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“You don’t just want an easement. You want to use my land. You want strangers to drive onto my land.”

“Just the road...”

“You never asked me what the road went past. What it might impact.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “What...?”

“Let’s get to work.”

He felt like an ass, because he had let her talk her way into this, had let her talk herself in circles.

And she had seemingly not noticed that he had never agreed to readdress his answer, just because she was working for him. He had thought it was funny that this woman who thought she was so damn smart only listened to the words coming out of her own mouth, and not the words coming out of his. That she was so certain of her logic, and her understanding, that she genuinely hadn’t heard him say no.

But she looked young and fragile just then, and he did have to confront the fact that she was his sister’s age, and if a man treated Jessie like this he would’ve run the guy over.

But it wasn’t like that. He wasn’t a man in the moment, just as she wasn’t a woman. He was a rancher, and she was a pain in his ass.

It wasn’t the same.

Right. And you looking at her breasts earlier wasn’t about you being a man and her being a woman.

No. It wasn’t.

Well, it was. But only in the most basic of ways.

She was... She was a little can of rage and determination under pressure. And the wrong thing was going to make that girl explode. He had no patience for anything like that. He didn’t do entanglements. And he didn’t do intense. He had a feeling that Quinn Sullivan only knew how to be intense.

So whatever he felt, whatever interest he experienced looking at her body... It didn’t go any further than that. It was physical. And it was hypothetical.

It would never be anything more.

This disagreement between the two of them had nothing to do with him being a man and her being a woman.

He could not care the hell less about her gender. Not when she was standing there feeling like an emblem of the mistakes he’d made in the past.

“Let’s just go,” she said, moving toward the truck.

“Sure.”

They got in, and he felt tangled up in his own fury. Even though some of it was at himself.

He had let her think that he wasn’t all that smart, and this explosion wasn’t exactly going to stand as a testament to his intelligence.

He had thought it was funny, and now he was irritated by it.

But he was also too damn stubborn to simply drop the facade.

The truth was, he did like to move slow. The truth was, he did like to carefully consider every angle before making a decision. And so if the little windup toy thought that made him slow, that was just fine.

Another testament to her inexperience.

They drove out toward the back field again, and he tried to imagine that field being full of Christmas trees. It wasn’t a terrible idea. He had done a little bit of research on it. He’d watched a couple of videos on the subject, which was one of his preferred ways of getting new info on very specific topics. The internet was a marvel.

One that he had learned to use to his advantage. There were a lot of good things about the Christmas tree idea, it couldn’t be denied, though at this point he did feel like if he took her advice he would owe her something.

Though she was the one who wanted that to be the case. He hadn’t agreed to anything.

They worked for a while, and then when it started to get warm, he told her to go back to the truck. “I’ve gotta go pick up feed today. You want to come?”