Always On My Mind (The Sullivans #8)(10)

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.