With Dani assigned to walk along the fence line to look for additional breaks, Jordan was left alone with Kelly.
“Get much sleep last night?” he asked eventually.
“Enough,” she replied tightly, concentrating on her struggle to stretch the next length of wire taut.
Jordan leaned down to help her. “Doesn’t look that way to me,” he observed.
She scowled at him. “Thank you.”
He grinned at the testy note. “Not that you’re not always beautiful,” he told her.
She glanced up, her face just inches under his. The nearness was too tempting for Jordan to resist. He dropped a quick kiss on the tip of her nose.
“Jordan!” she warned, casting a harried look in Dani’s direction.
“She might as well get used to it,” he said. “The same goes for you.”
“Not now,” she snapped impatiently, jerking on the wire. She lost her grip and the line snapped back, snagging her sleeve. She muttered a colorful expletive under her breath as Jordan reached for her hand.
“Let me see.”
“No. It’s nothing.”
He chuckled, suddenly recalling how often she had reacted just that way to any hint of sympathy whenever she’d taken a spill from a horse or scraped her knees when they were up to their childhood pranks.
“You never did want anyone fussing over you,” he said, capturing her hand despite her attempts to avoid his grasp. He couldn’t feel the warmth of her skin or its silky smoothness through the thick gloves, but he could imagine it. His body tightened.
“I still don’t,” she said heatedly.
Jordan ignored the protest and her squirming as he examined the rip in her sleeve and checked to see if the wire had snagged the tender skin beneath. “Just a scratch,” he said eventually.
“I told you that.”
“Yes, but your diagnosis wasn’t nearly as informed as mine. I actually checked your arm.”
“Jordan, I was working this fence line long before you showed up this morning and I will be working it long after you’re back in your penthouse office in Houston next week.”
“Can’t deny that,” he said agreeably. “But while I’m here, you might as well let me pitch in.”
She rocked back on her haunches and sighed. The look she turned on him was filled with exasperation and resignation. “On one condition.”
He grinned. “I love it when you bargain.”
She fought a smile and eventually succumbed. “Do you have any idea what a perverse man you are?”
“Is that good?”
“I’ve certainly never considered it to be a desirable attribute.”
“Then I’ll change,” he promised.
“Pardon me if I don’t hold my breath. As for that condition, you will not under any circumstances bring up that ridiculous proposal while Dani’s in the vicinity. Got it?” she asked, regarding him with a defiant lift of her chin.
“Why not?”
“Isn’t that obvious? I don’t want her getting ideas about the two of us. She’ll only be disappointed.”
Jordan glanced up and searched for some sign of Dani. The fence line apparently forgotten, she was gathering wildflowers. She had an armload. He was struck by a sense of déjà vu.
“Looks as if she has your taste in floral displays,” he commented, directing Kelly’s attention to her daughter. As he did, he realized where he’d gone wrong. He’d been trying to woo Kelly the same way he would court those shallow, grasping socialites in Houston. Kelly wasn’t a hothouse-flower kind of woman. Bluebells or daisies would have pleased her more.
Now that the realization had come to him, he saw that it had always been true. Her favorite gifts as a teenager hadn’t been the fancy ones he and his brothers and their friends brought to her birthday parties. She’d always loved most the ones her father and mother had made for her, gifts that had come from the heart.
What could he give her now that would have the same kind of meaning? He studied her as she watched her daughter, saw the delight and love shining in her eyes, and recalled how often she’d worried out loud to him about the absence of Paul Flint in Dani’s life. “She needs her father,” she had said more than once.
Jordan wasn’t convinced that anyone on earth needed a man like Paul Flint, but Kelly’s point had registered just the same. She wanted her daughter to have a daddy. Even his father had seen that.
If Jordan could prove to her that he was suited for that role, if he could give her what she wanted most for her child, maybe Kelly would finally accept the idea that she needed him as a husband, as well.
Kelly watched as the sun beat down on Jordan’s bare shoulders. He’d stripped off his shirt an hour or so before and she hadn’t gotten a thing done since. Every once in a while she managed to tear her gaze away after giving herself a stern lecture about turning into a sex-starved divorcée, but in general she found the play of his gleaming muscles entrancing.
How on earth did he stay so fit sitting in an office all day long? she wondered. His shoulders and chest were thicker than she’d recalled, no longer an adolescent boy’s body, but a man’s. An intriguing line of dark hair arrowed down his washboard-flat stomach and vanished beneath the snap of his faded, snug jeans.
For years now she had forbidden herself to study him with so much carnal fascination. First of all, she had been married and she would have died before allowing herself even a hint of disloyalty toward a man she’d belatedly discovered didn’t deserve it.
Then, more recently, it had seemed like a very bad idea to allow her old feelings for Jordan to stir to life again.
