April, Dani - Raven's Ranch (Siren Publishing LoveXtreme) (16 page)

“I’ll try and not flirt with you too much.” She laughed, feeling good that he was including her.

Bran started the truck, and they began to drive down the gravel road. To the east, the first rays of the sun were just spreading over the horizon. The wind off the prairie blew inside and rustled her hair under her hat. She smiled.

“So where are we headed?” she asked.

“Silver Lake,” he told her. “The Lazy L owns most of it, and it’s always prone to flooding. It’s just a big spillway for the snow melt coming down from the mountains in the spring and not in fact a lake at all, but it serves as a nice barrier between all that flood water and our grazing lands.”

“Didn’t I hear about there being a big flood out here about ten years ago?”

“Yep,” he told her. “That would be Silver Lake. We get bad enough thunderstorms to add to all that snow melt and she floods ten miles of our range. I guess I don’t have to tell you if that were to happen now, we’d be out of business.”

“So what are we going to be doing out there today?” she asked, as he turned off onto a dirt road and headed out for the range.

“You’re just going to look sexy and be eye candy all day,” he told her, his baritone voice frank and sure.

Raven laughed. “Okay, I know my role. What are
you
going to be doing at the lake?”

“Tyler told me he noticed it was starting to back up yesterday. It’s probably nothing, but it’s too serious of a matter to let go for even one day. We’re going out on that lake today and check it out.”

“If we find that it is backing up what can we do?”

“We can dredge it. We’ve got the equipment on the boat. It’s just a back-breaking chore. But don’t worry, I’m not about to let that lake flood us out.” He motioned to the back. “Help yourself to some coffee. We might have a long day ahead of us.”

She picked a thermos out of a little picnic-type basket he had packed in the backseat. There were plastic cups inside the basket. She got out a couple and poured them each a cup of black coffee. Without any cream or sugar, she found Bran’s coffee incredibly strong. Rather like he was, she mused to herself with a smile. But after she’d had a few sips the coffee begin to grow on her, also rather like Bran.

“Thank you, beautiful,” he told her as she handed him over his cup.

Raven sipped her coffee and looked out the window at the beautiful land that she owned as it sped by them. This was as far onto her land as she had gone yet. She got her first close-up look at some of the herd grazing idly on the yellow prairie grass. There were so many of them they dotted the landscape far into the distance. They were such serene animals they ignored the truck as it passed by them. A couple of them mooed to each other from further back on the range, and a calf ran to try and pick out its mother among the numbers.

The Lazy L owned a small single engine boat that easily glided across the tranquil water of Siler Lake. Hanging over the side was a lot of hoses and cords and arms that Raven could not place. Apparently this was the dredging equipment.

It was a beautiful, sunny day, not too hot and not too much wind, the sky high and a rich blue with not a cloud in sight, a perfect day for an outing on the water. Raven sat at the head of the boat, her choice to wear the short skirt giving her an opportunity to get a good suntan, and fortunately she carried a tube of sunscreen in her shoulder bag that came in real handy on a bright day like this.

Bran sat in back and steered the boat, spending several hours that morning just speeding along the shore of the small lake and watching the water level against small markers that had been placed in the lake bottom to measure its rise. Bran took off his shirt and frequently had to lean over the side of the boat and bring up the markers to check them.

Raven was amazed at his physique. He was built like a Norse god or a strong man from an action movie. His biceps were so wide they were almost as wide as her entire body, and his chest bowed out, ripped with powerful muscles. Yet even as big as he was, and he must have easily weighed three hundred pounds, his stomach and abs were hard and flat. He really didn’t have a neck. It was just one huge muscle that connected his head to his incredibly wide shoulders.

Raven leaned back against the side of the boat and took in the sight of his body as he worked. When he leaned over the side to pick up a marker, his perfect ass was on ready display for her under his gym shorts. She realized that she could watch him work all day. He was so confident and sure in his movements, she got a good feeling inside, warmth deep in her belly, and realized there was dampness between her legs.

She laughed out loud. “Who’s the eye candy here?” she teased him.

He just grunted and kept on with his task. “Throw me over some of that sunscreen, honey,” he commanded her. Whenever he spoke, she somehow felt a compulsion to obey him. “Hurry up before I die of cancer over here.”

She threw him the tube. His big forearm came up like the trunk of a tree and caught the tiny thing with ease. Soon the skin along his rock-hard chest was glistening with the liquid just as her legs were. There was an odor of sunscreen in the air. This was musky and intimate and made her insides grow even warmer.

“Bran?” she asked him as he worked.

“What?” His butt was to her again as he picked out another marker, splashing it over the side. Oh, how nice he looked.

“Chip told me that we lose almost twenty percent of our herd every year before we can get them to market.”

“He’s a real young guy and inexperienced still at ranching.”

“You mean that’s not an accurate number?”

He wiped some sweat off his brow and threw the marker back into the lake. “No, from what I count, it might even be a higher number than that. We lose a hell of a lot of head every year. That’s why we’re going out of business.”

