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“I can give you room and board,” Kitty told him, as if this was an actual negotiation they were having. “And then, when you’re ready to go off to your next cattleman adventure, we’ll call it even, divorce neat and clean, and be done.”

“Neat and clean is not the way I’ve ever heard a divorce described, I have to tell you,” he pointed out.

“That’s because most people make everything very messy.” Kitty was starting to sound impatient now and Finn was fascinated. “Look. I’m not going to pretend that the whole town hasn’t been talking about your family situation, because of course they have.”

“Fair enough,” he said. “Speaking of messy.”

She nodded. “If it makes you feel any better, my parents never cheated on each other, or ran around, or any of the things that your father did. But that didn’t make them any less toxic. Which is actually a very kind way to describe what it was like between them. What it’s still like between them, probably. We got out of there the minute Indy turned eighteen and we never went back. So when I tell you that I know what messy is, I do. That’s never going to be me.”

And Finn was a rational, reasonable man. He had been a good foreman because he kept himself calm in all situations and never made his decisions rashly.

So he didn’t know why the hell it seemed so tempting to just say yes, jump in, and take whatever part of Kitty this ridiculous enterprise might give him.

But that wasn’t him, no matter how much he wished it was.

So he nodded instead. “Okay,” he said.

Her whole face brightened. She even smiled, and that almost turned him around on the spot. It was a close call.

“What do you mean by okay?” she asked, clearly excited.

“I mean okay, I’ll consider it,” he said.

That smile, that he was fairly certain was now seared onto his bones for all time, dimmed a few watts. “For how long?”

“As long as it takes for me to come to a decision,” he replied steadily, the way he had replied to too many ranch hands in his time. “I’m not particularly impulsive, Kitty. The only impulsive decision I can recall making in recent memory was coming here to Cowboy Point because my sister decided it was time to introduce our side of the family to our siblings. I take my time. In my experience, quick means shoddy—and I can’t abide shoddy work.”

Her expression dimmed further, and up came that frown, right on cue. “You’re going to have to give me a timeline.”

“Do you have other candidates lined up?” he asked, mildly. Very mildly, because that was a notion he didn’t care for much at all.

Kitty sniffed. “No, but I have to look for some if you’re not interested.” She eyed him in a manner he could only call baleful. “You have two weeks.”

“Do I now?” he asked, with a laugh. “Two whole weeks?”

“It only makes sense,” she retorted. “Nobody likes to drag things on forever, Finn. It’s called decisiveness.”

He was getting the very clear picture that she imagined he was some kind of drifter, or ranching dilettante—whatever that was—who also couldn’t make up his mind to save his life. Something that was so funny that he considered reaching out to every man he’d ever worked with on the ranch so they could get a good laugh out of imagining that somebody would misread him like that.

But her freckles were distracting. Her mouth was right there. And he had to keep reminding himself that it was one thing to find a woman catastrophically pretty and quite another to jump in and marry her just because that would let him play the hero.

If there was one thing that Finn would never allow himself to do, it was to jump into anything without thinking it through, because that would make him no better than his father.

So he nodded to the woman in front of him, who apparently really wanted to be his wife—in name only, he was pretty sure, but still—and took a step back.

“Two weeks, then,” he said. “Give or take.” And he even thumbed his hat at her, to amp up the cowboy a little. “I’ll be seeing you around, Kitty.”

Then he stepped around her and continued on down the road toward the General Store, where he was meeting his brothers. Who he did not intend to share Kitty’s proposition with, thank you.

Some things a man had to ponder on his own.

But he did have the distinct pleasure of feeling her frown as he went, aiming it square at his back the whole way across the road.

Chapter Three

“What is the matter with you?” Flannery demanded exactly two weeks later, glaring at Kitty across her worktable in the kitchen of the restaurant. “You’ve been more ornery than usual lately, and that’s saying something.”

“I’m not more ornery,” Kitty retorted, though it was possible that the way she slammed her oven door behind her when she said it was a pretty good indication that she was not telling the truth. Entirely. “What I am is busy. Maybe you’ve noticed the tourists started early this year.”