In Bed with the Wrangler by Barbara Dunlop Read Free Book Online Page B

was hardly a choice assignment.
    But Royce needed to work the frustration out of his system somehow. How had he so completely misjudged Amber’s signals? He could have sworn she was as into him as he was her.
    He slid the heavy stack across the dropped tailgate and shifted it to the front of the box, admitting that he’d deluded himself the past few months in the hotel fitness rooms. High-tech exercise equipment was no match for the sweat of real work.
    “Something wrong?” came Stephanie’s voice as she appeared beside him in the pool of the yard light. She tugged a pair of leather work gloves from the back pocket of her jeans. “You looked ticked off.”
    “Nothing’s wrong,” Royce denied, turning on the dirt track to retrace his steps to the flatbed, passing the two hands who were on the opposite cycle. “Where’d you come from?”
    Stephanie slipped her hands into the gloves, lifting two boards to Royce’s five, balancing them on her right shoulder. “I drove down to join you for dinner. I wanted to see how Amber was doing.”
    “She’s fine.
    “She inside?”
    He shrugged. “I assume so.”
    “You have a fight?”
    “No. We didn’t have a fight.” An argument, maybe. In fact, it was more of a misunderstanding. And it was none of his sister’s damn business.
    “Something wrong with Bar—”
    “No!” Royce practically shouted. Wait a minute. His sister might have changed topics. He forced himself to calm down. “What?”
    “With Barry Brewster,” she enunciated. “Our VP of finance? I talked to him earlier, and he sounded weird.”
    Royce slid his load into the pickup then lifted the boards from Stephanie’s shoulder and placed them in the box. “Weird how?”
    It was Stephanie’s turn to shrug. “He yelled at me.”
    Royce’s brow went up. “He what? ”
    They stepped out of the way of the two hands each carrying a load of lumber.
    Stephanie lowered her voice. “With Jared gone. Well, Blanchard’s Sun, an offspring of Blanchard’s Run, took silver at Dannyville Downs, and—”
    “ S-o-n son?” Royce asked.
    “ S-u-n. It’s a mare.”
    “You don’t think that will get confusing?”
    Stephanie frowned at him. “I didn’t name her.”
    “Still—”
    “Try to stay on topic.”
    “Right.”
    The temperature dropped a few degrees. The wind picked up, and ozone snapped in the air. Royce went back to work, knowing the rain wasn’t far off.
    Stephanie followed. “Blanchard’s Run is proving to be an incredible sire. With every week that passes, his price will go up. So I called Barry to talk about moving some funds to the stable account.”
    “Did you really expect him to hand over a million?”
    “Sure.” She paused, sucking in a breath as she hefted some more lumber. “Maybe. Okay, it was a long shot. But that’s not my point.”
    “What is your point?”
    The first, fat raindrops clanked on the truck’s roof, and one of the hands retrieved an orange tarp from the shed. Royce increased his pace to settle the last of the lumber on the pickup, then accepted the large square of plastic.
    “You two get the flatbed,” he instructed, motioning for Stephanie to move to the other side of the pickup box.
    “My point,” Stephanie called over the clatter fromthe tarp under the increasing rain, “is Barry’s reaction. He went off on me about cash flow and interest rates.”
    “Over a million dollars?” Royce threaded a nylon rope through the corner grommet of the tarp and looped it around the tie-down on the running board. It was a lot to pay for a horse, sure. But there weren’t enough zeros in the equation to raise Barry’s blood pressure.
    “I felt like a ten-year-old asking for her allowance.”
    “That’s because you behave like a ten-year-old.” Royce tossed the rope over the load to his sister.
    “It’s a great deal,” she insisted as lightning cracked the sky above them. “If we don’t move now, it’ll be gone forever.”
    “Isn’t that what you said