Raven suddenly came back to herself. His words were sobering and downright depressing. “I don’t want to ever lose this place.”

“I don’t want you to lose it either,” he told her, bringing the boat to a full stop in the middle of the shallow lake. “I’d like to stay on here longer and get to know you a whole lot better.”

“Yeah, I’d like that, too.”

“Time for lunch,” he told her. “Go grab that picnic basket I brought and set it out here in the middle for us.”

She did as he told her. He had packed them a delicious-looking lunch. Cold
hors d’oeuvres
, cheese and crackers, pastries for desert, and a bottle of California red that looked like it might have even been expensive. It all looked delicious.

“You went into town and got us lunch?” she said, her tone high in amazement.

“No,” he told her, wiping off his hands of the lake water. “I don’t ever go into town other than to work out at the gym.”

“But, then how?”

“How else, I made it myself. The wine comes from a little stash I have back at my trailer. I pick up a bottle or two every time I go into town and work out.”

“You know how to cook?”

“Of course,” he said as if it didn’t mean anything. He kneeled next to her and helped her spread out a big blanket on the floor of the boat for them to eat on.

“Bran, I don’t even know how to cook,” she confessed to him as they set out the lunch together. “I could have saved myself a fortune on takeout when I was at college if I had learned, but I was just too dumb to learn.”

“Well, most beautiful women don’t know how to cook,” he said as if he knew from experience.

“Oh these are delicious.” She savored the taste. “Maybe you can teach me sometime.”

“Maybe,” he said, but didn’t sound too sure.

She poured them both a plastic cup of wine, and found she couldn’t keep her hands off either the
hors d’oeuvres or pastries. It had been too long since someone had actually prepared food for her other than a restaurant or fast-food joint, and they didn’t really count.

He had not put his shirt back on and was sitting close to her. She had to fight off an urge to reach out and touch him. The wine was going straight to her head, and she felt slightly giddy.

“Bran, is there any way we can keep all of our herd together without losing them before we get them to market?” she asked him, confident that this huge man seated next to her would have all of the answers.

“Maybe some technology out there, but we can’t afford to implement it. Your granddad had already looked into that before he died. We just don’t have the money.”

“I’m going to do some checking on the Internet. Maybe we can get some of that technology out here in time to help us with this herd.”

“You can check.” He shrugged his shoulders. “But it won’t do any good. Your grandfather already checked every source.”

“Just leave it to me, big guy. As soon as we get back I’m going to search out some sites.”

“Anyway, we’ve got bigger problems.”

“Like what?”

“The drainage in this lake is backed up. If we get even a half-decent rain it’ll flood the range for a mile in each direction.”

“But you can fix it, right?”

“Yeah, I can fix it. It means we’re going to spend the rest of the afternoon dredging.”

“Can I help with that?” she asked, feeling useless around the strong self-assurance of Bran.

“No.” He shook his head and climbed back to his feet. She felt empty without his huge bulk next to her on the blanket. “You just sit back and enjoy the view, maybe catch a swim this afternoon. I’ll take care of everything.”

“All right, I will.” Her voice sounded small next to his booming baritone.

Bran broke out his dredging equipment. Raven tried to watch what he was doing, wanting to understand the process, but this was one thing she hadn’t studied online yet, and the intricacies of what he was doing escaped her. The boat was going at a slow crawl as he lowered the hoses overboard and started to dredge the lake.

She soon gave up on having any chance of keeping up with him and found that all she was doing was staring at his perfect body as he worked. A few glances by Bran over his shoulder back at her and a half-knowing smile on his face told her that he was well aware of her attention. She blushed and felt uncomfortable and decided this would never do.

“I’m going for a swim,” she told him, taking her tank top over her head. Beneath it was the red bikini top that showed off her breasts nicely. “Let me know if I can do anything to help?”

“Take your time,” he told her, his eyes lingering on her now well-exposed cleavage. “This is shaping up to be a big job. We’ll be here all day, and maybe even part of the night.”

The thought of spending part of the night out here on this beautiful lake with Bran did not sound half bad to Raven. But she didn’t make any comment as she removed her cowgirl boots and lowered her denim skirt.

She dived into the water. It was cold and gave her a start the moment she hit. After a minute or two she adjusted to the temperature, and as she swam around she found that in most places her feet touched the sand bottom. The lake shore was only about thirty yards away and so she felt safe in swimming out a little ways and exploring.

She had not been swimming in a long time. The swimming pools back in the city were noisy and crowded, and at times she wondered how clean some of them were. This lake was pure, the water soothing, and there was hardly any sound around this deep in the mountains, only the engine noise of Bran’s boat, a few birdcalls, the buzz of a water bug or two, and other than that, silence.

The reflection of the mountain peaks less than ten miles away were cast off the mirror-like surface of the water. A lazy, white cloud slid past the sun in the sky and brought shadows about the landscape, and a feeling of peace settled in the air. Raven wished she could just spend the rest of her life right here on this spot because to her it was like paradise.