most closemouthed man I’ve ever met. If you can get away with stringing only one or two words together to answer me, you do.”

“I call that succinct communications,” he parried, his grin remaining. He saw her brows draw down into a scowl. Shiloh was a wordsmith and Roan knew she valued communication more that he did.

“I call it stunted conversation at best.”

He chuckled and spooned in a forkful of pie.

“It’s not funny,” Shiloh grumped good-naturedly. “It’s tough to hold a meaningful conversation with you, Roan.”

“Don’t I always give you answers when you ask?”

“Well . . . yes, but they’re so short. There’s no details. Just ‘yes’ and ‘no.’”

“I see.” He could feel her bridling over this idea of limited conversation with him. Looking for a way to get more than two or three words out of him. “I just gave you a long sentence about my family’s ranch, didn’t I?” he pointed out, enjoying teasing her far too much.

“And I loved it. I want more long complex sentences like that, Roan.”

He shook his head and gave her a rueful look. “I’ll bet when you were a little girl you just weaseled anything you wanted out of your mom and dad. Didn’t you?”

She rolled her eyes. “There you go again, Roan. Changing the direction of the conversation. This isn’t about me. I want it to be about YOU.”

“Yeah,” he murmured, finishing off the last of the pie, “I get it.”

Shiloh sat back, pouting and staring at him. “Do you not want to talk with me? Is that it?”

Roan held her unsure gaze. His heart contracted because he could see she was stymied and hurt by his gruff shortness. “No, I like talking with you, Shiloh.” A whole helluva lot more than he should. Roan saw some of her hurt go away, but the confusion remained in her gaze. “All my life, I’ve lived and worked around men. Not women. Men have a different language than women.”

“Yes, it’s called short, terse sentences. The fewer words, the better,” she muttered unhappily, wrapping her arms around her chest. “And you’re laughing at me. I can see it in the way your mouth is set.”

Roan reached out without thinking, brushing a tendril away from her cheek and gently easing it aside. “Let’s get one thing clear between us, Shiloh. I would never laugh at you. I might tease the dickens out of you, but I would never, ever make fun of you. That’s not who I am. I don’t believe in humiliating another person. It’s not in my DNA.”

Her lips compressed and Shiloh weighed his gruff words. “I know I’m a woman. I know I talk a lot. I guess maybe it’s culture shock for both of us. I’m used to being around my friends who love to communicate. I enjoy it. And you live out here”—she gestured widely around the room—“by yourself.”

“I do talk,” Roan assured her, trying to curb his smile. Picking up his coffee, he added, “I talk to Maud. She’s a woman.”

“More than two words?”

“Yes, many more than two words.” Again, confusion came to her face. Shiloh was one of those people who liked to figure out how a person worked, who they were and what made them tick. It was her writer’s mind at work. Roan couldn’t fault her on that.

“Well, then,” she said defiantly, “why can’t we hold more than a one-or two-word conversation, then?”

He raised a brow as he sipped the coffee. “I was trying to give you room, Shiloh.”

“What do you mean?”

“Maud told me you were stressed out because of this stalker. You were coming into a strange house with a strange man in it.” Shrugging, Roan said, “I didn’t want to put extra pressure or stress on you. I wanted to be a shadow in your life until you settled in here, the stress left you and then I’d become more chatty, I guess.”

Snorting, she muttered, “You’re chatty?”

Wrong word. Roan quirked his mouth. “I’m not a writer, Shiloh. Maybe ‘chatty’ was the wrong word. I meant to open up a bit more to you once you were happy in here.”

“Is that how you see me? As chatty?”

Oh, this was going sideways and Roan didn’t want it to go there. He sat up and pushed his plate aside, folding his hands, holding her mutinous stare. She looked lush when her lower lip drew into a pout. He wanted to kiss it, run his tongue across it, feel Shiloh respond, feel her start melting into his embrace. “You’re a highly intelligent woman with a very keen intellect. I don’t know how you could say you’ve been chatty with me. We’ve barely spoken a paragraph to each other at any given time. Right?” he asked, and drilled a look into her widening eyes. Some of her pout and mutinous look dissolved.