Chapter One:
Jeri Bell whistled as she put on her tool belt, the cheery California sunshine lighting the day beyond her bedroom window. The days she didn’t get to work on a construction site were a waste of time in her opinion, and she’d had a lot of those lately.
“But not anymore,” she said to herself as she started gathering her copious amounts of hair into a ponytail. She knew most women would kill to have as much hair as she did, especially as hers held a curl like it was the eighties and it hadn’t gotten the memo.
Now, she worked at Last Chance Ranch, and they needed dozens of buildings built or remodeled. She was working on the new dog enclosures first, because that would allow Scarlett and the ranch more room to house more animals. And more animals was good for the partnership they had with Forever Friends, who provided a lot of grant money for the ranch.
In fact, Forever Friends provided the salary Jeri had named, right down to the penny. Of course, she’d given an even dollar amount, so there were no pennies. She grinned at herself, burying the vein of guilt that was open and never seemed to close.
She brushed it aside like she’d been doing for a few months now, since she’d come to the ranch and started surveying the land, putting in quotes, and beginning the construction.
Her crew was usually at least a dozen men, and she’d become extraordinarily good at managing them over the past twenty years of her life. But out here, it was her and whichever cowboy she could scrounge from his regular chores if there was something that required more than two hands.
That was almost always Hudson, Scarlett’s boyfriend, or Sawyer, the cowboy who lived right next door to her. Jeri looked south as if she had superpowers and could see through cabin walls to the cowboy’s place next door.
He had an amazing dog that followed him around the ranch like, well, a puppy, and Jeri mourned the loss of her canine. The chickens she’d brought with her hardly counted as pets, as one of them had a crazy eye that seemed to look everywhere but where it was going. Still, she loved Spot and Feathers, and she left her ponytail to be bumpy so she could go feed them before she hurried over to the construction site.
Her yard wasn’t fenced, but the chickens never seemed to stray too far from the source of their food, and Jeri found them at the bottom of the steps just outside the back door, clucking away.
“Hey, guys,” she said, reaching for the wooden lid on the box she’d built to keep the feed in. She grabbed a handful and scattered it over the grass near them. Spot did his funky chicken run as he went after the food.
She laughed at them and threw more feed than they needed. Feathers, a brown and black chicken, would try to follow her over to the construction site. Then she’d realize that it was way too far for her two short feet, and she’d eventually make her way back to the yard.
“I’m going to get that house finished,” she promised them, looking at the half-finished coop Scarlett had given her permission to build. “I am. Tonight. I’ll work on it tonight.”
She was usually exhausted by the time she finished over in Canine Club, and really, she was never finished. She worked until her back ached and she reached a spot where she could pick up the next day. But by the time she got home, she was lucky to stick something in the microwave and collapse on the couch after eating it.
So her diet wasn’t the best. She often skipped breakfast and lunch, drinking only water so she didn’t faint in the summer heat as she hammered and measured and nailed.
While she worked a lot, she hadn’t lost much weight, because her eating habits crammed all her calories—high-density ones—into one meal.
It was fine. It was her life again, and she was grateful for that. In fact, she thought, Thank you for bringing me here as she walked away from the chickens and around to the dirt road in front of her cabin. She couldn’t help glancing at Sawyer’s front door, where sometimes the cowboy sat on the steps with his Australian shepherd at his feet and his guitar balanced against the post holding up the porch.
Whenever he sat outside at night and played, Jeri would make sure her windows were open. A few times she’d even gone out onto her back porch and listened to him sing in his beautiful tenor voice.
So maybe she had a little crush on the cowboy next door. Maybe.
Her heart pumped out an extra beat, and she reminded herself that she had done the boyfriend thing. The husband thing. The family thing. The in-a-new-relationship-with-someone-she-worked-with thing.
And she wasn’t going to do any of it again.
The price was too high—and she knew. She’d lost everything over the years, and she could only count on herself to rebuild her life.
Which is what I’m doing, she thought as she caught sight of Hudson’s truck rounding the corner and coming toward her. She put a smile on her face and waved to him as he passed, because through her divorce, the loss of her business, her crew, and all of her friends, she’d learned that it was easier to smile than to frown.
