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She laughed. “Well, I didn’t realize that you and I had a common enemy that we were doing things at.”

“Doing things at? What does that mean?”

She shifted, feeling uncomfortable. Because she didn’t talk about this. And she had the feeling in that sense they were on the same ground. Which was very odd.

They were supposed to be working together, though. Being forceful, angry Quinn certainly wasn’t bringing him onto her side. Maybe this...common ground was a better place to start.

“I went to school, I succeeded, I got myself there—I did all that to spite him. Because he acted like I could never take all of my passion and turn it into something that looked like drive in the way that he recognized it. He thought that caring more about himself made him smarter. I know he thought that. He thought I had too much passion in me, for the right thing, not just for the bottom line. But I could never be that person. We were never close to the other families in Four Corners because my dad...”

“Yeah, I know. He opposed them on a lot of things.That’s why he ended up doing the soybean deal with me. Because they wouldn’t allow him to do it on Four Corners land. And I was too young to realize it was because there’s a deep distrust of factory farming, and for good reason. For damned good reason.”

“I know. And it wasn’t something that had ever been done here before, so people didn’t understand. But yes, he went around the Four Corners families, and he used you. And that really was a terrible thing for him to do. And then he made you feel bad, about things that he shouldn’t have. And so now you’ve started a business, to spite him. And that seems fair.”

He chuckled. “Yeah. I guess it is at him. All right,” Levi said, wiping a bead of sweat from his brow. “It’s time to knock off.”

“How do you determine that?”

“What?” He looked at her like she was insane.

“I just mean how do you decide when to ‘knock off’?” She did the best she could to pronounce the quotes, which was for sure a little bit rude but she hoped he would miss it. “As far as I can tell, we didn’t really knuckle down and do any one project.”

“Didn’t... Listen, this isn’t a corporation. This is a ranch. I do the vast majority of the work on my own. I have a couple of guys who work for me a few days a week, but more or less this is my responsibility. I move with the seasons. I move with the sun. I’m the boss. I do what works for me.”

She made a musing noise. “Right. Well. It just seems to me like maybe if there was a more clear-cut system...”

“You get on my nerves and you aren’t going to be working with me this week,” he said, his voice hard, uncompromising. A challenge.

Why did she want to rise to his challenge so much? She had never in all her life looked at a brick wall and wanted to run into it quite so hard.

“And what exactly will you do if I show up without permission?”

He looked at her, like he was seriously considering what he might do, and like she wouldn’t like the answer.

“Listen, if you don’t behave, I will uproot you like the obnoxious little carrot that you are and drop-kick your ass back to Four Corners.”

It was just such an unexpectedly clever thing to say, mean though it was.

She hadn’t had a real clear sense of him, because he was guarded with the things that he said, and he took quite a long time to say them. But when it came to insults, he did seem to have a...flair.

And she couldn’t help herself. She laughed.

She had no idea why she laughed, but once she started, she couldn’t stop. All this sniping the whole day, and she was tired. Of work, of him, of everything, and then he’d said that.

“Is there something funny?” he asked.

She kept on laughing, and hiccuped, just a little. “It was just a very good sentence. Because my hair is red, so carrot was a really great example. And the image of you...uprooting me and drop-kicking me just amused me.”

“The hell?”

“I don’t know.” She wiped the tears that were streaming down her cheeks and hiccuped again. “I thought it was funny. An unexpectedly rich use of language.”

“Little bit of a backhanded compliment,” he said.

“I didn’t mean it to be.”

The breeze kicked up between them, and it was cold on her cheeks because they were wet. Her hair tangled into her face and she shook it free, and he was...

Looking at her. He had been, the whole time, but there was something different about this now. His gaze dropped to her mouth. Just for a second. Then he met her eyes again.