Barbara Ankrum - This Perfect Stranger

She spotted him half-hidden beneath the ash tree in her yard, shirtsleeves rolled halfway up his elbows, hacking away at what was left of that old tree limb.

Cain.

What was he doing up so early? Maybe he figured to finish the job and leave before she could get him to change his mind.

Maybe he hadn’t slept any better than she had.

She’d spent most of the night thinking about him, her situation, and the impossible scenarios she’d constructed around how she could save her home—everything from auctioning off the nonessential contents of her house to taking up striptease dancing at the local hangout. But none was as far-fetched as the one that had hit her sometime before she’d drifted into an uneasy sleep. It was too insane to even consider. Really. And Cain would probably call the men in the little white suits to come and take her away for even suggesting it.

Maggie chewed on her thumbnail, watching him bend over to scoop up an armload of wood. The muscles in his thighs bunched like liquid iron. He was strong. And if she didn’t miss her guess, a little reckless and maybe even a little desperate. Exactly the sort of man she needed.

It’s not over, the voice on the phone echoed in her mind.

Neither was she, she decided. Not while she still had a shred of hope.

With a grateful smile, Cain took the glass of lemonade from her hand and guzzled the cold liquid down. The afternoon heat had backed up in the barn where he was shoveling out stalls and he’d taken off his shirt again. He didn’t miss the way her gaze traveled across his bare chest, or the way that little bead of sweat had gathered above her lip.

“Where’s yours?” he asked.

She jerked her gaze upward with a flustered little flush of color. “What?”

“Your lemonade,” he said.

“Oh. Um.” She took the empty glass from him. “I…I’m not thirsty.”

He nodded, not believing her for a second. She’d been working her butt off in the pole corral with that demon seed, Geronimo, for the last two hours, getting nowhere. But she looked like she had more important things on her mind.

She’d been quiet at lunch, but he’d figured those dark circles under her eyes might explain that. She looked like she hadn’t slept any better than he had. But work, for him, was like a tonic. It made him feel useful. She looked plain worn down.

Or maybe she’d decided he’d worn out his welcome.

He braced a hand on his pitchfork and stabbed at the dirty straw near his feet. “I got that gate latch working again. It just needed a little grease, a couple of screws.”

“Gate latch?” she asked, lost.

“By the paddock.” When she still looked blank, he pointed. “By the north pasture?”

“Oh! The gate latch! Of course…the gate…latch. Thank you. Thanks…” She squeezed her palms together, as if she were looking to enhance her bustline. Something, as far as he was concerned, she didn’t need to do.

“Somethin’ wrong?” he asked.

“Wrong? No.” She smiled broadly. “Nothing’s wrong.”

Her teeth tugged nervously at her lower lip for the second time since she’d come in here, and she turned away from him, pacing to the other side of the barn hallway.

He couldn’t help but notice the way her jeans hugged those long legs of hers, curving against her backside. Nor did he miss the way that little sleeveless cotton blouse of hers outlined the slenderness of her waist and pulled against the fullness of her small breasts. Thoughts he had no business having pulsed through him with little jabs of awareness in regions he’d been ignoring for far too long. But, hell, no matter what his convictions, he was still a man. And she was a—

“I’m just going to say it,” she blurted out, whirling back toward him. “There’s no point beating around the bush. I have a proposition.”

His eyebrows went up. He liked the sound of this already.

“Cain?” she said in a voice usually reserved for pleas to the executioner. “Will you marry me?”

Following a moment of protracted silence, he laughed out loud. “Man, for a minute there, I thought you asked me to marry you.”

Her face had gone two shades of red. “I did.”

The smile slipped disbelievingly from his expression. Cain stared at her, dumbfounded. Standing up to his ankles in the horse dung and straw he’d swept out of the stables, he nearly sat down where he was.

“Not a real marriage, of course. Don’t look at me that way. I know how this sounds.”

Cain snorted, thinking it sounded like he’d been transported into some weird alternative universe while he wasn’t looking. “You do?”

“I-I said it all wrong. Actually,” she said, wrinkling her brow, “there is no right way to ask a complete stranger to marry you.”

He let the pitchfork’s handle thunk against the silvery old wood of the stall door. “Stranger being the operative word.”

“I know.” Maggie turned and paced to the other side of the barn’s main hallway. “I know. Don’t you think this sounds crazy to me, too?”

He shook his head, still not comprehending. “Then why—?”

“Because I need a husband, Cain. Technically. I need a husband or I’m going to lose this place.”

The gears began to lock in place in his brain. “Look,” he began, “I’m sorry to hear that. But I don’t see what that has to do with me.”

“Believe me,” she said, pacing from one side of the hallway to the other, “no one is more surprised by what I’m suggesting than I am.”

“Really.” Cain tore off one work glove and slapped it against his knee. Fragrant bits of straw dust swirled in the air between them. “I don’t think I want to know…but what exactly are you suggesting?”

She stopped pacing. “An arrangement.”

“Arrangement.” Even his voice sounded odd. And was it suddenly hotter in here?

“Yes. It would be strictly a business arrangement. With a contract. Guidelines. That sort of thing.”

“Guidelines.”

“You’re horrified.”

Cain rubbed his temple. “Horrified isn’t exactly—”

“Because I’d be horrified if I were you. I mean, after all, all you did was ride onto my place and innocently ask for a job and here I am—”

“Speechless is more the word I’d go for.”

“Right. I understand. But this could benefit us both.”

This he had to hear. “How?”

“Well, first of all, there’s the obvious. I need a husband to qualify for the loan I need to save this place. You seem to need a place to be. I just thought, since you weren’t heading anywhere in particular—”

“Did I say that?”

Her lips parted in surprise and he cursed himself for snapping at her.

“I…I—” she stammered, “maybe not.”

“I never said that.”

She nodded. “All right. At any rate, I wouldn’t ask you to do me this favor without compensation. I’m prepared to offer you—“she swallowed hard “—five hundred acres of my land in exchange for posing as my husband.”

Five hundred—! Cain nearly choked.

“To be delivered after our arrangement is terminated.”

Cain was still stuck on the five hundred acres of prime cattle country she’d offered. Something old and rusty lurched back to life inside him. A dream he’d thought long dead. Land.

Land that he could call his own. Maybe the old dream wasn’t as dead as he’d thought it was.

“Cain? Did you hear me?”

He dragged himself back. “What?”

“I said, you’d have to promise to stay—play my husband that whole time. If you broke your end of the bargain, or if we fail to make this place work…I’ll lose the ranch. And your part with it.”

She was right. It was a gamble. If she lost, he’d be out six months and the prospect of a place to start over. If she won, though…what? He’d settle down? Build a house and a picket fence and pretend he could ever have go back to the life he’d walked away from?