Scarlett had often said how much she appreciated how bubbly and optimistic Jeri was around the ranch, and Jeri appreciated the comments. She wasn’t exactly faking, but she did like looking at the bright side of things more than the dark. The glass was half-full and not half-empty.
After all, she’d picked herself up from some pretty awful things. Things she didn’t want to think about right now.
No, right now, she needed to get the inside walls of the third dog enclosure up. When the structures were finished, they’d be temperature regulated, but right now they weren’t. She worked through the morning, sweating and replacing the fluids with as much water as her stomach and bladder could hold.
She knew it was lunch only because the sun shone directly overhead—and Scarlett brought her a chicken Caesar salad.
Something was up. The owner was nice, and Jeri considered Scarlett a friend. Probably the best female friend Jeri had ever had. But she didn’t bring Jeri food very often, so Jeri asked, “What’s going on?” as she took the salad and the plastic fork from her boss.
Scarlett sighed and looked around the enclosure. “Wow, it’s hot in here.”
“Yeah,” Jeri said, opening the salad and pouring the dressing over it. “Thanks for getting this. Why’d you go down to town?”
“I was meeting with Jewel.”
Jeri stuffed her mouth full of lettuce and parmesan so she could buy herself some time to answer.
“She wants to make sure all of our paperwork is up to date,” Scarlett said.
“And you need my license,” Jeri said, licking her fork like there wasn’t a problem. She could produce her non-existent contractor’s license in a jiffy. No big deal.
Except it was a big deal. Her application had been turned down again, and the salad suddenly tasted sour. An image of her former foreman filled her mind—Brenden Evans. If she could just get a hearing with the committee, she could give her side of the story.
But she already had, and they’d still taken her license away.
The only way she could get a new license was to use a different name. But she needed legal documentation with the name, and the only way to get that was to lie, or pay for forged documents, or get married.
She couldn’t do the first two, because she didn’t need to go to jail on top of everything else. She still went to church every chance she got, and she’d begged the Lord for a solution that was legal and would allow her to keep building this life at Last Chance Ranch.
If she could find someone willing to marry her just for a few months….
Just like all the other times she’d thought about this exact thing, no one came to mind. Most sane men didn’t just marry female carpenters for a favor.
“I’ll go check on the status of it tomorrow,” Jeri said, forking another bite of chicken and lettuce into her mouth. She chewed and swallowed. “Maybe I did something wrong.”
“We just need the application and where it is,” Scarlett said, still looking around. “This is going so great, Jeri.”
She put that smile on her face, nodded, and said, “Thanks.” She stirred her salad around, the ever-present guilt blooming and growing into a raging river in her system.
She knew the status of her contractor license, and all she could do was apply again. Make up a little white lie about how she’d done something wrong and had to re-file, and give Scarlett that application status.
It would buy her another few weeks, at least.
Scarlett said goodbye and left the half-finished enclosure, leaving Jeri to her worries and doubts. She couldn’t eat any more salad—number one, she disliked salad. Number two, she wasn’t used to eating in the middle of the day.
She got back to work. Decided to stop while it was still light—and before she lopped off a thumb because she couldn’t focus. Her mind hadn’t stopped circling her problem, and she still had no idea what to do about it.
Her stomach growled as she walked back to the main road and around to the Cabin Community. Her feet crunched against the gravel, and she went through every able-bodied man she knew. Before the disaster that had lost her the license, she would’ve had a crew of fifteen men she could ask for a favor like this.
Now, while she liked this life a lot, she didn’t have anyone the way she used to. No one to really call on in a sticky situation like the one she currently found herself in.
Loneliness engulfed her, and she turned down the driveway that led to her back yard when she heard the clucking.
Up the steps her feet took her, and she went in the front door, her thoughts turning to dinner and what she had in the freezer. Three steps inside the cabin, she realized something was very wrong.
This didn’t smell like her house.
“Hullo, Jeri,” a man said, causing her to yelp and spin toward the sound. Her heart banged against her ribs as she realized she wasn’t staring at an enemy, but Sawyer Smith.
She’d gone in the wrong house. She scanned him from head to toe, noticing his hair was damp and curling in a very sexy way around his ears. He looked totally different without that cowboy hat on his head, and every female part in Jeri started rejoicing that she’d made this particular mistake.
