Rats. It was too far to jump unless she wanted to risk a broken ankle, so she had to slither down like one of her kindergarten children on the monkey bars. She hit the ground and turned around just as a gorgeous Arabian raced up in a swirling cloud of dust.
Ashley caught a quick glimpse of the horse’s rider and her pulse rate kicked up a notch. Her mouth suddenly felt as dry as a Cold Creek tributary after a three-year drought. It was the jerk himself. She couldn’t mistake those chiseled features and that strong jaw for anyone else.
She had a quick mental picture of him in Last Chance, when he had played a wounded outlaw with a tragic secret. She loved that movie. She loved all his movies.
Too bad they were all Hollywood make-believe.
Two
STORY:
Justin reined the horse in and tipped his hat back. Ashley took an instinctive step back at the menace on his features. Had she ever really been so young and so stupid to think she was hopelessly in love with him?
“You’ve got two choices here, lady,” he growled. “You either climb back the way you came or we wait here until the sheriff shows up to arrest you for trespassing. Which one do you prefer?”
A chorus line of nerves started tap-dancing in her stomach, and she couldn’t seem to think straight with those midnight-blue eyes boring into her.
“Go ahead and call the sheriff, Mr. Hartford. In fact,” she added brightly, “I can do it for you if you’d like, since I’ve got him on speed dial on my cell phone. I have all my brothers on speed dial. Luke is number two, right after Mom and Dad. It’s only fair, since he’s the oldest and that seemed the easiest way to keep the numbers straight. I should probably put Evan at number two since I call him most often. He’s the brother just older than me. We’re only two years apart so we are probably the closest. Still, he’s at number three. I don’t call the twins very often since they live on the coast, so they’re at five and six. But like I said, Luke is number two, so it would be easy to get him here fast if that’s what you want to do—”
By the time she had the sense to realize she was rambling and could manage to clamp her teeth together to stem the gushing flow of stupidity, Justin Hartford’s famously gorgeous eyes had started to cross.
This was all his own fault, she thought, crabby all over again. He didn’t need to sit there on his horse and glower at her as if she was the treasonous spy in one of his movies.
“I’m sorry,” she said stiffly. “You don’t care about any of that. When I’m nervous I ramble.”
“I hadn’t noticed,” he muttered, with such condescension she wanted to smack him. “Enlightening family history aside, you’re still trespassing—an eight-foot-high locked iron gate is usually a big tip-off there.”
She drew in a cleansing breath and let it out again. This wasn’t going well. She needed to put aside her instinctive nervous reaction to her silly teenage heartthrob and focus on the crisis at hand—the reason she was there.
“It’s your own fault. If you weren’t such a...a darn hermit maybe I wouldn’t have to resort to such drastic measures.”
He blinked. “A hermit?”
“Yes! How am I supposed to talk to you if you hardly leave the Blue Sage?”
“I happen to like my privacy, Ms....”
She drew herself up to her full five-foot-three inches tall and glared at him with all the frustration that had been burning through her for three weeks. “Ashley Barnes. Ruby’s kindergarten teacher. Whether you want to be bothered or not, it is imperative I talk to you about your daughter.”
Three
JUSTIN LOOKED DOWN at the soft little blonde peach in the dusty-pink sweater who had just scaled his gate like some kind of Olympic gymnast. Ruby’s kindergarten teacher. He winced, embarrassed he had mistaken her for an obsessed fan.
Though he had walked away from Hollywood six years ago and moved to eastern Idaho without a backward glance, away from the attention he had never wanted, sometimes it followed him. He wasn’t obsessive about security. But what else was he supposed to think when he spied a woman climbing over his gate?
“Kind of drastic measures to take for a parent-teacher conference, don’t you think?” he asked as he slid down from his horse.
Her hazel eyes narrowed at him and he had to admit, up close she was seriously cute. Small and feminine, with short blond curls held back in a headband and dimples that appeared even when she was glaring at him.
She looked like a cream puff. Like a delicious, sugary, melt-in-your-mouth confection. He had sworn off sweets a long time ago, but that didn’t make the sudden intense craving any easier to ignore.
“I wouldn’t have had to resort to such drastic measures as climbing your stupid gate if you could be bothered just once to answer one of my dozens of pleas to set up a meeting.”
She didn’t let him answer—not that he had the first idea what she was talking about.
“I realize you’re a very busy, very important man,” she snapped, her hands fisted on her hips.
How did the curl of those luscious lips make the words sound like an epithet? he wondered.
“I’m sure you must have scores of people to see and all that,” she went on. “But you’re an actor—or you used to be, anyway. Couldn’t you at least pretend you care about your child?”
He jerked his attention from her lips as her words filtered through. “Excuse me?”
“You probably pay more attention to that horse of yours than you do to your own daughter!”
Justin
