An Impostor in Town (Colorado Series) Read Free

eaten in her life. He appreciated a woman who wasn’t a picky eater. Her appetite didn’t match her form. She was skin and bones. Did the woman eat right? Maybe he should feed her more often.
    She wiped her mouth with a cloth napkin he had purchased just for the occasion. “You cook pretty good…for a guy.”
    “You know what they say."
    “What?”
    “The way to a woman’s heart is through her stomach. Wait, I’ve got that backwards. No, sideways. Well, something.”
    She laughed and the tension in her shoulders visibly relaxed.
    “How would you like to go for a drive?” He wiped down the kitchen counter and held his breath. When she didn’t answer, he glanced her way. She blinked at him. “I need to feed my stock.”
    Her face brightened. “You have livestock?”
    “I run a few head of cattle, but mostly I keep the place for Poncho and Chief.”
    A grin played at the corners of her very pretty mouth. “Horses?”
    He wondered what it would be like to kiss those perfectly shaped lips. He shook his head to remove the stray thought. “Yeah. Do you like horses?”
    “My father was a foreman on a cattle ranch in Texas—”
    Why had she bit off the end of her sentence? She was a hard woman to get to know. Come to think on it, she never told him anything about her past. This was a first. “Well, come with me and help me feed them. They love company.”
    ****
    After Brian gathered a few supplies, they hopped into his truck and drove northeast on Florida Road toward Vallecito Lake and Missionary Ridge. Snow nestled among the trees along the side of the road until they reached the edge of the fire line. The barren ground was a blanket of white with stabs of charred wood pointing toward the heavens.
    He turned off the main road. After a mile or so, a pothole rattled the truck and Peyton grabbed the dash to keep from falling into him. “You’re not headed up here for old time’s sake, are you?”
    “Huh?”
    She grinned. Would he accept her teasing? “You know…the site of the fire.”
    He turned his head for a moment and then retrained his focus on the twisting road. “My place is up here about seven miles out of town. It’s not far from the original fire line.”
    “So your willingness to help fight the fire was more than being a good citizen?”
    His features set with confusion. “Good citizen?”
    “Or doing your duty?”
    He glanced her way again. His eyes flashed with a fire she’d never seen in them. “My land was being threatened along with my stock.”
    “No wonder you were so insistent on being included.” Heated debate erupted when the High Sheriff of LaPlata County joined the rank and file on the fire line. Brian had been a magnet for controversy almost from the first day he took office.
    “It didn’t feel right asking someone else to fight my fire for me. Especially when there was something I could do to help.” His eyes swept her face. “Does that burst your notions about me? Not so noble anymore, am I?” He disengaged and retrained his focus, yanking the steering wheel to miss a boulder in the road.
    His beat up Chevy truck shifted gears with a sputter and a lurch as he turned onto a small, winding track that cut through a low place in the hills and emerged on the other side of a ridge in a box canyon. Surrounded on three sides by steep, rocky cliffs, one wouldn’t have found his place without knowing it was there. The pasture was probably green and fertile in the late spring and early summer, but in winter a hard pack of ice and snow crusted the ground.
    He shifted into park. Two horses galloped toward the fence and whinnied as he got out of the truck. The Paint hung his head over the rail fencing, the first to nuzzle Brian as he opened the gate. The sorrel sauntered up with what appeared to be feigned indifference. It reminded Peyton so much of her younger years she bit her lower lip to keep from tearing up.
    She slid into the driver’s seat, drove the truck through the gate, and