“I prefer to be called Miss Barnett,” she informed him, her gaze serious. “And I don’t expect you to recognize me. We’ve never met.”
And to his astonishment, something happened as Jensen gazed back at her, waiting for her to tell him what she wanted from him—which he suspected wasn’t going to be the usual thing women wanted from him. Almost against his will, he found himself … intrigued.
Jensen wasn’t a hard man to please most of the time. He liked to work hard and relax harder. He liked sex with no strings, because he already had too much family and that was more relationship nonsense than any man needed. And more than he deserved, because he’d made his vows a long time ago. Most years, he liked his life well enough. But this was already a strange summer. It made him feel edgy that he wasn’t out there fighting fires the way he was supposed to be doing—because that had also been a part of the promises he’d made when he was eighteen. Turned out, even his favorite, no-strings forms of entertainment seemed a lot less fun because of that. Something he previously would have declared impossible.
Yet here was Miss Harriet Barnett. And she was completely different, for good or ill.
“What exactly is it you think I can do for you?” he asked. Mildly enough that it set her to frowning again, so mission accomplished on that. “Here in Cold River’s favorite den of iniquity?”
Her frown did not go away. “A date.”
Jensen really laughed at that. “I’ll admit it. I did not see that one coming.”
Harriet looked even more annoyed, and Jensen accepted the strange and somehow glorious fact that he was enjoying himself.
“I take it neither you, nor anyone else, listens to the voice mailbox at the Bar K,” she said.
With great censure.
Jensen couldn’t stop grinning. Maybe he also wasn’t trying too hard. “I can promise you that you have already given more thought to the voice mail situation at the ranch than I ever have in all my days on this earth.”
“The existence of a voice mailbox suggests that messages can be left there, Mr. Kittredge. And there would be no purpose in that if no one ever listened to them, would there? That’s the bare minimum. At the very least, I’m sure we can agree that a business should do the bare minimum, shouldn’t it?”
“I’ll be sure to take that up with the secretarial staff,” Jensen assured her. Meaning he would take time out of his busy day tomorrow to give his youngest brother, Connor, a hard time about not listening to those messages, simply because he could, because he was older. Although it was less fun to needle his baby brother these days, now that Connor had gone ahead and shacked up with his woman. He was far too revoltingly satisfied to take the bait, most days. “But you should probably know that women don’t usually use the ranch voice mail to ask me out.”
“To ask you out?” She looked as if he’d lapsed into a different language.
“And to tell you the truth, Miss Harriet, I don’t date.” He smiled, letting it get hot and edgy, just for fun. “But I might be convinced to make an exception for you.”
Harriet Barnett blinked. The glasses perched on her nose seemed to call more attention to her eyes, which meant that he couldn’t help but notice she happened to have just about the longest eyelashes he’d ever seen. They made her blue gaze even prettier.
It almost outweighed the way she was still frowning at him.
“You misunderstand me,” she informed him. A bit severely, in his opinion. “I’m not attempting to ask you out, heaven forbid.”
Jensen wasn’t sure if he was entertained or insulted at that point. Or both.
One of her hands rose to her throat, and he thought that if she’d been wearing pearls, she would have been clutching at them just then. “I won a date with you, Mr. Kittredge.”
“It’s much more likely that I knocked you up,” he said idly, with a grin that made her fingers tighten around those imaginary pearls. “I don’t make a habit of raffling off dates.”
Jensen would never call his social life dating. It was usually a little too naked, intense, and happily temporary for that. Besides, he had his hands full without throwing any formal dates into the mix.
“The Harvest Gala takes place every year the night before Thanksgiving,” Harriet told him. Sternly.
“It sure does.” He eyed her lazily as they headed down this tangent. Still game, apparently, though he couldn’t have said why. “My little sister organized it last year.”
“One of the things that were raffled off were nights with various men in the community, and not in a romantic sense. It was all in good fun, for charity.”
That did ring a bell. Jensen recalled sitting in his best suit with his cowboy hat on, laughing uproariously as some of his friends—the ones who hadn’t figured out how to say no to his remarkably tenacious little sister—paraded themselves around onstage so that the rapacious women of the Longhorn Valley could throw money at them.
Luckily, Jensen was generally immune to his younger siblings, to their usual dismay.
“I considered bidding myself,” he told Harriet now, smirking a little. “Just so I could make my brother Zack take me out to a nice meal and call me pretty, but my grandmother did not approve of me wasting the good sheriff’s time like that.”
And besides, it had been even more fun to watch Sheriff Zack get bought by the president of the Ladies Auxiliary, who had been after him to sit down and defend his recent decisions for months.
“Three firefighters were raffled off that evening,” Harriet continued in that same prissy voice of hers. A lot like Jensen was having no effect on her whatsoever. Which was so unusual that once again, he found himself more intrigued than he should have been. “I personally bid on Buddy Spears.”
“Buddy Spears moved out of the county this winter.” Jensen knew Buddy. He was pretty sure Buddy had coached him in Little League approximately a million years ago. The Spears family had lived in town instead of out in the fields like the Kittredges, and Buddy and Elaine had moved away so they could live closer to their grandchildren. Who were presumably being raised somewhere with less intense winters.
Information Jensen possessed because people told him things without him asking or had conversations he couldn’t help overhearing. That was Cold River. There was no such thing as private business. There was only the town and the valley, and everyone in it was part of the same old story.
“As I was duly informed when I called the fire station,” Harriet told him.
“I don’t know why Buddy was auctioning himself off, anyway. Unless he expected Elaine to bid on him. Though to my recollection, Miz Spears did not exactly have the kind of personality that would find a bidding war on her own husband all that amusing. No matter if it was for charity.”
“He was standing in as a proxy, it turns out,” Harriet Barnett informed him. She did not speculate on the Spears marriage or Elaine’s potential thoughts on her husband taking bids, once again proving that she was not a local. “The fire chief said he had always planned to nominate someone to take his place. But I don’t mind telling you, as I told him, I found that false advertising.”
Jensen settled back against his seat. “I just want to make sure we’re on the same page here, Miss Harriet. We’re sitting in the Coyote, without a drink between us, discussing your hurt feelings that you didn’t get to go on a date with Buddy Spears. Who, decent guy though he was, was also what my mama would call no oil painting. And old enough to be your grandfather. And, not to put too fine a point on it, married.”